Trades Ten Years Later - Yankees trade Eduardo Nunez to Minnesota
Remember that time when the Twins beat the Yankees?
The Names: Minnesota Twins receive: Eduardo Nunez. New York Yankees receive: Miguel Sulbaran.
The Team Context: The Minnesota Twins were born in Washington in 1901 and developed a reputation for our nation’s capital as “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” by 1904. The franchise spent 60 years in Washington competing in an 8-team American League and finished in first place 3 times, second place 5 times, third place 6 times, fourth place 6 times, fifth place 7 times, sixth place 9 times, seventh place 14 times, and eighth place 10 times. To summarize the math, they were in a bottom-two spot 40% of the time and won the pennant 5% of the time. If you missed the World Series championship in 1924 and 7-game defeat in 1925, you missed the entire good era of Washington Senators/Nationals baseball.
The new Minnesota Twins made a World Series in 1965 (another 7-game defeat) and entered the divisional era with a muffled bang (swept 3-0 by the Baltimore Orioles in each of the first two seasons of the American League Championship Series). Eventually, Minnesota fans were rewarded when the team won the World Series in 1987 and 1991.
This may seem like an unnecessarily granular history, but I should stress that I’ve mentioned EVERY macro highlight from the franchise’s first century of existence. If you were born in 1901 and then moved to Minnesota at age 60 and followed the Senators/Nationals/Twins for your entire 100 year life, all the good seasons you saw have been described above. 1924, 1987, and 1991 were awesome and 1925 and 1965 weren’t totally embarrassing. The best player in franchise history retired in 1927 and the second-best player in franchise history left the team after “a bitter war of words with Twins owner Calvin Griffith [that lasted] for more than a year.” Go Twins!
The second century started off on the right foot, as first-year manager Ron Gardenhire led the Twins to the 2002 ALCS before falling to the eventual-champion Angels. After that, things get uncomfortable, even if it would be a while before we would notice in real-time. In 2003 and 2004, the Twins had effectively identical seasons – an American League Central division championship followed by a 3-1 defeat in the ALDS to the New York Yankees, with the Twins winning game one before losing three straight. In 2006 the Twins faced the Oakland Athletics in the ALDS and couldn’t even muster the one win, losing in a 3-0 sweep. Back-to-back playoff appearances in 2009 and 2010 resulted in back-to-back ALDS sweeps, both at the hands of the Yankees. Now it started to look like a trend.
After losing twelve straight playoff games, the Twins walked off a cliff and lost at least 90 games for the next four seasons, the fourth of which had just gotten underway under the leadership of final-year manager Ron Gardenhire at the time of this trade. The Twins were 3-3 after their first six games of the season, the most recent of which were back-to-back wins in Cleveland with gametime temperatures of 36 degrees (with 24 mph wind) and 43 degrees (balmy!). Their other win was in Chicago, with a gametime temperature of 37 degrees (with 24 mph wind). It remained to be seen if they would stay .500 at reasonable temperatures (they would not).
In the latter two games, the Twins started a fellow named Pedro Florimon at shortstop, batting him ninth. Florimon had played basically a full season in Minnesota in 2013 and posted a .221/.281/.330 slash while playing the kind of excellent infield defense that allows you to keep an MLB job without hitting abilities. Florimon was picking up where he left off in 2014, going 0-for-4 and 0-for-5 in the two most recent Twins wins to bring his 2014 early-season slash down to .059/.111/.059.
Oh, should I mention the Yankees too? The New York Yankees were the sports franchise synonymous with bullying competitors into submission through superior financial muscle for most of the 20th century. They won their first World Series in 1923 (one year before Washington’s first), then won 15 more by 1953. They crammed in a few more in the tail-end of the 1990s and 2000 to celebrate the Minnesota Twins centennial with 26 World Series championships to their name, then won another in 2009 to bring the total to 27. Yawn. None of this glorious history is fun to read (or write) about if you aren’t a Yankees fan – let’s discuss one of their failed prospects instead.
