The Twins Don't Need a Full Rebuild. They Need a Direction.

[ewen21]

11 minutes ago, rv78 said:

Watching another failed season only proves to me they don't know what they are doing, or they do and just don't care as long as the fans keep supporting their failed product on the field.

This is why Buxton wants to be a Twin for life in my mind.  He knows the expectations are almost non-existent for him.  He's who has been chosen to be "the face of the franchise" and this is largely due to a large section of the fanbase.  It almost seems as though since Target Field has opened the Twins and a great number of fans are content with Buxton even though he appears in roughly 60% of the games each season.  If this is the player you want to make for your "face of the franchise" then good luck with building a team.

 

Rant over!

[HeresWaldo]

26 minutes ago, ashbury said:

I'm not a Zebby woofer, but this is a really unfair take.

He's had 22 starts this season.  b-r.com provides a version of Bill James's old "game score" that provides a quick-and-dirty guide to how a starting pitcher did in a game.  Sorting Matthews's starts by this tool, he had 13 starts that are solidly above average.  You can look at the game logs of them below.  You'll see that the Twins won 9 and lost 4 of those games - the losses were 2-1, 2-0, 3-1 and 2-1 - his team's offense let him down completely in those 4 well-pitched losses. 

In the other 9 games, at the bottom of the list in the display, the team managed to go 3-6 because the offense bailed him out three times.  When Zebby is bad, he can be REALLY bad.  But the three absolute worst games look very odd in the one-line summary, as if the manager was hanging him out to dry.  I don't actually think there was malicious intent - in those games, the Twins offense was contributing little (4 runs total by the end of those 3 games) so the braintrust in the dugout may have judged that the game was not likely to be won so the starter might as well eat some more innings if he can (if so, this blew up in their faces all three times), and/or the bullpen was stressed so they didn't want to turn the game over to them any sooner than necessary in a lost cause (5+ innings of shutout relief wouldn't have salvaged these games).  Sometimes a pitcher "wears one" for the team, and I see three such games that dragged his ERA down more than if the manager had come and got him like might be expected on those days his team wasn't hitting.

All in all, he's had more good games than bad, 13-9, That's not easy to do at the major league level, and you certainly don't do it with no talent.  His team has gone 12-10 in his starts, representing a little bad luck, and his official W-L record of 9-10 is even less lucky.  

Again, I'm not apologizing for Zebby - I' m trying to make sense of his season.

In my view, if the coaching staff can unlock something more - something new he can do when a game starts to go bad for him - there's cause for optimism.  If not, then he remains a .500 pitcher, which is not "terrible."

I like averages, but sometimes it pays to look deeper at the underlying data.

 

Thanks, I appreciate the thoughtful response.

You're welcome to use the stats you prefer, but be aware that Bill James himself referred to Game Score as "a kind of garbage stat that I present not because it helps us understand anything in particular but because it is fun to play around with." The thing to keep in mind about Game Score is that it's heavily driven by the number of hits allowed, which means it's driven by the defense behind the pitcher on any given day. Zebby has a .269 BABIP this season, so it makes sense that Game Score would like him, since the defense behind him has generally been good.

If we look at stats known to be predictive of future performance, like K%, K-BB%, and FIP, he's been a solidly below-average starter this season. These poor overall results make sense because we know that in addition to his low strikeout rate he is allowing extremely high average exit velocity on contact. Per Baseball Savant, he's in the 6th percentile in average exit velocity, which would generally mean a high BABIP, not the abnormally low BABIP he's actually allowed. This suggests he's been quite lucky on balls in play, which is what makes the poor topline results so discouraging to me.

I'm by no means saying this makes him a guaranteed failure going forward. Baseball development isn't linear, and it's certainly possible he takes a step forward this offseason or could be converted into a great reliever even if he continues to struggle as a starter. All I'm saying is that his numbers this year haven't been great, and the predictive stats support those poor results, so as far as I can tell, there's no strong reason to bet on him being good next year as a starter.

[LastOnePicked]

2 hours ago, bean5302 said:

Yeah, he's doing a terrible job cleaning the bathrooms in Target Field, too.

Now I know you're joking around. The idea that Tom Pohlad has ever cleaned a bathroom anywhere is beyond ridiculous.

