Everyone knows: Spring training games do not matter. When all is said and done, spring training is for training.

So why are the Twins so bad at it? This year, the Twins wound up with a losing record for the Grapefruit League. They're the only team to post a losing spring record in Florida each year of this decade. The Pirates haven't had a winning one, but they have at least had a couple of seasons at exactly .500. Over in the Cactus League, only one other team has matched the Twins' run of ineptitude: the Cleveland Guardians. Both teams had their last winning preseason in 2019.

We all know these games do not matter. As study after study has demonstrated, there is no correlation between these records and those posted in the regular season. Some studies have gone further, to suggest even some advanced stats do not help us predict league performance in games that count.

Yet, there's more than random chance happening here. Randomly, the chances of six straight losing Grapefruit League slots are around 1%. The Cleveland example seems important; they have been the Twins’ central rival for the last half-decade. They're continually over-performing projections, often through a hitting style that befuddles Twins pitchers by wearing them down. What lessons could we draw from that? I was curious: where was the bad production from the Twins coming from? Was it some sloppy work in the final innings by lower-minors prospects? Or was there something else afoot?

I took all results from both Cactus and Grapefruit League from 2020 to 2024 (the 2020 Grapefruit season was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a fair number of games were played first). I grouped innings together: 1st to 3rd, 4th to 6th, 7th to 9th. Usually, starting pitchers will only go two or three innings until the last week, and most starting lineup batters will take their three swings into the 4th or 5th inning before leaving. That likely means that these divisions generally demonstrated the transition between certified major leaguers and newly minted prospects coming in for a few innings. My idea was to simply look at run differential: which group of players scored more or allowed more runs?

To make the chart easier to read, I only focused on Grapefruit League teams:

It’s not hard to miss the Twins here. They are, notably, doing their worst work early in games—worse than any other team in Grapefruit League baseball (though if you included the Cactus League, Cleveland would perform the worst). So what does it look like if we only look at the Twins, inning by inning?

Again, this suggests that the problems with Twins’ Grapefruit League records have much more to do with their starters. Specifically, the problem seems to be pitching. If we convert runs to “Runs+,” where 100 would be the league average, Twins hitters have a 98 Runs+ in the first though third frames. Meanwhile, the pitchers have allowed a 111 Runs+. For comparison, the Dodgers seemingly bring eight or nine top-line starters to camp before losing them to injury, and have an 81.5 Runs+. 

There's a chance that Grapefruit League struggles have carried the seeds of regular-season trouble, then. However, there's also a chance that the problem we're seeing has already been solved. If the so-called Falvey pitching pipeline is really reaching its peak productivity, it makes sense that the starters have struggled at camp, while the minor leaguers have succeeded. Twins pitchers have allowed an 89 Runs+ in the 7th through the 9th innings. If widespread reporting is correct, the Twins (perhaps more so than other teams) seem to have let players use the exhibition season to experiment with new pitches.

But we will still have questions. In all these seasons, the Twins have posted a losing record in April—until last year, which was saved by a 12-game winning streak that began after starting 7-13. Carlos Correa tells us that his spring does not matter, but it’s hard to look at a .337 OPS and not have some concern, especially when it was the third-worst performance for a spring training hitter in all of baseball with over 40 plate appearances. Should we be worried about Jhoan Durán’s lack of swings and misses? Rocco Baldelli has spoken all spring about the changes they made this camp, and many of us have been wondering about the efficacy of that. Maybe there was a greater need for those changes than we realized, though. 

Those questions will be answered in a matter of weeks. The Twins probably won’t wear this spring training monkey on their back, but if we come to the end of the season with some of the same befuddlement as last year, maybe we should start looking at this awkward losing streak more closely. It might be capturing a failure of process we can't quite articulate, but which is still real and telling.