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Early on, it looked like this could be another in the recent string of starts by Bailey Ober that have steadily raised the concern level around him from non-existent to very high. Byron Buxton staked his starter to a 1-0 lead with a leadoff home run, trying to burn off the humidity that lingered behind a two-hour rain delay with a rocket over the high wall in left-center field. We'll discuss Buxton a bit more later, because his continued brilliance is the best thing going on in Twins Territory right now. Right away, though, Ober gave up that lead—and then some.
All season, the narrative has been there. Ober's velocity has been down since spring training, which was more notable even then than it would be for many pitchers, for multiple reasons. Firstly, of course, Ober had less margin for error, as it were; he's never been a hard thrower. Secondly, though, Ober is usually at his strongest (and his velocity is usually highest) early in the season. That he came into spring struggling to hit his usual numbers was worrisome, and indeed, he's been fighting to stay above 90 miles per hour with his heater almost all season.
For several starts, he pitched around that problem, but even when his ERA didn't show the strain of his diminished speed, his strikeout rate did. In 11 starts across the months of April and May, Ober posted a 2.43 ERA, and the Twins won eight of those games. However, he only punched out 18.8% of opposing batters even during that span. After Wednesday night, he has three starts in June, and his ERA has skyrocketed to 8.31. Not missing bats has caught up to him, and we can point to an obvious reason for that inability to induce whiffs: the lost velocity.
In the first inning against the Reds, he made the mistake of trying to establish his heater, and work off of it. All year, he's been (wisely) ratcheting down the usage of his fastball. With a lefty-heavy top of the lineup for the Reds, however, he tried to go after them a bit with it, so that he'd be able to go to his changeup more against the same hitters the second and third times he saw them. Try though he might, he's often been unable to find a satisfactory feel for his breaking stuff this year, which has led to slight reductions in his use of those offerings. That makes it more important that he find spots to make use of the heater to lefties, so they can't sit on his changeup.
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TJ Friedl singled to lead off the bottom of the first, though, and after Ober managed to get both Gavin Lux and Elly De La Cruz out, former Twins farmhand Spencer Steer stepped to the plate. Ober went after him, too, with fastballs. Big mistake. Steer saw three pitches, all of them fastballs. Ober was sitting 91-92 at that early stage of the game, but Steer rode the third pitch (a 1-1 test of the outer edge) out of the park to the opposite field, flipping the scoreboard. It was 2-1 Reds, and the Twins would never catch them.
That mistake and its grave consequences illustrate the lack of a margin for error for Ober right now, but to his credit, he recovered fairly well. As the game wore on, he tweaked his approach, and perhaps his mechanics. Ober's fastball still lost velocity as the game went along, but he also began changing the way he attacked hitters. Here's a chart showing his pitch mix based on the count, for this full season.
Even as he's reduced his overall fastball usage, I can make a strong case that he's leaned too much on the heater early in counts this year. On occasion, when the scouting report says that a hitter is a bit passive in a given count, he should try to sneak one by hitters, but by and large, it's time for the towering hurler to start pitching backward. It's encouraging, then, that he did just that on Wednesday night, especially after the first inning.
The Reds are a very patient team, so Ober still picked spots to throw them fastballs. In fact, he tied a career high with 12 called strikes on the heater. (The other time he did so was way back in early August 2023.) As the game progressed, though, he started far more hitters with soft stuff, and used the fastball either to buy back strikes or to catch hitters looking for an offspeed pitch in a deep count. Cincinnati did put up runs in the second and third, but Ober largely regained control of the game after that Steer homer. He'd record all 17 Twins outs for the evening, before the second round of rain came and washed out the contest. His final line (5 2/3 innings, 9 hits, 4 runs, 5 strikeouts, 0 walks) is unimpressive, but he took a small step toward something viable.
It appeared that he also made a slight mechanical change during the game, and there's evidence of that in the data, too. It's hard to see what he did differently from the default center-field cameras on the TV broadcasts, but Ober appeared to be more balanced as he finished his deliveries later in the game, and for the first time since roughly last July, his extension (the distance, in feet, from the front edge of the rubber to his actual release point, capturing the amount by which he shortens the distance from himself to the plate) plummeted.
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Interestingly, extension has not always mapped well to overall effectiveness or health for Ober, whose height and unique amount of extension have been an advantage and one way to mitigate the problem of having below-average velocity for most of his career. Whether it had to do with mound conditions, was an experiment in managing the left hip issue that has plagued him this year, or just allowed him to feel his landing foot better and stay more stable throughout his delivery, Ober seemed not to be launching himself quite as far down the mound later in his appearance, and it worked. His command of (especially) his breaking stuff improved, and so did the results.
Unfortunately, for one game, that was all too little, too late. The Twins never meaningfully answered the Reds' initial volley. A pair of singles and an RBI groundout pushed across a second run against Nick Lodolo in the fourth, but the Cincinnati lefty neutralized the visitors fairly easily around that. This offense just isn't generating the kind of dangerous contact that became their trademark for most of Rocco Baldelli's tenure. It's beginning to look like a major restructuring of the offense will be required to change their fortunes, and that probably has to wait until the offseason. For now, they need to keep finding ways to create runs one or two at a time, but they should also continue working with their young core to produce the power that was expected of them just a few years ago.
Buxton is the blessed exception to all of that. He hit that first-pitch home run, but he also had hard-hit balls in each of his other two plate appearances. Both were outs, but they were very well-struck air balls to the outfield. It seems like every time he steps into the box, he's hitting the ball hard.
That 100-mph flyout to right field, by the way, was Buxton's 13th hard-hit ball to the opposite field this season. That's the most such batted balls he's ever had in a season, tying 2023 and 2024. It took him over 100 fewer plate appearances to get there this year than in either of the last two. He's become a pole-to-pole power threat and a better situational hitter than ever, and he's drawing walks. The Twins need several other players to follow his lead, and so far, they haven't. Nonetheless, Wednesday was a demonstration of his immense value.
What's Next
The good news is that the Twins didn't need their bullpen at all Wednesday night. After David Festa's start Tuesday night threatened to burn it out at the front end of a stretch in which they play 13 games without a day off, the rain gave them a nice reprieve. Chris Paddack will try to compound that relief by working deep and dominating the light-hitting Reds, while Cincinnati will trot out veteran right-hander Nick Martinez. The game starts early, at 11:40 AM Central, as the Twins wrap a miserable road trip and try to avoid having it be a winless one.
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