Beyond that, I think I missed your point, Bean. What was it?

[ashbury]

19 minutes ago, HeresWaldo said:

Thanks, I appreciate the thoughtful response.

You're welcome to use the stats you prefer, but be aware that Bill James himself referred to Game Score as "a kind of garbage stat 

Forget the Bill James angle; it's just a convenient starting point for analysis by separating bad games from good games.  Look at the game logs.  Those 13 games at the top of the list are very competent major league outings.  

You're still looking at averages.  Every number/stat you mentioned is an average. That's a mistake when the data is irregular.

Look at the GAMES.

[bean5302]

3 minutes ago, LastOnePicked said:

Now I know you're joking around. The idea that Tom Pohlad has ever cleaned a bathroom anywhere is beyond ridiculous.

Beyond that, I think I missed your point, Bean. What was it?

My point is Tom Pohlad has his own responsibilities, but choosing which players are on the roster isn't one of them unless his direct comments in regard to making roster decisions are to be ignored.

Pohlad may not have provided an expansive budget the moment he walked into the job; however, the front office is free to use that budget any way they see fit. While Tom Pohlad may have set the expectation the team would compete, that did not preclude trading Ryan and or Lopez if the front office could justify the moves through free agent signings and trading for other assets.

[Cory Engelhardt]

1 hour ago, ewen21 said:

Thanks for your response.  

I mean, there is a lot more to do. But it's not been NOTHING. That's all I meant.

I would hope they do more, trade for players that can be part of the core. That SHOULD be the goal no?

[HeresWaldo]

39 minutes ago, ashbury said:

Forget the Bill James angle; it's just a convenient starting point for analysis by separating bad games from good games.  Look at the game logs.  Those 13 games at the top of the list are very competent major league outings.  

You're still looking at averages.  Every number/stat you mentioned is an average. That's a mistake when the data is irregular.

Look at the GAMES.

Okay let's do that. These starts represent 84 innings pitched, during which he struck out 70 guys for a 7.5 K/9 or 21.5 K%, both of which are solidly below league average. The ERA and FIP in these starts are unsurprisingly quite good since we're limiting ourselves to only starts where we already knew the results were good - 2.14 ERA/3.42 FIP - but this is overwhelmingly driven by the extremely lucky .239 BABIP and 0.86 HR/9 rates. So yeah, if we filter down to the starts where the guy with a 6th percentile barrel rate and 6th percentile exit velocity against doesn't give up homers and the defense is good behind him, he looks good. If these were starts where he was regularly punching out 10+ I'd totally agree with you, but even in this extremely overly filtered data set he's pretty clearly getting lucky.

Now, if what you're saying is I'm still missing the point because these are still averages I'm using and the results in those game were good, that's fine, as long as we're clear that those individual game results are not at all predictive of future performance. 

[TheLeviathan]

4 hours ago, SE23 said:

Add:

Luiz Arraez

Yandy Diaz

Carson Kelly

1 starting pitcher (FA or trade)

1 relief pitcher (FA or trade)

 

We need a "Drunk Takes" thread.  I nominate this one as a starter.

[Glorybound]

4 hours ago, Cory Engelhardt said:

Bradley, Ryan, Lopez, Abel, Tait, Clemens, Hoffman, 

Non of that group was acquired during the last two off seasons.

[LastOnePicked]

1 hour ago, bean5302 said:

My point is Tom Pohlad has his own responsibilities, but choosing which players are on the roster isn't one of them unless his direct comments in regard to making roster decisions are to be ignored.

"We owe the fan base something. We owe our veteran and star players something. And we owe this organization something. And that something is hope." - Tom Pohlad, Dec. 2025

This seems like a pretty clear statement of direction that came directly from ownership. We fans have no true insider access, but the little glimpses we get can sometimes give us a decent idea.

That's the idea I got, at least. Tom Pohlad realized that completing the rebuild would be bad PR, and he chose to gamble. I thought it was a foolish gamble then and I still think so now. I have no idea what ownership is thinking about 2027 - we'll all have to wait and see.

 

[Cory Engelhardt]

1 hour ago, Glorybound said:

Non of that group was acquired during the last two off seasons.

I agree. They didn’t do enough. I hope they have better offseasons ongoing