The Blue Jays landed José Soriano, then still had teams calling.
That’s how much the right-hander meant at the trade deadline. Even after Toronto completed its deal with the Los Angeles Angels, the Minnesota Twins and Chicago Cubs were among the clubs that checked in with the Jays to see whether Soriano might be available again, according to league sources granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about deadline dealings publicly. Toronto listened.
The Jays were not actively shopping Soriano after acquiring him, one source said, but they did entertain offers. That kind of post-trade sniffing is standard deadline business, especially for a pitcher Toronto clearly valued enough to build a package around. The Jays had already beaten out other clubs in talks with the Angels, sending three prospects to Los Angeles in a deal headlined by shortstop Arjun Nimmala.
Minnesota was especially aggressive. The Twins, already in talks with Toronto about Jeff Hoffman, explored a Soriano package built around infielder Kaelen Culpepper, their No. 3 prospect, plus additional pieces.
Toronto, according to one source, made it clear it would only keep talking if Riley Quick, the Twins’ top pitching prospect, was included as the second piece in a multi-player deal. The sides never found a match.
Culpepper, of course, is now in the majors. Minnesota promoted him on Friday, and he homered in his debut. Soriano made his Blue Jays debut on Saturday and threw 4 2/3 innings of one-run ball against the Philadelphia Phillies.
Where Culpepper would have fit in Toronto is a fair question. Ernie Clement, Kazuma Okamoto and Andrés Giménez are all under team control for at least the next two seasons. But with elite young talent, teams usually find room if they want it badly enough.
For the Twins, the pursuit fit the way they handled the deadline. After last year’s sell-off - 10 players gone, including several talented relievers under team control and shortstop Carlos Correa - they flipped the script and tried to buy. Team chairman Tom Pohlad was blunt about the need to do more.
“This is a build-and-they-will-come situation,” Pohlad said in July. “The fans are not going to come back based on words.”
Three weeks before the deadline, Pohlad said Minnesota would buy if it was close enough to the playoff race. The baseline plan was straightforward: strengthen a bullpen still taking shape and add rotation depth.
The Twins did exactly that by landing veteran relievers A.J. Minter and Hoffman, along with Baltimore’s Dean Kremer for the back end of the rotation.
But they wanted a bigger swing, too. Once Minter and Kremer were in, the final three days were spent chasing a headline move, and Soriano was near the top of the list.
That’s consistent with how Minnesota viewed the market. Soriano was the prize starter they were willing to seriously explore, even to the point of discussing some of their better prospects.
They were also in on Angels infielder Zach Neto and left-hander Reid Detmers. For Neto, who has three years of team control left, Los Angeles asked for a package centered around top Twins prospect Walker Jenkins, and Minnesota wasn’t willing to go there.
In the end, Soriano went to Toronto, where he slots behind Dylan Cease and gives the Jays a top-of-the-rotation look for the next few years. The fit also reflects what Toronto actually pulled off: the Jays talked all the time about balancing buying and selling, but this time they did it, moving veterans on expiring contracts in Kevin Gausman and Daulton Varsho while bringing in Soriano.
Soriano has been one of the steadiest pitchers in the game over the past three seasons, with the 23rd-best ERA among starters who have thrown at least 400 innings in that span. Toronto, though, thinks there’s more there. The club has seen similar growth paths before, including with Cease this year and Robbie Ray in 2021.
“He’s a different dude than Dylan,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said, “but I think that there are some parallels there that can hopefully be picked up pretty quick.”
Toronto and Minnesota did finally match up on one deadline move, with Hoffman going to the Twins for three prospects just minutes before the deadline. It was the latest in a growing run of deals between the clubs, following Louis Varland to Toronto in July 2025 and Tommy Nance to Minnesota last month.
“I feel like sometimes it just means that there’s better alignment on how that team sees your system as opposed to big mismatches,” Twins GM Jeremy Zoll said after the deadline about dealing with the Jays. “But in certain cases, we don’t line up and you can never know exactly how each team is going to value all your players.
You’re just working as hard as you can to assess the market and where those value matches and mismatches are to create alignment to get it actionable. I don’t know exactly how that has come to be with Toronto the last few years.”
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