SwainZag

Face it folks:  your 2024 Minnesota Twins are not good.

As of the time of this writing, they are 17-2 vs CHW, COL, LAA, OAK.  These are 4 of the 5 worst teams in baseball.  They are 25-33 against everyone else.

In MLB, they are 10th in runs scored, but 22nd in ERA.

Thank you ownership for taking a WS contending team and intentionally making them worse.
Thank you for taking the TV money and not reinvesting it back in the team.
Thank you for not allowing the FO to go out and getting a quality SP or two to replace the ones that left.
Thank you for not ensuring your fans get to watch their team on television this year by building in a solid out clause.

The articles of who the Twins should trade for need to stop.  No trade is coming that will increase payroll or move a top 10 prospect.

As a lifelong Twins fan, I am utterly disgusted with this year.  You should be too.

As you have likely seen at this point, the Twins signed Infielder Donovan Solano to a 1 year, $2 million dollar deal. When you first look at this deal, you may have thought that Solano is a similar role to Kyle Farmer and seems to be redundant. While there may be some overlap, I think there are a few reasons where both guys still get a good amount of at bats this year, especially against lefties. 
So let's compare Solano to a few other guys that I saw many people mention as targets for the Twins, Luke Voit and Yuli Gurriel. One reason the ladder two guys were brought up was their ability to hit lefties, so let's look at that first. 
Luke Voit versus lefties in 2022 had the following line: .174/.298/.271. I will concede that these stats are lower than his career .236/.329/.439 line against lefties. 
Yuli Gurriel versus lefties in 2022 had the following line: .265/.298/.441. These are slightly lower than his career .282/.333/.474 line against lefties as well. 
As for the Twins most recent acquisition, here are his stats versus lefties: 
Donovan Solano had a slash line of .301/.348/.422 line versus lefties in 2022. His career line is .282/.322/.389. 
The next thing I wanted to compare these players on was their Walk%, K% and their projected WAR going forward. 
Walk %: 
Voit: 10.2%
Gurriel: 5.7%
Solano: 5.7%
K %: 
Voit: 28.5%
Gurriel: 11.2%
Solano: 18.0%
Projected WAR (using ZiPS): 
Voit: 0.8 WAR
Gurriel: 1.5 WAR
Solano: 1.2 WAR
Seeing these stats, you might try to say that Gurriel would be the best choice of the three for a fit. The reason I think this is not the case can be summed up in one word: versatility. 
Donovan Solano can not only play 1B, but can also play 2B, 3B, and will likely get some ABs as a DH as well, against lefties specifically. Gurriel at this point in his career is a 1B with the ability to DH of course as well. Voit is a 1B/DH as well. 
Not to overlook Solano's ability to hit against righties as well. He doesn't hit righties super well, but can at least give you a good AB if needed. He has a career slash line of .276/.329/.367 against RHP.
One thing to remember is Solano is a depth piece who, similar to Kyle Farmer, will play mostly against LHP with occasional starts coming against RHP. Solano's versatility will also be helpful in case someone gets dinged up (which will happen at some point) and as a potential defensive replacement depending on who is in the game as well. Solano hits a lot of line drives, as evidence by his career .332 BABIP. 
I'd like to make this clear, I don't think Donovan Solano is an all star level player, but I think he's a solid depth piece that gives manager Rocco Baldelli another option this coming year. The Twins depth is much different than the past years, and hopefully this means they learned their lesson regarding not being too top heavy on the roster and not having as much depth. 
Let me know what you all think of the Solano signing. Who do you think this bumps off the roster? My gut reaction says Larnach, but maybe things change before opening day (perhaps a trade?). 

