Minnesota Twins Farm System Overview – 2010
Overview
The Minnesota Twins are one of the most home grown teams in baseball. They’ve built their core over most of the past decade, while a couple of key parts actually came a little earlier, in the late 1990′s. However, they’ve made many shrewd moves to supplement their home grown talent, like plucking Johan Santana away from the Florida Marlins for pennies and trading A.J. Pierzynski for Francisco Liriano, Boof Bonser, and Joe Nathan.
The team has consistently drafted pitchers with good, but not great upsides. They have accumulated them and in the process found a few keepers like Scott Baker and Kevin Slowey. This process hasn’t changed over the years as they have many quality young pitchers with decent, but not great upsides lingering in the lower levels of their minor league system. Those pitchers were arguably the most difficult for me to grade and rank.
The Twins draft philosophy recently has been to draft athletes. They include the likes of Joe Benson, Ben Revere, and Aaron Hicks. The team has only dabbled in the Dominican Republic but made a huge splash in signing Miguel Sano.
But what makes the Twins really stand out is their presence around the entire world, from Australia where the team has signed Luke Hughes, Brad Tippet, Liam Hendriks, and Rory Rhodes to Venezuela (Wilson Ramos) to the Netherlands (Tom Stuifbergen) to Russia (Andrei Lobanov) and most recently to Germany, where the team signed Max Kepler, who is regarded as the best prospect ever to come out of Germany.
By expanding their reach internationally, the Twins can make up some of the ground on teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox, who the Twins can’t compete with in terms of shelling out money for big name free agents. What the Twins have done is — to an extent — provided a formula for small market teams to compete with teams in much bigger markets.
Twins Top-15 Prospects
Key Links1. Aaron Hicks | CF | Age – 20 | Grade – B+
2. Kyle Gibson | RHP | Age – 22 | Grade – B/B+
3. Wilson Ramos | C | Age – 22 | Grade – B
4. Miguel Sano | SS/3b | Age – 16 | Grade – B
5. Ben Revere | CF | Age – 21 | Grade – B-
6. Adrian Salcedo | RHP | Age – 21 | Grade – B-
7. Angel Morales | CF | Age – 20 | Grade – B-
8. Danny Valencia | 3b | Age – 25 | Grade – B-/C+
9. David Bromberg | RHP | Age – 22 | Grade – B-/C+
10. Joe Benson | CF | Age – 22 | Grade – C+
11. Max Kepler | CF | Age – 17 | Grade – C+
12. Ben Tootle | RHP | Age – 22 | Grade – C+
13. Carlos Gutierrez | RHP | Age – 23 | Grade – C+
14. Chris Parmelee | OF/1b | Age – 22 | Grade – C+
15. Billy Bullock | RHP | Age – 22 | Grade – C+
› Prospect Primer (Grading Criteria Explained)
› Team Page Listings
› Index of 2010 Top-15 Prospect Lists
› Index of 2009 Top-15 Prospect Lists
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