The Twins headed into Monday’s off-day sandwiched between cities on a West Coast swing, with taking three out of four from the Angels in the rear-view mirror and a three-game set at Safeco in Seattle coming up next. Entering Monday’s action league wide, the Twins are 29-24 — a .547 winning percentage that only three teams are exceeding to this point in the AL (New York, Boston and Houston).
The Twins are a game up on the Indians in the Central, though that comes with a pretty significant caveat. The Indians are a sleeping giant of sorts, as they’ve gotten just seven decent starts out of ace Corey Kluber — who showed last time out that he’s back in a big way — and virtually nothing from Danny Salazar or really anyone not named Carlos Carrasco. Mike Clevinger is making things interesting, as that rotation only gets better if one of Trevor Bauer or Josh Tomlin gets booted out. Bauer could do some really great things in the bullpen.
Anyway, the idea that the Twins can hold off the Indians all season long seems like a pretty big long shot. Over at Fangraphs, the standings projections still have the Tribe winning the division by nine games (90-72). In second place isn’t the Twins, but rather the Detroit Tigers at 81-81. The Twins aren’t far behind, however, at 79-83. That’s just a 50-59 record the rest of the way (.458 winning percentage), but hey, it’s still way better than most people expected at the beginning of the season, right?
Their playoff odds right now peg the Twins with a 7.6 percent chance of winning the Central and a 12.3 percent chance of making the playoffs overall. The folks over at Baseball Prospectus have the Twins finishing 52-57 the rest of the way — an 81-81 pace. Their playoff odds are a bit more diplomatic toward the Twins — they have been for most of the season — with a 30.7 percent chance at the playoffs and a 13.8 percent chance of winning the Central.
So let’s take a look at how things are going through 53 games. It’s almost the one-third mark of the season, so here’s our Minnesota Twins State of the Union.
Offense
Despite sluggish starts from Brian Dozier, Joe Mauer and Byron Buxton, the offense has been quite good so far this season. Miguel Sano is putting his name right in the thick of things for the AL MVP list — thanks in part to the injury to Mike Trout — and is reinventing our expectations for hitters who can strike out 40 percent of the time and still have a .400-plus wOBA. We’ve never really seen this before, so it’ll be interesting to see just how sustainable it is. Sano’s strikeouts seem to reflect an approach rather than an absence of skill, something fans have a hard time reconciling when thinking about their own playing days.
Robbie Grossman has done an unbelievable job swinging the bat in addition to taking walks at an absurd rate (18 percent — 0.5 percent higher than Trout to rank No. 1 among 171 qualified hitters and nearly 2 percent higher than the rate he’s striking out). He’s hitting .267/.407/.444, and frankly might make a better leadoff hitter in an optimized lineup than Dozier, who could do more damage hitting third, fourth or even fifth. Max Kepler has been great as well, as he’s hitting .269/.348/.462 while making virtually all the plays in right field.
Joe Mauer has been awesome over the last month or so, and his line of .287/.359/.416 should get the haters off his back at least for a bit. If he could finish the season at that line, he should provide plenty of value. Dozier’s been up and down — though a bit more down of late, it seems — while Jason Castro is hitting .219/.324/.398 while making a significant difference defensively. This is about what should be expected of him.
There’s not much else to write home about on this offense. Kennys Vargas was good in spurts but didn’t walk, Eduardo Escobar has settled in as a decent utility player and it’d be nice to see more from Buxton and Eddie Rosario, though each have shown some things in small bursts. Overall, the Twins are ninth in team wRC+ (101), first in walk rate (10.5 percent) and are the offense putting the ball on the ground the fourth-least (40.9 percent groundball rate). The pieces are in place for this to be a very, very good offense. Now just quit bunting!
Grade: B+
Trending: Up.
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Defense
In a game awash with different metrics that try to tell us different things, for me, it just boils down to “do they catch the ball?” The metric associated with that is defensive efficiency, which is basically “what percentage of balls in play does this team turn into outs?”
As you might guess, the Twins are very good in this respect. Like, No. 1 in the game good. The Twins are at 71.4 percent via Baseball Reference, far and away better than last season’s 66.2 percent rate, which ranked dead last. The tendency would be to put a lot of that on a great defensive outfield — where nothin’ falls but raindrops — and that’s not too far from the truth. Only five teams are allowing fewer grounders than the Twins (41.4 percent), which means they’ve leaned heavily on a strong defensive outfield to this point.
