SAN FRANCISCO – Aaron Sabato was resigned, if not discouraged. Or maybe, more accurately, he’d come to a place of acceptance.
At the end of his sixth year in professional baseball, without ever having gotten The Call to the Major Leagues, Sabato had begun coming to terms with the fact that his time with the Twins organization might be coming to an end. Players are eligible for Minor League free agency after six years, and Triple-A St. Paul’s season came to an end on Sunday.
Sabato, a first-round Draft pick in 2020, was literally three innings from his Twins tenure possibly coming to an end when a rain delay hit, and St. Paul manager Brian Dinkelman called him aside. Sabato would need to cancel his flight home to New Jersey after the Saints’ season ended. He would be headed west to join the big league club instead.
“We were in maybe the sixth inning of our last game of the season, and I was off, and, I mean, I was fully ready to go home,” Sabato said. “It was a complete 180 switch, but, I mean, it's everything I've ever dreamed of, so I'll take it.”
With about 15 family members and friends in attendance, Sabato made his Major League debut on Monday in the Twins’ 5-2 loss to the Giants. He started at first base, batting seventh, and went 0-for-3 with a strikeout.
It’s been a long, long grind for Sabato. There was no Minor League baseball in the COVID year of 2020, when he was drafted. He enjoyed a strong pro debut in 2021, but scuffled with underperformance and injury for the next three years. A strong season split between Double-A Wichita and St. Paul got him back on the radar in ’25, and in ’26 he posted huge numbers for St. Paul.
“I just said, if I can get on the field, then I can play a whole season healthy, I know what I can do,” he said. “And I was blessed and fortunate enough to stay away from injury and be on the field [this year]. I was able to actually grow as a player, and I feel like all those seasons before, of where I struggled and didn't feel like myself … a lot of people could have [given] up.”
And for a player like that, it’s meaningful to everyone in the organization to be able to give him an opportunity.
“I think it is important,” said manager Derek Shelton. “If you are a younger player in this organization or a player that’s grinded in this organization, and there has been the development and time invested on both sides – not just on the organization’s side, but on the player’s side – yeah, I think it speaks volumes to what you’re doing. Again, this is not a charity case. This guy hit some bombs and hit some doubles and had a really good year.”
It then is probably fitting that even after the call came, Sabato had a bit of an odyssey to get to San Francisco. He made it, eventually. His bags did not. A trip that was supposed to go through Dallas was instead diverted to Little Rock and eventually to a second airline. United got Sabato to California. As of Monday afternoon, it was unclear as to whether American had done the same for his belongings.
“I land on United, I go all the way across to Terminal 1,” he said. “I go there and then I ask the guy, and I'm like, ‘Hey, are my bags here?’ And he's like, ‘Oh, your bags are in Dallas.’ So I have no single piece of baseball equipment, and these guys have been hooking me up with one piece of equipment at a time, trying to piece it together. I think I got [Ryan] Kreidler’s bat, Royce [Lewis’] cleats, Kody [Clemens’] glove, Ben [Ross’] batting gloves, pro-hitter from the training room, so I'm piecing it all together one by one.”