Twins Hitters Attack the Zone Differently Than Any Other Team - Caretaker Exclusive

[Matthew Trueblood]

For the last half-decade, the Minnesota Twins have had about as distinct and persistent an offensive identity as any team in MLB. They want to hit the ball hard, in the air, to the pull field, and they don't want to break down and give up on that with two strikes. There's more to the story, though.

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports

This winter, the Twins were strapped for cash. They needed to upgrade their positional corps, but they didn't have many options, thanks to the financial constraints imposed on them by uncertainty about the future of their TV rights deal and by the conservatism of the Pohlad family. To beef up their first base and DH spots, they turned to veteran slugger Carlos Santana, partially because he was relatively affordable--but partially, too, because he beautifully fits their offensive philosophy.

If you want to know what a hitter is trying to do at the plate, break down where they swing, and when. Situational hitting and late-count plate protecting aside, hitters demonstrate preferences for swinging in certain zones and laying off in others, and that often has as much to do with what their optimal outcome for a given pitch or at-bat is as it does with their bat path or where they anticipate being pitched.

You might be tempted to guess that, as a switch-hitter with power and great career walk rates, Santana is the type of batter who seeks to turn on and crunch the ball. He's pull-oriented, as most sluggers are, and pitchers will naturally find their breaking stuff running inside on him, so they'll often try to jam him inside with four-seamers and cutters, too.

Perhaps because he knows that, though, those aren't the pitches Santana prefers. 

Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023

	Inner Third	Middle Third	Outer Third
MLB	42.9	57.1	32.5
Santana	29.2	55.3	38.7

Santana might not be an all-or-nothing slugger, but he likes to get the bat head out on pitches out away from him, rather than try to spin and be so quick that he can do damage with his hands pulled in.

The other notable addition to the Twins' collection of hitters this year is Manuel Margot, whom they acquired as much for his defensive prowess as for his stick, but while he doesn't cut the same patient figure as Santana, the shape of his distribution isn't so dissimilar. 

Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023

	Inner Third	Middle Third	Outer Third
MLB	42.9	57.1	32.5
Margot	44.9	56.1	33.7

Margot is much more aggressive on the inner third, but he's also pretty eager to hit stuff on the outer third. Again, these numbers are all early in counts, before the hitter has to worry about protecting the plate. We're seeing two different swing profiles, but they share something in common: they both attack that outside pitch, but show less interest in letting the pitcher induce them to swing high or low over the middle of the dish.

This probably won't surprise you, but the Twins are eager swingers on the outer third, as a team.

Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023

	Inner Third	Middle Third	Outer Third
MLB	42.9	57.1	32.5
Twins	40.8	56.4	34.7

They swing less often, even in early in counts, than the average team on inside and down-the-middle offerings. Out on the edge of the plate (and beyond), though, they swing fifth-most in MLB. What does that tell us?

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[Parfigliano]

Their philosophy is grip it and rip it.  Its flashy but as in golf its an approach that fails in the long run.

[Jocko87]

Love this.  It makes so much sense as a strategy.  It's not the old slap it to the opposite field and run game, it's what can we get extended on and hit hard.  And while it doesn't always end up going the opposite field it has always been a good indication of a hitter being locked in if they are hitting it hard to the oppo power alley.  It's also part of why the aren't managing to the strikeout.

My personal key for Buxton has always been seeing swings like this clip, hit hard to the oppo alley.  0-0 count he gets one away and does as described.  110mph at 21 degrees plays to all fields. I've always seen it as an positive indicator for Buck but now I understand why. Thanks.

https://www.mlb.com/video/dylan-cease-in-play-run-s-to-byron-buxton-x3057?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share

Also, I just went down an MLB Film Room rabbit hole.  I sorted for Buxton 2B, 3B and HR and just let it play as a hype video.  Maybe 15% of the videos featured an inside pitch.  It was fun to watch with this fresh data.

 

[Jocko87]

9 minutes ago, Parfigliano said:

Their philosophy is grip it and rip it.  Its flashy but as in golf its an approach that fails in the long run.

That's not the whole philosophy.  Grip it and rip it----when you get a certain pitch in a certain zone.  Adjust with two strikes, which is still a work in process, to be fair.

