Jose Berrios will join the Minnesota Twins in Cleveland sometime on Friday night and will be added to the active roster prior to making Saturday’s start against the Indians, who are sending their own young righty to the mound in the form of Mike Clevinger.
And while it isn’t saying much, the Indians have gotten more out of their nearly 60 innings of Clevinger (4.76 ERA, 8.4 K/9, 1.43 WHIP) than the Twins have from Berrios (8.02 ERA, 7.6 K/9, 1.87 WHIP). In fact, let’s put it this way: Clevinger has gotten one more out that Berrios in the major leagues, and has allowed 21 (!) fewer earned runs.
So yeah, it hasn’t been pretty in Berrios’ limited time in the big leagues. But this time is different, right? He’s been obscenely good in Triple-A this season, with a 1.13 ERA through six starts (five earned runs in 39.2 innings) with nearly a strikeout per inning, 1.8 walks per nine and a WHIP of 0.81.
Well….not necessarily. See, Triple-A has never been an issue for Berrios. He’s made 36 starts with the Red Wings, and has a 2.51 ERA down there with well over a strikeout per inning (9.8 K/9), no trouble with walks (2.4 BB/9) and less than a baserunner per inning (0.98 WHIP). All the chatter around Berrios this spring has been basically incredulity from fans asking with exasperation, “What the hell else does he have to do to get a shot?”
That question was met with a lot of unclear language and some subtle directives. That trepidation was met by the fan reaction that the Twins were simply holding Berrios down long enough to get an extra year of time with him under club control, as though that’s a consideration that would take precedent over simply getting him to a spot where he’s finally capable of carrying his own weight in the big leagues. But isn’t thinking about six years down the road pretty foolish when the man has allowed nearly an earned run per inning in his big-league time?
Carpe diem, folks.
And to be fair, using the word “finally” in that context is wholly unfair, but you get the sense that Twins fans are already sort of fed up with Berrios, the supposed “savior” for a rotation that has spent the last half decade in ruins. Fans, in general, don’t have patience for this type of thing, and it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that Berrios still won’t turn 23 for a couple weeks. In baseball terms, he’s still a baby.
To have gained that extra year of service time at this point, the Twins would have had to hold Berrios down at Rochester until nearly the end of June, an almost untenable task no matter how you slice it.
Consider this tweet from Twins Daily minor leagues/draft guru Jeremy Nygaard on Berrios and the service time implications:
In short, my diagnosis of the situation is this: people suggesting “hey, Berrios is already better than Nick Tepesch/Adam Wilk/etc.” are completely missing the point. Teams don’t roster their top 25 guys. They don’t roster their top 13 pitchers in the organization. Or the top 40 players in their system. There’s more nuance required than that.
In a vacuum, what has to be considered with Berrios is where he is on his development curve and what he’s ready for, progress-wise. Is Berrios as good as he needs to be in this moment? Can he hone his additional needed skills in the big leagues? Will getting rocked at the big-league level again put his future development potential in jeopardy? It’s easy to make these claims with no skin in the game — as in, people like me on Twitter or in bar room conversations across the state — but the people whose jobs are at stake have said, at least until Thursday night, that Berrios hadn’t reached that point.
In short, it has to be more than just numbers. But keep in mind who Berrios is competing with in Triple-A. It’s a league full of failed prospects in their late 20s mixed in with a handful of toolsy guys who are needing that last bit of refinement. Can those guys hit a good curveball, like Berrios has? Probably not, since they’d be in the big leagues if so, right? Triple-A is also full of guys who don’t necessarily command the strike zone well and will chase pitches big league hitters won’t. The umpiring also isn’t as good, which should be in consideration as well.
But this six-game stretch…it has to be Berrios’ best at Rochester, doesn’t it? After all, a 1.13 ERA is hard to beat, right?
Well, you might be surprised.
I ran some rolling six-game samples for Berrios’ time with the Red Wings and came up with the following (numbers via Baseball Reference):
- April 8-May 7, 2017 – 1.13 ERA, .471 OPS against, 39-8 K/BB ratio in 39.2 IP
- June 6-July 3, 2016 – 1.81 ERA, .430 OPS against, 45-10 K/BB ratio in 44.2 IP
- June 23-July 22, 2016 – 1.03 ERA, .465 OPS against, 45-10 K/BB ratio in 43.2 IP
Let’s look at that last stretch for a second. A little over a week later, Berrios go his second of three cracks in the big leagues. He made five starts — all in the month of August, and posted an ERA of 8.59 and allowed opposing batters to hit an obscene .316/.398/.484 against him.
Basically speaking, sheer dominance at Rochester isn’t enough. Now let’s correlate each of those three previous stretches with swinging strike rate. Swinging strike rate will give us an indicator of how dominant a pitcher is. For instance, the top four pitchers in baseball in swinging strike rate this season are Chris Sale, Danny Salazar, Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom. Those are some of the first names that’d be mentioned in discussions of nastiest repertoires every year, too. Right?
Each of these whiff rates correlates to the same bullet point above:
- 10 percent whiff rate
- 13 percent whiff rate
- 11 percent whiff rate
In other words, each time Berrios got smoked in the big leagues, he was arguably pitching even more dominantly at Rochester. Fangraphs is even iffier on Berrios, as it lists him with a swinging strike rate of 8.9 percent this season. Among 64 Triple-A pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched this season, Berrios is 14th in whiff rate — not far behind Clevinger (9.6 percent). And while top one-fourth of pitchers doesn’t sound bad on the surface, consider the competition. Not only in the batter’s box, but on opposing mounds. He’s behind guys like Jair Jurrjens, Buck Farmer and barely ahead of guys like Justin Masterson and T.J. House.
None of this is to say that Berrios hasn’t improved somewhere in the secret sauce of pitching, or that a great defensive catcher like Jason Castro won’t steal enough added strikes to make him comfortable on an MLB mound. But if the hope was that he’d be more “dominant” at Triple-A on his way to a promotion….that feels like a tough pill to swallow.
But the people tasked with making this decision forget more about pitching while they sleep than I’ll ever know. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see.
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