Tuesday Twins: Deadline on negotiations to bring Shohei Ohtani to the USA delayed

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• MLB, the MLBPA, and NPB had set an artificial deadline for agreeing to a new posting system that would allow Shohei Ohtani to come MLB this offseason, and that deadline was last night. There’s no new posting agreement, but the parties did agree to move the arbitrary deadline to tonight at 7:00 pm CT instead (at which point they’ll probably just delay the deadline again, and... this isn’t how deadlines are supposed to work, you guys). It’s still a long-shot Shohei comes to Minnesota, but the Twins may have a better shot at it than you think.
• This year’s Hall of Fame ballot was released yesterday, and it includes four former Twins — most notably, Jim Thome and Johan Santana; least notably, Orlando “Oliver” Hudson and Livan Hernandez. Former White Sox/Brewer/other things Carlos Lee is on there too, which is insane because it feels like he’s been retired for ten years by now.
• Yesterday was the deadline to add players to the 40-man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press seems most surprised the Twins didn’t protect Kohl Stewart.
• Nick Nelson over at Twins Daily played a really depressing game of “What if...?” involving Miguel Sano. What if Sano hadn’t fouled that ball of his leg? Or hadn’t needed Tommy John back in 2014?
• Speaking of Twins Daily, the always delightful Tom Froemming wrote about what the heck is going to happen to Kennys Vargas. Kennys is out of options next year, but it’s not clear there will be space for him on the big league roster.
• As Grant Brisbee so gratefully pointed out to me, Taylor Rogers’ twin brother in the Giants organization, Tyler Rogers, was NOT protected from the Rule 5 draft. THE TWINS COULD HAVE TWINS IN THEIR BULLPEN, Y’ALL.