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Last week, I wrote about the troubling signs around plate discipline for the weary, young, injury-depleted Twins. Too many players, especially some of the youngsters who felt the heavy burden of trying to carry an offense that had lost its dynamic leaders, started expanding their strike zones and flailing away at pitches they couldn't handle.
That was especially concerning, because it fits so nicely with the best narrative we have to explain this team's crumbling play: they're tired. Studies prove the impact of fatigue on plate discipline, and the guys who aren't playing hurt on this team are playing dead tired. The silver lining, though, is that plate discipline was never this team's identity, per se. Even when they're going well, the Twins aren't the most disciplined team in baseball. The Yankees and Brewers excel in that department. The Cubs emphasize it. The Twins aren't about that, to the same extent. They're about pull power, which means taking a certain measure of aggressiveness to the plate.
Now, though, comes the crushing news: It turns out that the silver lining was just another cloud, maybe darker and more dangerous than the first one, gathering on the horizon. The Twins live or die by pulling the ball hard in the air. It's how they set the single-season team record for home runs in 2019. It's why they were dubbed the Bomba Squad that year, and why I created what I called Bomba Rate in late 2022: the frequency with which a player lifts the ball to their pull field.
At their best, the Twins hit the ball hard in the air to their pull field considerably more often than an average team. Even if they strike out often in the process, they can get to plenty of offense, because they create the most chances for quick scoring of any team in the league. Batted balls at an exit velocity of 95 miles per hour or greater and with a launch angle higher than 10 degrees hit to the pull field result in extra-base hits almost half the time. The league slugs 1.952 when they make that kind of contact.
Here's a chart showing the frequency with which teams produce exit velocities of 100 MPH or greater (to any field, at any trajectory) and that with which they produce hard-hit air balls to the pull field, each on a per-plate appearance basis, by month. I've highlighted the Twins, and added arrows to show the passage of time, so the first Twins logo is for April and the one with the final arrow pointing to it is September.
That's very stark. We all knew the team was struggling to hit the ball hard in April, but even then, they were above the league average in pulling the ball hard, in the air. In May and June, they were hammering the ball, although not creating potential bombas as often as they sometimes do. In July, they ran into trouble generating raw exit velocities, but the hard, pulled flies only ticked up. August saw it all come together: the air raid was on. They generated plenty of hard contact in general, and they specifically hit a lot of those long, promising flies--even though they didn't enjoy quite the level of results they deserved.
September, by contrast, is a disaster for this team. Their dip from just under 10% of plate appearances ending in hard-hit, pulled flies to 6.6% means that, in the 650 trips to the plate they've accrued so far this month, they've hit 21 fewer potential bombas than they would have if they sustained their August pace. That's worth anywhere from 15 to 30 runs, based on situations, spread over 18 games. The Twins' September record would almost certainly be .500, and might be better than that, if they were still driving the ball to the pull field the way they did just one month earlier.
In June and July, Royce Lewis pulled a hard fly ball in just over 14% of his plate appearances. In September, that number is 3.4%. José Miranda's season mark was 10.4% before the month began; it's down to 4.1% in September. Since coming back up from St. Paul in early July, Matt Wallner had run a rate of nearly 15.8%, hitting a ball with an even chance to be an extra-base hit about every sixth plate appearance. Since Sept. 1, he's done so 4.9% of the time.
This is worse news than eroding plate discipline, although perhaps it's also easier to act on. If the Twins are healthy enough to execute something close their best swings, maybe a collective approach change--not to grind at-bats harder or be more patient, but to simply be more opportunistic and in touch with their best selves--could get them back to their slugging ways. Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa are back, and while no one is pretending they're as fresh and rested as in spring training, the team did handle them carefully. As a result, they've each made meaningful, positive contributions at the plate already. They can bring back an injection of this offensive identity, just by keeping up what they've shown they can do over the last week.
It needs to happen fast, though. For the month, the Twins are slugging .356. Some teams can win, at least enough to avail themselves of the cushion the team gave itself throughout the summer, with a .356 slugging average. The Twins aren't such a team. They're not built for this. They will live or die based on whether they can drive the ball in the air to their pull fields, because that's how they score runs and their pitching staff is too thin to win a string of 2-1 and 3-2 games. The missing drives have already hurt them badly. To stop the collapse from becoming fatal, they have to erase that deficit and get back to hitting bombas.
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- ToddlerHarmon, thelanges5 and BH67
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