Rounding Up Pitch Tweaks for Minnesota Twins Pitchers in Spring Training

The key seasons for baseball, of course, aren't the winter or the spring, but what happens in summer and fall can depend heavily on the work done in those two seasons of preparation. For the Twins under Derek Falvey and company, that means (in part) pitch design work. Minnesota has one of the most philosophically dedicated, proactive pitching infrastructures in baseball, which means that (in addition to developing homegrown hurlers a certain way) they can be reliably expected to make certain changes when they acquire a pitcher from outside the organization. 

That doesn't mean applying one-size-fits-all solutions to all pitchers and their problems. The team still understands the individuality of their charges, and tailors changes they make to those individuals. It just means that the solutions they choose among a set of alternatives will usually reflect their organizational principles.

Sometimes, those solutions can still be very broad, and not unique. Consider Ryan Jensen, whom the team claimed on waivers over the winter and was able to keep as a non-roster invitee after deisgnating him for assignment during the ensuing roster churn. This spring, he's not throwing harder, and he hasn't added a pitch. On the contrary, he's eliminated one. Yet, he's made one important change.

Jensen has been tinkering with and trying various flavors of the breaking ball since he first entered professional baseball, half a decade ago. None have been very effective, though, and the Twins were able to get through to him with a simple message: take what's not working, and scrap it. This spring, Jensen has been a purely hard-stuff hurler, utilizing a four-seam fastball, sinker, and cutter. Whereas those three pitches are often overlapping or difficult to distinguish for a given pitcher, though, Jensen has very different looks with the three.

That's been made more dramatic this spring, too, because Jensen is getting (on average) three more inches of ride (rising action, relative to the expected action of gravity on a spinless pitch) with the four-seamer than he got last year. That's an enormous jump, from essentially average to markedly above-average. As you can see, the pitches being classified as a sinker for him are also sinking more, looking more like... aha! A changeup. Jensen's so-called sinker is coming in five miles per hour slower than his four-seamer. While we don't yet have confirmation of this, I'm here to tell you: that's a changeup. The Twins have Jensen going away from the sinker and toward a hard changeup, with plenty of tumble underneath such a high-riding four-seamer.

Jensen's spring results have been spotty, and as a non-roster arm, he's not guaranteed to see time with the team this year. After these tweaks, though, he's in a much-improved position. It wouldn't be remotely surprising to see him come up because of some injury this summer and contribute unexpectedly in middle relief.

Jensen is far from alone, though. Let's take a look at three other Twins relievers making adjustments of varying degrees of omen this spring.