[rv78]

It runs parallel to the theory of swing for the fences, which more often than not results in swings and misses, and weak grounders. Sano could have been a decent hitter had he taken the "swing hard on every pitch" approach and thrown it into the garbage can. Someone as strong as he was could have hit 40 HR a year if he would have toned his swing down a bit and concentrated on just making contact. Austin Martin was pushed into trying to be more of a power hitter by coaches and it cost him a year of development in the minors, finally realizing that he isn't the type of hitter the Twins were trying to make him. He only started to hit decent again when he went back to being a singles/doubles hitter using all fields and not a HomeRun hitter. 

My guess is if Ortiz had stayed in the Twins organization he wouldn't have learned to hit to the opposite field and would have been a sliver of the hitter he ended up as, being in Boston and punishing the green monster with doubles off of his left handed bat. Compare any good hitter that using the whole field, like an Arraez and then look at a Max Kepler who tries to pull almost everything. Not hard to see which ones are the better hitters.

[Rod Carews Birthday]

26 minutes ago, rv78 said:

My guess is if Ortiz had stayed in the Twins organization he wouldn't have learned to hit to the opposite field and would have been a sliver of the hitter he ended up as, being in Boston and punishing the green monster with doubles off of his left handed bat. Compare any good hitter that using the whole field, like an Arraez and then look at a Max Kepler who tries to pull almost everything. Not hard to see which ones are the better hitters.

Actually, that was back in the days when the Twins were teaching players to go to the opposite field and put the ball in play Punch and Judy style.  The complaint that Ortiz had was that they weren't letting him be the power hitter he was, and when he got to Boston they let him swing away.  Presto. . . he's a power hitter.  So, no.  Those aren't the right dots to connect.

This isn't an either/or scenario. We need players like Arraez and we need players like Max (the 2019 and last half of 2023 version) in order to have the maximum effect.  In retrospect, they were certainly wrong to try to make Austin Martin into a power hitter, but they didn't know that at the time (and neither did anyone else).  It was a gamble they took so that they could take someone with a good hit tool and add the power tool.  Without it, Austin Martin is likely to be somewhere from a fringy major league utility guy to a decent MLB player.  With it, he could be a big star.  That's the gamble they took and in this case they lost.  They did the same with Buxton.  It took awhile, but it seems to have worked, even if he can't stay healthy, but that's a different subject.

[ashbury]

5 hours ago, Jocko87 said:

Adjust with two strikes, which is still a work in process, to be fair.

"Work in progress" is an understatement.  Two strikes are arguably what kept the 2023 edition of the Twins from having an elite offense, in double-whammy fashion:

1. No team hits "well" with two strikes. MLB OPS was a putrid .523 once two strikes are reached, although that's somewhat an accounting artifact since strikeouts harm OPS greatly and those get rung up only in this scenario. Atlanta did best in this dubious category, with an OPS of .596, a rate that would get even a great gloveman sent to the minors if that was his overall production.  The Twins, though, managed to fall far below even this modest bar, with two-strike OPS of .482, "good" for 28th of all 30 teams.  Leading culprits were Joey Gallo (surprise surprise!) and Michael A Taylor, no longer with the Twins for 2024.
2. You could live with poor two-strike outcomes, if you avoided them.  Unfortunately, our Twins led all the majors in PA that reached two strikes, at 3423.  That's a lot more than half of their total 6219 PA last season.

Double whammy.

Despite this article's lead-in about two strikes, I didn't see much that addressed this aspect.  It's very interesting to learn about the generation of power on outside pitches.  I see from the same b-ref.com table that, on PA resolved on the first pitch, our 2023 Twins were second best in the majors with a 1.105 OPS.  (The average team does good in this situation of course, at .955, the Twins just done gooder and almost goodest.)

Is there something about this tactic that stops working so well once there are two strikes?  Maybe I didn't read carefully enough.

[Jocko87]

8 minutes ago, ashbury said:

"Work in progress" is an understatement.  Two strikes are arguably what kept the 2023 edition of the Twins from having an elite offense, in double-whammy fashion:

1. No team hits "well" with two strikes. MLB OPS was a putrid .523 once two strikes are reached, although that's somewhat an accounting artifact since strikeouts harm OPS greatly and those get rung up only in this scenario. Atlanta did best in this dubious category, with an OPS of .596, a rate that would get even a great gloveman sent to the minors if that was his overall production.  The Twins, though, managed to fall far below even this modest bar, with two-strike OPS of .482, "good" for 28th of all 30 teams.  Leading culprits were Joey Gallo (surprise surprise!) and Michael A Taylor, no longer with the Twins for 2024.
2. You could live with poor two-strike results, if you avoided them.  Unfortunately, our Twins led all the majors in PA that reached two strikes, at 3423.  That's more than half of their total 6219 PA last season.