Gilberto Celestino has had an interesting path to the majors, and one that reduced his initial shine for most of the fanbase. Celestino was acquired for Ryan Pressly at the 2018 trade deadline, alongside Jorge Alcala, in a very unpopular deal at the time. MLB Pipeline ranked Celestino the 15th best prospect in 2019, and 14th best in 2020. The consensus was that Celestino was a standout defensive center fielder, but questions about his bat and power limited his overall projection.
When Celestino was called up out of emergency in 2021, his initial performance not only confirmed the offensive questions in the prospect rankings but the calling card of his defense was also poor with -2 Outs Above Average coming from 56 attempts. Celestino was clearly overmatched at the major league level, as he played a handful of games at AA before making the jump to the Twins. Celestino accumulated a 22 wRC+ and -0.7 fWAR in only 62 plate appearances in 2021. 
Needless to say, when Celestino was added to the 2022 Opening Day roster the reaction amid the fanbase was tepid. It's probable that the Twins didn't even envision Celestino making the roster, as they optioned him to Triple-A St. Paul on 3/31. Many believed that his status on the roster was to be temporary, with rumors swirling about the Twins adding Justin Upton to be a source of right-handed power in the outfield. 
Derek Falvey even went as far to say that Celestino could be off the major league roster in a week's time. 
Flashing forward to early May, Celestino has outperformed expectations, and probably any output that could have come from Justin Upton. As of 5/9, Celestino has provided some of the best offensive and defensive numbers on the team. 
  AVG OBP SLG OPS OPS+ wRC+ wOBA fWAR bWAR Gilberto Celestino .324 .390 .405 .796 144 143 .361 0.6 0.4 FanGraphs has Celestino as the 6th most valuable offensive player on the Twins in fWAR and his wRC+ is the third highest on team behind Byron Buxton and the legendary Kyle Garlick. On the defensive side of his game, Celestino has 2 Outs Above Average (84th percentile). It's a small sample size, but how has Celestino been so valuable this early on? 
The answer to that question: Celestino has had amazing plate discipline. 
Season Pitches Zone % Zone Swing % Zone Contact % Chase % Chase Contact % Edge % 1st Pitch Swing % Swing % Whiff % Meatball % Meatball Swing % 2021 235 51.5 64.5 82.1 26.3 63.3 43.8 30.6 46 23.1 6 85.7 2022 145 52.4 65.8 96 15.9 72.7 46.2 28.6 42.1 8.2 8.3 66.7 MLB   48.5 66.8 82 28.3 58.4 42.6 29.2 47 24.6 7.2 76
The highlighted cells show that areas where Celestino has been outperforming both his 2021 self, and the MLB average. He's simply become one of the most contact-oriented players in the game, and one of the most discerning about balls and strikes. He's swinging and making contact at pitches that are meant to be swung at in the zone, and spitting at the outside pitches that usually result in outs. 
Among all players with at least 25 plate appearances, Celestino ranks 3rd in Whiff % (8.2%) , and 16th in Chase Rate (15.9%). To put that in further perspective, here's a look at Celestino compared to two other players with great plate discipline reputations. 
  Pitches Zone % Zone Swing % Zone Contact % Chase % Chase Contact % Edge % 1st Pitch Swing % Swing % Whiff % Meatball % Meatball Swing % Gilberto Celestino 145 52.4 65.8 96 15.9 72.7 46.2 28.6 42.1 8.2 8.3 66.7 Luis Arraez 351 43.6 66 92.1 25.8 88.2 46.4 19.5 43.3 8.6 5.7 60 Juan Soto 549 43.4 56.7 80.7 19.3 66.7 41 20.3 35.5 23.1 5.8 78.1 MLB   48.5 66.8 82 28.3 58.4 42.6 29.2 47 24.6 7.2 76 Am I saying that Gilberto Celestino is the next Juan Soto or Luis Arráez? No, but I am saying that Celestino is a supremely disciplined hitter with extreme contact skill. That doesn't always take a large sample to determine. Soto has a chase rate of 19.3%, which ranks in the 90th percentile. Arráez has a miniscule whiff rate of 8.6%, which is in the 100th percentile of MLB players. Celestino tops both players in these areas at this point in the season. 
The only knock on Celestino this year can be his lack of power. Both his Barrel Rate (3.2%) and his average exit velocity (86.9 MPH) rank below the MLB average. However, the Twins have plenty of slugging across their lineup to make up for that. Luis Arráez used to be the lone bat-to-ball man in the lineup with names like Miguel Sano, Gary Sanchez, Alex Kiriloff, and Gio Urshela. It helps to have offensive diversity, and Gilberto Celestino may be filling a needed niche that nobody expected. 

