Sunday Notes: The Minnesota Twins Have a (Mostly) High-Pick Homegrown Lineup
The composition of the Minnesota Twins’ projected starting lineup caught my eye while I was perusing Roster Resource during the Winter Meetings. Not only were all but two of the nine position players homegrown: each of those seven was drafted in either the first or second round. Byron Buxton (first round in 2012) is the oldest of the bunch, while Luke Keaschall (second round in 2023) is the youngest and most recent.
Where do the Twins rank among MLB clubs in terms of homegrown position-player starters taken in the first two rounds? According to Jon Becker, who along with Jason Martinez keeps Roster Resource running like a well-oiled machine, the Minnesotans top the list. Moreover, while the Baltimore Orioles have six, and three other clubs have five, the rest have notably fewer. Fully half of the 30 teams have no more than three, including the Houston Astros, Miami Marlins, and Toronto Blue Jays, who have none.
My colleague provided me with some other roster-construction breakdowns as well, but before we get to those, let’s hear from Minnesota’s president of baseball operations. I asked Derek Falvey what the aforementioned seven-of-nine says about his organization.
“What I think it says is that we’ve had a run of guys that we’ve identified in the draft, near the top,” he replied. “No one is going to bat 1.000 in the draft — we all know that — but we have a number of [picks].. who have found a way to contribute at the big league level. It speaks a lot to our development process, too.
When you look around our field, Royce [Lewis] was a first-overall pick [2017], but Matt Wallner was a little bit deeper [39th overall, 2019],” continued Falvey. “Luke Keaschall [49th overall, 2023] was a great find from our amateur guys. He wasn’t necessarily high-profile coming out of Arizona State, so a good job by our scouting group, and by our development crew to make him better. Ryan Jeffers [59th overall, 2018] has been a very steady catcher for a long time. He came up through our system. So, what I think it means — hopefully what it means — is that it is a reflection of a good process, and partnership, between player development and scouting.”
On the other side of the coin is a current shortage of impact bats that aren’t homegrown. Only Josh Bell, a recent free-agent signing, and Austin Martin, a 2021 trade acquisition, came over from other organizations (and the latter may soon be usurped by 2023 first-rounder Walker Jenkins, or by Emmanuel Rodriguez, whom the Twins signed as a teenager out of the Dominican Republic in 2019.
A number of other teams — I brought up the Los Angeles Dodgers as an example — have had success while being mostly transactional. While the defending World Series champions have undeniably drafted and developed well, they have also made themselves better via trades and the free agent market (having deep coffers — ditto a willingness to spend — obviously helps).
“I don’t think there is one-size-fits-all for any team,” said Falvey. “You need to have some homegrown players. There have been stretches of time where we’ve had a bunch of [acquisitions] on our team. Two of the pitchers at the top of our rotation were traded for, Pablo [López] and Joe [Ryan], at different stages of their careers. Jhoan Duran was a trade, but he was in A-Ball and we grew him up through the minor leagues.
“You don’t want to shut off any valves to potentially get talent into your system,” Falvey added. “Probably the best teams overall, over time, find a way to blend all of that. They get their top draft picks, they pick out a few guys later in the draft — in our case, that’s a Bailey Ober [346th, 2017], or a Griffin Jax [93rd overall, 2016] converting himself from an up-and-down starter to a good reliever. We need more of that.”
Back to Becker and our Roster Resource projected 2026 lineups (as of this past Monday).
While the Twins have the most homegrown first- and second-rounders currently slated to start, they don’t have the most homegrown players overall. That distinction belongs to the St. Louis Cardinals, who have eight (seven draft picks and one international signing). Meanwhile, Minnesota is joined by half a dozen other teams in having seven players who were either drafted by the organization or signed as amateurs out of the international ranks (this excludes players coming over from NPB or the KBO). The six are the Arizona Diamondbacks, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Guardians, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Tigers, and Kansas City Royals.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates with two each, the San Diego Padres with one, and the Miami Marlins who don’t have any.
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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS
Wee Willie Keeler went 12 for 30 against Pete Dowling.
Pee Wee Reese went 12 for 29 against Art Fowler.
Minnie Minoso went 12 for 28 against Sid Hudson.
Roy Smalley went 12 for 27 against Milt Wilcox.
Dick “Dr. Strangeglove” Stuart went 12 for 26 against Chris Short.
