No one is trying to lowball the Twins

Let’s continue debating points made by other people today. After Joe’s excellent rebuttal of a Warren Goldstein piece on baseball history, I want to look at something more current and something near and dear to our hearts: Johan Santana.

Up in Minnesota, where it storm in the winter, David Zingler thinks that other teams are trying to lowball the Twins (hat tip to Baseball Musings). He writes:

The Big Market Teams (BMT) are low-balling the Twins with offers that won’t include another star player (like Jose Reyes or Robinson Cano) or two-top shelf prospects (like Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester). This is a travesty.

Now, we can debit the merits of trading Robinson Cano as much as we’d like. In fact, some of you have beaten this one into ground. But the fact is that no one is lowballing the Twins.

As we’ve said over and over again, the Twins are, in effect, trading away one year of Johan Santana — his final before his potentially hits free agency — and the exclusive negotiating rights to a contract extension. The Twins, when they give up Santana, will lose just one year of his services, and nothing more. So that’s how the Yankees, Red Sox and Mets are viewing this trade.

What would you give up for one year of Johan Santana? From the Yankees’ perspective, it doesn’t make much sense to give up multiple years of multiple cost-controlled younger players in this deal. So in the end, it’s not really a lowball offer as much as it is a market correction. Had the Twins signed Santana to a low contract extension and they tried to trade him right away, the discussion would be different. But the reality is that the Twins are losing just one year of Santana if they trade him now, and that’s all that other teams are considering in putting together trade proposals.

Meanwhile, if the reports are accurate. The Yankees were willing to hand over a rather substantial package of prospects at one point. I don’t think any deal centered around Phil Hughes and involving other players is a low-ball offer, but that just might be my Yankee bias speaking.