If Celestino's current blend of strong defense and astounding swing decisions holds up, he probably ranks as a starting-caliber outfielder on most major league teams. The lack of power will always hold him back from being a true star, but his skillset fits today's game more so than the previous half-decade. The surprise addition to Opening Day roster may have been the perfect fit for the 2022 brand of baseball. 
 
 

It's been a unconventional season for the Minnesota Twins second basemen. While the club raced out to the worst record in the major leagues, it was Brian Dozier that was struggling right along with the majority of the group. Typically know to fade down the stretch, Dozier's bat didn't seem to ever make the transition to games that counted. Now he's turned a massive corner, but there's more to the narrative than the offensive production.
 
Trying to overstate just how bad Dozier was for the Twins out of the gate it probably a fools errand. He was batting .191 to end the season's first month, and in the lead up to his eventual benching following the May 22nd game, he was batting a dismal .199/.284/.318. Paul Molitor sat Dozier down for the next two games, the final of which he made a late inning appearance in. There were calls for him to head back to Rochester (although never realistic), and patience had grown thin. It was there though that Dozier appeared to have turned a corner.
 
Returning to the Twins lineup in his normal role on May 25, Dozier has since started all 60 of the games he's played in. Across that time, he's slashed .296/.367/.587 with 16 doubles, three triples, and 15 homers. With an OPS of .954 over the past two months, Dozier has been one of the Twins and baseball's most impressive hitters.
 
Lost in all of the offensive production is just how drastic the disciplinary change Dozier has made at the plate has been. A season ago, Dozier set the Minnesota Twins single season record for strikeouts with 148. He'd never fanned more than 129 times in a season, and his 61 walks in 2015 were a significant drop-off from the 89 totaled just a season prior. This year though, Dozier has turned a corner in both departments. Through 105 games (playing in 100) Dozier has struck out on 73 occasions while walking 41 times. That puts him on pace to fan just 113 times (a career best), and draw 63 walks.
 
The change in plate discipline has lent itself to a heightened level of productivity for the Twins second basemen. He's currently enjoying a career best .257 batting average while producing an .817 OPS, another career mark. Even with his troublesome mark, Dozier's improvements are evident in the numbers supporting the output. He's swinging and missing just 7.7% of the time (down from 9.0% in 2015), and he's chasing out of the zone just 27.7% of the time (just off of his 27.6% career mark set in 2014).
 
At his core, Brian Dozier has an always will be a dead pull hitter. He sells out to generate power, and he's made a career out of it. In 2016, he's generating a career best 29.9% hard hit rate, while using the middle of the field 32.2% of the time (his highest since 2013). Although his spray chart is essentially a reflection of his career output, the ability to wait pitchers out, not swing and miss, and get his pitch has translated into a resurgence that could not have been predicted.
 
I've been all over the place trying to figure Dozier out this season. The numbers early said to wait it out, while I wondered if his approach had become an all out sellout, and that he might be cooked. As the dust begins to settle though, it appeared all Dozier needed was for his approach to translate into results.
 
Expecting a career .242 hitter to continue plugging away at a near .300 pace might be a tough ask. Right now though, Dozier has produced a 2.6 fWAR to lead the Twins, and is on pace to turn in his second best season as a big leaguer (behind only his All Star season).
 
Should Dozier continue to show a greater plate discipline, he'll find himself with plenty of opportunities to get his pitch, and you can bet he'll deposit it into the left field bleachers more often than not. The production numbers have been great for the Twins two-bagger, but it's also been fun to see a big leaguer make the adjustment to dictate at bats, and force pitchers to make mistakes.
 
