What Team Stats Can Tell Us About the Twins’ Pitching Philosophy - Caretaker Exclusive

[Davy Andrews]

In 2024, the Minnesota staff sat at the top of the league in several categories. What can that tell us about the organization as a whole?

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I love looking at the pitching or hitting stats for an entire team. I think it might have started because of the 2023 Braves, who just raked all season long from top to bottom, but I love going over to the League Statistics pages on Statcast and sorting by all the different columns. Every team is made up dozens of players with their own individual styles and skill levels, but I like to think of each team as its own little ecosystem. The players themselves and the way they develop are informed by the environment the team provides.

For example, the Twins prize velocity and prefer four-seam fastballs, and that has informed both the pitchers they’ve acquired and what they’ve taught their young pitchers once they got them. I bring all this up because, as I was sorting the other day, I noticed something interesting. That one interesting thing took me down an entire rabbit hole, and I am now going to drag you down with me. Here’s where it started: I noticed that this season, opposing batters loved to swing at the Twins’ pitches. Their 49.7% swing rate trailed only the Mariners, whose opponents swung almost exactly 50% of the time.

To tell you the truth, I’m not positive what that super-high swing rate means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. It definitely makes sense, in that the Twins threw a lot of strikes. Their 50.6% zone rate ranked third in baseball, behind the Rays and the Red Sox. But it wasn’t quite as simple as, "They threw strikes, so their opponents swung more often." The Twins ranked third in swing rate both inside and outside the zone. Awhile back I did a study about which stadiums have the best batter’s eye in center field, and therefore make it easier to see the ball. One way I measured that was to check the batters’ plate discipline, thinking that at ballparks where the batters could see the ball better, they’d make better swing decisions. But that turned out to be wrong. When batters could see the ball better, they swung more often at offerings both inside and outside the zone. The ball just looked juicier to them, so they swung more. This is purely a guess, but maybe the Twins’ high swing rate meant that they lacked deception, or that their pitches were somewhat predictable.

Here's another strange thing: When you think of teams who hit the strike zone a lot, you probably think of teams who throw a lot of fastballs, since breaking and offspeed pitches are so often designed to generate chases and whiffs. But you’d be wrong (and by you, I actually mean me, because that’s what I thought until I looked it up). The Twins threw a four-seamer, sinker, or cutter 49.3% of the time, lowest in all of baseball. The league average was nearly 56%. The Twins hit the strike zone a ton even though they threw fewer fastballs than any other team in baseball.

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[LambchoP]

I am just glad that since Falvey took over, the organization seems to have moved on from the old pitching style of soft tossing, pitch to contact guys. That just doesn't work in today's game and it's a good thing the Twins changed to value velo and strikeouts. 

[Bob Twins Fan Since 61]

Thanks for doing the research and writing this article.  Found it very interesting and informative.