Twins Return Correa to Sender For Partial Refund

I was a young baseball writer working in Houston when Carlos Correa came up with the Astros. At the time, I was convinced that this 6-foot-4 mountain of a man with a massive throwing arm but unimpressive foot speed would end up at third base before too long. A lot has happened since then. When fellow shortstop prospect Alex Bregman got promoted a year later, it was Bregman, not Correa, who slid over to third. From there, Correa developed into a Platinum Glove winner and a consistent plus-10 defender or better.

Then Correa left the Astros entirely and stayed away after a successful one-season audition with the Twins. Even after a reunion with Houston was mooted in the lead-up to the deadline, the scuttlebutt said it wasn’t happening and the Astros traded for Ramón Urías to fill the Isaac Paredes-shaped hole in the infield.

But after all those bumps in the road, and after 10 years of waiting, I turned out to be right after all: Correa is headed back to Houston, along with $33 million in cash, for minor league left-hander Matt Mikulski, and in accordance with my prediction, Correa is going to play third base.

Never abandon your takes, kids, you have no idea when the universe will decide to prove you right.

The Astros further beefed up their lineup by adding outfielder Jesús Sánchez minutes after the Correa deal. Pitcher Ryan Gusto is going to Miami, along with prospects Esmil Valencia and Chase Jaworsky. That’s a sneaky good pickup, given the current state of Houston’s outfield, but Correa is the headliner.

Make no mistake: This is a salary dump. The Twins greased the wheels for this trade by paying down part of Correa’s contract, but even after the cash infusion, plus Minnesota’s share of remaining signing bonus payouts, Houston is taking on (by my math, which Jon Becker double-checked) some $70.4 million in salary between now and the end of 2028.

Suffice it to say: If the Correa of 2025 were the Correa of 2017, or even the Correa of 2022, this deal would not be happening. The Twins signed Correa to lucrative free agent deals twice in the hopes of landing a legitimate superstar who’d slipped through the cracks. Remember how, in the 2022-23 offseason, Correa agreed to contracts worth more than $300 million with both the Giants and Mets, only to have those deals yanked after a physical?

The Twins, usually far from a hotbed of free agent activity, gave Correa a six-year, $200 million contract with incentives and options to stay in Minnesota. They thought the big market teams’ cowardice could be their gain, bringing a marketable two-way superstar to the Twin Cities for good.

Turns out the big market teams’ cowardice was actually just a smart decision. The specific injury at issue then was an old ankle surgery, and Correa’s leg has actually been fairly sound over the past three years.

He has, however, gone on the IL with plantar fasciitis twice and made other IL trips for a concussion and an intercostal strain, while missing the odd game here and there with various other injuries. If you count a stint on the COVID list in 2021 as an IL trip, 2020 is the only season since 2016 in which Correa avoided a stint on the IL.

And when he’s been able to stay on the field, the results have been inconsistent. Last year, Correa put up a .310/.388/.517 line with 14 homers in 86 games. That’s a 155 wRC+ and 4.2 WAR in about half a season — legitimate MVP territory. Or runner-up-to-Aaron-Judge-in-MVP-voting territory in this day and age, which is no less impressive. Then, of course, the plantar fasciitis flared up.

Correa was mostly healthy in 2023, and again this year, but he posted a 94 wRC+ then and a 97 wRC+ now, with 42 double plays across that season-and-a-half run.

This is sort of the converse of the Mets prospects who went to the Giants in the Tyler Rogers trade on Wednesday. Correa is as big a name as there is, and he played like a superstar just last year, but the name value doesn’t match up with the production. I think you have to treat him like an average hitter with the potential to be a very, very good defender at third. Anything the Astros get on top of that is gravy.

Even working by that extremely circumspect view of Correa, the Astros sure could use him; they’re currently out three-quarters of their Opening Day infield. Paredes just went on the IL with a season-ending hamstring strain. Jeremy Peña’s breakout season has been interrupted by a broken rib suffered in late June, though he just started a rehab assignment and should be back at shortstop in Houston soon. And Brendan Rodgers hasn’t been seen since he strained his oblique six weeks ago.

Add to that the going-on-three-month absence of Yordan Alvarez and Houston would surely welcome another power bat to the lineup. Two, in fact, if you count Sánchez.

Bringing back Correa feels opportunistic, part nostalgia trip and part “if we rub our lucky magic beans together maybe he’ll play 140 games a year and hit .300 again.” The Sánchez trade fills a more precise need.

In the past 100 years, there have been 27 players in the AL and/or NL who primarily played the outfield, batted right-handed, and threw left-handed. Rickey Henderson is the most famous by a huge margin, but this is a strange enough phenomenon that you probably remember Ryan Ludwick or Cody Ross or Guillermo Heredia as oddities.

There are only two such players in the league today: Chas McCormick and Jake Meyers, and they’re both Astros, and they’ve been sharing an outfield for the past five years.

I’ve never understood this. It’s like having two pet narwhals or two AMC Gremlins, so you can always have one to drive when the other breaks down. Actually, that’s exactly what the Astros are doing; Meyers is on the IL with a calf strain, while McCormick is chugging along as the short half of a center field platoon. Not that he’s hitting; McCormick has a 64 wRC+ since the start of 2024.

