Davy Andrews

Carlos Correa only played 83 games, and the Twins only won 82. But don't let that distract you from what Correa just accomplished. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images What with the injury and the trade rumors and the gut-wrenching slow-motion trainwreck that was the final quarter of the Twins’ season, this article is here just to serve as a simple reminder: Carlos Correa had an absolutely bonkers 2024. According to FanGraphs, Correa put up 4.3 WAR in 2024 despite playing in just 83 games. That was the fourth-highest total of what has at least an outside chance of being a Hall of Fame career. This century, 153 shortstops have had seasons in which they put up at least 3.9 fWAR. Would you like to guess how many of them played fewer games than Correa? If you guessed zero, then you were right. In half a season, Correa was the 26th-most valuable position player in baseball. When he went down with plantar fasciitis on Jul. 12, his 3.6 fWAR ranked 10th among all position players. To be sure, having a great first half is never a guarantee that you’re going to have a great second half, but that’s still extraordinary. As much of a bummer as it is, staying healthy is a skill, and players who can do it deserve recognition. I’m not trying to say that Correa should be viewed as the best player in baseball this season, or even the best player on the Twins. What I am saying is that his absence made it too easy to ignore just how special this (half-)season was. Let’s not fall into that trap. Before we dig into just how Correa amassed all that WAR, I’ll just say quickly that this is why I’m not too worried about the trade speculation. Don’t get me wrong; I would be straight-up devastated if the Twins were to trade Correa. However, while it might be easy for Twins fans to miss this particular silver lining after a very cloudy season, I assure you that teams around baseball have not. They get just how valuable Correa is, especially considering his contract situation. He’s signed through the 2028 season, with another four years of club options at progressively smaller dollar amounts, which means that exercising them would reduce the contract’s average annual value against the competitive balance tax. You can bet that for Correa to accede to a deal, he would want at least one of those options exercised. Stop for a moment and try to imagine the prospect haul that would be required to acquire Correa on (say) an eight-year deal with a lower AAV than Nathan Eovaldi's. So while the Twins might listen to offers, it would take a monster offer for them to even consider it. Okay, let’s talk about how Correa did it. View full article

Look, it's a long offseason. Use this information to impress your Twins fan friends and repel everyone else on earth. Image courtesy of © Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images Did you know that in 2024, Byron Buxton was the best ground-ball hitter in baseball? Of course you didn’t know that. Why would anyone know that? It’s information that offers no tangible benefit to anyone. It barely qualifies as trivia. But now you know it. In 2024, Buxton hit 75 ground balls, and on those ground balls, he batted .400 with an absurd 155 wRC+. The league as a whole batted .249, with a wRC+ of just 41. Buxton was more than three times better than the average player! To be clear, this means nothing at all. Buxton is a career .304 hitter on groundballs, with a wRC+ of 68. In 2024, he hit his grounders harder than usual, but not the hardest he’s ever hit them. It’s just a fun fact—one that you can use at holiday parties to signal to people that they shouldn’t waste any more time talking to you. Having the ability to successfully chat people up is a useful gift, but even more useful is the ability to say something so specifically meaningless that they’ll leave you alone. That’s our goal for the day. We’re ice fishing for fun, useless stats. Here's our second stupid fact of the day. Stathead has a split finder feature, in which it separates pitchers into groundball pitchers or fly ball pitchers. Against fly ball pitchers, the Twins were the best team in baseball. Their .782 OPS was the highest in the league, and their 114 home runs trailed only the Yankees. That part makes sense. The Twins have cultivated a team full of hitters who try to pull the ball in the air. They’re going to fare well against pitchers who throw four-seamers up in the zone. If we look in the other direction, you won’t be surprised to learn that against groundball pitchers, the Twins ranked all the way down at 25th, with a .667 OPS. In fact, if you look at the past five seasons, the Twins still rank all the way down at 25th. That’s one of the dangers of cultivating a team with a singular focus, rather than a diversity of approaches and swing paths. Everyone will have the same weakness. Wait, we’re coming dangerously close to pulling a lesson from our statistics, and that’s not what we’re going for at all. Let’s get back to nonsense: You know how the Twins were the best team in baseball against fly ball pitchers? Well they also grounded into the most double plays against fly ball pitchers. They grounded into 60 double plays against fly ball pitchers. How is that even possible? Against groundball pitchers, they ranked all the way down at 21st! View full article

