Twins

Joey Gallo and Trevor Larnach Are Starting To Look Eerily Similar

Photo Credit: Nick Wosika-USA TODAY Sports

A couple of the Minnesota Twins are taking their team namesake to another level. While it’s not uncommon for teammates to share common attributes, Joey Gallo and Trevor Larnach are starting to look eerily similar, especially when it comes to some of their numbers under the hood. Are they influencing each other? Are they both in the mold of slugger that this front office seems to seek out on an annual basis? Is it just early on in the season, and I’m making too much out of a small sample size?

The answer probably includes a mix of all three. But it’s both fun, and possibly concerning, to link the two sluggers. And when it comes to Larnach, the former first-round pick will surely hope to reach Gallo’s ceiling while avoiding his floor.

For what it’s worth, if Larnach could tap into the elements that have made Gallo a two-time all star, the Twins would gladly take that. Like his fellow left-handed hitting teammate, Larnach has shown flashes of prodigious power when healthy, but those spurts have been limited since he made his major league debut in 2021. Before succumbing to a wrist ailment that ended his rookie season prematurely, Larnach had a few stretches where he showed what he could do with the bat. In the first 200 plate appearances of his MLB career, he hit a robust .262/.357/.436, which was 22% better than league average. He hit 16 extra-base hits in that span, capturing the attention of Twins fans in what ended up being a rough year for the club. That raw power isn’t quite at the same level as Gallo, but it was a promising start.

Flash forward to this season’s version of Larnach, and he has a .241/.356/.391 slashline, with six extra-base hits in just over 100 plate appearances. That’s definitely a far cry from Gallo, but their numbers under the hood start to look similar when you do a little digging.
For example, Larnach has a 14.9% walk rate and a 31.7% strikeout rate so far this season. Those figures are not that far from Gallo’s numbers over his career (14.8% walk rate, 37.1% strikeout rate), and they start looking even more similar when looking at their batted ball data on Baseball Savant.

Due to Gallo’s quick stint on the IL in the second week of this season, he doesn’t yet qualify for many of the batting figures compared to the rest of the league. But if we look at his numbers from last year — which, full disclosure, was a rough campaign for Gallo — it’s easy to see a comp with his young teammate.

Brace yourselves – this could be taken as a cautionary tale. But it shows the holes that both players have displayed in their swing when they’re struggling. In a disappointing 2022 campaign, Gallo’s most-notable blemishes were his swinging-strike tendencies (1st percentile), strikeout percentage (1st percentile) and expected batting average (1st percentile). While not nearly as profound as Gallo, Larnach has struggled with those same figures this season (6th percentile swinging-strike, 11th percentile strikeout rate and 46th percentile expected batting average).

That sounds scary to hopeful Twins fans that are hoping Larnach can continue to nail down a prominent role on the club. But Baseball Savant also shows areas that both he and Gallo have had great success. They both either excel or are at least solidly above average when it comes to barrel percentage (Gallo 98th percentile, Larnach 78th percentile), walk rate (Gallo 95th percentile, Larnach 90th percentile) and chase rate (Gallo 61st percentile, Larnach 75th percentile).

So there’s a lot of give and take. Larnach would be thrilled to be in the same realm as Gallo when it comes to hitting the ball hard, taking walks and avoiding chase pitches out of the zone. However, he needs to evolve past Gallo’s propensity to swing and miss at pitches in the strike zone and his boom-or-bust mindset, especially if he’s lacking in the boom department as he has been to start this season.

This certainly doesn’t mean that Larnach is destined to become Gallo, for better or worse. But the two have become key members of the Twins’ offense and share a handful of similarities in their playing style. Is this by design of the front office? Have the two players influenced each other in their brief time together? Are they sharing jock-straps? Whatever the case might be, the Twins and their loyal fans will gladly take the production they’re been receiving from these two like-minded sluggers.

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