Double whammy.

Despite this article's lead-in about two strikes, I didn't see much that addressed this aspect.  It's very interesting to learn about the generation of power on outside pitches.  Is there something about this tactic that stops working so well once there are two strikes?  Maybe I didn't read carefully enough.

And if it's going poorly, this approach is going to go very poorly.  As evidenced by Gallo, expanding the zone early gets you to two strikes quickly and without Arraez like two strike ability slumps abound.  If this is the strategy, it really illustrates why some of the at bats we saw last year seemed so poor.  They were trying to take advantage of an early pitch that's up and out but if you aren't seeing it well you can expand the zone and boom, two strikes looking lost.  Pitch recognition and scouting are key to this approach.  

Santana and Margot will help as replacements for the two worst offenders but the real improvement will come if they can keep the second half improvements.  I wonder how this data changed over the season, and compared to chase rates up and out? The quality of at bat certainly seemed to improve. 

[oregontwin]

3 hours ago, Rod Carews Birthday said:

Actually, that was back in the days when the Twins were teaching players to go to the opposite field and put the ball in play Punch and Judy style.  The complaint that Ortiz had was that they weren't letting him be the power hitter he was, and when he got to Boston they let him swing away.  Presto. . . he's a power hitter.  So, no.  Those aren't the right dots to connect.

This isn't an either/or scenario. We need players like Arraez and we need players like Max (the 2019 and last half of 2023 version) in order to have the maximum effect.  In retrospect, they were certainly wrong to try to make Austin Martin into a power hitter, but they didn't know that at the time (and neither did anyone else).  It was a gamble they took so that they could take someone with a good hit tool and add the power tool.  Without it, Austin Martin is likely to be somewhere from a fringy major league utility guy to a decent MLB player.  With it, he could be a big star.  That's the gamble they took and in this case they lost.  They did the same with Buxton.  It took awhile, but it seems to have worked, even if he can't stay healthy, but that's a different subject.

Does anyone else remember the home run Ortiz hit basically one handed after breaking his wrist earlier in the game? 

[oregontwin]

Also I wanted to say, off topic a bit, that I have been a baseball fan since before the Twins came to Minnesota, Milwaukie Braves back then, and I really wish....well never mind. But I do really love and appreciate those of you who dig into stats and facts that I'm too lazy to work out anymore. Could have used you 60 plus years ago, but even now I can't thank you enough for the enlightenment. Please keep it up.

[jkcarew]

2 hours ago, Jocko87 said:

As evidenced by Gallo, expanding the zone early gets you to two strikes quickly and without Arraez like two strike ability slumps abound.

The modern hitter (and Gallo fits the category) get their 2-strikes mostly by TAKING strikes, not expanding the zone. (Especially relative to earlier generations of players.) Hence the preponderance of ‘three true outcome’ guys. The mantra is to offer only at pitches you can drive out of the park. Can’t do that with a fastball tailing hard into the inside corner or a slider at the knees on the outside black, etc, etc.

The conundrum is, that in many, many at-bats this results in HAVING to expand the zone with 2 strikes. That’s where we’re at. The Twins will still have their share of these guys…Julien probably the ‘best’ example.

[jkcarew]

Hitting has always been about finding the sweet spot between the ‘aggressive’ approach where swinging early in the count can reduce likelihood of K, but also can lead to frequently putting ‘pitchers pitches’ into play (soft contact) resulting in muted BABiP/SLG…vs ‘patient’ approach, offer only at pitches you (think) you can drive hard for extra bases…taking the tough pitches, and increasing likelihood of getting into 2-strike counts and subsequently K’ing.

We all know where that pendulum currently stands. A ton of players in the league that wouldn’t have a clue about how to execute the ‘aggressive’ approach because they’ve only hit with the one tool in the box right from little league.

Maybe more data drives the pendulum more into balance. Maybe more data will drive it further out of balance.