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Regular readers of this column may recall that I’ve questioned (criticized might be a better word) Red Sox manager Alex Cora’s decision to occasionally pencil Ceddanne Rafaela’s name into the starting lineup at second base, which he did 14 times in 2025. While Cora’s options were somewhat limited due to injuries, playing baseball’s best defensive centerfielder out of position was arguably a misguided move.
According to the team’s president of baseball operations, that is unlikely to happen again in 2026. Craig Breslow said the following when he met with the Boston media over Zoom earlier this week:
“We’ve seen the way that Ceddanne can impact the game in center field. The rest of the league took notice — obviously, he was awarded a Gold Glove there — and I think we’re a better team with Ceddanne in center field. We’ll try to keep him there as much as we possibly can.”
A followup question seemed in order: Was the young outfielder’s offensive development hindered by his’ shuttling back and forth between positions (from mid-July through August)?
“His routine in terms of offensive preparation didn’t change at all,” replied Breslow. “But I can’t really speak to whether or not adding another variable — that being whatever position he was playing and the defensive prep — had an effect on him. The more stability we can provide, and certainly he is an elite defender in centerfield, the better off we’re going to be, and the most likely he is going to be.”
As I’ve written previously (yes, I’m maybe beating a dead horse here) Rafaela had a 114 wRC+ before being taken out of his comfort zone, and by season’s end that number had slid to 91. Moreover, he had a minus-21 wRC+ over 79 plate appearances while being stationed at second base.
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A quiz:
The Orioles have played in Baltimore since 1954. Since that time, only two O’s have recored 200 or more hits in a single season more than once. Cal Ripken Jr is one of them. Who is the other? (A hint: he also had one 200-plus-hit season with another team.)
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NEWS NOTES
Albert Hall, an outfielder who played for the Atlanta Braves from 1981-1988, and for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1989, died on December 16 at age 67. A native of Birmingham, Alabama who logged 202 big-league hits, Hall was frequently utilized as a pinch-runner. All told, he swiped 67 bases, including 33 in 1987.
Andy Kosco, an outfielder who played for seven teams across the 1965-1974 seasons, died on December 19 at age 84. Originally with the Twins, the Youngstown, Ohio native saw most of his action with the Dodgers, with whom he hammered a career-best 19 home runs in 1969.
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The answer to the quiz is Miguel Tejada. The erstwhile All-Star shortstop had 203 hits in 2004, and 214 hits in 2006, during his Orioles tenure. He also had a 204-hit season with the Oakland Athletics.
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A random obscure former player snapshot:
Joe Roa played the smallest roles on back-to-back Cleveland Indians clubs that won 100 and 99 games respectively before going on to lose in the postseason. In 1995, the right-hander made one appearance (his first in the majors) and surrendered four runs over six innings. He then made one appearance in 1996 and allowed two runs over one-and-two-thirds innings. The Southfield, Michigan native then went west. Roa was the PTBNL in the December 1996 trade that sent Jeff Kent and others to the San Francisco Giants in exchange for Matt Williams.
Roa went on to play for five teams across the 1997-2004 seasons, with that body of work comprising 120 games and a 4.94 ERA over 266 innings. His most extensive experience came with yet another team that played October baseball. In 2004, Roa made 48 relief appearances for the Twins, earning a pair of wins and registering a 4.50 ERA over 70 frames. As was the case with Cleveland, he didn’t pitch in the postseason.
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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Jaylin Rae is slashing .400/.443/.544 with a pair of home runs in 101 plate appearances for the Australian Baseball League’s Sydney Blue Sox. The 24-year-old Sydney-born infielder/outfielder played collegiately at both Charleston Southern and Western Kentucky.
Bobby Dalbec has signed with NPB’s Yomiuri Giants. A fourth-round pick by the Boston Red Sox in 2016, the University of Arizona product left the yard 25 times in 2021 — his first full big-league season — only to then have his career go south. Dalbec heads to Japan having batted .222 with 47 homers over 1,065 MLB plate appearances.
Harold Castro will reportedly join the KBO’s Kia Tigers next season. A native of Caracas, Venezuela who has played every position but catcher, “Hittin’ Harold” was with the Detroit Tigers from 2018-2022, and the Colorado Rockies in 2023.
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Junior Caminero had a stupendous first full big-league season with the Tampa Bay Rays. The 22-year-old (he celebrated that birthday in July) slugger bashed 45 home runs while logging a 129 wRC+ and 4.6 WAR. But while the bat is what stood out, Kevin Cash made it a point to bring up his glove when asked about the third-sacker during the Winter Meetings.
