Parker Hageman

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For three straight years now, the Minnesota Twins have been forced into tapping one of their position players to take the mound late in a blowout game. In 2011, it was Michael Cuddyer. Last season, the honors went to Drew Butera. This year's position player was veteran infielder Jamey Carroll. Had Aaron Hicks remained on the roster, he might have been the obvious position player to be called into mop-up duty considering he was a talented high school pitcher throwing in the mid-90s and multiple teams viewed him as a pitcher at the time of the draft. Nevertheless, Carroll retired his opponents with guile and not heat. Carroll's nine-pitch eighth inning was not a thing of beauty, but it worked. He retired three consecutive Royals hitters and did not use anything resembling fastball, despite being his best fastball. MLB.com's PitchF/X system chatted all of his offerings are either a changeup or a knuckleball -- both reasonable assumptions for pitches thrown under 80 miles an hour. The St Paul Pioneer Press’s Mike Berardino tweeted after the game that Carroll had not pitched at any level since his Babe Ruth League days as a fifteen-year-old. I’m guessing the velocity has not changed much since then. How does Carroll's outing compare to Cuddyer and Butera's? [ATTACH=CONFIG]5107[/ATTACH] You have to wonder if Carroll’s grotesque fingers gave him an unfair advantage to put addition movement on each pitch that a normal, healthy-handed pitcher would not. Sort of like Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. [ATTACH=CONFIG]5108[/ATTACH]

With the Biogenesis scandal taking out some key players across the league, the Minnesota Twins could stand to benefit from the suspensions. According to an ESPNDallas.com story, the recently suspending Nelson Cruz leaves the contending Texas Rangers without a right-handed power bat in the outfield. As such, the team may potentially be in the market for one at the August waiver deadline for a player like Josh Willingham, cites the article. (h/t @DBrauer)

At the Star Tribune, La Velle Neal has a great write-up on yesterday’s win and profiled the significance of rookie Oswaldo Arcia’s seventh home run of the year – one that proved to be the difference in Sunday’s affair. What made this noteworthy was Arcia’s adjustment he made to the opposition. Here’s Arcia via translator Chris Colabello: Twins hitting coach Tom Brunansky had some great things to say about his performance: This is a good development, if he can continue with this approach. Being pitched away has been Arcia’s weak spot, inciting the most swing-and-misses as he has often tried to do too much in his first year with the Twins. As Mike Radcliff told me last month, Triple-A offers plenty of opportunity for hitters to learn to adapt to pitchers who know how to exploit a hitter’s weakness and this may have been critical to Arcia’s offensive development. “In Triple-A,” said Radcliff, “there’s a lot of guys who know how to pitch. They might only throw 86 [mph], but they’ve got different kinds of pitches and they’ve been to the big leagues and they know how to care up a hitter and they see a hole and they can attack it. So you can make a case that Triple-A provides even another talent level of sorts for any hitter going up.” Arcia has now had three stints in Rochester and has proven that he can handle that level of hitting. Yesterday demonstrated that he may be adjusting. This morning, Nick Nelson wrote that Arcia has given Twins fans a reason to follow the team through the remainder of the season. One thing to watch while watching is how Arcia handles that pitch on the outer-half of the strike zone.

Following the latest loss to the Kansas City Royals, the Twins send down two struggling players in pitcher Scott Diamond and center fielder Aaron Hicks. Oswaldo Arcia, who has been hitting .375/.490/.725 with four home runs in his last 49 plate appearances since being demoted in early July, will be recalled. The second player is unknown but odds are the Twins will tap left-handed pitcher Andrew Albers. Albers is 11-5 with a tidy 2.86 ERA and a 116/32 K/BB ratio. While Albers has earned the opportunity, his 132.1 innings he has pitched exceeds his previous high by 28.1 innings. It will be interesting to see how the 27 year old holds up.

True, but this is not necessarily a repeatable skill set.

One potential landing place for Twins first baseman Justin Morneau was the Baltimore Orioles but now that option looks dead, according to league sources. Now, Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun tweeted that the team has “decided it wasn’t a fit for production and money” as well as the team being more interested in right-handed help. Former GM and current ESPN analysis, Jim Bowden, says that his sources in baseball have said the key to moving Morneau will be for the Twins to eat Morneau’s salary. The third-place Orioles had needed production from their designated hitters, who had amassed an unsightly line of .202/.264/.379, well below the average. Morneau’s recent slump had done nothing to inspire the Baltimore organization to pursue him at the deadline.