The Player Context: At the time of this trade, Eduardo Nunez had played in parts of four MLB seasons. The first was in 2010, when Nunez got into 30 games as a utility infielder for the Yankees. After the season, Nunez was discussed as an untouchable prospect and the eventual heir apparent at shortstop whenever aging legend Derek Jeter decided to retire. He posted a reasonably effective batting line in 2011, playing 112 games as Jeter missed some games with injury, even if defensive metrics suggested that Nunez wasn’t adding too much value to an MLB team yet. In April 2012, an injury to Brett Gardner led to suggestions from Joel Sherman that Nunez get tryouts in the outfield as a “promising player” who could be part of the Yankees future. But when this idea was floated by Sherman to Yankees GM Brian Cashman later that season, Sherman reported that “Cashman could not have been more emphatic in disagreeing,” with Cashman’s appraisal seemingly based more on Nunez’s limitations as a hypothetical outfielder than his shortstop talent. “He is a free swinger and his defense would not be a plus. Put his OPS in left field and I think it would rank near the bottom,” said Cashman. It was academic in any case — Nunez had missed a month and counting at the time of the interview due to a thumb injury.
2013 brought an unfortunate combination of circumstances to the Yankees, as Jeter missed almost the entire season and a healthy Nunez was pressed into regular shortstop duty. It went poorly, as Nunez hit like a shortstop (.260/.307/.372) while playing defense like a bowling pin. By the Uniform Zone Rating (UZR) defensive metric, Nunez ranked 1,085th among 1,085 MLB players in 2013 with a score of -13.4. The difference between Nunez and 1,064th-place Rickie Weeks (whose UZR was -6.4 for the year) was the same as the difference between Weeks and DJ Lemahieu (who tied for 267th that year and would go on to win four Gold Gloves).
Wait, this one is even better. By the Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) metric, which includes catchers and pitchers in its pool, Nunez ranked 1,962nd among 1,962 MLB players in 2013 with -27 DRS. There were only four players with worse than a -17 DRS. The difference between Nunez and 1,935th-place Adam Dunn (whose DRS was -11 for the year and whose nickname was “Big Donkey”) was the same as the difference between Dunn and Paul Goldschmidt (who tied for 81st that year and would go on to win four Gold Gloves, including one for his great work in that 2013 season). Defensive metrics are not typically this united (there’s substantial variation in the other names at the bottom of the two lists), but Eduardo Nunez’s defensive performance was so horrific that our most powerful computers could do nothing but bow in acknowledgement at the devastation.
By the time Spring Training kicked off in 2014, nobody wanted to imagine Eduardo Nunez replacing Derek Jeter (who had announced a planned retirement after the season, but was still around). The ending for Nunez ended up being even more ignominious than the Yankees career had been, as he was effectively beaten in camp by the anonymous duo of Dean Anna and Yangervis Solarte to lose out on a potential utility spot. In order to get these guys on the 40-man roster (which probably involved additional identity checks to verify they were real people), the Yankees designated Nunez for assignment.
The Trade: When an MLB player is euphemistically “designated for assignment,” the only immediate action that takes place is their removal from the 40-man roster. The team is granted a seven-day window to figure out how to dispose of the player that they’ve just jettisoned. There may be circumstances where a team hopes to keep a DFA’d player in their minor league system (which can only happen if no other MLB team wants to take on their contract), but typically the most-optimal outcome for the designating team is to make a trade with another team that wants to acquire the player. Not all 40-man rosters are created equal, and just because a guy has worn out his welcome in your city doesn’t mean that every other GM feels the same way. But, since every team knows that the designating team is on a seven-day clock which could end with the player being released for no compensation, it can be difficult to work against that leverage to extract any meaningful trade return.
Eduardo Nunez was designated for assignment on April 1 (unfortunate day to lose your job) and this trade was made on April 7, which tells us that the Yankees were not rushing to accept the Twins’ offer of Miguel Sulbaran. Sulbaran had signed with the Dodgers out of Venezuela and was traded to Minnesota at the 2013 trade deadline for Drew Butera, which Steve Adams at MLBTradeRumors called “a surprisingly good return” for Butera given that Sulbaran had ranked 14th in the Dodgers farm system. Sulbaran’s time in Minnesota was obviously short and the stats seem fine, but the vibes must have been pretty awful given his departure less than 8 months post-acquisition. The live analysis from Mike Berardino was that Sulbaran “reported to spring training overweight,” so it was either that or the unearned run he allowed in his 1.0 inning pitched for the Twins A-ball team in 2014 that wore out his Minnesota welcome.
It’s difficult to find pictures of a minor Twins prospect from 2014 Spring Training, so I’ll have to trust the judgment of contemporaneous Twins fans that referred to Sulbaran only as “the fat pitcher” while still coming to the reasonable conclusion that they’d rather have The Fat Pitcher in their organization than Eduardo Nunez.