“What we don’t talk about enough is that coming out of spring training there was legitimate concern about his defense,” said the Tampa Bay manager, who admittedly wasn’t fully confident in that aspect of Caminero’s game. “I give him so much credit. After about a month in, really working on his defense with Brady Williams and Rodney Linares, he became a very good defensive player to where when the game was on the line, and there was a ground ball hit [to] third base, we felt really good about it.”
The numbers don’t exactly agree with Cash’s “very good defensive player” assessment — Caminero finished with 18 errors, as well as a minus-5 DRS and a minus-3 OAA — but he nonetheless did show improvement. Given his ability to punish pitchers, Caminero doesn’t need to be Brooks Robinson in order to provide All-Star-quality value.
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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE
At The Athletic, Jayson Stark’s Strange But True 2025 compilation highlights plays and moments that stood out for being… well, strange but true.
Voros McCracken has started a Substack. The eponymously-titled first entry is I Bet You’re Wondering How I Got Here.
CBS Sports’s Matt Snyder wrote about how Manny Ramirez is fading quietly into the sunset in his final year of BBWAA-ballot eligibility.
Purple Row’s Renee Deshert wrote about how new Colorado Rockies president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta is building trust and, much to her approval, a team of nerds.
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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS
Pete Fairbanks, who has reportedly agreed to a free-agent contract with the Miami Marlins, has made 15 career appearances against the team he is slated to join. Over those outings, the 32-year-old righty reliever has tossed 15 scoreless frames while holding batters to five hits in 50 at-bats. He is 1-0 with five saves versus the Fish.
Los Angeles Dodgers batters have combined to draw 5,702 walks over the past 10 seasons, the most in the majors. Kansas City Royals batters have combined to draw 3,983 walks over the past 10 seasons, the fewest in the majors.
Mike Mussina went 270-153. He allowed 3,460 hits and 1,559 runs.
Andy Pettitte went 256-153. He allowed 3,448 hits and 1,572 runs.
The Toronto Blue Jays signed Frank Catalanotto on today’s date in 2002. Previously with the Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers, “The Cat” proceeded to play four seasons north of the border, putting up a 111 wRC+ and 6.1 WAR. He had a two-homer game against the Tigers in 2003, and a 6-for-6 game against the White Sox in 2004.
The Chicago White Sox signed Darrin Jackson as a free agent on today’s date in 1993. Previously with four teams, including the crosstown Cubs, Jackson went on to bat a career-best .312 with 10 home runs and a 114 wRC+ for the South Siders in 1994. The personable former outfielder has been a broadcast analyst for the White Sox since 2000.
Players born on today’s date include Myles Jaye, a right-hander from Fayetteville, Georgia whose MLB career comprised five appearances with the Detroit Tigers in 2017. His first two outings were a stroll in the park — a combined five-and-two-thirds scoreless frames — while his remaining three were a veritable train wreck. Over seven innings, Jaye was jolted for 15 runs. All told, his ledger includes a record of 1-2 and a 12.08 ERA.
Also born on today’s date was Count Sensenderfer, an outfielder who batted .299 while coming to the plate 234 times while playing for the National Association’s Philadelphia Athletics from 18971-1874. Per his B-Ref bio page, Sensenderfer holds the record for most career at-bats without a walk by a non-pitcher.
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
I’d almost completely forgotten Tejada even played for the O’s. Got there eventually but it was tough! Good quiz this week.
Yep, tough trivia..no clue on this one.
Knew Tejada played for the Orioles, but, my memory was that he was washed soon after he signed, which obviously wasn’t true.
Ended up going with Rafael Palmeiro after also considering Eddie Murray, Albert Belle & Roberto Alomar.
My only two other thoughts were Alomar and Brian Roberts. If I’d remembered Raffy or Eddie I probably would’ve gone with either of them over Tejada, luckily my memory is terrible
I guessed it was either Murray or Palmeiro. In hindsight, I remember Tejada getting a nice round 150 RBIs in his 1st year in Baltimore, and it makes sense that he would get to 200 hits several times because he had decent batting averages and didn’t walk much.
I had completely forgotten it, so I never got there. My completely wild guess was Eddie Murray because I knew he had 3000 hits and played many years outside of Baltimore, although I didn’t really think he ever got 200. He didn’t.
I guessed Frank Robinson. Turns out he did it in Cincinnati but topped out at 182 in BAL.