I find it hard to get worked up about Sánchez generally; the occasional bonkers exit velo notwithstanding, he’s an average player overall. But let’s look at his platoon splits, as well as the platoon splits of the other guys who are on the Astros roster and can play outfield.

Not that you’d want to platoon a top prospect like Smith, who’s developing for tomorrow while playing today, but Sánchez fills Houston’s need for an outfielder with pop who can actually threaten right-handed pitchers. And he’s a solid corner outfield defender who has experience standing in center (Is he good there? Don’t worry about it!), which gives the team even more platoon flexibility.

Finally, as we’re seeing rental bats and relievers get shuttled all around the map, Sánchez has two arbitration years left after this one. Which plays into how the Marlins are getting three guys for him.

Gusto has made 14 starts and 10 relief appearances for the Astros this year. (Wow, the Astros really have had a lot of injuries this year, haven’t they?) The 26-year-old rookie with average fastball velocity has thrown seven different pitch types. He has a 4.92 ERA, which isn’t great, even in a home park where dingers come cheap, but he’s running a .331 opponent BABIP and doesn’t walk that many guys, so his FIP is down at 4.11.

Essentially, FIP thinks he’s an average pitcher, rather than a replacement-level one. He’s heading to a home park on the other end of the spectrum, so we’ll see what happens.

Valencia is a 19-year-old outfielder who has a promising swing but poor results — and by “results” I mean chase rates and contact rates that simply will not work for a 5-foot-10 guy with below-average speed and power. The realistic best-case scenario is a hit-over-power corner outfielder, but there’s so much runway for a player this young (he only graduated off the complex this year) that I wouldn’t give up on him just yet.

Jaworsky was an over-slot day two pick in 2023, a nailed-on future shortstop (or at least shortstop-capable utilityman) whom the Astros were hoping would fill out and hit well enough to get his legs and glove to the big leagues. Those hopes are, as yet, unfulfilled. Jaworsky is currently in High-A, where he’s striking out 21.6% of the time and slugging .359. Which looks suspiciously like he’s getting the bat knocked out of his hands and swinging and missing, which is a bad combination.

It’s not a great return, but Sánchez — a guy with massive platoon issues who’s about to get expensive in arbitration — is so much more valuable to the Astros than he is to the Marlins.

Finances notwithstanding, it’s way more than the Astros gave up to get Correa back. I had to go directly to James Fegan, who wrote our Astros top prospect list, to get a report on Mikulski, because he didn’t even make the unranked “Other Prospects of Note” section.

The Giants drafted Mikulski in the second round out of Fordham in 2021, when he was throwing in the upper 90s from the left side. His stuff has backed up considerably since then, leading to his release at the end of spring training this year. Even with his sinking velo, Mikulski hides the ball well enough to get big whiffs with his slider, but a violent delivery with major head whack has left him with absolute rock-bottom command. I don’t want to pile on Mikulski — he didn’t do anything but show up today — but he might be the least valuable player in the Astros system who can still be billed as a prospect.

In other words, this is a 26-year-old who’s walking a batter an inning in his third season in High-A. If the Twins can get something out of him, they deserve to win this trade.

As exciting as these moves are for the Astros, spare a thought for the Twins in all of this. Minnesota entered this season with a reasonable hope of winning the division, and while Joe Ryan and Byron Buxton survived deadline season, the Twins traded 11 big leaguers in the four days leading up to the deadline. I’m hardly the only person doing trade coverage at FanGraphs this week, and as I sit here on Thursday evening I do not know for sure how many Twins trades I’ve recapped in the past 21 hours. I think it’s three, but it might be more.

On balance, it makes sense to salary dump Correa. This all-in move hasn’t worked, and while I’m not board-certified in sports medicine, I do know that big guys with plantar fasciitis tend to have trouble running as they get further into their 30s. Unless the Astros hook up with Miracle Max, this is only trending in one direction.

But trading Correa, and getting less than nothing back for him, would sting the most if I were a Twins fan. For a couple years, they were playing in the deep end of the free agent pool. They had a bona fide free agent superstar to build around. Now, after three and two-thirds seasons and just one trip to the playoffs, ownership has decided to cut its losses on Correa before his 31st birthday.

A lot of the Twins’ other business this week was painful but reasonable: mostly outgoing free agents who were unlikely to be re-signed. The best player with any real team control remaining, Jhoan Duran, brought back some serious freight. And these trades didn’t just net far-off prospects, they bought low on talented guys like James Outman and Taj Bradley. You could talk yourself into things turning around quickly.

But ditching Correa like this isn’t a baseball trade. It’s an ownership group of second-generation skinflints settling up with a nine-figure creditor in preparation for selling the team.

Yes, seeing Correa’s contract out probably would’ve been throwing good money after bad. Yes, the Twins could find better ways to spend the $70.4 million they no longer owe him. But they just admitted defeat on the biggest free agent signing in franchise history. That’s a hard pill to swallow, no matter what the numbers say.