The Results: Sulbaran briefly looked like an MLB player as he ascended through Hi-A, AA, and made it to AAA for one start in his first season and a half with the Yankees. But the paper trail (or at least the baseball statistics) stop in 2015. The tail end of Sulbaran’s professional career involved at least some injuries and at least one suspension for a violation of the drug program. He was released by the Yankees in May of 2017 and that was all for his baseball career.
If Eduardo Nunez provided any value to the Twins at all then the trade would be an easy win for them, but the -1.4 WAR Nunez had compiled as a Yankee suggested this was going to be harder than it sounded. Nunez wasn’t great in 2014, but heated up in 2015 to post his first season as an above-average MLB hitter. The defense was respectable enough for Nunez’s season to have clear positive value to a major league baseball team — 1.2 WAR according to Baseball Reference (that’s a dash, not a minus sign). Things went absolutely off the deep end in 2016, as a strong start to the season resulted in an All-Star selection for Nunez that nobody could have reasonably expected when the Yankees designated him for assignment. The Twins certainly did not expect it, nor did they expect it to continue, with Twins manager Paul Molitor starting his answer with “it’s a slippery slope” when asked about Nunez’s future as a long-term option with the team. For their part, the Twins were on their way to a 59-103 season that would be their worst in Minnesota and had a great excuse to sell everyone that smelled like a trade piece. Nunez was traded to San Francisco at the trade deadline for Adalberto Mejia, who hung around the Minnesota bullpen from 2016 to 2019.
There can be no doubt that, with respect to the Eduardo Nunez - Miguel Sulbaran trade of April 7, 2014, the Minnesota Twins beat the New York Yankees handily. What victory could possibly mean more than that?
The Aftermath: The Twins quickly rebounded from their dreadful 2016 to make a surprising playoff appearance in 2017. As a Wild Card team, they were forced to play a winner-take-all game for the right to advance in the playoffs. There could be no better foe for the upstart Twins in such a high-stakes setting than the mighty New York Yankees. The Twins had lost twelve straight playoff games, with nine of those losses coming at the hands of the Yankees. Their most recent playoff win was preceded by three more losses to the Yankees way back in 2004. Was it finally time for Minnesota to vanquish its foe?
Obviously not; the Yankees won 8-4. No big deal, it was a fluke for Minnesota to compete that year anyways. The 2019 Twins were the real deal, winning 101 games and hitting a staggering 307 home runs to set a new record for the most by an MLB team in any single season. It’s a good thing they were able to reach such gaudy heights, since the 2019 Yankees were right on their tail with 306 home runs that season. When the playoffs rolled around, the two best-slugging teams in baseball history found themselves facing each other in yet another ALDS matchup. The Twins had now lost thirteen straight playoff games and ten straight playoff games to the Yankees, but clearly had a team capable of outhitting New York and ending the recurring nightmare.
That didn’t happen though; the Yankees won all three games to sweep the series. The playoff loss streak extended to sixteen games and the Yankees playoff loss streak extended to thirteen games. The latter streak remains intact, as the two teams have not faced off in the playoffs since 2019. The Twins grew their overall losing streak to nineteen games (losing the first two games of a best-of-three Wild Card series in 2020 and then losing Game 1 of the 2023 ALDS) before finally breaking through with a win over the Astros in Game 2 of the 2023 ALDS to capture Minnesota’s first ALDS triumph of any sort since 2004. Then they were promptly eliminated. The new Minnesota Twins playoff losing streak stands at two games.
Eduardo Nunez played at least part of every MLB season between 2010 and 2020. According to Baseball Reference, he was worth 0.2 wins more than a replacement-level player would have been across that decade. The Twins managed to capture 1.9 of the 0.2 WAR that Nunez posted in his career, math that is somehow correct. But they didn’t manage to keep his career highlight – that honor belongs to the Boston Red Sox. In Game 1 of the 2018 World Series, Alex Cora brought in the right-handed hitter Eduardo Nunez to pinch-hit for the left-handed hitter Rafael Devers against left-handed pitcher Alex Wood, a strategic decision that is still completely ridiculous regardless of how spectacularly it worked out. With two outs, Nunez hit a three-run home run that gave the Red Sox an 8-4 lead and proved to be the most-impactful play of the game by win probability added. We’ll probably discuss this in greater detail (unfortunately) in 2027 to celebrate Nunez’s trade from San Francisco to Boston.
Miscellaneous: Eduardo Nunez spent 2021 in Taiwan as a member of the Fubon Guardians, where he was teammates with former trade partner Adalberto Mejia.
April 18, 2024:
Pittsburgh Pirates receive: Ike Davis
New York Mets receive: Zach Thornton and Blake Taylor