Depends on how a team views relievers and their potential. Duensing has very solid stuff against lefties, strong peripherals versus them. At the same time, he's allowed some hits but not many big hits. In a LOOGY role, he could put up good numbers. The difference is that Duensing is arb-eligible. Makes a difference thinking you may be able to keep him past this year. Of course, he would make a lot at arb, too. Personally, I don't think he goes anywhere.

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]5043[/ATTACH]Left-handed relievers are a valuable if not under-appreciated members of society. You know, like oxygen. While they may seem ubiquitous and always available, a team could get killed if you don't have any. They have a certain vampiric quality to them as they are seemingly able to last forever while continually finding work. Darren Oliver, 37-years-old, has been employed steadily. Despite mixed results, J.C. Romero has hung around baseball. Even with numerous options out there, when the trade deadline comes around, contending teams rush out to acquire one or two for safe measure. Because of this it is possible that Minnesota Twins’ reliever Brian Duensing may have thrown his last pitch with the team on Wednesday night. Admittedly, Duensing does not quite fall into that category of a specialist. In the recent past, he had been able to dominate same-sided opponents with a big slider. Judging by that alone, it appeared that he would make a strong left-handed reliever. After bouncing from the rotation to the bullpen thorough out his five years with Minnesota, 2013 has been the first year he has been a full-time reliever. And this season he has been asked to retire lefties more than the previous years. “The only thing I feel like is really different, is the fact that I am more focused strictly on the lefties,” says Duensing in regards to his approach. “I’m not coming in worrying about the righties as much, but I’m facing righties a little more than I did earlier in the season. The main thing is that it is kind of hard, at this very moment I don’t have the feeling that I know exactly where it’s going to go all the time. Which is fine: If I don’t know where it’s going, they don’t know where it’s going.” This admission, when synchronized with Mike Moustakas’ eighth inning solo home run on Wednesday night, would highlight Duesning’s shortcoming this season. Catcher Joe Mauer would call for the standard slider down and away to the left-handed hitting Moustakas but the pitch would be up and middle-in and wind up just inside the right field foul pole. To be sure, the home run was a rare display off of Duensing – just his second allowed in 2013 – yet command issues are noticeable. The transition to the bullpen has allowed Duensing to air it out constantly knowing that he will have a short outing, more so this year than before. After averaging 4.0 outs per appearance from 2009 to 2012 while in relief, he’s down to 2.4 outs per appearances this season. As such he’s hitting closer to 93 on the gun. Of course, the trade-off may be the decline in precision. For instance, the lack of command has been prevalent in Duensing’s overall peripheral numbers. After walking just seven percent of all batters faced, the lefty has issued free passes to ten percent of hitters this year. So does he believe the fastball -- when trying to rear back and attempt at triple-digits on the radar -- is the culprit? “It’s basically all of them. It’s kind of scary but, as of lately, the results have been a little better.” For the most part, sure. After all, Duensing had been stringing together a good series of appearances. In seven appearances from July 9 to July 26, he had not allowed a run to score. However he was playing with fire in several of those outings, allowing four walks and a hit batter in 6.2 innings and last night, he struggled to retire four Royals lefties in a row. Duensing seems content with his role in the bullpen but acknowledges the challenges of transitioning from a starter to a reliever takes preparation. “It’s not easy to come to the ballpark everyday and be prepared to throw. As a starter you have four days off in between, so mentally it is kind of taxing on you to try to figure out when you are going to pitch. Every day you might pitch. You might throw three, four days in a row or you might not throw for five.” The move is not always as simple as it would seem. In 2011 while with the Twins current Miami Marlin Kevin Slowey was reassigned to the bullpen but struggled with his new role. Some research has indicated many pitchers have moved from starter to reliever and not only have done well but thrive with added velocity or a specialized role. Look no further than Duensing’s current bullpen mate Glen Perkins who has rebounded as a fallen starter to a reliever with a mid-90s fastball and devastating slider, eventually becoming an All Star closer. On the other hand, others cannot clear the preparation hurdle. That was Slowey’s biggest downfall. Manager Ron Gardenhire noted in May of that season that they would call down to the pen to get Slowey ready he would throw “five or six pitches” then say he was ready. The results would be that Slowey would need a few days of rest afterwards. There is a reason why marathon runners do not always make good sprinters. More often than not, Gardenhire has been consistent with Duensing’s usage in 2013 and Duensing has given him no indication that he is not equipped to handle that sort of treatment. According to Baseball-Reference.com, 31 of Duensing’s appearances have come with no days or one day off between outings. In his 10 appearances with no days of rest in between, he has limited opponents to a .257 average and just two runs. Although not quite the rubber band man that Matt Guerrier was during the late 2000s heydays, Duensing has demonstrated he can be ready when needed, a fact which he attributes to preparing for the marathon of starting and adjusting for the sprint of the bullpen. “In the offseason, I prepare like I’m going to start,” he says. “ Obviously, it is a lot easier if you are prepared to go long, it’s a long easier to go short. During the season, like when they said I was going to be in the bullpen, I changed my mentality and the throwing I do – you are not playing long-toss every day, you are kind of shortening up here and there and you are really paying attention to how your arm and body feels and how it is working, ‘cause you have to be ready to go every day, so you have to make sure you know what it takes to make sure you are ready to go.” Duensing, now in his fifth season in the majors and will have his second year of arbitration this offseason, says the experience has helped breed familiarity with his opponents – something that can be both good and bad. “There are some guys I feel comfortable knowing how I want to go about pitching them. There are some guys who I still may not have a good idea about. I am also noticing that I may have fallen into patterns the last few years – like I noticed a lot of lefties try to take the same kind of approach on me.” The book for left-handed pitchers says to stay away from lefties – bust them on the outer-half of the plate with fastball and breaking pitches. Duensing started to feel that same-sided opponents were cheating a bit and going with that pitch. Instead, he has been trying to go inside to left-handed opponents more. “I’ve had a lot of success going in on lefties. So I don’t know if that means the ball is running a bit more or if they are looking middle-away, I feel like that is a typical way a lefty would pitch a lefty, away with sliders and fastballs. I try to get out of my normal patterns and keep them guessing.” Like on Wednesday night, Duensing sawed off former college teammate and groomsman Alex Gordon’s bat into a toothpick on a fastball inside. However, Gordon won the battle with his friend with a liner the other way when Duensing would go back outside with a fastball that stayed away but up in the zone. When asked if he has ever reviewed pitchf/x data, Duensing said he had brief encounters with the numbers but had not explored anything to any extend, he has felt more comfortable trying to gain an edge by examining video and watching hitters in the box. He admits this may be time to take another look to see if the information can help him breakaway from tendencies that opponents have picked up over the years. “That might help me with tendencies and why certain guys are taking certain swings of certain counts. I feel like it is human nature to get into a tendency to get into a pattern. Especially if something is working, you are going to stick with it. It would be interesting to find out if there was something I could change.”

