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We, the good, dutiful Twins fans, have poked high and low over the past few weeks, interrogating each poor team’s roster for potential improvement. These players may be wasted with their current franchise, after all; might a move to the dynastic Twins better both side’s fortunes? Indeed, there are quality players available on such teams, but Minnesota may want to look at the Baltimore Orioles and their first baseman, Ryan Mountcastle.
The Orioles strategically moved their left-field fence back 26.5 feet and raised the wall nearly six feet before the 2022 season. The result is aesthetic garbage, soiling one of MLB’s classic ballparks with jagged, empty nothingness, but it also bore great success, as the team took off in their first season with the new dimensions. They stacked their lineup with lefty power bats and righty contact hitters immune to left-field’s new poison; Mountcastle was left sobbing in the rain.
As Jay Jaffe wrote in his recent replacement-level killers piece, when the Orioles first brought their Great Wall of Baltimore into existence last season, “perhaps no hitter bore the brunt [of left field’s dimensions] more than righty-swinging Ryan Mountcastle, whose 86-point gap between his slugging percentage and .509 xSLG was the majors’ largest, limiting him to a 106 wRC+.”
xSLG is one of Baseball Savant's many New Deal program-sounding stats. It determines the expected slugging percent of any given batted ball based on exit velocity and launch angle, regardless of outcome.
Things aren’t any better in 2023, as Mountcastle continues to lag behind his batted-ball data. He’s actually added a few points of xSLG, sitting at .519, good for 27th-best amongst qualified hitters. He’s tied with Bo Bichette.
Indeed, being a righty power bat in Baltimore is like being cursed to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Camden Yards is the fourth-toughest ballpark on righty homers—and the fourth-best at suppressing righty offense in general. Target Field isn’t an outlier in either metric, but its simple virtue of lacking a vast chasm where fans should be sitting could right Mountcastle’s problems.
The whole situation smells a lot like the issue the Rays had with Willy Adames. Adames was a quality player—a slick shortstop capable of punishing a baseball like a corner outfielder—but he couldn’t see the ball for squat at Tropicana Field, a small problem given that Tampa Bay played 81 games a season there. They bit the bullet. The Rays found a partner with the Milwaukee Brewers, plucked a few talented arms from their system, and both sides have enjoyed a mutual tide-rising, with Adames playing his excellent fully-realized game and Drew Rasmussen tossing nearly 250 innings with a 2.70 ERA.
Admittedly, the deal would make Minnesota’s lineup somewhat complex. Mountcastle is only a first baseman, and Alex Kirilloff—one of the few consistent potent bats in Minnesota’s lineup—calls that position home. With Byron Buxton evidently tied in a 30-year mortgage at DH, Kirilloff would need to move to the outfield, necessitating shuffling in the form of a Joey Gallo DFA (technically likely, maybe tough given the FO’s attachment to their moves) or a Max Kepler trade (not in a million years).
In any case, Mountcastle is an asset the Orioles can’t use, a weapon they can’t fire. They know this. If the price is right, it might be beneficial for the Twins to save the power bat from his home ballpark, enjoying the fruits of an offense unable to grow in Baltimore’s harsh environment.
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