Pace and Change: A Remarkable Night at Target Field

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

 

The Twins hosted Bark at the Park Night on Tuesday against the Marlins. It's a love-it-or-hate-it kind of event, and generally, I hate it. Dogs are wonderful creatures, of course, but the ballpark isn't a space built for them, and when things are good, the ballpark should be so full as to make the inclusion of dogs an unwelcome inconvenience. Often, that's exactly how it feels.

Lately, of course, the Twins haven't had that problem. In fact, as it turned out, Bark at the Park was perfectly timed this spring. A crowd of just 13,471 (I don't care enough to check whether they do, but you have to actually buy a ticket for your dog now, so they should count, too) filed into Target Field, but by the end of the game, they were in full voice, sounding (for the first time since last July, and only a few times, even then) like more than their actual number and like a crowd with a real connection to its team.

It was a great night for baseball, with a game-time temperature nearing 70°, with a stiff breeze to remind your it's still only mid-May in Minnesota. It was not a great night to be a hitter, however, especially in the early going.

"The shadows are tough—tough on everyone, early," Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers acknowledged after the game. "I think both sides put some ugly swings on the ball the first few innings."

Visiting players, especially, have long grumbled about the shadows for summertime 6:40 PM starts, when the sun is behind home plate and shines brightly off the batter's eye and the limestone above it. The shadow of the seating bowl and its roof stretches across the field slowly at first, leaving the plate in shadow right away but the mound in partial sunlight. This was the Twins' first home game in nine days and their first night game at home since May 1; it marked the first time this shadow effect played out at the venue this season.

Both Eury Pérez and Bailey Ober took full advantage, though, in ways that go beyond simply profiting from hitters being distracted or scintillated. Pérez has some of the best raw stuff in the big leagues.

"We have to stay on his fastball," manager Derek Shelton said of the team's plan against Pérez, before the game. "Because as hard as he throws, if you come off the fastball and you're looking for something else, you're not going to have a chance." Early on, whatever they were trying to do, that was exactly how it felt—like the team had no chance. Pérez carved through the top of the Twins lineup in the first inning, highlighted by a three-pitch dissection of Jeffers:

Jeffers froze and watched Pérez's sweeper for strike one, then fouled off a sinker well up and in for strike two, almost in self-defense. After that, when Pérez dotted the outside corner with a four-seamer at 99.5 miles per hour, the at-bat was over before the ball hit catcher Joe Mack's mitt.

Ober, of course, is the league's softest-tossing starting pitcher, which made for a sharp contrast with Pérez. Fairly quickly, though, it became clear that he wouldn't be easily outdueled. The young Marlins lineup has shown its upside this season, but they haven't seen a pitcher quite as in control as Ober was Tuesday night. Quickly, they got taken out of their game plan, and then they got taken out, period.

After the game, Ober would talk a lot about being able to "get [his] hand in the right position" to throw all his pitches. This is a frequent refrain for Ober, whose huge frame and great extension make it both highly valuable and (at times) very difficult to manipulate the ball the way he needs to. He's at his best when he feels he can adjust his hand position at release without affecting the rest of his delivery, and often, that comes when the rest of his body is healthy and working correctly in sequence. It's remarkable, because it's something fans can't see with the naked eye, and that even turns to useless blur on replays, but when Ober can turn his wrist deftly in each direction and feel the ball coming off his fingers in just the right way, he knows that he has control of the action. In a world making fun of his lack of speed, he's assessing himself based on small adjustments being made at a speed faster than a TV camera's frame rate.

All of that was happening Tuesday, and Ober talked about having good feel for all of his pitches—but the truth is that he barely needed three of them.

Barely 20% of the pitches Ober threw Tuesday night were breaking balls. He has three flavors of breaker—slider, sweeper, curveball—and he utilized all three, but none were especially important. He got two outs on them almost by accident, with overeager 0-0 swings by Marlins batters when all Ober was really trying to do was steal a strike to start the at-bat. He also didn't throw his sinker at all.