In 2024, the Minnesota staff sat at the top of the league in several categories. What can that tell us about the organization as a whole? Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I love looking at the pitching or hitting stats for an entire team. I think it might have started because of the 2023 Braves, who just raked all season long from top to bottom, but I love going over to the League Statistics pages on Statcast and sorting by all the different columns. Every team is made up dozens of players with their own individual styles and skill levels, but I like to think of each team as its own little ecosystem. The players themselves and the way they develop are informed by the environment the team provides. For example, the Twins prize velocity and prefer four-seam fastballs, and that has informed both the pitchers they’ve acquired and what they’ve taught their young pitchers once they got them. I bring all this up because, as I was sorting the other day, I noticed something interesting. That one interesting thing took me down an entire rabbit hole, and I am now going to drag you down with me. Here’s where it started: I noticed that this season, opposing batters loved to swing at the Twins’ pitches. Their 49.7% swing rate trailed only the Mariners, whose opponents swung almost exactly 50% of the time. To tell you the truth, I’m not positive what that super-high swing rate means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. It definitely makes sense, in that the Twins threw a lot of strikes. Their 50.6% zone rate ranked third in baseball, behind the Rays and the Red Sox. But it wasn’t quite as simple as, "They threw strikes, so their opponents swung more often." The Twins ranked third in swing rate both inside and outside the zone. Awhile back I did a study about which stadiums have the best batter’s eye in center field, and therefore make it easier to see the ball. One way I measured that was to check the batters’ plate discipline, thinking that at ballparks where the batters could see the ball better, they’d make better swing decisions. But that turned out to be wrong. When batters could see the ball better, they swung more often at offerings both inside and outside the zone. The ball just looked juicier to them, so they swung more. This is purely a guess, but maybe the Twins’ high swing rate meant that they lacked deception, or that their pitches were somewhat predictable. Here's another strange thing: When you think of teams who hit the strike zone a lot, you probably think of teams who throw a lot of fastballs, since breaking and offspeed pitches are so often designed to generate chases and whiffs. But you’d be wrong (and by you, I actually mean me, because that’s what I thought until I looked it up). The Twins threw a four-seamer, sinker, or cutter 49.3% of the time, lowest in all of baseball. The league average was nearly 56%. The Twins hit the strike zone a ton even though they threw fewer fastballs than any other team in baseball. View full article

Why did the advanced metrics love the Twins' pitching staff so much more than the traditional ones? Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images The Twins' pitching staff ran a 4.26 ERA in 2024. That ranked just 21st in baseball, and it was one of the reasons they missed the playoffs. In fact, here’s the list of playoff teams that had a worse ERA than the Twins: nobody. Not a single playoff team had a worse ERA than the Twins. Want to play in October? You need to pitch well. However, it’s not quite that simple. As our knowledge of the game’s intricacies has advanced, ERA has fallen from its place of prominence. A wide variety of ERA estimators attempt to account for factors outside the pitcher’s control—defense, batted ball luck, sequencing, park factors—in order to get a better idea of what the pitcher actually did right or wrong. Fielding-independent pitching (FIP) looks only at the three true outcomes of walks, homers, and strikeouts (as well as the long-slighted fourth true outcome, hit-by-pitches; what could be truer than throwing a baseball directly into the flesh of a fellow human being?). FIP has long been known to be more predictive of a pitcher’s future performance than ERA. xFIP takes things a step further. It replaces a pitcher’s actual home run total with the number of dingers that Statcast thinks they deserved to give up. I bring all this up because if you look at these estimators, you’ll see that they tell a very different story about the Twins staff (and season) than their ERA does. The table below shows how the team fared according to various stats. The first row shows the raw numbers, and the second shows their rank among all MLB teams. Calling the difference stark would really be underselling things. Metric ERA FIP xFIP DRA SIERA ERA- FIP- xFIP- DRA- Raw 4.26 3.84 3.83 4.14 3.65 106 94 94 93 Rank 21 7 5 4 3 22 6 4 4 Nearly every advanced metric thinks that the Twins had a top-five pitching staff in 2024. Top five! How did they end up ranked 21st in ERA? View full article

