

Welcome to the Wednesday edition of The Cooler, where sometimes we agree to disagree. Let’s get to it:

*The Twins brain trust, led by Derek Falvey and Thad Levine, made several long-term contract offers to young core players this offseason. They weren’t able to land two of their biggest fish — Eddie Rosario and Jose Berrios — but they did ink two significant players to five-year deals: Max Kepler and Jorge Polanco.

Kepler’s deal is worth at least $35 million for those five years (with a team option for another year at $10 million), while Polanco will get $25.75 million over the same span (with team options for two more years at $22.5 million combined).

These types of deals are usually win-win at a certain level. Young players get financial security without the year-to-year haggling that comes with arbitration or eventually free agency. Teams get cost-certainty and the possibility of a discount if players outperform their contracts.

Two months into those five-year deals, both Kepler and Polanco are showing strong signs that they might, indeed, outperform those deals. Even in a stacked lineup, both are standing out.

Polanco is second in the American League with a .335 batting average and his .988 OPS easily leads all MLB shortstops. Kepler is fresh off winning player of the week honors. He has a 10-game hitting streak, during which he’s cracked four homers and driven in 16 runs — including two big ones Tuesday to break a scoreless tie in an eventual 5-3 win over Milwaukee.

Kepler turned 26 in February, and Polanco will turn 26 in July. They had previously established themselves as everyday players, but they had enough cold stretches to go with hot stretches that their ceilings were uncertain. But now they look like more than that — and the Twins stand to benefit from that continued trajectory through prime seasons of their careers.

Rosario and Berrios, by the way, cannot be faulted for betting on themselves. Both are having monster seasons, and they stand to make even more money down the road.

*By the way, if your impression of the 2019 Twins is that they will have a hard time keeping this core together because so many players are on short-term contracts, that narrative might be a little oversold.

These five players are slated to be free agents in 2020: Catcher Jason Castro and second baseman Jonathan Schoop, plus starting pitchers Michael Pineda, Kyle Gibson and Jake Odorizzi.

Castro has shown his value this season, but Mitch Garver sure seems ready to handle the full-time role in 2020. Schoop has been a very nice pickup, but if Miguel Sano delivers this season, it’s not hard to envision Marwin Gonzalez’s versatility being deployed more at second base next season. (Nelson Cruz, who has a $12 million team option in 2020, is another piece of this puzzle).

Of the three pitchers, performance the rest of this year will be key. If Martin Perez continues to look as good as he has, the Twins will almost certainly pick up his $7.5 million option in 2020. Berrios isn’t a free agent until 2023. Odorizzi and Gibson could be candidates for medium-length extensions — as could Pineda, if his health holds up. But the Twins could also promote from within (hey, Devin Smeltzer), deal from a prospect-rich minor league system for a quality starter (hey, Alex Kirilloff) or sign someone else to fill out their rotation.

Long story short: The Twins will have decisions to make. But their wait-and-see approach — which has produced big results in 2019 — leaves more room to keep most of the roster together in 2020 than I might have thought.

*Smeltzer defied odds in so many ways Tuesday. His back story is obviously incredible, and you could almost see all the life experience he’s packed into 23 years on earth being deployed on the mound.

One more way he defied odds with his six scoreless innings: The Brewers have feasted on “finesse” pitchers this season, posting an .878 OPS against them compared to a .735 OPS against power pitchers. In this case, power and finesse are determined not by mph but by strikeouts and walks per nine innings, but it stands to reason that Smeltzer will be a finesse pitcher in the majors even after striking out seven last night.

*Three Twins players were wearing Willians Astudillo-themed shirts on the team plane ride to Tampa. And one of them was Astudillo.