As the Minnesota Twins left Cleveland following a four-game series loss, their lack of production from the lineup stood out. Solid outings from Pablo López and Chris Paddack felt wasted as Minnesota’s bats could only muster only six runs over the final three games of the series.
Add in today’s game to the mix for good measure, a 4-3 loss, where the offense struggles again. It’s only May 1. The Twins are just 6.5 games out of first place in the division. While the Twins aren’t buried in the AL Central standings yet, this week was a missed opportunity to show the division that the squad was beginning to put it all together. Minnesota is still in fourth place in the AL Central but had a chance to leapfrog the Cleveland Guardians with a series win.
The Twins came into the series off the heels of a 5-1 homestand that ended with a sweep of the Los Angeles Angels. Now only was the team able to stack three wins in a row for the first time all season, but it was how those wins looked.
Minnesota’s bats came alive to score 21 runs in the three games against the Halos. An 11-run outburst on Monday in Cleveland made those following the team feel like the lineup had turned a corner. Even a little bit of that run-scoring ability throughout the final games of the series gives the Twins a series win and a much better swing of momentum after a 4-game showdown with their biggest division rival in recent years.
The Twins have a bottom-third offense coming into the getaway game in Cleveland. Their lineup only scored 120 runs, which is 18th in baseball, while their 25 home runs as a team are 25th. Home runs aren’t everything, but the team’s .673 OPS is 22nd in MLB and shows the extra base hits aren’t following either. A .220 team batting average isn’t going to generate offensive momentum, either.
Injuries haven’t helped matters. Royce Lewis hasn’t played this season, which takes away one of Minnesota’s most talented sluggers. Injuries to Matt Wallner, Willi Castro, and Luke Keashcall also take some thump out of manager Rocco Baldelli’s batting order.
As much as that’s an issue, the team still has talented hitters. Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa have been largely healthy through the first month, and bounce-back seasons from Ty France and Edouard Julien set a floor for the team that should be producing more than it has been.
The hope is that Lewis and Castro can rejoin the team within the next week. Adding two of their high-profile starters back into the mix will certainly help add more quality hitters to Minnesota’s lineup. Still, in the meantime, the Twins need to find a way to generate any more offense until they return.
Continuing to come up big with runners in scoring position will be crucial. The team has a .269 batting average with RISP, a number good enough to be top-7 in baseball. Still, they must find a way to hang crooked numbers consistently. The Twins have a low bar to clear: score more than two runs.
The Twins have scored two runs or fewer in 13 games through the first 31 games of the 2025 season. The only teams with fewer games scoring two or more runs are the Angels and the Chicago White Sox, two of the worst teams in baseball.
Looking deeper into the Twins’ numbers, it’s a mixed bag. There is some good to build on with Minnesota’s offense collectively. An 89.0 MPH team exit velocity is just 20th in the league. But they hit it hard when the Twins can square up on the baseball. Their 8.5 percent barrel rate is 13th in the league, and Minnesota’s 41.9 percent hard-hit rate is top-7 in baseball. The Twins can make hard contact, but they need to find a way to make it a consistent feature of the lineup.
The team is bringing down its strikeout numbers from a season ago. Their 22.2 percent strikeout clip is 16th in the league compared to the 21.3 percent clip a season ago in 2024. Fewer swings and misses are generally a good trait. That being said, contact for the sake of contract can also be a problem.
Minnesota’s hitters are having an issue smashing balls into the ground. Their 32.9 percent ground ball rate in 2024 was 29th in baseball, with only the Los Angeles Dodgers having a lower ground ball rate last year. This year, their 44.2 percent ground ball rate is the 7th-highest in the league. Pair that with below-average exit velocity, and it creates too many weaker ground balls that turn into ground outs instead of base hits to the outfield.
Production issues with the lineup aren’t just making Twins hitters look bad; it also burdens the pitching staff. Minnesota’s pitching staff was expected to be the driving force on this team. That unit has generally held up its end of the bargain. The pitching staff has a 3.54 team ERA that ranks top-8 in the league. However, due to offensive issues with the Twins, they have a -0.16 Win Probability Added (WPA) as a pitching staff.
It’s not so much that the unit is bad in the clutch, but more that the pitching staff has been given tight ball games to pitch in every game. The bullpen has been inconsistent; Minnesota’s 3.49 bullpen ERA is top-9 in baseball. However, in terms of WPA, the unit ranks 27th in baseball with a -1.58 WPA clip from the relievers.
It’s a good group, but the value of the pitching staff depreciates when giving up one run becomes the difference between a win and a loss. This series put a bitter reminder of that reality. The Twins lost games two and four of the series on low-scoring, walk-off losses where the relievers coming in had no margin for error.
Despite the missed opportunity against the Guardians, the Twins still have a chance to fight back up the division standings. The pitching has still put Minnesota in a position to win more often than not. It’s up to the Twins hitters to put more hits together and increase their ability to score runs for the team to get back into the thick of the AL Central race.
