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Also a game changer when he literally scores the winning run. That helps.

I found a new walk-up song for France:

Welp. I'm not counting on a win, but this game was an improvement on previous games. They stayed in it, had some useful outs that scored runs, had some good pitching, and poor pitching and defense. I'll take it as a positive. A better loss (assuming they lose) than most of them have been.

Every upgrade waiting in the minors since Buxton and Sano were supposed to be the duo that would lead the Twins for a decade has ultimately been a disappointment. I wouldn't count on this years SPS team to be any different. Something else is broken deep in this system that has led to a decade of next generation talent to flop (yes, even including Buxton, and so far Lewis, though the latter still has a chance to be a difference maker).

Interesting way to gauge bullpen performance with different metrics, but the WPA would be much higher if the offence were able to able to score more than 2 runs per game. All of those scoreless frames would have been worth more WPA if there were more runs to protect. As it is, almost every bullpen run scored can be the difference between winning 2-1 or losing 1-2. The isolated Sands and Jax performances aside, I'd say the pitching is looking pretty good. Bob Gibson and Mariano Rivera would have losing records and terrible WPAs on this team.

And today we learned that Ober, Ryan, and Lopez have all been seriously injured in a petting zoo incident. They got too close to the sheep and the llama attacked them all.

I'm excited. There are several young-ish players that are all coming out of their sophomore slump seasons. It could be a magical year if Miranda, Larnach, Julien, Wallner, and more have career years (which I don't think is impossible). If they don't then I'm not worried. No amount of adding the best players in the offseason would fix them. I'm ready to watch as many of the 162 as I can regardless of how many wins they get. I was a Tigers fan in 2002 and 2003. I can take anything.

I'd just use him as mop up, or whatever, until they need to send him down for practical reasons then DFA him. I'm not going to worry about the off chance he becomes a star pitcher in 3 years if he is going to be a huge liability this year. There are better pitchers this year that could be up. This isn't going to be like giving up John Smoltz to get Doyle Alexander back. He's just an AA prospect.

The fun thing about baseball is that anything can happen. Last year, as great as the Twins started out, both the White Sox and the Twins were 10-20 for their last 30 games. Ok, the White Sox will not win the division in 2025. Almost anything can happen, but not that.

Leading off with your best two hitters is definitely a good move when stealing basis is no longer a part of the game. I'd be worried about wasting leadoff hits/walks/hbps with double plays in the next 1-2 at bats. So I'd be more interested to see a thousand simulations of having a fast, but not terrible, hitter in the 2 spot. How would a Wallner-Buxton 1-2 perform over a Wallner-Correa 1-2?

It's put up or shut up time for most of the team. I wouldn't be surprised for a near-MVP season out of the lot (Miranda, Larnach, Lee, Julien, Lewis, Wallner, etc) but I also wouldn't be surprised if any of those (except Lewis) got traded or DFAd by the trade deadline. I'm hoping Borgschulte is made of magic and all of these position conversations sort themselves out because players are playing close to their potential rather than their floor.

Even if he starts in St. Paul, he still could pitch 20+ games in Minneapolis at some point. Not worried about which relievers on the bump head up for game 1. We’ll see plenty of them all.

He has 92 stolen bases over an entire 10 year career. He could have that many in a single year (if he ever managed to play 150-160 games). He's not a base stealer and he never will be. I'll settle for breaking up double plays and scoring from first on outfield hits.

Vazquez' offensive numbers were pretty terrible overall. But over the last three months of the season he hit .266/.295/.705. Obviously no Joe Mauer, but he was dramatically underrated during this stretch due to his abysmal start. That probably made him one of the Twins' best hitters in the last months.

Guys who hit .300 after a few games at AA are not MLB ready. Even if they also have a great few games in Spring Training. If we aren't willing to give rookies a chance after some hard times in the majors (e.g. Julien, Martin, Martin, and then Miranda and Larnach from the year before) then we shouldn't be rushing kids in to be way over their heads. Let him develop. Otherwise Keaschall will be the next guy we all hate in a year and a half.

I'm a Julien believer. He was electric a couple of years ago. A one-two punch of Julien and Lewis looked like it had the makings of a Mauer Morneau pair, or a Canseco McGwire... you get the picture. I remember either a writer or podcaster about a year ago comment on Julien's delayed development due to his coming up in Quebec where baseball wasn't prominent enough to have top tier coaching at the pre-college level. I'm hopeful that he just needs a bit of time to learn how to overcome the setback at the highest level. Part of having rookies succeed is being willing to put up with sophomore slumps and growing pains. Let's just hope that this is the year.

Yes. Sorry for confusion. Games where they only score one run. The points being that offense isn't giving pitching the chance to win, AND they aren't even winning the low percentage of those games say... 10%.. that might make a difference in the final standings. 1-0 games are not likely, but they do sometimes happen to other teams.

