Parker Hageman

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]3596[/ATTACH]About a year ago, the Minnesota Twins left Florida with a roster of 25, bound for the Twin Cities and, ultimately, the basement of the American League Central. Quite a bit of turnover has occurred from that collection of individuals – a whopping 12 from the 2012 Opening Day roster are no longer with the organization. Several of those players caught on elsewhere but have deemed unfit to place on another team’s 40-man roster. A few of those are out of major league baseball. Among the departed is last year’s Opening Day starter (Carl Pavano, who remains unsigned because of a life-threatening injury sustained while shoveling), the team’s closer (Matt Capps, who was recently cut from the Cleveland Indians but was retained on a minor league deal), two of the five bench bats (Sean Burroughs, unsigned, and Luke Hughes, who last played in Australia) and their situational lefty in the ‘pen (Matt Maloney, who may not pitch much due to recovering from Tommy John surgery). Beyond that group, Opening Day third baseman Danny Valencia failed to catch on with the Baltimore Orioles this spring and will start the season with their Triple-A affiliate. Reliever Jeff Gray did not merit enough of a role to even make the Chicago White Sox’s 40-man either and will be stashed with their International League team as well. Think about that for a second. These were supposed to be either key contributors or maneuverable pieces that turned into flotsam and now a vast majority of the other 25 teams would not bend over to pick up for nothing. Just one year removed from the Twins evaluators determining these guys were among their best 25 players. [How did they ever win 66? It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.] With the finalization of the roster occurring over the next few days, the Twins staff will be attempting to move on from a group that went 6-16 through the season’s first month. The objective of the offseason was to create a rotation that can keep the Twins in the game long enough to remain competitive but this year, the staff is having troubles identifying their number one guy as the Opening Day starting pitcher still remains unknown (but is widely believed to be Worley). Outside of Jamey Carroll, the bench will consist of athletically talented yet unproven players in Eduardo Escobar, Wilkin Ramirez and Darin Mastroianni. Maloney and Gray will be replaced in the bullpen with Tyler Robertson and Ryan Pressly, two guys who have 25 major league innings between the pair. While the success of the team is dependent on the rotation, the starting lineup and defense, depth plays a large role as well. Is this group solid enough to finish April at or near .500, let alone for the duration of the season?

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1500ESPN.com's Darren Wolfson tweeted this morning a few minor revelations. According to Wolfson, the representatives from the recently released utility man Yuniesky Betancourt (Phillies) and pitcher Freddy Garcia (Padres) have contacted the Minnesota Twins but the organization informed the agencies that the team was not interested in either veteran.

Pelfrey: It did not go...terrifically. In 5 innings, he allowed 3 runs on 7 hits.

The Minnesota Twins announced this afternoon that pitchers Scott Diamond and Anthony Swarzak will begin the season on the 15-day DL.

I am not suggesting because of Porcello's 18 innings of success that Hendriks' should do the same. Hendriks should do that same because of the simplification of his repertoire and the addition by subtraction of removing his slider from the arsenal.

Hendriks' issue seems to mimic that of Detroit's Rick Porcello. This spring, the Tigers wanted Porcello to refine his slider but he has since moved away from throwing that pitch and thrown his curveball more, which has been a better overall pitch in a small sample size. In late February, Porcello told Jason Beck that: Porcello's had a heck of a spring since embracing the curve - in 18 innings he's struck out 18 and walked none. This Fangraphs.com piece shows what that hook is like which is very similar to what we've seen out of Hendriks. My advice to Hendriks would be to do something similar to Porcello and work on the curve and shelve the slider for now.