I got it immediately. Tejada was on the O’s in the baseball game I played the most in my life by an order of magnitude (MVP Baseball 2005).
Hands down the best sports video game ever made (possibly best game period).
I was 100% certain it had to be Murray – guy didn’t miss many games and always hit for decent averages and spent more than a few years on other teams. I have no idea how he never had 200 hits in a season. Heck, he never had 190 in a season. I actually briefly thought of Tejada but thought he hit for lower averages as a power hitter. Turns out his batting averages were higher than I thought.
The other name that popped into my head was Brooks Robinson since he played forever but he obviously played his whole career with the O’s so it couldn’t be him. I also thought his batting average was too low for a 200 hit season. His career average was low-ish at .267 but at his peak he actually ran pretty good BAs from 1959-1964 and topped 190 hits 3 times.
Just checked and there have only been six 200 hit seasons for the O’s since 1954: 2 for Ripken, 2 for Tejada (plus a 199 hit season), BJ Surhoff with 207 in 1999 and Al Bumbry with 205 in 1980
Definitely did not get the quiz this time. I went with Nick Markakis, which I might not have gone with except that he seems like he would be a great answer to a trivia question. Not the answer, but he was amazingly consistent in the hits department, with five consecutive years for the Orioles where he ranged from 182 hits to 191.
I think the trivia question you were looking for was “which former Orioles player will be elected to the HOF in 2025 solely to spite Jay Jaffe?”
I used to joke around with a line almost identical to that but with Harold Baines instead of Nick Markakis. I still feel guilty.
Oof. I guess we know who to blame now though.
I think the next one to make Jay lose his mind will be Johnny Damon. Maybe Paul Konerko. I think the veterans committee will elect Torii Hunter but I think Jay will be emotionally prepared for that. And Jimmy Rollins but he’s not nearly as egregious a pick.
I don’t know that the standard hall voting process is screwed up enough now that a player like Baines could get in that way. I think the most likely route to something like that would be if the phrase “Salvador Perez is a Royal for life” edges closer to literal rather than metaphorical.
Jerry Reinsdorph pulled in some favors for Baines. Politics at its best. Totally agree Baines sits in the bleacher seats at any HOF activities, JR reflects the cronyism of the City of Chicago, where the theme is vote early, and often.
I went with Frank Robinson and also considered Nick Markakis, Eddie Murray and Rafael Palmeiro. Totally forgot about Tejeda.
Also went with Robinson.
Got it right away somehow, Tejada just popped in my head with the clue. I knew he never walked much so stuck with it.
If you aren’t one of the seven of nine on the Twins, you will be assimilated.
Two points:
1) The discussion about the number of homegrown players on a team was highly informative. I often hear fans say that their team is playing poorly because it doesn’t possess enough homegrown players, and the good ones were traded away. It appears that this value has no significant impact on a team’s performance.
2) I agree that Rays manager Kevin Cash was exaggerating about the fielding of Junior Caminero. However, he was correct that JC finished the year as a good fielder. I watch the numbers this season. I am quite certain that by the end of April, Caminero was, at one point, the worst fielding positional player as measured by OAA and FRV. I suspect he was on a pace to set records for badness. (A fan remembers such events.) However, after that, JC played above-average defense, causing his defensive numbers to be less negative.
Unfortunately, I was unable to use the FG database to filter fielding stats by months to confirm my memory. Maybe someone else can show me how to perform this task.
“Home Grown” is very difficult to define effectively in baseball because of the various ways to obtain players and minor league development. This focused on Twins draft picks, but international signings are also “home grown.” On top of that, if you trade for a guy in A ball and develop him, most people would call that “home grown.” What if you unlock a career minor leaguer who other teams couldn’t develop? What about a Rule 5 player that some team didnt think enough of to protect, but you turn into a viable MLB contributor? Was Ohtani “home grown” when he was in Anaheim? Probably not, but there are all kinds of varying degrees here.
Of the 8 teams mentioned as having the most homegrown talent on their roster overall., they were collectively under .500 in2025…even if you exclude the Rockies. Of the 8 teams, only Tigers and Guardians made playoffs last season.
I think it comes down to how we define home-grown “talent.”
We know some teams trade away their expensive, talented players to rebuild.
The projected starters then will consist of prospects and suspects until the team feels it has a strong core to support: at that point they fill holes by bringing in talent developed by other teams.
This metric has the virtue of simplicity, and the drawback of oversimplification. (e.g., Cal Raleigh and Ben Williamson might not be the same amount of home-grown talent in the real world.)
