The Surprising Truth About the Twins, Spin Rate, and Release Extension

First of all, let’s be clear: these are small, selective samples. Because only 11 teams’ home games are tracked by Statcast this spring, many clubs have only had small percentages of their total pitches measured and reported for our study. That means that certain key pitchers on a given roster might not have had any results captured at all. Meanwhile, everyone is using pitchers who won’t be factors during the regular season, and those hurlers are mixed right into the dataset. Any spring training data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, you don’t have to trust these numbers to believe that the Twins lag the field in getting extension and imparting spin on fastballs. In 2020, they were 22nd in average release extension (in other words, the distance in front of the rubber at which the ball actually leaves a pitcher’s hand) and 25th in average spin rate. If you’ve been laboring under the belief that Minnesota actively seeks out and acquires pitchers with spin rate in mind, you’ve been using too local a lens to view what is a global phenomenon.

It’s not that the Twins don’t like pitchers who release the ball closer to home plate, of course. Nor is it the case that they actively disdain high-spin heaters. They did target Rich Hill last winter, and Hill famously makes excellent use of spin to give his pedestrian fastball unexpected hop. They have long been high on Lewis Thorpe, who has by far the best extension on the roster so far this spring and led them in that category last year, too. (The next two players on that leaderboard for 2020, for the record, were Trevor May and Zack Littell. Like Hill, they departed this winter as free agents, and the team made little effort to retain any of the three.)

Rather, your takeaway from this should be twofold. Firstly: every skill and trait a given player possesses has a certain price in the marketplace of baseball talent. This is related to the cliché summation of Moneyball, which reduces everything the A’s were doing at that time to the exercise of identifying and attacking market inefficiencies. To acquire pitchers who excel in the area of extension or spin, the Twins would have to outbid other teams for those traits, and they might simply feel that the cost of those traits is currently higher than is warranted.

Secondly, though, it’s worth noting that the team also isn’t emphasizing extension or spin in its development of internal pitching options. Jorge Alcalá, Randy Dobnak, and Cody Stashak have well below-average extension. Dobnak, Michael Pineda, Taylor Rogers, and José Berríos are all low-spin guys. Part of that is the fact that Dobnak, Rogers, and Berríos all rely on sinkers, for which neither extension nor spin rate is as important as they each are for the four-seamer. Broadly speaking, the Twins have encouraged their pitchers to maintain two distinct fastballs, and they’ve prioritized command. Some of the mechanical changes they’ve helped pitchers make have improved their command and their ability to work east and west, at the expense of extension.

It’s fairly clear that the team thinks raw velocity, deception, and location are more important than extension and spin. I agree with them on those points. Those are minority opinions in the modern game, which has allowed the team to acquire pitchers who do the things the team likes best very well, at relatively low cost. It might be that the team intends to eventually pivot to a more north-south, power-centric, spin-obsessed pitching plan. As other teams stop prioritizing those things so highly, and as automatic strike zones proliferate and eventually come to the big leagues, that shift might become advisable, or even necessary. For now, though, the Twins are quietly amassing a pitching staff that has success in old-fashioned ways, even as they use cutting-edge tools and remain open-minded about new concepts in the discipline of pitching.

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