CLEVELAND — As the clock wound down towards Major League Baseball’s trade deadline, a group of Twins players gathered together in a room at the team hotel in downtown Cleveland, their eyes glued to MLB Network.
Sometime around 5:50 p.m. local time, outfielder Matt Wallner estimated, reliever Louie Varland’s phone rang. About six minutes later, so did Griffin Jax’s. Everybody in the room knew what that meant.
“It was pretty surreal just seeing them answer phone calls and the next thing you know, they’re on different teams,” starting pitcher Bailey Ober said. “It’s tough. It’s never fun to go through.”
Thursday marked a day unlike any other for the Twins, one in which the front office executed seven different trades. All told, the front office made nine deals before the trade deadline, sending away 10 major leaguers — nearly 40 percent of the 26-man roster — as it attempted a reset on a roster that been underperforming. By the time the Twins returned to the ballpark a day later to take on the Cleveland Guardians, they were still trying to process everything that had happened over the past few days.
“It was the most interesting day of my big-league career, for sure,” Wallner said. “It was just different.”
Wallner said he hadn’t used the social media site X — formerly known as Twitter — in two years, but logged back into his account to keep up with all the trades, which came in at a dizzying pace.
Ryan Jeffers spent Thursday at home in Minnesota with his family after welcoming his second child, Hayes, on Saturday. He took his daughter, Harper, to the aquarium at the Mall of America and rode the carousel with her, enjoying some one-on-one time with his daughter.
“I’m constantly checking my phone and seeing what’s happening, seeing what latest news is dropping, seeing the dominoes continue to fall, continue to fall, go home and eat some lunch, then see someone else go,” Jeffers said. “It just kept coming. It never felt like it ended.”
By the time the front office was done with its work, Chris Paddack, Jhoan Duran, Harrison Bader, Brock Stewart, Danny Coulombe, Willi Castro, Carlos Correa, Ty France, Varland and Jax had all been shipped to other teams. Twins players walked into a clubhouse on Friday that featured some new faces — like Alan Roden, who was acquired as part of the Varland/France trade with Toronto — and some more familiar, like Edouard Julien and Austin Martin.
But even a day removed from the deadline, it was still hard to completely comprehend what had happened.
“No one’s done processing all parts of what went on,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “That might take some time to happen but we have to get back to work.”
Baldelli spent his day bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, touching base with his players, talking both to those who were departing and some of those who remained. Traded players who hadn’t yet traveled to Cleveland received a phone call from the manager.
While the scope of what the front office did was shocking, the individual trade that seemed to surprise people the most within the clubhouse was the Varland deal considering the local product is much further from free agency than the other players who were dealt.
“There (were) some guys that you had a feeling we might trade. I wouldn’t have initially put Louie in that category,” Baldelli said. “Everyone was some version of emotional. I think it was hardest on Lou. I don’t think that’s even close.”
Of the group set for free agency after this season — Bader, Castro, Paddack, France and Coulombe and Christian Vázquez — all dealt but Vázquez, who said he was surprised he was not part of Thursday’s roster purge. The other five players traded — Correa, Stewart, Varland, Jax and Duran — were under team control past this season. In return, the Twins were able to access either more prospect capital or, in Correa’s case, payroll flexibility.
For those who remained, Friday marked the beginning of a new reality.
“A lot of guys were shocked,” outfielder Trevor Larnach said. “I think it’s safe to say not a lot of people have seen something like that. It’s definitely crazy to be a part of.”
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