I think the definition “home grown talent” is super vague. The Twins should absolutely get credit for developing Jhoan Duran. Think about it, if we’re thinking about scouting as part of this process, why would we say that only amateur scouting counts? They scouted Duran and developed him.
But then they probably shouldn’t get credit for developing Joe Ryan. Joe Ryan was basically a finished product with the Twins traded for them. But even that’s tricky, because the Rays clearly didn’t know what they had in Joe Ryan, and it’s like the Twins did. So no development, but scouting.
And then they developed Luis Arraez, who they flipped for Pablo Lopez. So you could make the argument that it was a home-grown player that got them Lopez. But then they signed Pablo Lopez to an extension, so he shouldn’t count in that category anymore. Or at least not count much.
On top of all these definitional problems, the only fast list any of us can bring up is by scanning roster-resource and looking at the colors. So even if we wanted to come up with a different method for evaluating home grown talent, the only easy method we have still shows that the Padres didn’t develop Fernando Tatis Jr, that the Rays didn’t develop Junior Caminero, the Phillies don’t get credit for Cristopher Sanchez, and that the Brewers didn’t develop Freddy Peralta. Heck, if you look at the Rays and the Brewers you will see they don’t run a lot of guys out there who they got as amateurs, despite having a pretty good scouting and development group. Those guys get traded away.
There’s definitely a way to quantify all of the different parts of this, but it would be a lot of work.
The one thing that we can definitely agree on is that there is absolutely nothing about your amateur / minor scouting and development system that is involved with giving a lot of guys money. For this reason it’s easier to rule out teams that are not “home grown” or due to their development pipeline than ones that are. It’s pretty clear that none of the Blue Jays, Phillies, Dodgers, Padres, or Yankees are “home grown”. Some of that is clearly due to money, and other parts of it are taking other teams’ castoffs and making them better (the Ernie Clement being a recent example). And which is also a list of most of the favorites to either win their division or snag a wild card spot next year.
And even among the not “home grown” you’ve listed, the Dodgers and Padres are, by reputation, quite good at drafting and development, but trade the fruits away.
To follow your logic, and try to rank teams, you’d need to take 100% of projected WAR from home drafted. internationally signed, and developed players, 50-70% from players traded for in low to mid minors, maybe 20-30% for AAA guys acquired and established players acquired by traded prospects, and you’d end up with a semi-accurate mishmash. Probably not worth pursuing at all 🙁
I think you could do it halfway if you could pull all of the leaderboards, plate appearances / innings spent in the minor leagues affiliated with a particular team, amount of service time used with a team, and their WAR split by team.
That would allow you to construct weights for whether a team signed them as an amateur and a separate one for the amount of time they spent in the farm system.
That information is split between Roster Resource and the leaderboards, and I don’t see a way to download it and merge it although I would guess it’s connected somewhere in the back end.
It wouldn’t capture the cumulative nature of the various Tampa Bay trade trees, or the Twins trading for Luis Arraez for Pablo Lopez (or the Reds trading Jonathan India for Brady Singer, etc) but you could make an argument that’s something else anyway.
Modeling the effect of trades would be by far the hardest thing. Not just because you’d have to figure out how to model trading away someone who you had developed yourself versus someone you got another way, but also just from a data wrangling perspective. The roster resource transaction database only goes back to 2020 and joining up trades between teams would be potentially doable but way more work, out of line for the amount of information it would give you.
I’d argue the Yankee position player group could be considered home-grown; 4 of the current projected starters are Yankee draftees/IFAs (5 if you include the injured Volpe). Zero position players on the current Yankee roster were initially acquired via Major League FA.
This is an oversimplification, of course. Stanton, and, to a lesser degree, McMahon and Grisham were salary dumps.
Pitching is a different story — they have three huge FA at the front of the rotation.
“ Fully half of the 30 teams have no more than three, including the Houston Astros, Miami Marlins, and Toronto Blue Jays, who have none [who were drafted or signed as IFA].”
Aren’t (off the top my my head) Bo Bichette, Vlad Guerrero Jr., and Jeremy Pena homegrown?
I guess Bichette doesn’t count now that he’s a free agent.
You picked the nicest possible framing for the Twins. The lack of free agents reflects directly on the (Pohlad) ownership’s craven fire sale followed by reneging on their promise to sell the team. The roster is a fruit with the juice squeezed out of it that remains clutched in the vice grip of a bitter miser.