Here’s how the Twins are doing on fly balls and line drives defensively, relative to the league average:
- Twins OF, Fly balls – .752 OPS, .064 BABIP
- Twins OF, Line drives – 1.530 OPS, .554 BABIP
- AL average, Fly balls – .853 OPS, .085 BABIP
- AL average, Line drives – 1.529 OPS, .594 BABIP
Outside of basically identical results on line drives, the Twins are still doing yeoman’s work on balls hit in the air defensively.
The infield isn’t doing too poorly, either, as Twins first basemen are third in UZR/150, second basemen are 18th, shortstops are first and third basemen are ninth. Strangely enough, second base seems like the least worrisome of those positions to the naked eye, as Dozier largely seems competent over there. Overall, though, it would seem to suggest that the infield defense is pretty good, though not necessarily great.
Castro and Chris Gimenez have been pretty solid behind the plate, too. Only four teams have allowed fewer stolen bases (23), while they’ve thrown out 13 of 36 attempted base thieves for a solid 36.1 percent rate. Baseball Reference lists the AL average this year at 29 percent. As far as framing goes, Castro ranks 11th among 78 MLB catchers in framing runs (3.0), while Gimenez is 26th (0.8, albeit in a much smaller sampling).
Grade: A
Trending: Steady.
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Rotation
Much of the positive reception this group has gotten has been due to Ervin Santana’s blazing hot start. Through 12 outings, Santana has a 2.44 ERA, though that’s backed by a 4.64 FIP due to an obscenely low .153 BABIP and an iffy HR/9 rate (1.22). He hasn’t blown people away strikeouts-wise (6.4 K/9), is walking a fair number of batters (3.6 per nine) and overall isn’t doing much out of the ordinary except holding batters to just a .155 batting average. While that’s commendable, it’s worth wondering just how sustainable it is.
Typical baseball analysis would tell us it’s not very sustainable at all, but let’s dig in a little deeper. Among 163 pitchers who have thrown at least 500 pitches, Santana ranks 148th in exit velocity allowed on average. That is in the positive sense, as just 15 pitchers have allowed a lower average exit velo than Santana’s 84.8 mph. If we bump that threshold to 1,000 pitches, only Kyle Hendricks, R.A. Dickey, Chase Anderson, Tyler Anderson, Scott Feldman and Dallas Keuchel are lower than Big Erv. Now that doesn’t mean that he can sustain a razor-thin BABIP, but he does have more leeway to work with than the average pitcher.
Meanwhile, Jose Berrios has been brilliant through five starts, with fWAR seeing him as nearly as much of a positive (0.6 WAR) as Santana (0.7) in less than half as many starts. The rest of the rotation is relegated to also-ran status. Adalberto Mejia has posted a decent ERA (3.95), but has so-so underlying peripherals. He may be on the right track, though. His sample size isn’t enough to really draw strong conclusions from (27.1 innings), but the 45.6 percent groundball rate is certainly a good thing. Kyle Gibson has been a mess this year, so much so that he was sent back to Rochester for the first time in nearly four years. His last two starts, for what it’s worth, have been a bit….less messy: 3.27 ERA, 10-6 K/BB ratio in 11 innings, .275/.370/.375 line against. Having him face San Francisco rather than Seattle this time around is a brilliant strategy by manager Paul Molitor; the Mariners have one of the better offenses in the game, while the Giants have jockeyed with the Royals all season for dead last in team wRC+.
Phil Hughes went back on the DL with issues somewhat pertaining to his thoracic outlet surgery from last year, and he’s probably on the long track to come back and contribute this year. The numbers weren’t good, but his transformation was interesting. As a guy throwing 90 mph and mixing in all his pitches, he had to fight to compete, which at times didn’t go well but at other times showed that he was learning how to be a much more effective pitcher with diminished stuff.
Hector Santiago has gotten absolutely throttled lately, but did get off to a good start. He’s going to need to beat his FIP — something he’s consistently done — to provide the Twins with value the rest of the way. He’s a free agent at season’s end.
There’s not much more to say here. It’s Santana and Berrios and pray for rain, for the most part. However, it’s supposed to be the other guys sending words to the big guy upstairs. Mejia has some promise, and it’d be nice if guys like Stephen Gonsalves and Fernando Romero can work their way into the discussion sooner rather than later.
Grade: C+
Trending: Up.
