The Minnesota Twins mostly kept a low profile at this year’s trade deadline, and GM Thad Levine has an interesting parallel for what the process is like.
In a recent interview with Baseball Prospectus’ Aaron Gleeman, a joking Levine compared the trade procedure to the popular online dating app Tinder.
“Most of it’s done through Tinder,” he said. “You don’t get off the ground quickly, no trades. A lot — too much, in my opinion — is put on the profile picture. Actually, none of that’s true.”
The Twins were sellers to an extent this year, trading All-Star reliever Brandon Kintzler to the Washington Nationals and flipping Jaime Garcia to the New York Yankees just days after acquiring him from the Atlanta Braves.
As for the Tinder comparison, it’s a compelling one, even if it was made in jest. Teams do often go based off name value, stats, and other surface metrics when identifying potential trade targets. Sometimes though, other GMs just aren’t interested or they may drag out the process before talks ultimately fall apart. Other times however, two teams really hit it off and have a match in short order. Sound at all familiar to the online dating world?
For his part, Levine, quite the forward thinker with regard to app technology, has done a fair amount of left-swiping recently. But with the Twins on the fringe of an AL Wild Card spot, it remains to be seen if his trade deadline strategy was a good one or if he should have boosted the team’s profile more.
