The Minnesota Twins added a pair of pitchers with significant MLB time to their stable when they announced they had signed righties Nick Tepesch and Ryan Vogelsong to minor-league deals. Both deals have invitations to spring training, with each pitcher having a shot to break camp with the big-league club as a swingman — a pitcher who can pivot between starting and relieving.
Tepesch is likely the lesser-known to fans of the two, as the 28-year-old righty has thrown the bulk of his 223 big-league innings with the Texas Rangers — Thad Levine’s former club. Tepesch made 43 appearances (40 starts) with the team between 2013-14, posting a 4.56 ERA with 5.4 K/9 and a WHIP of 1.37. He briefly surfaced in the big leagues in 2016 with the Los Angeles Dodgers, as he allowed five earned runs in four innings (11.25 ERA) in a spot start.
Tepesch does not throw particularly hard (90.3 mph average fastball) but instead will mix things up with a four-seamer, sinker, slider, curve and a show-me changeup. He’s been a roughly league-average groundball guy in his career (43.5 percent) and his slider is really his only swing-and-miss pitch (11.1 percent career whiff rate). With Tepesch it’s most likely one of two things, as either he’s finding a familiar face in a landing spot that should provide an opportunity, or perhaps Derek Falvey and Levine see something they hope to unlock from Tepesch as he’s still a relatively young guy. He seems more likely to start the season in Triple-A Rochester than not, however.
Vogelsong is a grizzled veteran righty who will turn 40 right around the All-Star Break. He’s spent his entire career with two teams — the Pittsburgh Pirates and the San Francisco Giants — but it’s been an unconventional path. First of all, he’s played with each of those teams….twice. First the Giants, then the Pirates, then Tommy John surgery, then he went overseas to play in Japan for three years. He came back stateside and bounced around in the organizations of the Phillies and Angels in 2010 before parlaying a fairly strong season — he lead the team in innings and strikeouts — in Venezuela with Tiburones de La Guaira that winter into a deal with the Giants, again.
By the time Vogelsong threw his first pitch in 2011 for the second take with the Giants, he was already 33 years old. He rewarded them with a very, very good season however, as he posted a 2.71 ERA in 30 appearances (28 starts). He was rewarded with his first and only All-Star appearance that season, and finished 11th in the NL Cy Young balloting.
All in all, his second run with the Giants (2011-’15) was fairly successful, as he posted a 3.89 ERA (4.03 FIP) in 792.2 innings while working mostly as a starter. His last three years were on the bumpier side (4.63 ERA in 423.1 innings), and so after re-signing with the Giants following the 2013 and 2014 seasons, Vogelsong landed with the Pirates for the 2015 season.
Vogelsong was in the midst of a pretty good start to his season when he was hit on the bill of his helmet by a Jordan Lyles pitch on May 23. To that point, Lyles had a 3.74 ERA in 21.2 innings with a 16-10 K/BB ratio while working as a swingman. The pitch fractured his orbital bone, and he reportedly told trainers he thought his career was over when the injury happened.
(note: we don’t share this to sensationalize, but to simply show how incredible his comeback last season was)
Vogelsong managed to get back to the big leagues by early August, and had a fairly good first handful of appearances — 2.48 ERA over his next five appearances, all starts — before closing the season on a particularly rough seven-start stretch: 7.67 ERA, .935 OPS against and 22-19 K/BB ratio in 31.2 innings.
It would appear rather likely that Vogelsong would be ticketed for a sixth-starter-type role, perhaps serving in the long role that was basically vacant for much of the 2016 season. In that way, he’d probably be battling Justin Haley for innings.
The Twins announced on Thursday that they had added catcher Chris Gimenez on a minor-league deal with an invitation to spring training as well. In a way, Gimenez to Minnesota was almost too easy to predict; he had spent the past two seasons with the Rangers (Levine) and Indians (Falvey), and was drafted by Cleveland back in 2004.
In fact, Gimenez has been with the Indians on three separate occasions, and here’s how his big-league time has been divvied up the last three seasons:
2016 – Indians
2015 – Rangers
2014 – Rangers and Indians
Even quirkier yet was that Gimenez made his big-league debut for the Indians back on June 3, 2009 — against the Twins.
There’s not much to say about Gimenez offensively. His career-high in plate appearances came this past season as a 33-year-old — thanks in large part to an injury to Yan Gomes which happened, you guessed it, against the Twins — when he hit just .216/.272/.331 while coming to the plate 155 times. Overall for his career, he’s compiled 776 plate appearances over eight seasons — a little over a full season worth of trips to the plate — with a career line of .218/.297/.335 with 15 home runs. There’s a little pop there, but not much else.
Gimenez graded out positively — not by a huge margin — in StatCorner.com’s pitch-framing metrics for the 3,000-plus pitches he caught in the big leagues this past season, and in general, Baseball Prospectus tends to agree. They have him just over the zero mark in framing runs, and at plus-0.1 in adjusted fielding runs. Basically, he’s fine behind the plate.
According to incoming Twins MLB.com associate reporter Shane Jackson, Gimenez is a great voice in the clubhouse, not only with teammates but also with the media:
Parker Hageman of Twins Daily also passed on an interesting quote from Gimenez, on what the latter looks for as a catcher:
Most likely, Gimenez is in camp to put some pressure on John Ryan Murphy for the backup job behind Jason Castro. Murphy graded out well in framing in the minor leagues, but his offense clearly left a lot to be desired. At the very least, the Twins need catchers for spring training, but there seems to be at least a decent shot Gimenez sees the big leagues at some point this season — though maybe not with the Twins necessarily.
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The Twins also announced this week that LaTroy Hawkins and Torii Hunter would join the Fox Sports North broadcast this season as color commentators.
Both players were hired by the team as special assistants earlier in the winter, and will be part of a rotating team of color commentators behind Bert Blyleven. That team also includes Roy Smalley and Jack Morris, who have backed up Blyleven in recent seasons.
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The Twins formally announced on Thursday that Billy Joel will be coming to Target Field in July. Tickets will be available on Jan. 20 at 10 a.m., with the show on Friday, July 28.
The show will take place when the Twins are in the midst of an eight-game, three-city road trip out west to take on the Dodgers, A’s and San Diego Padres before returning home to take on the Rangers on Aug. 3.
