Fire Gardy

This is just paperwork at this point, but Miguel Angel Sano/Jean* has received his work visa and will be allowed to travel to the USA and work for the Minnesota Twins.

* When he was negotiating the deal, his name was “Miguel Angel Sano.” When he signed the contract with the Twins, he became “Miguel Jean.” When he got his work visa, he is apparently “Miguel Angel Sano” again. Sano is his mother’s name, and Dominican people typically use their mother’s name out of respect until they come of age and begin using their father’s name — but if you’re in the middle of an identity/age verification process, is this really the type of stuff you want to be doing? I’ll be calling him Sano/Jean for the foreseeable future.

Thus ends the first exciting ordeal of his professional baseball career — the process of proving his identity and age and officially becoming the property of a major league team. As everyone knows by now, Sano/Jean claimed he was 16 years old and few believed him (he’s 6′3″, 190 lbs, and very advanced for his apparent age); the Pirates were said to be most interested in his services, but refused to commit without proof of his age. When MLB said they could verify his identity but not his age, the Pirates submitted a lowball offer to his agent, and the Twins were able to steal him away by taking a risk on him.

“Miguel will pick up his visa on Monday and with that it ends a long and painful process,” [Sano/Jean's agent, Rob] Plummer said. “Many teams were interested in Sano’s talent, but Minnesota always trusted that everything was right and that’s why today they have one of the best young players in the world.”

Sano/Jean will most likely report to the Pacific Gulf Coast league to start his professional career in 2010.

The Sano/Jean signing was, in my mind, one of the three events that marked a turning point in the history of the Twins organization, from the “fill up with low-risk/low-upside middle infielders who can’t hit and supplement with the occasional low-baseball-IQ super-athlete who probably won’t make it” philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s, to a much more aggressive “focus on high-upside talent even if it costs more money and entails considerable risk” strategy that they’ve shown lately with these three moves:

1. Signing German teenager Max Kepler to the largest bonus in the history of European players
2. Signing Dominican teenager Miguel Angel Sano/Jean to one of the largest bonuses in the history of Latin American players
3. Going well above slot to steal Kyle Gibson with the 22nd pick of the draft after he slipped from the top 5/10 due to injury concerns

Obviously, the former strategy has worked well; the Twins rebuilt themselves from the disaster that was the 1990s into a model franchise by following it. But the time for a change had certainly come: it would be virtually (if not completely) impossible for the team to take the next step without focusing on higher-upside prospects. And after the Twins blogosphere clamored for years for the Twins to at least try to take the step from “annually contending within the division but incapable of competing with the top AL teams” to perhaps being able to make a title run and sustain a higher level of success, they’ve finally started to do it.

For now, 2008 and 2009 have been remarkable for the back-to-back Game 163s, and for the transcendent play of Mauer. But by the time Sano/Jean reaches the high minors, 2008/2009 could very well be remembered as the year the Twins changed course and altered their history for the better.

Over the long run, that’s much more significant.