It doesn't take an advanced degree in baseball to recognize the Twins as an all-or-nothing team at the plate. They might not send hitters up there looking to hit a home run in every plate appearance, but no team in the league is as comfortable with trading contact altogether in order to achieve their prime directive: hit the snot out of the ball, preferably in the air, and preferably to the pull field. Hit Bombas.
No team in baseball history has struck out in as great a percentage of their total plate appearances as did the 2023 Twins. On the other hand, the 2023 Twins hit 233 home runs, to lead the American League. They were as feast-or-famine as any team in the annals of the game, and it didn't stop them from getting to the playoffs, or even from breaking that nightmarish two-decade schneid in postseason games. The Twins overcame the Blue Jays in the AL Wild Card Series, in fact, in large part because of Royce Lewis's home-run heroics, and they struck out more than the Jays even en route to sweeping that series.
For at least the last 20 years, there has been a prevalent--even pervasive--narrative that crops up every season in October, when the national networks take over to broadcast playoff games: you need to be well-rounded and put the ball in play in the playoffs. That theory has been pretty well debunked. Regular-season team contact rate did predict the winners of playoff series pretty well over a few years at the beginning of the last decade, but that didn't prove to be a sticky effect. It was a function of transient circumstances of the game, and it faded in its predictive power.
Thus, you'll now find a lot of smart people on Baseball Twitter every autumn, loudly decrying the loud decrying of home run-centric offense. The favored stat of these counter-counterrevolutionaries is the records of teams who out-homer their opponents in a postseason game. The team who hits more home runs wins a startling share of games in the playoffs; it's something like 80 percent. A playfully troglodytic aphorism popularized by Baseball Prospectus co-founder Joe Sheehan has become the slogan of the stat-savvy baseball fan every time they have to listen to Álex Rodríguez call for another bunt, or John Smoltz bemoan another empty two-strike hack: "Ball go far, team go far."
Here's the thing: Smoltz and ARod are right, and the smart people are wrong.
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