No, Ober cut through the Marlins with a simple mix: fastball high, changeup down. He left a few changeups up, but they missed the zone to his arm side, where they couldn't get him hurt. He brought a few fastballs down, but the hitters were sitting on the changeup in that area and couldn't punish those, either. Though Ober's fastball only sits at 88-89 MPH (he touched 90.6 Tuesday) and his changeup comes in at around 83, he can disrupt hitters' timing with the best of them, thanks to the exceptional shape on his four-seamer. Its vertical movement is extreme, considering how low his arm slot is. That's why models like Baseball Prospectus's StuffPro label it as an above-average pitch, despite his extreme dearth of velocity. 

When he can locate that fastball high and that changeup low, all the way across the plate, he becomes very tough to hit, because the shapes of the two pitches are so much more different than is typical of two offerings at relatively similar speeds. That's what was happening Tuesday night, which allowed Ober to sail through the first five innings with lots of weak, early contact. It was a scoreless tie at the game's halfway point.

Ober was pitching masterfully, but Pérez was the one truly dominating. The Twins had cobbled together something almost like a rally twice in the early innings, thanks to walks by Pérez, a Luke Keaschall hit-by-pitch, a strikeout wild pitch, and a throwing error, but they didn't have a hit their first two times through the lineup. Pérez had two quick outs in the fifth, in fact, when Byron Buxton drew a walk to start the third turn for Twins batters. That turned out to be the pivot point of the game.

Trevor Larnach hit a soft liner toward shortstop. In another world, it could have been an inning-ending groundout. In fact, under baseball's pre-2023 rules, it almost certainly would have been one. With Larnach ahead in the count 1-0, Buxton took off for second base with the pitch. Miami shortstop Otto Lopez broke to cover the bag, and Larnach's one-hopper floated through a vacant infield toward left fielder Heriberto Hernandez. If the Marlins had still been allowed to load the right side of their infield with three defenders, Lopez probably would have been coming to cover second from the other side, and third baseman Connor Norby would have been in position to field the ball.

Because he wasn't, though, and because the ball was hit slowly with the play right in front of him, Buxton was able to hare around to third base. He and third-base coach Ramon Borrego even pondered trying to score. Hernandez fielded the ball and released it quickly, but his throw was an underhand wing to Lopez, near second. The Twins have scored more than once when an opponent underestimated their aggressiveness and threw too casually to the middle of the diamond, and they had it in mind to do it again.

It would have been a dangerous play. However, in the context of the game, it would have been justifiable. With two outs in the inning and runs at such a premium, the opportunity to score one only needed to come with about a 25% expected success rate to be worth the attempt. Ultimately, Borrego and Buxton made the snap decision not to risk it, and they were probably right to eschew the try. Even with Buxton running, the ball being on the infield that early should have given the Marlins a four-in-five shot to nab him.

Instead, things fell to Ryan Jeffers—but, on another 1-0 pitch, the Twins made things happen, instead of waiting for them to happen. Larnach and Buxton executed a double-steal, wherein Larnach's job was to draw a throw to second base and get in a rundown, allowing Buxton to score.

That the Marlins threw through here speaks to the way the game was already tilting, and changing. The shadows had given way to the neutral golden shimmer that prevails when the sun is too low to cast shadows on the field but still bright enough to bounce its light off the mirror-windowed high-rise beyond left field, and off the white sign in center field. Buxton's speed had created a hit for Larnach and applied pressure to the Marlins, and the lineup was getting its third look at Pérez.

Under that pressure, the rookie Mack made the wrong play, though he made it the right way. With Buxton as the lead runner, the visitors should have allowed Larnach to take second uncontested. Failing that, though, Mack's throw—immediate, without hesitation and right on the bag—was perfect. Xavier Edwards made the real error. He caught the ball and checked on Buxton, but when Buxton hesitated just long enough to fool him, Edwards turned to try to run down Larnach. That's when Buxton broke for home, just barely beating the throw.

Had Edwards simply held the ball and forced Larnach back to first base, a lot of things might have been different. To Larnach's credit, he, too, set the trap well. He waited just far enough to avoid being tagged out easily, but close enough to demand that Edwards make a play on him. Had he retreated faster, Buxton probably would have had to hold. Had he been a half-step closer to Edwards, he might have been out before Buxton could score, one way or another. Larnach has messed up this very balance in the past, but he got it right this time. Buxton's speed had broken the game open, with a double-assist from the lefty slugger.

