New Pitching Coach Brian Reith's Remit: Get Twins Pitchers to Beat Their FIPs

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Eleven pitchers threw at least 50 innings for the 2026 Minnesota Twins. Six of them—Taj Bradley, Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, Zebby Matthews, Taylor Rogers and Kody Funderburk—finished with ERAs that were essentially reflective of their fielder-independent skills, as measured by FIP (Fielder Independent Pitching). All six of those guys had FIPs within 0.20 of their ERAs. Of the other five hurlers, though, four had markedly worse ERAs than their FIPs would have predicted. Connor Prielipp's ERA was 1.14 worse than his FIP. Yoendrys Gómez's was 0.22 worse. Andrew Morris was 1.11 worse, and Travis Adams was 0.55 worse. Only Dean Kremer prevented runs better than his strikeout, walk and home-run rates would have predicted. He had a 3.48 ERA in his stint with Minnesota, against a 3.82 FIP.

As a team, the Twins had a 4.23 FIP but a 4.56 ERA. The former ranked 20th in the majors; the latter ranked 25th. The failure to prevent runs as well as their pitchers' baseline skills suggested they should cost the Twins about six games in the standings; they missed the playoffs by seven games.

One major reason why results fail to live up to pitchers' skills (at an individual or team level) is defensive support, and the Twins know they didn't offer their pitchers good defensive help in 2026. Brooks Lee was a great third baseman, but only moved there after six dreadful weeks at shortstop. The team didn't find an adequate defensive regular at short until mid-August, when they called up Kaelen Culpepper. Luke Keaschall began the season at second base, where he's a butcher. He's not good in the outfield, either, but moving him there mitigated the damage—too late for many Twins hurlers. Royce Lewis was a fine first baseman, but only landed there after a failure in his final trial at third base. Trevor Larnach is a bad defensive outfielder. Kody Clemens is a fine defender, but has limited range and arm strength and was often asked to do more than he's capable of—like playing center field, in one stretch.

With Lee, Culpepper and Keaschall at the spots that suit them best and young legs (Walker Jenkins and Emmanuel Rodriguez) taking over in the outfield, the team is optimistic about their 2027 defense. That might improve the results their pitchers enjoy, on its own. However, pitching coach Pete Maki was still fired at the end of the season, and the team hired long-time Rays minor-league pitching coach Brian Reith to take his place. Why? Some of the answer might lie in those FIP gaps.

At the end-of-year press conference, managers and executives always try to avoid saying anything about anything without being directly asked about it. It's just part of the modern team's information hygiene routine. They stay mum unless directly asked to comment on a topic, and when that happens, they try not to give away anything valuable. Jeremy Zoll made it most of the way through the press availability the team held just after the end of the regular season without breaking that rule. Here was his one wobble.

"We spent a lot of time in spring talking about [how] we thought starting pitching was going to be our heartbeat," Zoll said, in response to a question about the depth of his rotation. "[We] fell short of that being true, and we need to go under the hood on these gaps between our FIP and our ERA over the last number of years, and the impact that defense is having on that, and some of the position changes we're having, but also to know that when you dream on what the rotation could look like for 2027, it's hard not to be extremely excited, knowing how strong of a foundation that would give us for the rest of the roster."

No one had asked Zoll about the interaction between skills and results. That wasn't the thread of the conversation in which he was then engaged. He introduced that thought, which is telling. The Twins are concerned about the fact that their results on the mound don't match the talent they believe they've assembled. That's a big part of why Maki lost his job, and why Reith is here now.

It's true that the Twins need to play better defense. Getting to more balls and converting the ones fielders reach into outs more reliably is a goal for every team, but it's especially important for teams who haven't done it well recently; that's the state of the Twins here in the fall of 2026. However, there are also ways for pitchers to affect the quality of contact they surrender and the likelihood of hits on balls in play against them, and if the team concluded that they haven't been doing enough to make their defense's job easier via savvy pitching, they reached the right conclusion—albeit a bit later than they should have.

Pitchers' top objective is to miss bats. It's vital that hurlers have ways to induce weak contact (or at least to minimize hard contact) when batters do touch the ball, though, for two reasons:

It's not always possible to strike people out; some contact is inevitable.
The harder one has to try for a strikeout to get an out, the more susceptible one is to high pitch counts and walks, which are trouble of a different kind.

We now have granular data on what happens when bat meets ball: where along the bat did the contact occur? Was it up the handle, or out on the end of the lumber? Did the hitter have the pitch timed up, and therefore have a good chance to hit the ball forward? Did they hit the top or the bottom of the ball? These are all valuable data, but one element controls exit velocity and the overall quality of contact most. It's the horizontal location of contact along the barrel. Getting a hitter to hit it off the end of the bat or up the handle a bit weakens contact and makes a hit much less likely.

Last season, the Twins allowed the most centered contact on fastballs of any team in the majors. They were, simply, too much in the middle of hitters' sweet spots. That's because they've been one of the most four-seam-heavy teams in baseball over the last several seasons. They prefer a four-seamer to either of the other major fastball shapes—especially the sinker.

Twins hurlers threw four-seamers on 33.5% of all their pitches in 2026. That's actually part of a downward trend, for them. As they lean ever more into breaking and offspeed stuff, the share of their pitches that were four-seamers has fallen steadily, from 41.8% in 2022 all the way to last year's number. However, the Rays are way ahead of them, on this front. They only threw four-seamers 27.2% of the time last season, and have been under 30% more often than over it in the seasons since the pandemic. Therefore, they were average in getting off the center of hitters' bats in 2026. Their team ERA (3.70) beat their FIP (4.04) by almost exactly the same margin by which the Twins' FIP beat their ERA.

Reith won't be able to wave a magic wand over Twins hurlers and produce the same results. The Rays have better defenders than do the Twins, and they're the state of the art in defensive positioning—something the Twins did very poorly in 2026. The Twins also have a collection of pitchers who have developed and been taught to work with the four-seamer at the heart of their arsenal. Sinkers and cutters move off the center of hitters' bats better, though they also produce fewer whiffs than four-seamers do. Reith might be part of a change in pitching philosophy, but it won't be an overnight overhaul.

Minnesota has to prevent runs better in 2027, and they need better results on contact to do it. That should and will start with better defense, but their pitchers can also induce contact that's more conducive to outs. Expect Reith to get them throwing more sinkers and/or cutters, whether that's by tinkering with a pitcher's mix or bringing in new arms with different arsenals. It's not time to abandon what the Twins have done well over the last few years, but they need to update their pitching paradigm. In Reith, they chose someone already familiar with the how and why of switching lanes (literally and figuratively) in the pursuit of better pitching outcomes.