The Minnesota Twins Are Whiffing Away at a Momentous Opportunity

I continue to believe the simplest explanation for the strikeouts is that Popkins is teaching exactly what the FO wants him to teach, and the players are doing exactly as they are being taught. FO has 1 offensive philosophy:  grip it n rip it.  As a hitting coach Popkins is tasked not with teaching professional at bats and fundamental baseball, but only things like launch angle and exit velocity (probably accompanied by an overwhelming amount of data and video).    

There's a reason the FO hires young, hungry, inexperienced guys with little to no MLB equity like Rocco and Popkins:  they want to be able dictate everything without question.  Which is why firing Popkins or Rocco won't matter, Falvine will just replace them with clones who will carry out their extreme analytics agenda with a nod and a smile.  

21 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

You want interim manager Jayce Tingler for the rest of the season? That's the most likely scenario.

Without a change nothing will change. Now that the Twins have a losing record again why not change. I think there are some ex players out there that would jump at the chance to manager the Twins. We all know Rocco will not change so hire a leader that will help the Twins win.

1 hour ago, TwinsDr2021 said:

I want nothing to do with this FO and manager in a rebuild. NOTHING! If they clean house and hire new people I can accept that (won't like it but can accept it)

IMO if this FO want to save it jobs it fires Rocco, sooner than later.

If pohlads don't come out and say this is a total system failure it is a travesty  ...

History is repeating itself  , not in a hundred or thousands of years apart but just in a few years ...

The FO retained all coaches from last year they really believed that it was injuries that derailed our season , mostly that is true but coaching was also questioned ...

Sometimes the FO  goes and gets what they think is a quality player ( position or pitcher ) in a trade and says it's exactly what we are looking for but ends up being a flop because their evaluation  or somebody's evaluation  is poor ...

Same goes With their evaluations of their coaching staff , it's also a poor evaluation  , tingler  was not a good manager and I'm not sure if he is a good bench coach , I hear nothing from the players ...

But my eye test on 3rd base coach  , hitting coach  fundamental coach , base running coach seems to not get the message across to the players  ...

Do you know you can make fire with ice  , yes you can ..

The twins are a bunch of ice statues  ...

How to make fire with ice  , use a chip of ice and on a sunny day use it as a magnifying glass to start the fire ...

I recommend that the FO  and Rocco start using a magnifying glass to see their errors and light that fire in their player's ...

14 minutes ago, terrydactyls said:

I agree. 

Here is my proposed lineup right now.

Assumption:  Buxton, Correa, Polanco, Kepler, and Vasquez all placed on the IL.

CF Andrew Stevenson

2B Eduard Julien

SS Royce Lewis

1B Alex Kirilloff

RF Matt Wallner

LF Trevor Larnach

3B Brooks Lee

C  Ryan Jeffers

DH Jose Miranda

Bench:  Taylor, Castro, Solano, and Jair Carmargo

What's your lineup?

Ha ha yep that's over the top. You are missing Farmer, so in your scenario I would swap Farmer for Lee. It's too early to mess with that guy, but the rest of it? Could be fun to watch. 

I'm begging the Twins to understand that they're not the only organization with an analytics department and advanced scouts. 

We're obsessed with not giving players too much playing time. Rocco religiously plays the rightie-leftie matchups, and makes substitutions as soon as possible to maintain those matchups. All nine guys are aggressive and try to hit everything 450 feet. 

That's the easiest thing in the world to gameplan against:

1) Don't throw strikes, especially on the first pitch. Make the hitters prove they're willing to take walks.

2) Don't change tactics when there are runners. The lineup/strategy isn't conducive to manufacturing runs. If there's a guy in first, though, the garbage you throw should be low to get the double play

3) If you use an opener, you can get the Twins to empty their bench (assuming they have one that day) by the fifth. 

Lather, rinse, and repeat. 

The Twins need to use their analytics and scouts to make adjustments. That's just not happening, though. Making adjustments is one of the main parts of coaching! Simply put, we need to hire an actual coaching staff. 

52 minutes ago, Woof Bronzer said:

I continue to believe the simplest explanation for the strikeouts is that Popkins is teaching exactly what the FO wants him to teach, and the players are doing exactly as they are being taught. FO has 1 offensive philosophy:  grip it n rip it.  As a hitting coach Popkins is tasked not with teaching professional at bats and fundamental baseball, but only things like launch angle and exit velocity (probably accompanied by an overwhelming amount of data and video).    

There's a reason the FO hires young, hungry, inexperienced guys with little to no MLB equity like Rocco and Popkins:  they want to be able dictate everything without question.  Which is why firing Popkins or Rocco won't matter, Falvine will just replace them with clones who will carry out their extreme analytics agenda with a nod and a smile.  

Unfortunately this is probably true. And since it is up to the FO to fire Rocco and/or any coaches, they will have to go as well. 

1 hour ago, DJL44 said:

You want interim manager Jayce Tingler for the rest of the season? That's the most likely scenario.

not ideal but if the choice is him or the current manager, Then Yes

My hope would be they bring in somebody from the outside and say here is our general philosophy don't stray too far (especially from the pitching side) and you have a 100 or so games to prove you deserve the job. Hand him or her the keys and step aside, and lets see what happens. (I mean can it get any worse, since the last three games of the 2020 season the Twins have gone 183 and 209)

@Nick Nelson Any idea where the team ranks with scoring 2 runs or less in 40% of their games? It would be interesting to find out.

For most of the last two decades the top baseball analysts said K% doesn't matter on offense. It seems that theory has now been broken, and not just by the Twins.

