This is a series of evaluations that will be done this offseason on every player that closed the season on the 40-man roster for the Minnesota Twins, with one appearing every weekday from now until each player has been evaluated. The plan is to start with Mr. Albers and move all the way through the pitchers, then to the catchers, infielders, outfielders and finally those listed as designated hitters on the club’s official MLB.com roster. That means we’ll wrap it up with Miguel Sano sometime in the first week of December.
- Name: Yorman Landa
- 2016 Role: Alternated between late-inning and closing work at High-A Fort Myers, but did not pitch after July 24 due to a shoulder injury.
- Expected 2017 Role: Assuming he lasts on the 40-man roster — and can get healthy — he’ll likely be pushed aggressively in an attempt to get him to the big leagues in relatively quick fashion.
- MLB Stats: N/A
- MiLB Stats: 3.24 ERA (3.25 FIP) in 41.2 innings, 8.4 K/9, 4.8 BB/9, 1.46 WHIP at High-A Fort Myers.
- Contract Status: This upcoming season will be year two of his options (out of three).
2016 Lowdown:
There were some curious additions to the 40-man roster prior to the 2016 season for the Minnesota Twins, but perhaps none as curious as Landa, who had yet to pitch at High-A and had thrown all of 52 innings above Rookie Ball before the club was forced to make a decision on him, or risk losing him in the Rule 5 draft. Since righties with high-90s velocity don’t grow on trees — at least not in this organization — the Twins opted to protect him despite the fact that he’d be slated to spent most, if not all of the season at with the High-A Miracle.
Landa was coming off a solid parts of two seasons with Low-A Cedar Rapids between his ages-20 and -21 seasons, both of which combined tell the story with him. Between the two years, Landa combined for 52 innings with a 2.25 ERA, 10.6 K/9 and a BB/9 mark of 4.7. That comes out to a passable WHIP of 1.21, though that spiked upon his promotion to Fort Myers.
Reports across the internet — both on the national and local side — portray Landa as a fireballer whose command can escape him at times, but who gets good downward plane on his stuff. That’s notable because Landa isn’t a very big guy, as Baseball Reference lists him at 6 feet even and 175 lbs. Pitchers with slight frames can struggled getting the downward plane necessary to keep the ball in the ballpark, but that hasn’t been an issue for Landa, who has allowed just four home runs in 223 innings as a professional (0.2 HR/9).
But is a flamethrowing 21- or 22-year-old with limited MLB experience worth a 40-man spot, especially when a team would have to roster him in the big leagues all season to steal him from the Twins? That’s probably a valid question.
Grading Landa on the entirety of his season misses a couple points. The numbers aren’t particularly good, but it misses that he was out from late July on with a shoulder issue, and it doesn’t isolate how he pitched before the time we can at least ostensibly wager he was feeling the issue. Twins Daily says that Landa missed the rest of the season with a shoulder issue, though it’s unclear if he had to have surgery or not. Surgery would most likely mean he misses a large chunk of next season, for what it’s worth.
On the whole, Landa’s ERA and strikeouts are fine, but the walks are a. better than his career rate of 5.1 per nine innings but b. still troublesome. Looking at the opposing batter splits on a pitcher can tell one some things they might not have been able to deduce from just looking at the back-of-the-baseball-card stats, and in Landa’s case they seem to portray a pretty accurate picture. Opposing batters hit ..257/.361/.336 against Landa this season, which says he was fairly hittable, issued too many free passes but didn’t allow many extra-base hits. We already know he doesn’t allow many home runs, but through the magic of the splits tool on Baseball Reference we can see that he induced a groundball rate of 58 percent this year. That’s well above the AL average rate for relievers this year (45.7 percent), and frankly into Brandon Kintzler territory.
So you’ve got a guy on your hands who can induce grounders like Kintzler, but strike people out as well. The light starts to flicker now when you think about the club’s enthusiasm for the youngster, because if he can add even decent command, he starts honing in on the holy trinity for pitchers — grounders, strikeouts and limiting walks. He’s two-thirds the way there.
He was merely OK before going down for season-ending shoulder surgery…
But another thing about Landa is that before he was shut down for the season on July 24, he was really, truly brutal that month. Landa came into July with a 2.53 ERA, a .248/.341/.299 line against and a K/BB ratio of 34-16 in 32 innings with a 60 percent groundball rate. That’s not perfect, but it’s also not far from a possible promotion to Chattanooga to end the season, either.
Landa made two more scoreless appearances to start July, but on the whole he got rocked in the month: 5.59 ERA in 9.2 innings, 5-6 K/BB ratio and an opponents’ line of .286/.422/.457. The groundball rate fell to 52 percent — shoulders can do weird things to a guy’s stuff — as he allowed nearly as many earned runs in July (six) as he had the rest of the season combined (nine).
So most likely it’ll come down to health, though it’s hard to say. Landa has survived the first mass exodus of the 40-man roster, but that might have just been culling the most obvious guys. It might not become a clearer picture until chief baseball officer Derek Falvey officially takes over, and gets more of his fingerprints on the roster. That’s where the truly fringe cases — such as Landa, Mason Melotakis, Alex Wimmers, Ryan O’Rourke and perhaps others — will truly find out where they stand.
Grade: B-. Landa wasn’t repeating High-A, but also wasn’t particularly young for the level either. He was merely OK before going down for season-ending shoulder surgery, and might not survive the offseason on the 40-man roster as new boss Falvey surveys the scene.
