The San Francisco Giants traded reliever Taylor Rogers in a money-saving move. But that’s why baseball needs to prioritize keeping families together.
The San Francisco Giants ended their two-year experiment with a dual-twin bullpen when they traded Taylor Rogers to the Cincinnati Reds. The move saves the Giants $6M after they sent the Reds $6M as part of the deal, but it means they had to separate the Rogers twins like Dr. Ben Carson wielding a scalpel. That’s simply wrong.
Baseball – and every sport – should allow twins to count for a single roster spot. Why? Because it’s fun to have twins on the same team, looking all identical. It’s especially good when they throw with the opposite arms, as is the case with Taylor and Tyler. Seeing twins simply feels magical, adding to the wonder of baseball. It’s like having a bullpen full of elves, or unicorns, whose parents weren’t very creative about names.
It’s such a positive that baseball should incentivize major-league twinning. What I’m proposing is to let twins to represent one single roster spot. Identical twins were once were part of just one embryo, so having them occupy the same roster spot logically follows. We’d even extend it to fraternal twins! They’d still get to earn their full salaries, but perhaps the cheapest one doesn’t count for the competitive balance tax.
It hasn’t come up very often in baseball history. Taylor and Tyler are only the 10th pair of identical twins in major league baseball history, and the fourth to be teammates. They’re the first since Jose and Ozzie Canseco were both members of the Oakland Athletics in 1990. Your author was lucky enough to see the Canseco brothers set what must have been a major-league record for twins by combining for six strikeouts in one game.
It’s been hard to keep the twins together in the NBA as well. The Phoenix Suns briefly employed both Morris twins, Markieef and Marcus, who were so close that they negotiated their contract extensions together, agreeing to a discount sum of $52 million for four seasons that they were allowed to decide how to split. Then Phoenix traded away Markieef, Marcus got upset and demanded a trade, and the two have collectively played for 13 different teams since, never together. That’s twin-defensible!
Robin and Brook Lopez have only played together for one-and-a-half seasons. Sure, their pregame wrestling shenanigans may have been a factor in Milwaukee wanting to separate those hooligans, but it’s still a shame.
Professional sports should prioritize keeping families together. Wouldn’t the Warriors’ title runs have been even sweeter if Seth Curry could have occupied a bonus roster spot? Couldn’t the Giants have had Ryan Minor on the team to play a disappointing third base while his twin brother Damon Minor was disappointing at first base?
But now Taylor’s gone. Who knows when a baseball team will even have a chance to pair twins? Maybe somewhere there’s a set of twins cruelly and inexplicably separated as babies when their parents divorced, only to someday meet at baseball camp and plot to reunite their estranged parents. Wouldn’t it be a shame if those twins joined the same baseball team and then one of them got traded for a AA reliever?