The Minnesota Twins haven’t lived up to preseason expectations. There were some concerns entering the season, primarily injuries to Jhoan Duran and Anthony DeSclafani and ownership’s decision to replace Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda internally. Still, ZIPS projected Minnesota to win the AL Central.
The lineup has been something of a nightmare. The Twins have a league-worst 0.135 batting average with RISP and a third-worst 3.35 runs per game. Most importantly, they’ll be without Royce Lewis and Carlos Correa for the foreseeable future. Lewis is a few weeks into a potentially eight-week absence, while Correa is gearing up to return sometime in May.
After being Minnesota’s greatest strength last season, its rotation has been unreliable. Joe Ryan has leveled up to potentially Cy Young-contending levels, Pablo López is off to a solid start, and Bailey Ober has recovered nicely after a disastrous season debut in Kansas City. However, backend starters Chris Paddack and Louie Varland have yet to find their footing.
Varland has struggled to induce whiffs and keep the ball in the park, leading to a 9.18 ERA (43 ERA+) and 3.2 home runs allowed per nine innings (HR9). His struggles were enough to warrant a demotion to Triple-A St. Paul.
Things clearly weren’t working for Varland, who altered his pitch mix coming into the season.
He still has his great fastball to build around (104 Stuff+ via MLBPitchProfiler). However, Varland shifted from throwing ~13% sliders last season to more cutters and a new curveball this season. He still occasionally mixed in a changeup and sinker.
Varland doesn’t need to be a finished product yet. He has only pitched 110.2 MLB innings. Still, what Varland needs to do to be an MLB-caliber starter is unclear. He probably will not turn out to be Jacob deGrom, but there are enough similarities in their arsenals and strategies that make deGrom a fun ceiling for which to strive.
When he’s healthy, deGrom’s stuff and command are practically unmatched. He has an elite 98+ mph four-seamer, a 92+ mph gyro slider, a 91+ mph changeup, and he sometimes mixes in a hard 83+ mph curveball.
deGrom’s velocity may be impossible to emulate, but Varland has created a similar mix. Varland’s pitch plot, shown below, isn’t too dissimilar to deGrom’s.
Based on their release points, their four-seamers have roughly 16 inches of induced vertical break (IVB) and a vertical approach angle that is 0.22 degrees flatter than expected. They have similar gyro degrees at release (meaning their wrists are tilted similarly) and release heights (5.4 feet).
The two pitchers also throw similar changeups. Besides the velocity gap present across every pitch, Varland’s changeup has almost the same movement profile as deGrom’s.
Perhaps most importantly, they throw similar breaking balls. Varland’s cutter is deGrom’s slider, and their pitch movements are similar. Since Varland ditched his old slider in favor of his cutter, it’s his most important breaking ball.
deGrom doesn’t use his slider like a typical MLB pitcher. He loves the pitch, throwing it to lefties and righties. In 2022, he threw his slider 33.4% of the time to lefties, significantly more than the 11.3% changeups in those situations.
Varland shows a similar interest in throwing breaking balls to opposite-handed hitters despite having a solid changeup. 21.9% of the pitches he threw to lefties were cutters, compared to 14.3% changeups. Those figures were more dramatic before his last start when they were 28.9% and 8.9%, respectively.
Command is where things start to go wrong for Varland. He has a light version of deGrom’s arsenal but hasn’t been able to execute it.
Below are the locations of his cutters to lefties:
He’s left too many of them in the zone and hittable regions.
While whiffs are far from the only measurement of a pitch’s success, the following visual shows how important location is to execute a cutter/slider to opposite-handed hitters:
They need to be down. deGrom excels at keeping Varland’s sliders down to lefties, and Varland will undoubtedly work on this if he chooses to maintain his current arsenal.
Conversely, Varland would benefit from elevating his four-seamer. It’s not a secret anymore that high fastballs induce more whiffs and popups and likely limit consistent hard contact. Varland’s flatter-than-average four-seamer accentuates this.
With a high location (hiLoc) percentage of just 44.4% this year (28th percentile), Varland has not set the pitch up for success.
Instead of pounding the top of the zone, Varland’s four-seamer frequently leaks over the heart of the plate. 37% of the four-seamers he’s thrown have hit the middle “column” of the zone (xmLoc, 92nd percentile). Even worse, 13.3% of his four-seamers have been middle-middle (mmLoc, 92nd percentile).
Varland has straightforward issues that are difficult to fix. He has solid stuff, which would bode well for his prospects as a reliever. To remain a starter, he must follow the recent big league trend of spotting four-seamers up and command his cutters even lower or mix up his arsenal.
