The 2022 Minnesota Twins might have been the most frustrating team in franchise history, and not just because they underachieved. Plenty of Twins teams have been good on paper, but not in practice. But it wasn’t that they underachieved, it was how they went about it.
Having a solid lineup that can put up runs and build leads is good, generally. But when a thin starting staff and bullpen constantly allow opponents to chisel away at leads, that strength becomes demoralizing. That was the life of watching last year’s Twins, a series of trust falls where Dylan Bundy, Chris Archer, and Tyler Duffey bailed on you the second you started tilting back.
Or at least, that was what it looked like at the time. The 2023 Twins are underachieving again, merely four games above .500 in an AL Central Division where the second-place Cleveland Guardians are currently slated to pick 11th in the draft. This time, though, the starting staff and bullpen are there, and it’s clear that Twins-related frustration goes deeper than that.
What is the root of it? At this point, you can chalk it up to a simple inability to just be normal.
Any team experiences ups and downs over a 162-game season. Lulls are inevitable, as are injuries, extended slumps, and team construction flaws coming back to bite. These past two years seem to go beyond that and into a realm created by malicious “The Sims” players.
Minnesota entered the offseason with two simply-stated, but complicated goals: Fix the pitching staff and find some way to keep star shortstop Carlos Correa in the fold. Both were much, much easier said than done. The thing is: they were! Correa’s wild offseason ultimately landed him in Minnesota, while Pablo López stabilized a rotation where Kenta Maeda returned to form and Bailey Ober and Joe Ryan (pre-injury) took the next step.
Last year, Twins starters finished 14th in the American League in innings pitched, 11th in strikeout rate, and ninth in ERA. This year? They’re first, first, and fifth, respectively. The bullpen is only slightly better relative to the pack, but at least Jhoan Duran has Griffin Jax and (improbably) Emilio Pagán emerge as credible backup for holding late-inning leads.
That kind of turnaround should be celebrated, except the bats have all gone quiet. Somehow, the team’s strengths and weaknesses have flipped entirely within a year, despite a fairly stable roster! That’s not normal!
On paper, the Twins haven’t fallen off that far in hitting. They went from being seventh and fifth in the AL in runs scored and OPS last year to eighth and ninth, respectively, in 2023. But this year’s lineup has artists at distributing their runs in the exact wrong places.
There’s an all-or-nothing nature to the offense that is baffling to watch night-in, night-out. The Twins are tied for the ninth-most games in MLB with seven or more runs, and paradoxically, fifth-most in games where they score two or fewer. In that middle zone, between three and six? 28th.
It’s a big reason why the Twins have the worst Win/Loss% among MLB playoff teams in games where they allow three runs or fewer (45-16). Forget being lights out like the Baltimore Orioles (56-7 in such games), even matching a middle-of-the-pack team like the Seattle Mariners’ .800 win% in such games would have the Twins at a much more respectable 66-54 record. Instead, the Twins have an unlikely but possible to lose 4.5-game lead over a Guardians team that sits five games below .500.
Again, they don’t even need to be great! Just be normal, please!
So much of this team just flies in the face of anything years of watching baseball would teach you to understand. The biggest source of (quite unfair!) frustration surrounding Byron Buxton, for example, isn’t his injury history. We’re used to seeing star players have their bodies break down… once they’ve hit their 30s. But we’re not used to seeing top-five raw talents in baseball have this happen to them all through their mid-20s. It’s just not normal.
As for Correa, who in fairness, is gutting through plantar fasciitis right now, also defies what we think a star player should be. In his two seasons with the Twins, he’s got a .781 OPS, which ranks 48th among 117 qualified hitters. That should be great, but it’s had little impact on winning in terms of situational hitting. His Win Probability Added (WPA) sits at a slight negative (-0.17), which is 88th among that same 117-player sample.
It might seem more normal if this was Correa’s MO when he was in Houston. But from 2015 to 2021, Correa was a top-50 (of 152 qualified hitters) player in terms of both OPS (T-50) and WPA (40th). From a player who otherwise has 5.6 WAR as a Twin, no less.
We beg you — please just be normal!!
Normal teams make realizations like Willi Castro is third on your team in WAR for your hitters, and Donovan Solano has been your third most-potent right-handed bat and address those things accordingly at the trade deadline. Not the Twins, who refused to make even a marginal attempt to put more right-handed punch in their lineup. Normal fanbases shouldn’t have to beg for a productive, home-grown talent like Matt Wallner to supplant Joey Gallo (even if his recent five-game hot streak raised his average to .185).
Is this a good team? Maybe. They’ve got the pitching, and when healthy, they’ve got more talent in their lineup than they’ve shown this year. Anything can happen in the playoffs, so perhaps this is the squad that delivers the Twins a breaking of their certainly-not-normal 18-game playoff losing streak.
Even if they are a good team, that’s beside the point. We’ve experienced this since the All-Star Break, where Minnesota’s gone 17-12, which is on paper a very strong 95-win pace. Even that is made less enjoyable by the 1-6 record they’ve sported against the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals — two bad teams that, say, the Ron Gardenhire teams would fatten up on — over that time.
It’s just not normal, and that’s why an otherwise fine team can be this frustrating to watch.
