Randy Dobnak has spent the last few years living inside the strange math of baseball. A five-year, $9.25 million deal should have been the kind of prize that secures a career. For Dobnak, it also became a tether - one that helped set up his family, then made him difficult for other teams to claim when the Twins no longer had a major league spot for him.
That’s the part he understands best now. The contract signed in Spring 2021 changed everything for him and his young family.
His wife retired and became a full-time mom, and Dobnak said plainly, “We’re good for money. We’ll never not be good for money.”
He knows where he came from, too. Undrafted out of four years at Alderson Broaddus College in West Virginia, he made his way to Minnesota after independent ball in Michigan, where he also drove for Uber to help make ends meet.
So the gratitude is real. But so is the frustration of what came after.
“I’ve thought about that all the past five years,” he said. “In hindsight, I’d still sign it.”
After missing nearly two seasons because of a rare finger injury, Dobnak found himself stuck in a no-man’s-land: healthy enough to pitch, but without a Twins job and with a contract that made him too expensive for another team to take a shot on. He had made only six combined appearances for Minnesota in 2024 and 2025 when the Twins finally moved him at the 2025 trade deadline, one of 11 players dealt away.
He didn’t even realize what was happening at first.
“When they called, I thought I was being DFA’d,” he said. “I was in Toledo (with the Saints) when (general manager) Jeremy Zoll called, and I thought I was being released.
And then he was like, ‘I want to thank you for everything. You and Chris Paddack are being traded to the Tigers.’
”
There was a twist in that deal, too: the Tigers were sending Dobnak to Triple-A Toledo, “And I was already there,” he noted.
The journey didn’t stop there. After Detroit released him, Dobnak signed a minor league deal with Seattle, then used the upward mobility clause to look for a major league roster spot somewhere else.
Kansas City answered, and the fit has worked. Through Wednesday’s games, he was 2-1 with a 1.76 earned-run average in eight appearances, including six starts, for the Royals.
The move also gave him something else: a fresh look at how other organizations operate.
“I was in Minnesota for parts of six years,” he said. “When I was traded, it was nice to see how different organizations did things.”
Meaning …
“Some are results driven, some are analytics driven,” Dobnak said.
The contrast has shown up in how he pitches, too. In his last outing for the Twins, he gave up one run on two hits, including a home run, over 5⅓ innings of long relief in a 9-2 loss to St.
Louis. The next day he was released, and after clearing waivers he went to St.
Paul.
Then came a moment that felt like a full-circle turn. Late last month, Dobnak returned to Target Field and threw seven scoreless innings in a 4-0 Royals win, earning his first major league victory in five years. He did it with a four-seam fastball that tops out under 92 mph and offspeed pitches in the low-80s.
What he heard from the Twins during his time there still sticks with him.
“With the Twins, I’d come out after a good performance and they’d say, ‘Yeah, you got your outs, but you shouldn’t have because the numbers weren’t there on the (radar) gun.’ I pitched seven shutout innings against them (on July 29). They hit some balls hard right at people, but there were still a lot of ground balls, and it was still seven shutty.”
Now, after the stretch of being optioned, DFA’d, released and traded, Dobnak isn’t rushing to map out what comes next. His recent run could put him beyond a minor-league camp-invite deal next spring, even with a potential lockout hanging out there, but he isn’t looking that far ahead.
The last year and a half, he said, has been unusual. And after everything - the injury, the movement, the contract, the uncertainty - he’s choosing to keep it simple.
“The past year and a half has been unique. I just live in the moment,” he said.
“I don’t worry about the future. I just live day to day and hope things will be better tomorrow.”
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