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]3564[/ATTACH]On Thursday night, the Minnesota Twins showcased two of their potential starters for their remaining rotation vacancy – Liam Hendriks and Cole Devries. Together, the pair silenced the Yankees’ bats over eight innings, allowing just one unearned run over eight innings. Of course, spring training is not about the results but the process. For Hendriks, that process included peppering in more non-fastballs. As was discussed during the Fox Sports North broadcast, the Twins staff were looking for Hendriks to mix in more of his secondary offerings after he became what they felt was too reliant on his fastball during his last outing. “It was coming out of my hand well,” Hendriks told reports afterwards. “Curveball was good. Mainly slider to the righties, curveball to the lefties." Perhaps Hendriks’ biggest issue right now is his inability to shut down right-handed hitters. Last year, lefties slapped him around to the tune of .768 OPS. Righties, meanwhile, torched him with a 1.020 OPS. Among starters with a minimum of 30 innings against right-handed hitters, Hendriks’ .351 batting average was the highest in baseball. Against righties, he is a two-pitch pitcher, arming himself with a fastball and a slider. The slider, up to this point in his career, has been a detriment to his success. According to BaseballProspectus.com’s leaderboard, Hendriks’ slider created the lowest percentage of outs in baseball last year. His slider had “put away” just 4.1% of hitters on the times it was thrown, making it terribly ineffective. C.C. Sabathia, a Yankee sitting across the field from Hendriks yesterday, managed to retire 32% of his opponents on that pitch – the highest rate in baseball. It does not take a math major to realize there is a huge chasm between the results of Sabathia’s offering and the one Hendriks spins. Did we learn anything new from this most recent spring start? Probably not. After all, the Yankees only threw out three right-handed hitters against Hendriks: Kevin Youkilis, Eduardo Nunez and Francisco Cervelli. A literal non-Murderer’s Row of Yankee sluggers. Nevertheless, to his credit, with the exception of the fourth-inning walk to the shaved Youkilis, Hendriks did his job – none of the aforementioned righties reached base. I’ve cited several times over that one of Hendriks’s biggest issues is his slider and the coaching staff likely recognizes this as well. During his last bullpen session prior to the start, the 24 year-old struggled with his secondary offerings’ location. “During my bullpen, during my offspeed, I could not locate a single thing,” Hendriks told reporters. “It was disgraceful. [Anderson] said ‘Stay back, stay relaxed.’” Unquestionably, the curveball looked sharp. He maintained a strong 12-to-6 break with this pitch and kept the Yankees’ left-handed unit at bay, one that included renowned sluggers like Travis Hafner and World Baseball Classic winner, Robinson Cano. Hendriks’ fastball command helped set up that giant breaking ball and kept the lefties off-balanced for the duration of his outing. But there were occasions in while he seemed to lack the confidence in that pitch. During an early battle with Hafner, the Aussie held a 2-2 advantage but shook catcher Drew Butera off twice before throwing a fastball (a ball) and then followed it up with a second fastball (fouled off) before missing with a curve. The shake-off could have been a cat-and-mouse game of shaking off a fastball only to set up Hafner for the fastball still, however, his admittance of command issues of his breaking stuff in his recent pen session only seems to reaffirm the notion that Hendriks shook off a curve. If 2012 has any bearings on it, Hendriks has demonstrated that he shies away from his breaking stuff when he is ahead of the hitters. Look at his pitch breakdown from BrooksBaseball.com from last year: [ATTACH=CONFIG]3565[/ATTACH] What Hendriks needs is more confidence in his secondary pitches. He pitches backwards by throwing his non-fastballs out-front but he fails in the sense that he does not have a put-away pitch. Spotting his fastball will only get him so far. And, to this point in his career, that has meant success at Triple-A. With Samuel Deduno making a strong case for one of the two positions open in the rotation, the race is tightening between Hendriks and Devries.

I don't know when it was created but Dan Szymborski (the guy who generates the ZiPs projection system) shared it earlier this week on Twitter. ThePuck's comments just made me think about that.

I will say this: There seems to be an effort to change from that previous mentality. Trevor May & Alex Meyer represent a significant deviation from that. The last draft showed more power arms than finesse-types. It's hard to just bring in power arms, particularly through the free agent market, but it appears the organization is making in-roads towards that.

Over at BaseballNation.com, Rob Neyer directed our attention to a recent piece constructed by Bill James, at his side project, BillJamesOnline.com (subscription re'q). In the piece, James takes aim at the notion that ground ball pitchers are more valuable than other types of pitchers, to which James says simply isn't true: He rattles off a list of the game's best pitchers, all of which happened to be more fly ball oriented. James then went on to list the number of ground ball pitchers who had two or three years of success but wound up injured (like Chien-Ming Wang or Brandon Webb): Neyer raises some very valid points regarding James's statements made without a complete study done on injuries (which I bet will be done soon!), but, overall, it raises some questions about the Minnesota Twins and their recent penchant for ground-ballers. In the past decade, the Twins have had several of sinkerball pitchers have two or three goods years but either out of the major leagues because of injury or ineffectiveness (possibly due to injury). Joe Mays and Carlos Silva come to mind. Currently, the Twins also have brought in more of these types this off-season (including Mike Pelfrey and Vance Worley) and have others in-house who are coming off of surgery (like Kyle Gibson and Nick Blackburn). Clearly, a study needs to be conducted to see if James's statements hold water, but if true, then the Twins strategy of grabbing ground-balling types is very misguided.

Pitch FX has the ability to catalogue pitches based on spin and movement. While thrown at similar speeds, curves have more horizontal run than a change (which typically run the opposite direction). If you look at Deduno's game charts, you can see the distinct difference in the break of the curve (purple triangles) versus his change (red): Now, there's definitely going to be some miscategorization, as you can see, there is some blending of his "cutter" (which is likely just his fastball since he has only one grip) and some blending of his change with his fastball. In terms of Kaat not recognizing his pitches, even the most advanced baseball people will have troubles deciphering pitches from time to time, especially with guys they are not following constantly.

Grantland.com's Jonah Keri takes an extremely in-depth look at base larceny with notably thief Coco Crisp. Keri and Crisp review video of Crisp swiping bases and the A's center fielder describes his thought process and what he is seeing in each pitcher's moves. One example happened to come against the Minnesota Twins' Brian Duensing in August of last year. Duensing (and his catching mate) allowed five steals on six attempts in 2012 and Crisp explain a little bit about why: As a team which allowed the highest swipe percentage in baseball (82% success rate), the 2013 Twins need to limit the damage on the base paths.