Fire Gardy

I know I’ve been harping on the fact that the Twins are a pitching-rich organization lately, and I also know that all of are very familiar with our young pitchers. But tonight, FanGraphs has a post up about the Twins organization’s cache of pitching talent.

Aside from pointing out that all our pitchers are 27 or younger, they bring up an “even more talented” young pitcher who’ll be in AAA this year. Anthony Swarzak. I’ve been high on this guy for a couple of years now, and he’s still just 23 years old despite having been drafted in 2004.

He has a 94 MPH fastball and a plus curveball, and is working on his changeup.

Of course, Swarzak was suspended last year for drug use — don’t worry, it was just “recreational,” not performance enhancing — and that could be an indication that he has makeup problems.

Given that teams are starting to get enamored by Swarzak’s talent, and that young pitching is becoming more and more valuable around the league, it might be time to start thinking about trading Swarzak away. While we might prefer to trade Perkins and promote Swarzak, teams tend to prefer “potential” over “has struggled thus far in the majors,” so we might get more for Swarzak than Perkins.

You might question the wisdom of trading away some of our almost-major-league-ready talent from AAA, as the White Sox have foolishly been doing, but it’s more than possible because of the aforementioned young rotation. Given the fact that our entire rotation is under team control for the next 2-5 years, we can unload some guys from AAA this year (and next year, and the next) while we wait for the next wave to arrive: guys like Jeff Manship and Shooter Hunt and the rest of the big guns striking everyone out in A ball.

It’s a debatable situation, but we should all remember that most teams don’t get to debate something like this.

With a talented, young starting rotation already established at the Major League level, the Twins have time to be patient with Swarzak and allow him to mature in the minors – both as a pitcher and as a person. Many organizations in baseball would love to have that luxury.

Well said. Whether we keep Swarzak or not, our pitching pipeline is still the envy of the league.

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