Twins

8/25: Berrios vs. Norris, Copious Injury Updates and Buxton Rolls in Rochester

The Twins need to figure out what's best for Berrios the rest of the way.

Greetings from Target Field, where it’s delightfully cool with a light breeze swirling as the grounds crew prepares for the 12:10 start. It’s righty Jose Berrios on the bump for the Twins against lefty Daniel Norris. There’s no local TV coverage, but MLB Network will have the action as part of a national telecast.

The Twins have lost six games in a row, and are just 2-9 against Detroit this season. In other words, to split the season series they’ll have to win the final seven games against the Tigers this year. That seems….like a tall order.

Injury Updates

Manager Paul Molitor said the tentative plan was to get Joe Mauer back into the lineup Friday in Toronto. Mauer is battling a bit of an issue in his left quad, and Molitor said he thinks it may have been a little more problematic than Joe let on. Molitor also suspects scoring on a double in Atlanta might be what aggravated the issue, though it was something that was bothering him beforehand.

Molitor said that Sano getting back out defensively at third base is “kind of day-to-day.” In his discussions with Sano, Molitor said he came away with the impression that Sano wasn’t entirely comfortable with making the throws necessary to play third base. Molitor said he felt Sano could play there — as he did in the last two weeks — but that he’s not getting a signal that Miguel feels great about how his elbow is doing. Molitor added that having competent other third basemen on the roster — including Trevor Plouffe, Jorge Polanco and Thursday’s starter Eduardo Escobar — also helps the team bring Sano along slowly to make sure he’s right.

Buddy Boshers threw before Thursday’s game, but Molitor said he didn’t have an immediate update on his status. He appears to be progressing nicely in his recovery from elbow inflammation.

Trevor May threw again as he’s working on lengthening out in his catch sessions on flat ground. The plan is for him to get back on the mound in a week as long as he progresses, Molitor said.

Hector Santiago is expected to return to the rotation next Wednesday in Cleveland. He’s battling a thumb issue — soreness and a bit of bruising — that he told reporters has bugged him off and on for 3-to-4 years, but just had never bugged him to the point where he had to miss a start. So they’ll back off him for a bit. That’ll be 11 days between starts for Santiago.   

Here’s how the Twins line up today:

Berrios is in search of some positivity, but there hasn’t been much through eight starts. Case in point: He’s made those eight starts, but tallied just 32 innings total — an average of just four frames per start. A pressing issue for Berrios is that he’s completed six innings just once — on Aug. 1 in Cleveland, his only MLB quality start — and has still yet to break the 100-pitch threshold for one reason or another. 

On the positive side, Berrios does have 32 strikeouts in his 32 innings. Fangraphs’ PITCHf/x doesn’t have Berrios featuring any specific swing-and-miss offering, but he’s got healthy whiff rates on each pitch. Strangely enough, his best swing-and-miss pitch so far has been his four-seam fastball with a 10.1 percent whiff rate. That’s…..atypical. But his two-seamer is the only pitch with a whiff rate under 8.9 percent.

Opposing Berrios is Norris, who has quite an interesting story. He’s got the backstory of living in a van down by the river — literally — dating back to his days in the Blue Jays system, but he also spent parts of the last year dealing with thyroid cancer. He found out last April but delayed treatment until the offseason, when he had a malignant growth removed. 

As a pitching prospect, Norris was obviously highly regarded as he was part of the package that brought David Price to Toronto last season. Like Berrios, Norris has struggled to pitch deep into games this season (28.1 innings in seven appearances/six starts), but the results have been mostly encouraging (3.81 ERA). Norris brings it in the 92-93 mph range on average with his fastball, and he’ll mix in a slider, curve and changeup. The slider has been more of a swing-and-miss pitch for him this year, but last year his changeup was dastardly (21.6 percent whiff rate). He’s got serious potential.

Byron Buxton led off Thursday’s game with Rochester with a home run. It’s been a bit of a slow burn for Buxton this time around in Rochester, as he’s hit .261/.306/.478 in 13 games back with the Wings entering Thursday’s action. Buxton struggled similarly when the Twins sent him back earlier in the season, just to turn it on shortly thereafter. That looks to be the case here, too.

Notes & Quotes

  • Polanco has hit safely in 20-of-23 games since rejoining the team.
  • The Twins have the worst rotation ERA in baseball at 5.45. Just three teams are over 5.00, and the next worst (Arizona) checks in at 5.16.
  • The Twins are 3-7 in their last 10 games, 4-11 in their last 15 and just 7-13 over the last 20.
  • On this day in 2008, the Twins traded Mark Hamburger — current ace of the St. Paul Saints — to the Texas Rangers for current bullpen coach Eddie Guardado.
  • Molitor on his desire to get Sano back to third base: “I’d like to get him out there. I have enough options to where I just haven’t had to force it. You can have a discussion about how much getting a chance to play over there between now and the end of the year might potentially help him down the road, but I don’t think it’ll be a huge difference maker in terms of him being able to come back and be a third baseman. It’d just be nice to see him out there continuing to gain experience.”
  • Molitor on Berrios: “You look for the steadiness, pitch-to-pitch, inning-to-inning, outing-to-outing where it comes together more consistently in terms of just how he handles situations. How he commands pitches. How he deals with things when they get a little bit hot. There’s probably going to be some of those (a-ha) moments along the way, but I think it’s got to be a little bit bigger than that. We saw glimpses last time out of some of the work that he’s done here over the last couple weeks. I think the work that he did helped him more out of the windup than the stretch to this point, in terms of how we’re trying quicken that arm up a little bit. It seems to happen a little bit more naturally for him out of the windup than it does the stretch. He’s got another session behind him, and we’ll see how it plays today.”
  • Molitor on Plouffe playing first base: “He does well over there. He’s got pretty good feel for playing over there. He’s made some nice plays. He understands the nuances of the position fairly well for not having a ton of experience over there.”  
  • Molitor on his motivation to play Mauer regularly down the stretch: “I still like trying to win games. I don’t mean that facetiously. We’re going to be playing a lot of teams where the games are going to matter, and I’m going to try to run out the best team I can for the most part. I’m going to try balance that with giving people opportunities in areas that are in question going forward for us. But I think it’s the right thing for guys who are your regular players, that they should be out there as much as they can within reason. I have a little bit more room not to force it because of our circumstances, but when those guys are able to play they’re going to play.”
  • Molitor on if Tyler Duffey will make his next start: “That’s the plan as we sit here this morning. We’ll have to see how we get through today with Jose and Pat (Dean) tomorrow, and if we’re going to need to do anything along the way to supplement depth and length out there. We’ll try to tackle today and see how we do.”

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