The Twins Had One of Baseball’s Best Pitching Staffs in 2024—Just Don’t Look At Their ERA - Caretaker Exclusive

[Davy Andrews]

Why did the advanced metrics love the Twins' pitching staff so much more than the traditional ones?

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

The Twins' pitching staff ran a 4.26 ERA in 2024. That ranked just 21st in baseball, and it was one of the reasons they missed the playoffs. In fact, here’s the list of playoff teams that had a worse ERA than the Twins: nobody. Not a single playoff team had a worse ERA than the Twins. Want to play in October? You need to pitch well. However, it’s not quite that simple.

As our knowledge of the game’s intricacies has advanced, ERA has fallen from its place of prominence. A wide variety of ERA estimators attempt to account for factors outside the pitcher’s control—defense, batted ball luck, sequencing, park factors—in order to get a better idea of what the pitcher actually did right or wrong. Fielding-independent pitching (FIP) looks only at the three true outcomes of walks, homers, and strikeouts (as well as the long-slighted fourth true outcome, hit-by-pitches; what could be truer than throwing a baseball directly into the flesh of a fellow human being?). FIP has long been known to be more predictive of a pitcher’s future performance than ERA. xFIP takes things a step further. It replaces a pitcher’s actual home run total with the number of dingers that Statcast thinks they deserved to give up. 

I bring all this up because if you look at these estimators, you’ll see that they tell a very different story about the Twins staff (and season) than their ERA does. The table below shows how the team fared according to various stats. The first row shows the raw numbers, and the second shows their rank among all MLB teams. Calling the difference stark would really be underselling things. 

Metric	ERA	FIP	xFIP	DRA	SIERA	ERA-	FIP-	xFIP-	DRA-
Raw	4.26	3.84	3.83	4.14	3.65	106	94	94	93
Rank	21	7	5	4	3	22	6	4	4

Nearly every advanced metric thinks that the Twins had a top-five pitching staff in 2024. Top five! How did they end up ranked 21st in ERA?

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[Schmoeman5]

I don't think so.

[DJL44]

Bad defense was definitely a contributor

[TwinsDr2021]

So don't believe you lying eye? Believe what could of, should of, might have happened?

[Brett]

Would like to understand individual ratings rather than the outfield collectively. Then I can spend my offseason wondering how much better is Larnach over Castro in LF? Or, better yet, will ‘25 Keirsey be better than ‘24 Margot as the 4th OF?

[Werbellik]

So, the Twins have assembled a pitching staff that is fly ball oriented in a smaller ballpark with bad defensive outfielders. Sounds like a front office problem to me.

[Mark G]

So, it wasn't bad pitching, it was bad luck, bad fielding, and a small ball park.  Who knew? 🫠

 

[David Maro]

Too many 3-2 counts and position players playing out of position didn't help. Not all players want to play like a utility player. Pitchers pitch count climb when you go 3-2 again and again and then throw a meatball. How about trying to pitch instead of being a thrower. Throwing 100 miles per hour doesn't get it done when you throw it down the middle.

[LambchoP]

If we have to rely on Festa or Mathews right out of the gate, I'll be worried about our rotation. They need more time in AAA, especially Zebby who was pitching in A ball last year. I like our 1-4 with Lopez, Over, Ryan and SWR. Paddack will probably be moved so I think we need to somehow grab a SP to be our number 5. Mathew Boyd could come cheap. Kikuchi would be great but he's too expensive. As long as Festa, Mathews and Morris start the year in the minors with Festa our first call up as injury replacement we should be ok. All this is assuming the team cleans up our atrocious defense somehow.

[old nurse]

There are places that talk of the importance of pitch sequencing . That factor seem to be important to pitching yet are not accounted for in pitching metrics. That could also be an explanation of why ERA and FIP can be so different. Command also comes into play. Outcomes vary as the ball count goes up   The lack of command could also play a part as the Twins stressed not walking batters could lead to more hittable pitches.  If the article contained that information, my bad. 

[tony&rodney]

The single biggest improvement that can be made to the pitching staff is to put players in the field that make defensive plays. Right now the roster is slow and below average defensively.

[Riverbrian]

On 11/8/2024 at 12:28 PM, Brett said:

Would like to understand individual ratings rather than the outfield collectively. Then I can spend my offseason wondering how much better is Larnach over Castro in LF? Or, better yet, will ‘25 Keirsey be better than ‘24 Margot as the 4th OF?

I recommend taking the formula and running the numbers to watch the wheels turn.

The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming number of routine plays strangling the data.   

Once you notice the overwhelming number of routine plays... you come to the conclusion that the differences in data must be drawn from the underwhelming amount of non-routine plays.