Rocco Baldelli didn't just call his team's performance over the weekend in Kansas City disappointing or weak. He chose the word 'unprofessional'. To a hard-nosed New England baseball man, the cardinal sin in the game is not a failure to be good enough, but a failure to show adequate intensity, purpose, or intelligence. A series in which his team scored only two runs was just the latest example of their growing ineptitude at the plate, and it wasn't the product of fly balls dying on the warning track or close calls going the wrong way.
No, the Twins swung early, and often, and they made lousy contact. Give the stellar Royals pitching staff some credit for that, but be sure not to apportion the responsibility for it all to them. The Twins are on a woeful jag in this regard.
So far this month, as a team, the Twins are chasing just over 36% of pitches outside the strike zone. That's the worst showing for any team in any month all year. Obviously, that's very misleading, because we're only eight days into this month, so outliers are bound to be more common, but the truth of it can't be easily erased. The difference between their in-zone swing rate and their chase rate is also the lowest any team has posted in any month of the season, by a comfortable margin. They're swinging indiscriminately, and it's killing any chances they might otherwise have of producing consistent offense.
On this chart, you can see April and May in a cluster on the left, where the Twins were too passive and struggled out to an uneven start. On the right, clustered just as nicely, are June, July, and August, when the team was healthier and more aggressive and consistently producing superb offensive numbers, even if it came with a little more chase. But right now, as that top data point so clearly tells us, they're a mess.
That's not entirely their fault, of course. They're nearing the end of a long season. Almost 10 years ago, Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus did a landmark study about the management of the difficult grind that is an MLB campaign. In it, he found that players show worse plate discipline as they wear down, and that without days off to shield them from the effects of the grind, those effects pile up and materially damage an offense's production.
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