The Twins were uniquely bad at bunting in 2024, but they also might have been uniquely good at bunting. Image courtesy of © Erik Williams-Imagn Images You probably know that the Twins weren’t big bunters in 2024. But did you know that they had just two bunt hits all season? Two bunts! You can count them on one hand, even if you’re a lobster. As you might have guessed, that was the lowest total in the league. Most teams had more than 10. Forty-nine different individual players had more bunt base hits than the entire Twins team. We started tracking these things in 2002, and if you throw out the short 2020 season, the 2018 A’s are the only team that has ever had fewer bunt hits. They had zero. The Twins bunted just 24 times in total, the sixth-lowest mark in baseball. Still, while the absolute number is extreme, it’s not surprising that the Twins didn’t bunt a lot. For starters, they weren’t built for small ball. They had a top-10 offense with a lot of power but not much speed. Actually, that doesn’t quite do justice to the reality of the situation, so let me phrase it differently: the Twins had no speed whatsoever. They ranked last in sprint speed, stolen bases, and stolen base attempts, and they ranked in the bottom five in success rate and overall baserunning value. Moreover, the team’s only real burner, Byron Buxton, was also its best power hitter. Nobody would recommend taking the bat out of Buxton’s hands. Plenty of us enjoy watching more of an old-school approach, but with a roster like Minnesota’s, bunting regularly would have been downright irresponsible. The numbers bear that out and then some. FanGraphs tracks the percentage of your bunts that go for hits, and Statcast allows you to find the batting average of a team’s bunts. The majority of the teams in the league had a bunt hit rate above 30% and a batting average on bunts above .460. The Twins were at 8% and .143, the worst in baseball on both counts. I also made my own bunt success metric. Even though the numbers say that sacrifice bunts aren’t necessarily the smart play, I wanted to give teams credit for succeeding or failing at whatever they were trying to do. To that effect, I took each team’s total number of bunts, then I subtracted their bunt base hits, successful sacrifice bunts, and bunts where the batter reached on an error. That left just the bunts that ended up as regular old outs, either because a base hit attempt or a sacrifice attempt didn’t work out. Then I divided that number by the total number of bunts. For the Twins, it was 50%. Half of the time, their bunts were total failures. Only the Red Sox, whose bunts failed a catastrophic 56% of the time, were worse. Atlanta finished in first place with an astonishing 11%. Just two of their 18 bunts ended up as failures. Just to recap what we’ve established so far, the Twins didn’t bunt much because they were super slow. And as expected, on the rare occasions when they did bunt, things went very, very badly. You could make a strong argument that when they got a bunt down, no team in baseball was worse than the Twins. But this story has a surprise twist! Are you ready? The Twins were extremely unsuccessful when they got a bunt down, BUT they were the best team in baseball at getting the bunt down! View full article

Trevor Larnach improved against soft stuff in 2024, but he still saw more of it than just about any other player. Ever. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-Imagn Images Let’s take a moment to make sure that we appreciate how good a season Trevor Larnach just had. Before the 2024 season, Larnach had played in 188 big-league games over three seasons, running a 96 wRC+ that made him a slightly below-average hitter. In 2024, despite dealing with injuries and some bad batted-ball luck, he put up a wRC+ of 121 over 112 games and 400 plate appearances. That made him the fourth-best hitter on a Twins team that finished the season with a top-10 offense. Look at the difference in his slash line stats. Season AVG OBP SLG wRC+ 2021-2023 .222 .315 .385 96 2024 .259 .338 .434 121 Difference .037 .023 .049 25 Larnach added 37 points of batting average, 23 points of on-base percentage, and 49 points of slugging. After striking out more than a third of the time in his first three seasons, he dropped his strikeout rate all the way to 22%. That was a huge improvement, and it was also absolutely necessary. His defensive limitations mean that in order to pull his own weight, the 6-foot-4, 223-pound Larnach needs to slug, so it’s a big deal that after three years of trying, he was finally able to do so. If you had to pick one player who epitomized the Minnesota offense, you’d likely go with Matt Wallner, the hot and cold slugger who struck out too much but pulled the ball in the air with unbelievable frequency. Larnach wouldn’t be a bad avatar for the team’s offense either, and not just because he hit well despite struggling to stay healthy. In 2024, 37% of the pitches Larnach saw were either four-seamers or sinkers. Among players who saw at least 750 pitches (roughly 170 plate appearances), that was the lowest fastball rate in all of baseball. In fact, that fastball rate is one of the lowest ever recorded. Sports Info Solutions has been tracking pitches since 2002. Over those 23 years, there have been 4,625 player seasons of at least 400 PAs. Larnach’s fastball rate ranks second from the bottom. That last part shouldn’t necessarily be surprising, because fastball rates have been dropping for as long as we’ve been measuring them, and most likely ever since the game began. In 2024, Larnach almost certainly ran one of the lowest fastball rates in all of baseball history. As for why that makes him a good representative for the Twins, well, Larnach wasn’t exactly alone. As a team, the Twins saw fastballs just 44.8% of the time, the second-lowest rate in the league. They were the only team in baseball without a single player who took at least 15 PAs and had a fastball rate of 50% or higher. Austin Martin came closest. He saw 466 fastballs and 468 other pitches; if just one got reclassified, he’d be at 50%, exactly. Player Fastball% Player Fastball% Austin Martin 49.9 Max Kepler 44.9 Ryan Jeffers 49 Byron Buxton 45.1 Kyle Farmer 48.8 Royce Lewis 43.9 Christian Vázquez 48.8 Jose Miranda 43.7 Manuel Margot 48.5 Alex Kirilloff 39.7 Carlos Correa 47 Edouard Julien 40.8 Matt Wallner 45.8 Carlos Santana 40.7 Willi Castro 46 Trevor Larnach 36.8 Brooks Lee 45.4 View full article