[Jocko87]

3 hours ago, jkcarew said:

The modern hitter (and Gallo fits the category) get their 2-strikes mostly by TAKING strikes, not expanding the zone. (Especially relative to earlier generations of players.) Hence the preponderance of ‘three true outcome’ guys. The mantra is to offer only at pitches you can drive out of the park. Can’t do that with a fastball tailing hard into the inside corner or a slider at the knees on the outside black, etc, etc.

The conundrum is, that in many, many at-bats this results in HAVING to expand the zone with 2 strikes. That’s where we’re at. The Twins will still have their share of these guys…Julien probably the ‘best’ example.

It's a completely different thing if you take a cookie because you mis-scouted or misread the pitch.  Joe Mauer was probably the last guy that spit on cookies just because he wanted too.  In zone swing percentages are up 4% since Fangraphs started tracking it in 2007.  Your modern hitter swings far more than your old timer.

Gallos out of zone swing % was up 7% over 2021, the last year he was a functional hitter.  Swinging strike % up 4.5% and called strike % down 3.1%.  Those are huge swings.  I don't have enough data to know that he was chasing for sure but his biggest hole has always been low and away, out of the zone.  I certainly remember plenty of swing and miss.  He's also been very poor over his career on pitches middle away which is very interesting considering the context of the article.  He's a prototypical lefty pull profile.

I'm wondering now if Gallo was a specifically poorly suited hitter for this model and that explains some struggles. 

[Melissa]

9 hours ago, oregontwin said:

Also I wanted to say, off topic a bit, that I have been a baseball fan since before the Twins came to Minnesota, Milwaukie Braves back then, and I really wish....well never mind. But I do really love and appreciate those of you who dig into stats and facts that I'm too lazy to work out anymore. Could have used you 60 plus years ago, but even now I can't thank you enough for the enlightenment. Please keep it up.

I’m similarly grateful, oregon.
 

And I too (born in Milwaukee the year the Braves moved to Milwaukee) still harbor resentment over their departure to the 13-state TV market down south after only a dozen or so seasons. The move of the original Senators to Minnesota in 1961 was also a factor in constricting the reach of the fan base. Ironically or not, I’ve now lived in St Paul for forty years and am a partial-season ticket holder for the Twins!

[JD-TWINS]

14 hours ago, ashbury said:

"Work in progress" is an understatement.  Two strikes are arguably what kept the 2023 edition of the Twins from having an elite offense, in double-whammy fashion:

1. No team hits "well" with two strikes. MLB OPS was a putrid .523 once two strikes are reached, although that's somewhat an accounting artifact since strikeouts harm OPS greatly and those get rung up only in this scenario. Atlanta did best in this dubious category, with an OPS of .596, a rate that would get even a great gloveman sent to the minors if that was his overall production.  The Twins, though, managed to fall far below even this modest bar, with two-strike OPS of .482, "good" for 28th of all 30 teams.  Leading culprits were Joey Gallo (surprise surprise!) and Michael A Taylor, no longer with the Twins for 2024.
2. You could live with poor two-strike outcomes, if you avoided them.  Unfortunately, our Twins led all the majors in PA that reached two strikes, at 3423.  That's a lot more than half of their total 6219 PA last season.

Double whammy.

Despite this article's lead-in about two strikes, I didn't see much that addressed this aspect.  It's very interesting to learn about the generation of power on outside pitches.  I see from the same b-ref.com table that, on PA resolved on the first pitch, our 2023 Twins were second best in the majors with a 1.105 OPS.  (The average team does good in this situation of course, at .955, the Twins just done gooder and almost goodest.)

Is there something about this tactic that stops working so well once there are two strikes?  Maybe I didn't read carefully enough.

Gallo - Taylor - Vazquez - Buxton - Wallner……

………none of these guys could have helped our 2 strike OPS much, just needed to watch the games in ‘23.

Buxton was hurt - Vazquez has been working hard over winter - Wallner was a Rookie & his profile will keep him striking out a fair amount going forward. Two guys are gone & replaced by Santana & Margot …….things should change significantly in the Team stats with two strikes.

[rv78]

16 hours ago, Rod Carews Birthday said:

Actually, that was back in the days when the Twins were teaching players to go to the opposite field and put the ball in play Punch and Judy style.  The complaint that Ortiz had was that they weren't letting him be the power hitter he was, and when he got to Boston they let him swing away.  Presto. . . he's a power hitter.  So, no.  Those aren't the right dots to connect.