Because the play at the plate was so close, Jeffers and Pérez had to wait out a replay review before the 2-0 offering could be thrown, with a runner now on second base. In those moments, the battle isn't between pitcher and batter, but between each player and themselves. Pérez lost his mental battle during the unwelcome downtime, lamenting the way a run had formed from almost nothing over the previous 10 pitches. Jeffers won his, and when Pérez made a mistake with a breaking ball on the first pitch after the interruption, Jeffers used it to triple the Twins' margin.

The game was effectively over, right then. On Tuesday night, the Marlins weren't scoring three runs against Ober. For one thing, he had that fastball-changeup pairing going. For another, Marlins batters were anxious and unable to defend themselves. 

Miami challenges more aggressively with their catchers than any other team in baseball. As a counterbalance (and as a means of facilitating that strategy), though, they challenge less than all but one other team (the Red Sox) at the plate. Ober, who has now faced all three of the teams who most notably eschew hitter challenges (the Red Sox, the Reds and the Marlins), has a 29.6% strikeout rate in those three outings and an 11.7% mark in his other six games. He stole strikes at the edges of the zone four times, including one for a called third strike; no Marlins batter tapped his head.

No matter. Ober's stuff was good enough to win even if those few calls had broken the other way. He was on his game, and despite the denigratiions of velocity lovers everywhere, Ober is still an above-average pitcher when he's on. His command and the contrasts in shape between the fastball and the changeup, with his great deception factored in, far outweigh his lack of power. He cruised so seamlessly through the sixth, seventh and eighth that there was little doubt he would start the ninth. He had only thrown 81 pitches to that point. However, when the towering righty climbed the dugout steps to head for the hill after the end of the eighth, a funny thing happened: the crowd erupted. 

Again, it was a small crowd. They didn't make an earsplitting roar; they weren't capable of that. But the volume and the passion of the pop that came from merely seeing Ober go out to finish what he'd begun was the perfect capstone to a great night of baseball. The outs Ober actually recorded to put the game away felt academic. They came easily. For one night, with the flair and cleverness of Buxton's speed, the thunder of Jeffers's bat, and Ober pitching an old-school masterpiece, the Twins' relationship with their fan base was repaired. No one left the park thinking the team's many ills were resolved, and no one is deluded about the heavy work still ahead as team and community try to weave themselves back together, but the fans were present and engaged on Tuesday night. The team rewarded them with beautiful baseball, and the fans gave that gift right back to Ober when his cleats hit the top step of the dugout.

It might be only the brightest moment in another dark season, or the last flicker of what this team was a few years ago and arguably still should be. But it also might turn out to be a turning point. Ober, Buxton and Jeffers aren't the future of the Twins. Most of that future is currently at Triple-A St. Paul. They made the present bright and worthy of celebration, though, and they'll be the leaders to whom the next wave of talent looks when they arrive in Minneapolis this summer. If nothing else, Tuesday was a demonstration of how good the team's veterans can be for the players coming up behind them—and of how badly the fans still want to be there when it all happens.

 

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[Twins_Fan_in_NJ]

I enjoy watching Ober 'pitch' in an era otherwise dominated by hard throwers - who don't necessarily pitch but just blow the ball by hitters.

[Linus]

Obers change is so good it gives him something to build around even if it means pitching backwards. Really fun to watch. Perez is nasty. 

[jimmiexx]

I really hope Ober can get back to his 2023 form... And Jeffers... And maybe get some young outfielders in the Show...

But at the end of the day, that was just a really good game. Hats off to Bailey!

 

[rdehring]

Loved the game.  Enjoyed your report.

I for one, hope that Buxton, Ober and Jeffers are part of the Twins future as the veteran part of their next competitive team.

[Nshore]

Still rooting for Lewis to keep turning that key in the ignition and finally have the engine turn over - before he gets towed.

[mickster]

37 minutes ago, jimmiexx said:

I really hope Ober can get back to his 2023 form... And Jeffers... And maybe get some young outfielders in the Show...

But at the end of the day, that was just a really good game. Hats off to Bailey!

 

Losing Jeffers next year will hurt, bad.  The extension window may have been missed, and with Boras as an agent it is even worse.............