MIN 5, DET 4: Late Rosario Homer Lifts Twins to Elusive One-Run Victory

Magic Number Update:

Division: 52

Wild Card: 55

Where would the Twins be without Rosario this year? I shudder to think. What a fantastic player and this team is very lucky to have what looks like one of baseball's premier outfielders.

Gonsalves! Woohoo!

Side note: I thought that Phil Miller tweet said "Brian Dozier contributed all 6 HR himself" and I was really confused for a minute. Now I get it.

For the first time in a while I don't have many complaints about the bullpen, they finally got Moya, Busenitz, and May up to the majors.

We could complain about Hildy, and Magill allowing all 3 inherited runners to score today...but what's the fun in that? The Twins won, the 'pen has indeed pitched pretty well this series. The guys you mentioned are performing well indeed. Fun seeing the Twins make a bit of a run. Looking forward to the big debut tomorrow for Gonsalves!
 

Not only does the bullpen roster look better but the usage isn't cringe inducing lately! If there was real change in how Molly spread out the workload I wouldn't have many complaints with him.

Now hildy needs a couple of days off. Maybe he could use Tom's chart!

This was a tough one, with 2 woeful teams trying to give the game to each other.

It was a race between the Twins' woeful pitching vs. the Tigers' woeful hitting, and fortunately the Twinks were not as good at being bad today.

Woke up at 4:30 (that's a.m.) and watched me some Quick Pitch, and what did my groggy eyes see but Rosario getting big hits for the Mets. Did we trade Eddie right after his go-ahead HR? Confusion was cleared up with a quick check of rosters. Whew. That was close.

Carry on.

It's a bummer Odorizzi doesn't go more than five innings all that often, but on the plus side he's a solid bet to go five. He's done that in 19 of his 26 starts, just about the same as Berrios (18 of 25). Also, Odorizzi has pitched to Garver way more often than the other two guys who have been in the rotation all year.

 

With Garver

94.1 - Odorizzi (72.2% of his IP)

44.0 - Berrios (28.6% of his IP)

41.2 - Gibson (27.1% of his IP)

 

I love Mitch, and the only way he's going to get better is by playing, but I see that breakdown and I feel like Odorizzi deserves some extra credit. I don't think there's any question that Wilson and (before he went down) Castro are miles ahead of Garver in terms of game calling. It's not like Odo was ever Mr. Efficiency, but he did average 5.67 innings per start over the four years prior to joining the Twins, and that's down to 5.03 this year.

 

I feel very comfortable penciling Jake into the rotation next season. 

I don't believe that Odorizzi's control issues have anything to do with pitch calling. He often misses way off the target and way out of the zone. Is there some objective evidence that Wilson is way better at calling games than Garver?

Not any ones in which I'm satisfied with the methodology, but there are some pretty good pitch framing metrics, and those suggest Garver is one of the worst in the league while Bobby is above average. That could certainly make a massive difference for a guy who needs all the strike calls he can get.

Or it could make little or no difference because he is missing by so much it makes no difference. What do you truly believe is the difference between how many extra strikes Odorizzi might have gotten by having more pitches caught by Wilson? I think that it is as negligible as the subjective pitch calling that was your original criticism of Garver.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the situation. You miss a strike when you're up 0-2 with the bases empty and two outs, no big deal. You miss a strike when you really need it, that could lead to a big inning. 

 

If you think he doesn't throw enough strikes, consider this:

 

Zone%

39.4-Gibson (second-lowest among the 70 qualified starters)

44.8-Odorizzi (15th)

46.4-Berrios (23rd)

 

I also think, as a flyball pitcher, Odorizzi could have benefited from the expected outfield alignment of Rosario-Buxton-Kepler. Hopefully those guys will be behind him for the majority of next season.

I was actually pointing out that Odorizzi makes a lot of non-competitive pitches that cannot be framed as a strike.  But I appreciate and am a bit surprised by the zone %.

Overall, the statistics are very close between Garver and Wilson catching, even though Garver doesn't get the benefit of catching Berrios and Gibson as much, while he's caught the vast majority of Lynn's and Odorizzi's games. ERA is 4.42 with Garver and 4.16 with Wilson. OPS is .756 pitching to Garver and .735 pitching to Wilson. I suspect those numbers would be fairly well flipped if Garver caught Berrios and Gibson more and Wilson had caught Lynn and Odorizzi more. Garver's numbers are also artificially jacked up by catching all of Santana's starts this year -- 8.03 ERA and 1.038 OPS in 5 games. And while the splits for the individual pitchers are a small sample size, only Berrios and Odorizzi (who has only been caught twice by Wilson) do better with Wilson behind the plate. Gibson has done far better in his 7 starts with Garver than in his 16 with Wilson.

So I think it's not clear that having Wilson catch is better for the pitchers than having Garver catch, and there's a good argument for the opposite.