TRADE: Twins Acquire Dylan Floro in Exchange for Jorge Lopez

The Twins announced that they acquired right handed reliever Dylan Floro in exchange for Jorge Lopez. According to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, the Twins view Floro as a more consistent option than Lopez.

Floro’s surface numbers are unimpressive with a 4.54 ERA on the season in 39.2 innings, but his underlying metrics are very similar to what has made him one of the league’s most consistent relievers the last three seasons. Floro sports a 2.78 FIP this season, a number inline with his career 3.32 ERA.

Floro primarily uses a sinker, fastball, slider pitch mix, while also throwing a changeup around 10% of the time to keep hitters off balance. He won’t blow you away as his fastball and sinker both sit around 93 MPH, but his best pitch, like many Twins pitchers, is his slider with an elite .226 XWOBA on the season (for context, Jhoan Duran’s total XWOBA is .247 which is in the top 3% of the league). With power arms like Duran, Griffin Jax, and eventually Brock Stewart already in the ‘pen, having a change-of-pace guy like Floro isn’t a bad move.

On the López front, the Twins essentially decided to cut their losses. He has looked nothing like the All-Star he was in the first half of 2022 since arriving in Minnesota, and while his velocity is tantalizing, Twins fans know all too well about the sinkers left right down the middle. If the Marlins feel like they can help him adjust his location and shape of his breaking balls, they could get a solid reliever with an extra year of team control. But it was clear he had run out of chances with the Twins.

Floro is a great representative of what is likely the Twins’ strategy at this deadline. This team has a lot of talent when they’re performing well. There doesn’t need to be any major overhauls necessarily, but there are distinct holes that need to be filled. Getting a solid, reliable reliever like Floro fills one of those holes.

Even with Thielbar’s return imminent and Stewart likely following shortly after, the Twins could still use another bullpen arm, particularly from the left side. With 6 days to go until the trade deadline, expect the Twins to be active for some other upgrades.