Waving the white flag

The only position
Eduardo Escobar didn't
play for the Twins
was first base.

Eduardo Escobar is gone, to the Arizona Diamondbacks for three players in A ball.

Ryan Pressly is gone, to the Houston Astros for two guys who have at least reached Double A.

Also gone is any pretense that the Twins still harbor playoff ambitions.

Escobar was on his way to his new team before the Twins took the field in Boston Friday evening. His departure saddens me, as I suspect it does every other Twins fan. Escobar is a fun player, eminently likable, and far better than any of us imagined he would be when the Twins got him from the Chicago White Sox in 2011.

Escobar filled the gap at third base and in the middle of the lineup opened by Miguel Sano's failures earlier this season. Now Sano, his minor league reboot apparently complete, gets a fresh shot at the job. It seems odd to say this about a guy who has long been seen as the future of the franchise, but I am not enthused about that. I have come to regard Escobar as a more reliable and productive player than Sano.

Ryan Pressly
was the Twins' best
Rule 5 selection
since Johan Santana.

But ... Escobar is a free agent to be, the Twins picked up three lottery tickets for him, and it's wise to  to get a handle on what Sano 2.0 is like. I want to hope that the Twins re-sign Escobar this winter, but that probably would require them to pull the plug on Sano, and I believe they still have too much invested in Sano.

As for Pressly: There are sabermetric analyses that regard him as one of the better relievers in the game. That's not been backed up by the results.

I'm eager to see how Houston uses Pressly. Their late-inning relief situation has been pretty ugly all year; closer Ken Giles's postseason woes carried over to this year, and the Astros sent him to the minors a bit more than two weeks ago. The Astros have had no shortage of pitching imports revise their approach and step up their game -- Charlie Morton, Justin Verlander, Garret Cole -- after arriving in Houston. Maybe the Astros see something they can tweak with Pressly.

As for the return for the two ... well, I'll grapple with that in another post on another day. Right now, the fan in me is grieving too much for the amateur GM to emerge. On the face of it, the Twins appear to have gotten better prospects for Pressly than they did for Escobar, because Pressly is still under team control in 2019.