This isn't an either/or scenario. We need players like Arraez and we need players like Max (the 2019 and last half of 2023 version) in order to have the maximum effect.  In retrospect, they were certainly wrong to try to make Austin Martin into a power hitter, but they didn't know that at the time (and neither did anyone else).  It was a gamble they took so that they could take someone with a good hit tool and add the power tool.  Without it, Austin Martin is likely to be somewhere from a fringy major league utility guy to a decent MLB player.  With it, he could be a big star.  That's the gamble they took and in this case they lost.  They did the same with Buxton.  It took awhile, but it seems to have worked, even if he can't stay healthy, but that's a different subject.

You may be right about Ortiz. I just remember sports writers talking about how he came to Boston and "learned" how to punish the ball off the green monster. I guess we can agree that if the Twins tried to make him a slap hitter then, and now they try to make everyone a power hitter that isn't, that they should accept what they have and just make them better at what they do best. Trying to make someone something they are not maybe isn't the best approach for the player or the team.

[CCHOF5yearstoolate]

20 hours ago, Parfigliano said:

Their philosophy is grip it and rip it.  Its flashy but as in golf its an approach that fails in the long run.

Hit hard line drives is one of the oldest truisms in baseball, and yet once you put numbers to that strategy some people are willing to abandon it in an instant. Not logical. 

[CCHOF5yearstoolate]

18 hours ago, rv78 said:

It runs parallel to the theory of swing for the fences, which more often than not results in swings and misses, and weak grounders. Sano could have been a decent hitter had he taken the "swing hard on every pitch" approach and thrown it into the garbage can. Someone as strong as he was could have hit 40 HR a year if he would have toned his swing down a bit and concentrated on just making contact. Austin Martin was pushed into trying to be more of a power hitter by coaches and it cost him a year of development in the minors, finally realizing that he isn't the type of hitter the Twins were trying to make him. He only started to hit decent again when he went back to being a singles/doubles hitter using all fields and not a HomeRun hitter. 

My guess is if Ortiz had stayed in the Twins organization he wouldn't have learned to hit to the opposite field and would have been a sliver of the hitter he ended up as, being in Boston and punishing the green monster with doubles off of his left handed bat. Compare any good hitter that using the whole field, like an Arraez and then look at a Max Kepler who tries to pull almost everything. Not hard to see which ones are the better hitters.

Miguel Sano's career pull rate: 45.6%

David Ortiz's career pull rate: 45.4%

Also, right field at Fenway is incredibly pull friendly for left-handed hitters. 

[CCHOF5yearstoolate]

15 hours ago, jkcarew said:

The modern hitter (and Gallo fits the category) get their 2-strikes mostly by TAKING strikes, not expanding the zone. (Especially relative to earlier generations of players.) Hence the preponderance of ‘three true outcome’ guys. The mantra is to offer only at pitches you can drive out of the park. Can’t do that with a fastball tailing hard into the inside corner or a slider at the knees on the outside black, etc, etc.

The conundrum is, that in many, many at-bats this results in HAVING to expand the zone with 2 strikes. That’s where we’re at. The Twins will still have their share of these guys…Julien probably the ‘best’ example.

Edouard Julien had a 11.1% swing percentage on pitches outside the zone with 2-strikes, which was the lowest in all of baseball with 20 or more such plate appearances. His issue is whiffs, not expanding the zone. 

He had a lower chase rate than Juan Soto last season. 

[ashbury]

4 hours ago, JD-TWINS said:

Gallo - Taylor - Vazquez - Buxton - Wallner……

………none of these guys could have helped our 2 strike OPS much, just needed to watch the games in ‘23.

Buxton was hurt - Vazquez has been working hard over winter - Wallner was a Rookie & his profile will keep him striking out a fair amount going forward. Two guys are gone & replaced by Santana & Margot …….things should change significantly in the Team stats with two strikes.

I almost mentioned Vazquez because he was just about as bad as the two I named.  I made a mistake, though, by overlooking Buxton, who in 2023 was even worse than Gallo or Taylor.  I looked at the bottom of the list and saw mostly small-sample players like Garlick and Stevenson, and flat-out missed Buxton with a .357 OPS with two strikes.  The good news is that, like any stat where you're going on 100-200 PA, there is fluctuation from year to year, and in 2022 Byron had been better than league average with two strikes.  Maybe it was the nagging injuries that account for it in 2023 and we can hope for a bounceback from him in every dimension including this.