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4925[/ATTACH]On a gorgeous Minnesota July afternoon, Jack Goin, the Twins’ manager of major league administration and baseball research, sits in the Target Field broadcast booth high above the playing field. Down below, the Twins are take batting practice and a variation of infield warm-ups that happens behind protective screens at every base. There is controlled chaos with batted balls going every which direction. The team is preparing for that evening’s game. Goin, meanwhile, is a part of the Twins’ front office team that has been preparing for the upcoming trade deadline. Since the June draft, the organization’s attention has been shifted towards the game’s big swap meet on the last day of July. The internal process for the trade deadline starts with an abundance of prospect research and checking scouting report. Goin reviews each organization’s top prospects, adding others who may have being intriguing statistically, and connecting with the team’s director of pro scouting, Vern Followell to compare notes. “We start looking at if we have reports on prospects, real prospects, which everyone has ranked. We look at the top 20, top 30, whatever. Specifically of those teams that are in the buying mode,” Goin says. “Now whether that is off of those lists or I’ve gone through and tried to cross-check it myself and say here are guys we should have interest in regardless of what our scouting reports say. Then we talk about it.” This is when Goin’s statistical favorites are vetted through the lens of the scout. Followell and his team’s scouting reports may help illuminate why a prospect is having an abundance of unexpected success. They may be hitters seeing a high percentage of fastballs in bandbox minor league parks or pitchers who are old for that particular level and are thriving by spinning off curveballs in the dirt; essentially, players who are succeeding through methods that may become obsolete as they progress in the minor league system. Occasionally, a potentially useful prospect may fly under the radar and require further scouting. It could be due to Goin’s research or a scout’s recommendation that a player was identified, but the Twins want to be thorough and complete with their information as possible if a team calls up to discuss a deal on a moment’s notice. “We try to make sure we haven’t missed anybody to limit the emergency visits as you get close [to the deadline]. It’s kind of like the draft; you are flying across the country at the last minute.” If a team has an information advantage going into the trade deadline, it means they can swap a David Hollins for a David Ortiz or turn a Brian Buchanan into a Jason Bartlett. Of course, those types of trades seem like ages ago for the ballclub. When was the last time Minnesota could consider itself the indisputable victor? Since then, teams have beefed up their analytics departments as well as their scouting teams. On their website, the Twins have 14 people listed under Baseball Operations. By comparison, the Pittsburgh Pirates, baseball’s newest surging darling, have 37 Baseball Operations roles involving both scouting and analysts on their website. Even small-market teams like the Pirates are going on the offensive when it comes to identifying as well as retaining talent. Goin agrees that the constructs of the trade deadline have changed. “There’s a difference in what the trade deadline is now versus what the trade deadline used to be,” he added. “I think it used to be more of a negotiation where you say we’re not giving up this guy and you get a list of A, B and C and you can take one guy from A and one guy from B and two guys from C, or whatever the combination.” “Because there is so much prep work – between analysis and scouting – teams really funnel down who they want. They say if you want this guy, we need this guy, this guy and this guy. Or they have a formula of we need a guy whose close in Triple-A, maybe a lesser ceiling, we need a certain position and then we want another guy that is low but have a chance to be the guy.” The Cubs’ recent Matt Garza trade demonstrates this mentality. With the Rangers in need of additional pitching and the Cubs looking to rebuild, they landed Mike Olt, a third base prospect with some major league experience, Justin Grimm, a starting pitcher with 22 major league games under his belt and then a lower level pitcher, C.J. Edwards, who has plenty of upside. The Cubs will also be entitled to a player-to- be-named-later as well. One starter with an expiring contract landed Chicago up to four useful chips. How do trade talks start? In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt