Fangraphs on Twins' strikeouts (and irony)

[Mike Sixel]

Yesterday Fangraphs ran an article on which teams they have covered least and most lately....the Twins came out last. The comments were priceless......

 

anyway, by coincidence, they published an article on Twins' pitchers today.....

 

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/my-new-favorite-projection/

 

Basically, the Twins are now projected (uh, it uses math, don't go if you are a math bigot) to NOT finish last in strikeout rate for the first time in 5 years (by the SLIMMEST of margins).

[gunnarthor]

On the first article, I don't really have a problem with fangraphs not writing a lot about the Twins.  Our FO is one of the most quiet in the game and they don't seek publicity so for a site that needs 'hits' it's probably a lot easier to go in another direction.  Their prospect guy - McDaniel - was pretty complementary of the Twins org on the prospect/drafting side before he was hired away (Marlins?).

 

On the second, well, that's interesting, I guess.  

[TheLeviathan]

Five consecutive years baby!  Take that rational approaches to winning baseball games!

[Brock Beauchamp]

I think the Twins jump higher than 29th this season. Add a full season of May (ugh) and Jepsen to the bullpen, sprinkle in some Meyer/Burdi, add some Berrios starts... I think you have a team that's still pretty bad at missing bats but higher than a handful of other teams.

 

I think this graph highlights how hard it is to change course in baseball. The Twins were caught with their pants on the floor in the late 2000s and only now are they seeing the fruits of changing their strategy to draft and develop players with the upside to miss bats.

 

In no way am I defending how long it took them to realize their error, just pointing out it takes time for organizational process changes to reach MLB.

[drjim]

One interesting thing about the Twins in the mid to late aughts was that they were obliterating team k/bb marks. They were certainly late to shift that philosophy (which did serve them pretty well for a decade) to the new higher k league, and that combined with general atrophy of pitching up and down the organization. It was an ugly, ugly combination that lead to the last 5 years.

 

It does take about 4 years to really rebuild a system. The first starters and relievers from the new model are starting to pop up.

[drjim]

To the bigger point, Twins are certainly a boring team for a site like Fangraphs to cover. Not a lot of trades and an organization that isn't embarrassing or baffling so it isn't all that interesting to criticize, but certainly isn't aggressive or all that progressive either.

[Mike Sixel]

Also, they haven't been contending......how many articles should a national site run about bad teams? Also, given all the Twins' fans' comments, clearly plenty of us go even w/o Twins' centricity....