For more from Off The Baggy, click here. Follow @tlschwerz

Everybody loves a good Yogiism. Accumulatively, I'm pretty sure I've spent hours surfing the internet for new Yogi Berra quotes during fits of boredom, and I never tire of seeing the same ones over and over again. The best thing about it is that just when you think you've seen his magnum opus, you run into another that somehow surpasses the last. One of my favorites, though I'd never call it his best or even necessarily close to holding that status (which speaks a lot for Yogiisms in general), is "You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you." The blatant obviousness is just so appealing to me - though of course it's that very perspicuity that makes a Yogiism a Yogiism.
 
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I got to thinking about it. Obviously it's true; as long as there are no ties in baseball, somebody has to win. But I wondered vaguely if it would be possible to argue the truth in that simple yet significant observation, and while I won't try to go there with this post, just for fun I decided to reverse the meaning and see how that came out. This is what I came up with: "We wouldn't have lost if you'd beaten us."
 
I was immediately intrigued by that phrase. At first glance it may seem a little silly because according to theory you either win or lose; however, there is a philosophical side to this statement. Let me paraphrase it a bit: "Even if you win, you can never beat us." Suddenly it begins to make a little more sense; if spoken truthfully, this can definitely be a perfectly correct statement. In fact, I think that it should be every teams' slogan that they live and die by. You can lose a game by numbers, but you should never lose in spirit.
 
That reminds me of another quote I've run into time and again: "I never lose; I only learn." To be honest, I am easily irritated by people telling me that I need to stop being so passionate about baseball since according to them, "It's just a game." In spite of that, I am beginning to marginally understand the word "just" in that terse, irritating remark when I look at it this way: in baseball, losses are inevitable. It's part of the game; the losses are what keep us following as much as the wins are. If a team wins 20 of 30 games, they are considered hot, even though that ultimately means 10 losses in little over a month. So just because you lose doesn't mean that you need to consider that game a failure. That would be like going 2-3 in your major league debut and thinking that you were a failure in your first at-bat, though chances are you hit a bullet that just couldn't get through the opponent's incredible defensive infield.
 
That, though, is barely scratching the surface of what I'm trying to get to. There are those games where a mistake is made. It could be an erroneous play by anyone - a bench player or a superstar contending for MVP alike. It could be a throwing error, a fielding error, a mental error. It could be a baserunning mistake, and you could either blame the player or the coach. It could be a bad pitch, or merely the wrong pitch for the given situation. Someone could have swung at a pitch in the dirt with a full count. Maybe the manager called for the hitter to bunt when any nitwit recently introduced to the game could not only tell you but explain why they should have been swinging in that situation. Or maybe they swung when it would have been better to bunt. Maybe it was a bad call by the umpire. Maybe it was a fan interference that messed up the momentum and completely changed the outcome of the game. It could even have been the general manager's fault for trading so-in-so for so-in-so and so-in-so and sending down so-in-so to make room for so-in-so on the roster. Or if we're talking about an extended period of time, maybe it was somebody's fault for refusing to play with pain and getting put on the DL for the pettiest reasons … or perhaps they were playing through an injury when they should have accepted the fact that they were hurt and stopped sacrificing the team's best interests to satisfy their own inflated ego. The possibilities are positively endless, and that's why we all know those games so well - the games when everybody from the insignificant fan in the bleachers to the obnoxious owner agree that "We should have won that game."
 
As a fan I know how devastating these losses can be, yet I rarely step back and try to assess the big picture by putting myself in the players' shoes and imagining the demoralizing effect these games must have on them. As professional athletes, they need to go out there and play game after game, and it's not just any old game, either; it is a game that involves emotions and romanticism as much as it does statistics and tenaciousness. Yet oftentimes teams bounce back and give a phenomenal performance after one of these losses. How can they possibly do this?
 