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Bullpen
It’s easy to call this unit a dumpster fire, but for different stretches this season it has been a somewhat useful bunch. That is, Brandon Kintzler has been solid closing out games, and some of the bridge to get to him has done OK, too.
Tyler Duffey has been incredible in his transformation to the ‘pen (9.4 K/9, 2.65 FIP) and Taylor Rogers is quietly having a pretty good year as well. Craig Breslow has done everything they’ve asked — which, admittedly, isn’t much — but everything else has been sort of a disaster. Michael Tonkin was barely used, and was so bad he cleared waivers after being DFA’d. That’s hard to do as a cheap reliever who throws hard in a league starving for bullpen arms. Adam Wilk and Jason Wheeler were non-entities, and the same can probably be said for Drew Rucinski and Justin Haley.
Alex Wimmers is up to stem the tide as a longer guy so Duffey can work later innings, but he’s probably not in the mix for much in the way of innings that aren’t of the mop-up variety. Matt Belisle has been an unmitigated disaster, though most of the damage against him has been concentrated to what amounts to about an inning or two worth of work. He’s already allowed nearly as many earned runs this season (17 in 19.1 innings) as the last two combined (19 in 79.2 innings). Buddy Boshers is OK, but he’s nothing more than a fifth or sixth reliever in a decent bullpen. This isn’t even a decent bullpen right now.
Randy Rosario is interesting, but it’s far too soon to know if he can help the team right now. He was amazing in May (held opposing batters to a 4-for-46 month), can get some grounders and has a good slider. He should be more than a lefty specialist, and could lock down some later work with something as simple as a couple week stretch of being competent. The bar is pretty low here.
There may be help on the way, but it won’t be in the form of Nick Burdi, who is down for the year with Tommy John surgery. There are still some interesting arms to filter through, though. That list includes, but may not be limited to: J.T. Chargois (hurt, but was very good last September with Twins), Trevor Hildenberger (2.01 ERA, 10.1 K/9 in 22.1 innings at Rochester), Alan Busenitz (2.31 ERA, 10.4 K/9), Rucinski (2.66 ERA, pretty good splitter), D.J. Baxendale (3.86 ERA at Triple-A), Nik Turley (0.37 ERA at Double-A, 4.43 at Triple-A, likely better in relief than starting), John Curtiss (zero earned runs in 18.2 innings at Double-A) and Mason Melotakis (2.57 ERA at Double-A).
Derek Falvey and Thad Levine have shown they’re willing to cycle through these arms to see who might fit, and that’ll likely continue all season if the bullpen continues to falter. Fans might not like the order of operations, but it doesn’t look like the front office is hesitant to pull the trigger when the time comes. Now the question is, how soon will they do that for veterans like Belisle, or even Breslow if he can’t be put into higher-leverage innings?
Grade: D-
Trending: Down.
Overall, it’d be hard to give the team a grade lower than perhaps a B+, though it’s still far too early to tell how sustainable it all is. They’re typically in the middle of power rankings that come out across national outlets, with the common refrain that the Twins just aren’t viewed as a team with staying power in a wild American League. However, the fact of the matter is that outside of Houston, Cleveland and maybe Boston, all of the rest of the teams have potentially fatal flaws that could keep them out of the playoffs, and the Twins are no exception. I still think this is an 80-win team as I wrote in January, but the only difference now is that there are some people riding the bus with me. There weren’t many back then.
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Friend of the program Hudson Belinsky, who started out as an Angels blogger and has ascended up to some big-time baseball work with Baseball America, wrote a great piece on Sunday after watching Kyle Wright’s start for Vanderbilt on Saturday. It’s a great article — find it here — and probably doesn’t hurt the righty’s case to go No. 1 to the Twins, which is what most of the steam I’ve been hearing is leaning toward.
In Keith Law’s latest Klawchat, he touched on a number of Twins related subjects, including Nick Gordon, Byron Buxton and of course, some No. 1 overall chatter.
Phil Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote a killer piece recalling the day the Twins made Joe Mauer their No. 1 overall pick back in 2001. You don’t want to miss this one.
Jeremy Nygaard over at Twins Daily is never short of draft takes, and this is a good one.
He doesn’t write terribly often, but when Parker Hageman puts down a joint over at Twins Daily it’s worth your time. This time, it was on what has gone wrong with Ryan Pressly.
Listen to Brandon on Midwest Swing
