A Minnesota Twins win coupled with a Los Angeles Angels loss on Wednesday flipped the script in the Wild Card chase yet again. The Twins halted a skid of losing three straight games and four of their last five, and jumped back ahead of the Angels by a half-game for the final Wild Card spot behind the New York Yankees.
That half-game difference will go away on Thursday, as the Twins head to Kansas City to take on the Royals, while the Angels are idle before opening a weekend set in Seattle on Friday night with old friend Ricky Nolasco on the hill.
One would be hard-pressed to find a reputable outlet which gives the Twins much more than a 40 percent chance to make the playoffs — which frankly is fine considering the number of teams in the hunt within just a few games — but why not start to dream a little bit about who could take the ball in a one-game Wild Card playoff, whether it’s at Target Field, at Yankee Stadium or wherever else might be in play?
One thing we can be reasonably confident about is that the race will come down to the wire, all but making lining up the rotation for that start an impossibility. Certainly, things may happen between now and then, including injuries, rainouts or the manipulation of the rotation via the return of Adalberto Mejia, or the use of one of the two remaining in-season off days — next Monday and two weeks from that day — to shuffle some things around.
Theoretically, it might make some sense to shuffle the rotation to maximize the number of starts Ervin Santana or Jose Berrios make down the stretch, but at the same time it might not be worth wearing them out at the expense of Kyle Gibson and Bartolo Colon — both of whom are pitching fairly well.
Assuming the Twins stay on regular rest all the way through the rest of the season, Berrios is slated to start the final game of the season, with Santana starting on Sept. 30. With the simple manipulation of one or both of the remaining off days, either one could theoretically be lined up to make the start in a potential Wild Card game.
But as it stands now, Colon is lined up to make that start. Well, then.
It’s probably not far from the truth that there are only three true candidates to make that start, and probably in the following order: Santana, Berrios, Colon.
It makes a lot of sense to start Santana and Berrios on those final two days against Detroit at home, considering they’ll almost certainly be pivotal, if not to get into the playoffs at all, but perhaps even to host the Wild Card game for the first time in Target Field history. We can’t lose sight of the fact that getting in is goal No. 1, but pushing forward to try to secure the home-field advantage certainly would not hurt.
Each pitcher has pros and cons that uniquely qualify/disqualify them, with Santana probably having the fewest demerits while it’s arguable which of the other two has more bust potential than the other.
Let’s take a look at the candidacy of each starter:
Ervin Santana
There’s really little debating that Santana has been the team’s best starter this season, and the argument could be made that he’s the most consistent as well. But what does consistent mean, really? Santana has made 28 starts with a sparkling 3.35 ERA (4.59 FIP), 1.14 WHIP and just 7.4 hits allowed per nine innings — a career-best mark for the 13-year veteran.
On twelve occasions, Santana has allowed zero earned runs or just one, and in five more outings, he’s allowed just two earned runs. He’s allowed three or fewer earned runs 19 times in 28 starts — a rate of about 67-68 percent of the time. That’s a pretty good boom rate if we’re talking boom-and-bust factor, right? But he’s also allowed five or more earned runs seven times, and almost all of that was concentrated over an extended period of struggles between May and June.
So let’s say most of his struggles were earlier in the season. That’s not inaccurate. Since Aug. 1, he’s been terrific, posting a 3.30 ERA, .661 OPS against and most importantly, 44-11 K/BB ratio in 46.1 innings. For a pitcher with such a large FIP-ERA gap, finding those strikeouts is key to closing that gap. With a swinging-strike rate of 13 percent over that time frame — the big-league average hovers in the vicinity of 10 percent — Santana is finding his form at the right time.
All things being equal, this is the guy Paul Molitor would prefer to hand the ball to. He just may not have the luxury of lining that up.
Jose Berrios
Berrios has been nipping at Santana’s heels all season long for the title of the ace on this staff, and for a while had possibly usurped the veteran righty before a rough patch in July and August. Berrios came into July with an ERA of 2.98 and left August encroaching on 4.00, with an 11-start stretch that was rather unsightly: .254/.323/.424 line against, 4.66 ERA and 55-18 K/BB ratio in 58 innings.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that his 4.01 ERA is exactly half what he did in the big leagues last year, however. And if a rough patch for a 23-year-old starter is still almost a strikeout per inning with a sub-.750 OPS against, that really is not egregious. Berrios figured some things out against the White Sox in his final start of August — 11 strikeouts, one walk and four hits in seven shutout innings — but fell back to the pack in an 11-4 loss to the Rays in his first September start.
From a raw stuff standpoint, nobody in the Twins rotation — and perhaps entire organization — can go toe-to-toe with Berrios. Nearly half of his starts (9-of-21) have registered with the righty getting seven or more strikeouts. He has also kept the blowouts to a relative minimum, as just four of his 21 starts (19 percent) have resulted in more than four earned runs. In a playoff atmosphere, keeping one’s team in the game is of utmost importance, since nothing is worse than a blowout loss in a winner-take-all scenario.
If Santana is the No. 1, Berrios is probably No. 1a. Lining up either of these two would be a luxury that Molitor would love to jump at.
Bartolo Colon
Really? But hear us out on this one. No moment is too big for the 44-year-old righty, who made a living pitching in New York City for three years with the Mets. The bright lights won’t get to him, as he posted a solid 3.90 ERA (3.79 FIP) over nearly 600 innings with the Mets prior to this season. That could be apt if the Wild Card game is played at Yankee Stadium, for instance.
If the Twins don’t have the ability to line up Santana or Berrios, is Colon the next-best option? Probably. He’s been fine since joining the Twins — 3.94 ERA (4.96 FIP), 5.5 K/9, 1.6 BB/9, 1.41 WHIP — though it’s on a razor-thin margin due to the number of hits and home runs he’s allowed, but he’s also been staked to a number of large leads where he’s simply laid the ball over the plate and let opposing teams hit it. That’s sort of his thing regardless of the score, isn’t it?
There’s certainly bust potential, as Colon could be pitching his final game in a blowout loss at Yankee Stadium, but what would be more fun than the venerable righty pitching the ragtag bunch of kids into the Division Series with the Astros, and thus likely lining up Santana and Berrios to start Games 1 and 2 against Dallas Keuchel and Justin Verlander?
We can think of worse things. Not bad for a guy picked up off the scrap heap, huh?
So what do you think? What is the likely scenario? What is the preferred scenario?
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