I can tell you that it isn't because they let a bad game get them down. Yes, there are players who get discouraged by having a bad game, and they find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into a slump until they have absolutely no belief in themselves as an athlete that can perform at a big league level. The effect can be calamitous, and sometimes a whole team goes down with them. This is all a result of them allowing themselves to be beaten; not intentionally, of course, for they still fight to win those games for all they are worth, yet they lose game after game numerically because they have already lost psychologically. They have lost the game before it's even started.
 
Judging from my personal experience, it takes an incredible effort at times to not let certain games get to you. If a player walked out on the field feeling the way I often do at the beginning of a game directly following an especially disheartening loss, how can I expect him to perform well? And if he doesn't perform well, how can I expect the team to win again? It's when I look at sports this way that I realize that there is much more to the game than statistics.
 
But if you have an attitude that says, "You didn't beat me. You might have won this game, but you can never beat me. Don't forget that tomorrow's another day - my day," you can never lose. You can use an especially terrible game to analyze past mistakes that have been repeated all season long like a little, ticking time bomb, yet were never obvious enough to draw your attention, and finally, after weeks of underlying presence, exploded, resulting in one of those the-world-is-coming-to-an-end (at least if you allow yourself to look at it that way) losses. The game is lost, but that is in the past. What matters now is the future, and the players and managers who never lose focus on the mistakes from the past and concentrate on eliminating them so that they perform better in upcoming games. That's why a team can lose one game 15-3 and the next day come back and slam the team 21-0. They didn't lose - they only learned.
 
A lot of people, admittedly myself included, try to stigmatize these types of players by attributing to them a word that they think is defaming or even vilifying: cockiness. Yet it is this very cockiness that leads a team to the playoffs, this very cockiness that helped them go 20-10 earlier in the season. And the very fans who would besmirch their integrity are more than happy to take those wins. I am by no means calling out any such fans or even trying to put myself on a pedestal - I am one of a kind and far too often find myself frustrated beyond words over "just a game." To let a little secret out, almost like Brad Pitt frustrated. The only thing that keeps me in control is the fact that I live on an even tighter budget than him. When you allow yourself to fall head over heels in love with your team, you sign a contract that has an often overlooked disclaimer in fine, black print at the very bottom of the tedious monotony of the document: "Love is blind." Over time you inevitably learn, but I never knew what I was getting myself into when I (rather subconsciously, I'll admit) developed a passion for baseball. Passion...there is no other word worthy of attribution to this feeling we all have for baseball.
 
Regardless of all my best intentions, though, I often find myself in yet another funk over a bad loss or a bad series or a bad week or month or year. I try to justify it by saying that it has no effect whatsoever on the team, and while in essence that is true, I rarely stop and think about how the players, coaches, managers, front office - and yes, even owners - have to deal with the same problem as I do, except on a far greater, far more significant scale. It is unfathomable to me that a team can go out on the field after being swept by a particularly terrible team who should have been on the other end of the spectrum and proceed to beat up the hottest team in baseball, all because they refused to lose. Players and teams can have all the talent in the world, but there's one crucial ingredient that is prerequisite to any winning team or MVP type player: belief in oneself and, to put it simply, the will and ability to never, ever lose. With this attitude, it doesn’t have to matter if your team doesn't have all the big names like the neighbor out east. It's this attitude that keeps baseball so unpredictable. It's this attitude that keeps baseball sentimental. In part, it is even this attitude that makes the statement, "Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything" (Toby Harrah) true. It is this attitude that keeps me following baseball.
 
I will never cease to be amazed by these players' and teams' ability to refuse to lose, defy all odds, and achieve the impossible. Most people have a hero, and as often as not, that hero is an athlete. My hero will forever be the athlete that never loses.
 
Seriously, how can you not be romantic about baseball?
 
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Read full entry here:
We Wouldn't Have Lost if You'd Beaten Us