ate three fistfuls of popcorn, made five calls and dealt two players – all in the span of ten minutes. Naturally, that is the Hollywood version of what is often a lengthy process. Some teams will use the divide-and-conquer approach to determine the lay of the land early in the month of July. Calls will be made by various members of the front to former colleagues or friends in another organization, putting out feelers to gauge interest. What do they need? Are they looking to shop anyone? Maybe a follow-up call is made. This is done by buyers and sellers alike but not the Twins says Goin, it is not how they operate. For the Twins, trade talks can start from the stands at a game with an innocuous conversation between scouts. “You’ll get one of our scouts calling in and he’ll say I was talking to so-and-so at the park the other day and they got interest in this guy or need a backup catcher and we need a utility infield. Then Terry [Ryan] would just respond by saying tell them to call us.” Some general managers use the media as a means of letting other teams know that they are buyers or sellers. Ryan recently used the local scribes to let people know that the team would listen to offers on everyone, thereby letting all the other GMs know that the Twins are open for business. Others use the media to gain information, particularly from MLBTradeRumors.com. “Everybody monitors that stuff,” acknowledges Goin. “There are GMs that see something and they call right away and they admit, hey, I saw on MLB Trade Rumors that you guys are shopping Liriano.” The trade market changes on the fly. One day a GM may be checking to see if his office phone is actually plugged in to having it ring incessantly. Houston’s GM Jeff Luhnow said that prior to the Garza trade there was little discussions for the Astros’ right-handed starter Bud Norris. Now, with Garza off the board, Luhnow expects to have different conversations regarding his player. As the trade deadline plays out, teams that are buying may become more desperate. At the same time, selling teams may wait too long and miss out on the buying market. Timing is everything. Part of that timing is deciding whether the team is a buyer or seller. There is no magic date in the schedule in which teams make that decision. The Twins do not run any projections at the All Star break to calculate what the remainder of the season is going to look like. The standings tell them everything they need to know. Double-digit deficits can be a gentle reminder that the season is not going as desired. “Depending on where you are, you try to hang on. Sometimes you may hang on too long,” says Goin. “We’re all competitive and it is hard to get that out of your system. We still want to compete, we want to win. There are a lot of things that go into making a trade. Then there are times that it is obvious that you are out of it.” And this is one of those times. Having seen this season play out now going on three years, the Twins would be fooling themselves into believing they should be anything but sellers. Minnesota’s most valuable trade commodity is Glen Perkins. In additional to being an elite reliever, he has an extremely team-friendly contract. Because of baseball’s enlightenment that says stats like the save are overvalued, would a closer like Perkins still be able to garner a decent return? “There are teams that have gone beyond that, sure” Goin admits. “But I think there are still teams that are going to go out and try to make a trade for a Perkins or [Jonathon] Papelbon or whoever they think they need to get to shore up the back of the bullpen. Some teams are not going to worry about that as much but there still are teams that will say this guy is having a good year, he’s driven in 85 runs through July and we need to get a bat. It may be a function of him being a good hitter and the RBIs are secondary.” With just a week remaining until the trade deadline, the Twins have conducted their due diligence. Goin and company have identified and researched hundreds of potential prospects across the league. The question remains if any teams will be interested enough in any of the current available players. That, Goin says, may be one of the biggest misconception about the trade deadline. “With media the way it is, internet, Twitter, everything, it gets so much more hype than what actually goes on. You might sit there and no one is calling you back. You may say we’d love to trade. We got guys or we’d like to trade for your guy and you do not get a call back. They literally do not call back. It’s strange. There is a lot of work that actually goes in to prepare for nothingness.”