OK. One more attempt to beat the dead horse of small numbers. Looking at the 24 Guardians, Tigers, and Twins. Also including the LA Dodgers (WS) and 95 Braves (possibly best pitching team in modern baseball) for comparison. I always like to think that if the team can score 3 runs, then they give their pitchers (if they are very good) a chance to win the game. So I ordered this list by games. 3 runs scored G W L Pct 95 Braves 25 15 10 0.600 Twins 21 12 9 0.571 Guardians 22 10 12 0.455 LAD 20 9 11 0.450 Tigers 20 7 13 0.350 So, when scoring 3 runs, the Twins actually did a pretty good job of winning coming in at just below the best pitching team in recent history. Good job Bailey, Joe, and Pablo (and Baldelli for leaving Pagan out of these games). They even beat out all of the other teams that pummeled them in the standings last season. So since scoring less than three runs shifts the blame to hitters rather than pitchers, I ordered these by number of games (yellow highlighting the best win percentage and brownish highlighting the second best win pct). 1-2 runs scored G W L Pct Twins 40 1 39 0.025 Tigers 39 10 29 0.256 Guardians 33 5 28 0.152 95 Braves 29 9 20 0.310 LAD 29 4 25 0.138 Here's where the differences that separate out the winning teams from losers start to be apparent. The Twins led this pack with 40 games with 1 or 2 runs scored. AND they won the fewest of these games. Bob Gibson would have lost a lot of these games, but not all of them... as can be seen by the 95 Braves winning 31%. For me, in these games, we can't possibly blame the pitching no matter how good it was. Finally, when we add 0 runs scored to those 1-2 run games it becomes clear that the way to win games is to score at least some runs. 0-2 runs scored G W L Pct Tigers 54 10 44 0.185 Twins 50 1 49 0.020 Guardians 48 5 43 0.104 LAD 34 4 30 0.118 95 Braves 33 9 24 0.273 The Twins were only more pathetic than the Tigers in that the Tigers actually managed to win 10 of these games. The best pitchers in the world won the highest percent, but ultimately managed to win the world series by only getting into this situation 33 times. Same with the Dodgers. Great pitching only matters when your hitters aren't terrible. But after you score a few runs... that pitching makes a big difference. A lot of numbers and spreadsheets to explain something we all probably already knew. Thanks to coming to my Ted Talk. I have to go work now.

Even more amazing is that when we add zero run games, the Twins had 50 games where they had next to zero chance of winning. That's almost 30% of games that are sure losses. I don't know how much that compares to other teams, but you'd hope to win at least 15% of 1 to 2 run games.

Just checked the numbers compared to the 95 Braves, which is the best pithing team in my memory (3 HOF starting pitchers all in their prime!). Interestingly, they won with fewer 1 and 2 run games (16 and 13 respectively) than the Twins (25 and 15). They did, however win 9 out of 29 of those games (9-20). They also won 15 of 25 of their 3 run games (15-10) making them an almost impossible to beat team. They both had fewer low scoring games AND they were harder to beat on those games. So in the 95 Braves case, they had better offense and better pitching than the Twins. So for the Twins to make this a world series year, Buxton, Correa, Lewis, and maybe even Julien, Miranda, and Wallner will all be competing for AL MVP. It could happen.

Glad to see they are doing this... but doesn't this just look like practice? Shouldn't they always have been taking grounders, and having batting practice where they help each other out? I guess I just have no idea what happens between games.

I'll take great pitching any day. And I'm happy to see a stacked pitching corps. But the team also needs to score runs. I played with some numbers to compare the Twins, Guardians, and Tigers. The Twins had 61 games where they scored fewer than 3 runs and only won 21.3% of those games. The Guards by comparison had 55 under 3 games of which they won 27.3%. The Tigers, who had great pitching, were in between and had 59 games with 28.8% wins. So in both cases, not only did the other two have fewer low scoring games, but they won more of those low scoring games than the Twins. Looking at just 1 run games. The Twins had 15, all of which they lost. The Guardians had 11 and lost all of theirs too. The Tigers had 21 1-run games but they won 3 of theirs. Had the Twins won just one of theirs, they would have made the playoffs (EDIT... Royals tied for second, not the Twins... whoops). A little more shockingly, the Twins had more 2 run games than the other two (25) and lost all but one of those. Meanwhile, Guardians went 5-17 and the Tigers went 7-11. Interesting that the Twins had a winning percentage of 57.1% on 3 run games, indicating that they DID have good pitching when they needed it, but a full 40 of their games -- almost 25% of games -- they gave their pitchers almost zero chance of getting the win. Bob Gibson wouldn't be able to save them in most of those cases. So... Yes, better pitching would have made the difference last year (if they were able to scrape even just one more win from a 1 or 2 run game). But had they made the playoffs, the better teams would have likely walked all them when a collapsed offense means your pitchers have to be perfect. It'll be an interesting year. Small market teams can't have it all. Hopefully they score a couple more runs AND have lights out pitching.

If all of the near rookies play up to their potential instead of their floor, there will be slightly less need for gold glove caliber infield defense. That's what winter is for: slowly forgetting the horrors of the previous year and building up that irrational optimism for the coming season.

They have had luck with some somewhat risky signings in the past several years (Michael A Taylor, Willi Castro, Donovan Solano, Gio Urshela, plus or minus one or two more). But this year's crop of free agents seems to look a little more like the Margots and Gallos. At the very least, I can't imagine that Harrison Bader is going to be anywhere as bad as Margot.

It would have been difficult, but if they really tried, they could have done a bit worse.