Of the top 15 RS/G offenses in MLB, only 4 are in the highest 15 teams for K%. When normalizing for park factors, that number falls to only 2 of the 15 highest K% teams are also in the top 15 for RS/G.

There is a very strong inverse correlation between K% and RS/G (even stronger when park factor adjusted) in MLB in 2023. 

16 hours ago, Dman said:

I generally love watching the Twins but the lack of offense is making it almost impossible to watch them.  They comically cannot come up with runs with the bases loaded and lose way too many one run or close games. It is just crazy how one area of the team the starter, the pen, the lineup seems to sabotage a win.  Call it cursed or whatever but it is just hard to fathom some of the losses this year.  Mostly because the offense makes the game(s) so close one small mistake is something they cannot overcome.

I keep waiting for some guys to get hot and the lineup to produce more consistently but alas it feels like a repeat of last year where they get reeled in and tank down the stretch.  Well I will keep the team on my radar but am done investing much in this pitiful offense.

A friend of mine, avid Twins fan, says that whenever the Twins load the bases with no body out, the next guy will K and the next guy will bounce into an easy double play. Scary how very often that exact thing happens. He now stops watching if the other team gets 3 runs. Turns off the TV and says it is over. I still suffer though the rest of the game if it is not Friday when they arent on.

Make the team watch Luis Arraez clips before each game.  He keeps his head IN, closer to the plate so he can see strikes/balls better, with the intention of making contact when he does swing.  Also, power hitters around the league will usually make one big cut on the first strike, then tone it down.  The Twins are swinging for the fences (Correa), leaning back on their heels as they flail at strike 3 instead of leaning in trying to make contact, pretty much the opposite of Luis Arraez.

2 hours ago, Woof Bronzer said:

I continue to believe the simplest explanation for the strikeouts is that Popkins is teaching exactly what the FO wants him to teach, and the players are doing exactly as they are being taught. FO has 1 offensive philosophy:  grip it n rip it.  As a hitting coach Popkins is tasked not with teaching professional at bats and fundamental baseball, but only things like launch angle and exit velocity (probably accompanied by an overwhelming amount of data and video).    

There's a reason the FO hires young, hungry, inexperienced guys with little to no MLB equity like Rocco and Popkins:  they want to be able dictate everything without question.  Which is why firing Popkins or Rocco won't matter, Falvine will just replace them with clones who will carry out their extreme analytics agenda with a nod and a smile.  

I agree completely with the second paragraph. So there's not much point in calling to get rid of Rocco but keeping the FO.

16 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

I didn't, and still don't, agree with the idea that strikeouts don't matter. 

The "Ks don't matter" thing is a perfect illustration of the fallacy behind extreme analytics:  it relies on the idea that players are Strat-o-Matic robots who are preordained a certain amount of outs every year.  Ipso facto, it doesn't matter what kind of outs they are, they're gonna happen regardless.

But this is just flat wrong.  Baseball is a sport played by humans, and hitting happens one at bat at a time.  Each at bat is going to have one of 3 outcomes:  walk (or hbp); put the ball in play; or K.  K is the worst outcome on the whole, and it's not even close.  (Yes, things like GIDP can happen when you put the ball in play.  These are far more rare than balls in play becoming hits though.  And the Twins have 10x the K outs vs the GIDP outs.)  Strikeouts matter, they always have, and they always will.  

Last season when I saw the team struggle to score runs, I thought -- they REALLY need Arraez.  The general sentiment was that a starting pitcher was more valuable (ok), but also that Arraez was easily replaced.  Not so.  Still, the offense seems much worse than you'd expect, as several folks have noted.  I assume the poor group performance is about a team approach to hitting, and that the offense has not slipped into some uncanny MN sports version of the Bermuda Triangle.  

2 hours ago, USAFChief said:

I didn't, and still don't, agree with the idea that strikeouts don't matter. 

The same people theorizing Ks don't matter for hitters turn around and tout Ks as desirable for pitchers.

Which they are, of course.

Both those things cannot be true.

 

Agreed. That never made sense to me that K% doesn't matter on offense when it is the most important statistic for a pitcher.

It's like saying that in football, turning the ball over on offense doesn't matter, but forcing a turnover is the most important statistic on defense. 

That's not to say that a high K% and a high wOBA cannot coexist, but any player/team that can pull that off is an outlier.

Noffense. 

Pfft.  Boring to watch. And tough on our starting pitchers.

2 hours ago, Minderbinder said:

Food for thought:

1.  At the beginning of this week, offensively, the Twins led the AL in batters' strikeouts AND walks.  But, the Twins' batters' SO/W ratio ranks 11th of 15 teams (2.86).  All four teams with worse (higher SO to W) ratios have sub-.492 winning percentages.

2.  On 6/5, the five AL teams with the highest pitching SO/W ratios  (all > 2.82) all have winning percentages over 55%.  Texas (.655 w/l) is at 2.60.  The Twins rank 12 of 15 at 2.42 and the three teams with lower pitching SO/W ratios all have sub-.500 winning percentages.

3. On 6/5, the Twins were tied for thirteenth (of 15 AL teams, with the White Sox) in save percentage with 52%.  Only the A's are lower at 29%.

4.  Ok, so subtract teams' batters' SO/W percentages (higher is bad) from pitchers' SO/W percentages (higher is good) and the top five teams are (in order) Tampa, Houston, Toronto, the Yanks and Baltimore,  The Twins rank 12 of 15 (-0.4) and the three teams below them are Kansas City, Chicago and Seattle, all sub-.500.  Oakland ranks 11 of 15 at -0.3.... 

Strikeouts matter.

Nice. And…walks matter as well.