According to a tweet by the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s David O’Brien, the Braves were at Target Field over the weekend, eyeballing the Twins’ relievers for a potential trade. Naturally, the Braves would want Glen Perkins but O’Brien suggests that Brian Duensing is viewed as a viable alternative. In chatting with Duensing after Saturday’s game, Duensing said that he is beginning to feel more comfortable with his full-time role in the bullpen. He still prepares exclusively for facing left-handed opponents despite seeing a near 50/50 split between lefties (84) and righties (79). His peripheral splits show that he is much better against lefties, which he has a 20-to-5 strikeout-to-walk ratio, compared to righties, where he has a 10-to-12 strikeout-to-walk ratio. Duensing would not command as much in return as Perkins, however, Duensing is under club control until 2016 and, if deployed properly, would be a very good left-handed only reliever.

Yes, says 1500ESPN.com’s Darren Wolfson. According to Wolfson, the Astros’ 28-year-old right-handed starter is a potential target for some on the inside of the Twins’ front office. Writes Wolfson following a conversation with Twins VP of Player Personnel Mike Radcliff: Norris is the Astros’ top starter and possibly the most valuable commodity that they have. At 28-years-old, he’s making just $3M this year and will have two more years of club control past this season. Because of that, the Astros are bound to ask for some top flight prospects in return. Norris has seen his strikeout rate decline since the transition to the American League – dropping from 23% to 16% (below league average of 20%). Admittedly, he has baseball’s worst defenses behind him. Houston has converted just 67.1% of balls in play into outs. Likewise, their 71 errors are the second-most in the game. Having to face a higher percentage of hitters and a more difficult league with a designated hitter means his strikeout rate will inevitably decline. For the Twins, I’d place the likelihood of this happening at roughly 3%.

Via MLB Trade Rumors, ESPN.com’s Jim Bowden provides a couple trade rumors involving the Twins’ Justin Morneau and Glen Perkins. According to Bowden, the Twins are reading themselves to part with Morneau and Bowden speculates that the Rays, Pirates and Yankees could all be potential destinations for the first baseman-DH. He stops short of speculating what Morneau could bring in return, however, based on the fact that he has been 19th in OPS (759) and 20th in WAR (0.8) among first basemen since 2012 and has an expiring contract, there bounty is likely to be underwhelming. Bowden says the interest in Perkins has been high and that such teams as the Cardinals, Reds, Dodgers and Braves have called on the Twins’ closer. Bowden says the Twins have turned away all inquiries. TwinsDaily.com’s Nick Nelson penned a great piece on why the Twins front office should be more open to listening on their best reliever.

