2:09 p.m.: outfielder Byron Chouri is the third player to go to Minnesota, tweets Misch.
13:57: infield view Jose Salas is also on the way to Minnesota, reports Craig Mish from SportsGrid and the Miami Herald. He is currently ranked fourth among prospects in Miami on Baseball America and fifth on MLB.com.
1:50 p.m.: The Twins and Marlins agree on a trade sending infielder Luis Arraez to miami and right handed Pablo Lopez to Minnesota, reports ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Dan Hayes, who first said the deal was progressing, report it will not be a one-for-one swap and additional players will be involved. Jon Heyman of the New York Post tweets that the twins will attract two prospects from Miami alongside Lopez.
The core of the deal, for immediate purposes, will be the twins swapping three years of Arraez, the reigning American League batting champion, for two seasons of Lopez, who will be an immediate upgrade to their rotation. The 26-year-old Lopez has proven himself as a premier big league starter over the past three seasons and has a 3.52 ERA with a 25% strikeout rate, 7% walk rate and ground ball rate of 47.4% reached 340 innings.
Lopez has dealt with some injury issues in his career and has ended up on the injury list three times due to shoulder strains. The most recent of those three injuries came in the summer of 2021 and wiped out more than two months of Lopez’s season, but he was injury-free in 2022 as he posted a career-high 180 innings in 32 starts. Last year’s performance earned Lopez a still extremely affordable salary of $5.45 million. He will be eligible for another arbitration raise in the 2023/24 off-season before reaching a free hand after the 2024 campaign – barring an extension, of course.
The newly acquired Lopez will enter a Twins rotation, which is also included Sonny Gray, joe ryan and Tyler Mahle. It’s possible that the Lopez acquisition could add some pressure Kenta Mada into a bullpen role after missing the entire 2022 season following internal orthotic surgery on his right elbow in September 2021. If the team wants to put Maeda back in the starting role he succeeded in for them in 2020 when he was the American League runner-up Cy Young vote, then arguably it will be 27 years old Bailey Ober pushed out of the starting blocks for the time being.
There’s more to come.