Who Have Been The Luckiest and Unluckiest Minnesota Twins Batters in 2023?

At the beginning of a baseball season it can take a while for statistics to normalize. The small sample sizes can cause incorrect opinions to be made about players when in reality their baseline numbers don’t tell the whole story. When you dig into their underlying statistics, you can come to find that a player’s been hitting the ball better or worse than what their results have been showing.

There are a number of ways to look at luck in baseball. For a long time, the most popular metric for doing this was batting average on balls in play (BABIP). While it can still be valuable to look at BABIP, advanced statistics have progressed to the point that there are better statistics out there to evaluate luck.

For this exercise, we are going to look at my go-to metric for evaluating luck, wOBA/xwOBA difference.

wOBA stands for weighted on-base percentage. Essentially what that means is that it measures how often a player reaches base, but it also weights those on-base events based on how a player reaches base. A more accurate measure than on-base percentage and slugging percentage. 

xwOBA on the other hand is expected on-base percentage. It doesn’t look at results but just the underlying numbers on every batted ball event (exit velocity, launch angle, sprint speed) and assigns a number of what a players wOBA should be. Take the difference between wOBA and xwOBA and you find out how lucky or unlucky a player has been.

With that in mind, let’s look at who have been the luckiest and unluckiest batters for the Minnesota Twins thus far in 2023.

Luckiest

1. Ryan Jeffers
wOBA: .364
xwOBA: .303
Diff: 0.061

Ryan Jeffers has had a really nice start to the year for the Minnesota Twins. He is posting what would be a career-best OPS of .815 and is third on the team with a .357 wOBA. Looking at Jeffers’s underlying numbers, though, it doesn’t appear that he should be hitting as well as he is. He has what would be a career-low average exit velocity of 87.7 MPH and is striking out at a 34% clip. 

Sure enough, the expected wOBA statistic backs up that thought as his xwOBA is just .295, a difference of 0.062. Peripheral numbers suggest that Ryan Jeffers’s results have been better than what his underlying numbers suggest that his results should be.

Jeffers has only put together 50 plate appearances this season, so even his underlying numbers have some time to normalize, but to this point his hot start should be expected to cool down a bit.

2. Byron Buxton
wOBA: .352
xwOBA: .324
Diff: 0.028

The next “luckiest” batter for the Minnesota Twins thus far in 2023 has been the player who has been arguably their best hitter of the season to this point, Byron Buxton. Buxton has been hitting the cover off the ball lately, but even his great numbers haven’t been without a little bit of luck.

While his numbers have been incredible, his average exit velocity of 90.4 MPH is lower than his season average has been over each of the past three seasons. The results have been there over the course of the season, but bumping up that average exit velocity will increase his expected numbers and take him off the list of “lucky” batters.

Unluckiest

1. Nick Gordon
wOBA: .209
xwOBA: .296
Diff: -0.087

Flipping the discussion around, the unluckiest batter for the Minnesota Twins through the first six weeks of play has been Nick Gordon. After a breakout season in 2022, Gordon has started the 2023 season extremely slowly, posting a meager .491 OPS over 75 plate appearances.

The advanced numbers tell a different story for Gordon, though, as he should have a wOBA of about .300. Certainly not an all-star start to the year, but far from the worst hitter on the team as his numbers would suggest. One thing that would help Gordon a lot is to elevate the ball more than he has. Currently, Gordon has an average launch angle of 8.2 degrees, down from 12.5 degrees in 2023. Increasing that launch angle would increase his xwOBA even higher than it is now and bring his numbers closer to how they were in 2022.

2. Carlos Correa
wOBA: .280
xwOBA: .320
Diff: -0.040

Not a surprise, the other unluckiest hitter for the Minnesota Twins in 2023 has been their superstar shortstop Carlos Correa. Correa has had a nightmare start to the season for the Minnesota Twins, posting an OPS of just .643 and is easily off to the worst start to a season over the course of his career.

Correa’s advanced numbers show that his average exit velocity is just 1.3 MPH off of his career average and his BABIP is a career-low .204.. Those hard hit balls should eventually start to  find holes and his numbers should start to creep up to where we have seen him in the past.

Do any of the players above surprise you? Do you think the luck will turn around for these players? Leave a comment and start the conversation!