This Ain't Your Dad's Starting Rotation

The offseason success for the Twins rested on how they would mold the starting rotation into a group capable of carrying the squad. The offense would be good; that much was apparent even before the Josh Donaldson signing. But without a great starting rotation, the outcome of the season would likely be the same as 2019, and no one wanted that.

Enter Kenta Maeda. After signing back Michael Pineda and Jake Odorizzi along with bringing in newcomers in Rich Hill and Homer Bailey, the Twins have reworked the starting rotation to their liking. Now it looks to be a dynamic group of hurlers who all provide quality outs in different ways. Almost every pitcher now has been acquired from outside the organization as José Berríos remains the sole homegrown starter. He also is the only starter who pitched for the Twins under the previous regime.

This rotation is also incredibly modern; maybe more so than any other Twins rotation in recent memory.

Since the front office headed by Derek Falvey and Thad Levine took over, one of the points of emphasis has been on acquiring pitchers who possess strikeout capability. Changing the entire philosophical landscape of a franchise isn’t an overnight job so this effort took time. Today it appears that the fulfilling of this undertaking has reached an upper echelon.

One of the stats I like to look at for pitchers is swinging strike %. It shows how often a pitcher was able to coax a hitter into swinging and missing at one of his pitches. In short, it stands for how nasty a pitcher may be. The Twins starting rotation in 2019 had a swinging strike % that was higher than league average (11.6% to 10.7%) which is likely the first time that has ever been true. Unsatisfied with this, the Twins sought to improve their whiffing (in a good way) by letting Martín Pérez walk and pivoting toward starters who possess that swing-and-miss ability.

Perhaps you remain skeptical. Getting hitters to whiff at any point in the count is nice but getting outs is still the point of the game for pitchers. That’s fair, so allow me to go to something that might be a bit more pleasing to you. Let’s look at K% which is the rate at which a pitcher struck out hitters over a specific time period (22 strikeouts over 100 plate appearances would yield a 22% K rate for example).

The average MLB starter struck out 22.3% of batters in 2019. Here is each probable Twins starter and his K% in 2019:

Berríos: 23.2%

Odorizzi: 27.1%

Pineda: 23.3%

Maeda: 27.1%

Hill: 29.8%

Bailey: 21.4%

That’s right, each likely major starting pitcher for the Twins in 2020 had an above average strikeout rate in 2019 with the exception of Homer Bailey. After suffering for years under the tyranny of “pitching to contact”, this is refreshing. Rick Anderson must be rolling in his grave after seeing these numbers*.

*I’m getting word that he is actually in Detroit but that may as well be a death sentence so I’ll let this be.

This new Twins starting rotation will be better suited for the modern game than probably any other Twins starting rotation in memory. They will be hunting for strikeouts and they all possess the ability to get those strikeouts when needed. Gone are the days of hoping that the batter hits a tapper to Nick Punto for an out. Now they’ll be trying to make the hitter look foolish enough to be placed on Sportscenter’s “Not Top 10”.

And that should have you excited to watch this Twins starting rotation in action.

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