BANNER CLASS

The Twins’ 2009 international class helped form the core of two playoff teams in the past three seasons

- KYLE GLASER

Entering the summer of 2009, the Twins were a mid-level player on the international market. They had some history of success, namely in Australia and Venezuela, but they rarely spent big money and rarely competed for top players.

In the Dominican Republic, in particular, the Twins were a virtual non-factor.

“We were shackled in the D.R. for a long, long time because we never had a facility,” said Twins vice president of player personnel Mike Radcliff, who oversaw the club’s international scouting for more than two decades.

“For a long time, going back to the ’90s and early 2000s, we had nothing. We had essentially rotating places where we would run tryouts in the D.R. We were basically just running tryouts wherever scouts could find a field.”

It was in that context that Fred Guerrero sought to make a big push. Since joining the Twins as a Dominican scouting supervisor in 2004, Guerrero had watched and waited for a class talented enough to convince his superiors to spend more money internationally.

In the class of 2009, Guerrero found what he was looking for. Two shortstops from San Pedro de Macoris, Miguel Sano, and Jorge

Polanco had caught Guerrero’s eye and became the targets of his pursuit. Halfway around the world, fellow international scout Andy Johnson had locked in on a German outfielder named Max Kepler.

Together, the Twins’ international staff decided this was the class worth going big on—the one they had been waiting for.

Facilitated by Radcliff and then-general manager Bill Smith, they got the money they needed to seal it.