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4824[/ATTACH]The Minnesota Twins have excelled in certain areas of their team-building. While they may be light years behind in developing starting pitchers, their ability to identify inexpensive bullpen talent has been impressive when it comes to the arms race. Casey Fien is one such find. For less than a million in salary the 29-year-old right-hander has provided the team with over $7 million in production value, according to Fangraphs.com’s valuation. That is a significant contribution from a pitcher who was on the verge of being organizational flotsam. Had the Twins not picked him up in 2012, Fien knows it could be possible that he would still be shuffling between different clubs’ Triple-A affiliates. He also acknowledges that if it were not for the Twins, he may not be the pitcher he is today. In his life before professional baseball, Fien already lived a fairly nomadic existence. After high school, the right-hander bounced around from three different colleges: William Penn University in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California and finally graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. In 2006, with a small farm community worth of ballplayers selected before him, the Tigers tapped him with pick number five-hundred and ninety-two. Being selected twenty rounds deep in the major league draft does not assure anything. Unless you are a stud high school prospect with college as leverage, draftees rarely make enough to finance a used Honda Accord with their bonus money. The road to the majors is filled with plenty of detours – and Fien’s path shows that. Following a seven-year stint in Detroit’s organization, with ten appearances at the major league level scattered between 2009 and 2010 (a season which began in March with him being waiver claimed by Boston and then Toronto before returning to Detroit less than twenty days later), Fien spent 2011 with the Houston Astros. A minor elbow strain eventually forced the club to cut ties with him in August. After a winter in the Mexican Leagues, the Twins extended him a minor league contract in January 2012. It was not as if Fien lacked the tools to succeed. After all, he had a mid-90s fastball and above average secondary pitches. Something needed to happen. It was then in the Minnesota Twins organization that it all clicked. “That’s a good way to put it,” said Fien. “It just started clicking for me. I started throwing everything for strikes and once you can start someone off-speed and then locate your fastball from then on out it’s your game, not their game.” In a late season call-up, Fien had a 2.06 ERA, the second-lowest among rookies to throw 35 innings or more. Did a change in his approach help him to succeed that year? “I wouldn’t say ‘change it’,” said Fien, “it was more of ‘focusing on what you need to work on’.” And helping him to focus on what he needed to work on was Rochester’s trio of instructors. “The pitching coaches up and down the lineup, they tell you what you need to work on, how to get to the big leagues. Last year, I had two great coaches, I had Bobby [Cuellar], who’s in the bullpen now, and I also had [Rochester manager] Gene Glynn, who was a great person to talk to. And Bruno [Tom Brunansky], Bruno was a guy who I would go to and ask ‘what do I need to do to get these hitters out?’” The 29-year-old California native may have a warm demeanor with a friendly smile in the clubhouse, but out on the mound, he clearly has ice water in his veins. Fien says this was not always the case the previous years in which he was simply trying to throw strikes instead of pitching. The lessons and skills learned from Rochester in 2012 helped turn him into a reliable late innings reliever, and now he has been used more frequently in high leverage situations over the last month as Jared Burton has struggled. What’s more is his services have been requested with numerous runners on base – 30 to be exact in the first half, the seventh highest in the American League. That is a significant undertaking and vote of confidence by the manager considering he allowed 11 of the 25 inherited runners to score last year. To his credit, Fien has allowed just four to score or 13%, a minuscule rate when compared to the league average of 32%. Small sample size notwithstanding, he has clamped down when he needed the final out of an inning, particularly when a runner was in scoring position. According to his splits at Baseball-Reference.com, opponents are 0-for-18 with two outs and have a running on second or beyond. In April, Fien told reporters that in those RISP situations, he uses the hitters’ aggressiveness against them. As hitters begin to smell those RBIs, they tend to expand the zone in efforts to drive that runner in. Using a running cutter/slider, Fien has been able to move this pitch from one side of the strike zone to well off the plate and leaves hitters completely incapacitated. How impressive has his cut piece been? If you search Fangraphs.com’s pitch value leaderboard, Fien’s 8.8 runs above average falls within the top five of qualified relievers and one name ahead of Mariano Rivera, whose cutter has elevated him to legendary status over his career. Matching an approach with the stuff is a surefire method for keeping yourself in the big leagues. “Getting confidence and sticking with your game plan,” Fien says revealing his secret recipe for success. “Because once you try to do something that you are not supposed to…young guys, when they get here, they try to do too much. You just have to find your niche, your comfort zone.”