Twins Video
I get why people are sick of Max Kepler. He looked like a transcendent talent eight years ago; a sweet-swinging lefty who slowly rose to dominance over minor-league competition after signing as a raw 16-year-old wild card out of Germany. He looked great doing everything and the expectations were sky-high. He then treaded water his first few seasons in the big leagues, holding his own offensively, slashing .233/.313/.417, while flourishing defensively. His metrics looked good, his BABIP looked low, and the Twins were so sure of a breakout they gave Kepler a long-term extension, potentially buying out several of his free agent years.
The breakout seemed to come in 2019, when he popped 36 home runs and got MVP votes, but in retrospect we all know it had to do with the juiced ball that year. He’s reverted to the form he showed from 2016-2018 since then, which is worth about 3.0 WAR over a 162 game sample. He still plays great defense, doesn’t strike out and offers 20 home run power. His career OBP is .315, which is pretty playable given that.
So the crusade against him is a bit much, with Aaron Gleeman-types offering the same critiques (poor contact quality, not being as good as we thought, blocking other prospects) and thinking if they repeat them over and over, it makes the case more compelling.
But let’s be real here. The contact quality issue is ever-present, but he nonetheless puts up average offensive numbers, with a career 100 OPS+. He isn’t as good as we thought but who cares; this isn’t a sunk cost... developing average players is good! I had a commenter in a piece I did on Alex Kirilloff complain that seeing Kirilloff having a Kirk Gibson-like career would be a disappointment, so it's no surprise Twins fans are disappointed Kepler didn’t turn into Paul O’Neill .
Part of the frustration with Kepler is when he makes an impact. His production comes in drips, not bursts (like Byron Buxton). He needs to get his timing right before he’s impactful, but once he does, he’ll give you a hard hit ball every game against a right-hander. It’s not sexy but it is pretty valuable over time, and even this year, a recent hot drip (.298/.355/.614) has raised his OPS by 107 points since he was chastised for his baserunning mistake in Tampa.
And it's not like the Twins’ other options are great. Or, we can't prove that yet. Matt Wallner and Trevor Larnach aren’t exactly Mays and Mantle. Wallner is cited by Gleeman ad-nauseum as the “back-to-back Twins minor league player of the year,” in trying to justify giving him runway. Except Gleeman himself has always been the one to put that honor in quotation marks because the award tends to reward players who dominate the high minors but aren’t anticipated to do well in the majors. Previous winners include Randy Dobnak, Kennys Vargas and Zach Granite. And Wallner may fit that bill, as well. Keith Law placed him 15th on his preseason rankings of Twins prospects, with the following comment:
"Wallner has an 80 arm and plus raw power with terrible pitch recognition — the man just does not hit offspeed stuff anywhere near often enough to be a regular, with massive strikeout rates last year: 30 percent in Triple A, 38.5 percent in the majors."
Fangraphs puts Wallner eighth on their mid-season Twins prospect rankings, noting that his 70% zone contact rate would have ranked as the lowest in all of baseball, five percent lower than Josh Donaldson who was the next worst. Baseball Prospectus ranked Wallner tenth, with the note that, “Few hitters find sustained success in MLB making such little contact as Wallner did in his debut.” Where did Gleeman rank him? Fourth.
Us having collective ADHD and wanting novelty and star level performance at all times is no reason to ditch a perfectly average big league regular like Kepler. Sure, Wallner threw out Brandon Belt and his necrotic knees trying for a double once, but Kepler would have made the catch on that same ball without leaving his feet. And do the Twins need more swing and miss in their lineup?
Larnach is a decent fielder, much better than Wallner but without the range of the more athletic Kepler. He also has had a full season’s worth of games in the majors and hasn’t hit for any power, with 18 career home runs in 177 career games. Some of that lack of production happened while Larnach was fighting through injury (more on that next paragraph), but this year his OPS+ sits at a Kepler-ish 92, meaning eight percent below average.
Kepler just hasn’t been that bad, especially if you parse out his injuries in your analysis similar to how we evaluate Larnach. He contributed 2.2 bWAR last year despite playing for two months with a broken toe, ranking between Joe Ryan and Nick Gordon for the season totals in bWAR. While playing with that injury he posted a sub .500 OPS.
This is where Gleeman in particular is most disingenuous. He has never mentioned Kepler’s toe injury in any of his analyses that I’m aware of, but he has mentioned on a few occasions that Kepler is not one to play through injury, viewing him as a player who likes to be 100%. Which is it?
What I expect from Kepler is exactly what he was producing last year prior to the toe injury- .244/.344/.390 with good defense in right field. He’s shown the ability to be a little better than that, but as is, that is a three WAR player, and the sort of production any team should be happy to pencil in from their seventh or eighth best hitter. Look at any team (besides the Braves) and tell me how good their seven-hole hitter is.
Of course, this Twins team needs to get their offense going, and Kepler hasn’t helped much overall. But the focus shouldn’t be on sacrificing defense in favor of mystery boxes. Peter Griffin put it best when offered the choice between a mystery box and a boat. “A boat's a boat but the mystery box could be anything, it could even be a boat!”
Similarly, on a recent podcast, Gleeman mentioned the downside of cutting Kepler was that Wallner and Larnach don’t perform. “Then you can just trade for another team’s Max Kepler.” was his solution.
Kepler is also important to the clubhouse, and you could see he was one of the more emotional players coming out of the much-ballyhooed team meeting, cussing out the plate umpire on a brutal called strike in Baltimore, which I can’t remember him doing, ever, and giving perhaps the most dramatic bat flip for the Twins all year one at-bat later. Max Kepler is playing defense and posting a .730 OPS while not striking out that much. He is not the problem.
As much as you, me and Gleeman all want to see the next shiny toy without enough experience to have a cap on their projection, I’m glad the Twins’ brass stuck to their guns and didn’t do a knee-jerk DFA weeks ago when Kepler was struggling the most.
Kepler is vegetable lasagna, a lower octane Nick Swisher, a younger Mark Canha, a prettier Austin Kearns. And he’s making less than Gio Urshela. Give him a break.
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now