In 2024, the Twins were the best team in baseball at pulling the ball in the air. With the entire hitting staff gone, what does that mean for the 2025 season? Image courtesy of © Jordan Johnson-Imagn Images So let’s start at the beginning. Going by weighted on-base percentage (wOBA, if you’re in a hurry), here’s the value of each kind of batted ball during the 2024 season. Groundball: .228 Line Drive: .642 Fly Ball: .420 Popup: .014 Fly balls are good. Line drives are great. So long as you don’t pop the ball up, hitting the ball in the air is where it’s at. Let’s get a little bit more granular, now, and break down those air balls by spray angle. Pull: .792 Straightaway: .427 Opposite. 362 All three are still great, but pulling the ball in the air is even more where it's at; it's where "where it's at" is at. There are two big reasons for that: First, you tend to hit the ball harder when you pull it. Second, center field is where the fence is deepest and the best outfielders play. Even though pulled balls are hit harder, this season, the average pulled home run was hit at an exit velocity of 104.2 mph, while the average home run to center was hit 105.9 mph. It just takes more mustard to hit it out to center. Maybe you hate the focus on power and launch angle that has taken over the game, for aesthetic reasons. That’s completely understandable. But the numbers above are too clear to ignore. They’re why everybody is trying to pull the ball in the air. So far, I’m guessing I haven’t surprised you, but maybe you will be surprised to learn that in 2024, no team pulled the ball in the air as much as the Twins. The Twins pulled 819 line drives and fly balls, which represented 7.2% of their swings, 13.4% of their total plate appearances, and 19.3% of their batted balls. All four of those numbers were the highest in baseball. Everybody is trying to pull the ball in the air, and the Twins were the most successful team in the league, not just this season, but in the entirety of the Statcast Era. Since Statcast started measuring these things in 2015, that 13.4% mark is the highest in baseball. In second place? The 2019 Twins, who pulled the ball in the air in 13.1% of their plate appearances, and who inspired Matt Trueblood to coin the statistical phrase "Bomba Rate". In today’s game, Isaac Paredes is the poster boy for pulling the ball in the air. Doing so allows him to hit the ball out of the ballpark even when he doesn’t get all of it. In 2024, Paredes’s average home run was hit at just 99.8 mph. He was the only player in baseball who hit more than 15 homers and whose homers had an average exit velocity under 100 mph. That’s his specialty, and when Paredes put the ball in the play, he pulled it in the air 28.9% of the time, the highest rate of all qualified players. But you know what the Twins specialized in last season? Players who didn’t get enough playing time to qualify. If we drop the batted ball minimum to 200, Byron Buxton jumps into first place at 29.1%. That’s right, higher than Paredes. View full article

The flame-throwing closer saw his release point — and his velocity — drop in 2024. How did that happen, and might be be able to raise them again? Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images Last week, Matthew Trueblood wrote about the importance of fastball shape, highlighting the particular attributes that the Twins prize most highly. Today, I’d like to look into the shape of the team’s most exciting fastball: Jhoan Durán’s four-seamer. First, let’s address the elephant in the room: Duran saw his ERA rise from 2.45 in 2023 to 3.64 in 2024. That’s not great, but if you’re reading this site, you probably know already that Duran dealt with some really bad luck. His FIP and xFIP were actually lower than in 2023. His .321 BABIP was higher than 85% of all pitchers (minimum 50 innings pitched). When batters put the ball in play, the 53-point difference between his wOBA and xwOBA was higher than 96% of all pitchers (minimum 100 batted balls). Results can be fluky--especially for relief pitchers, who have smaller sample sizes. I’d like to focus instead on process, because even if the results were influenced by luck, Durán’s fastball really did change shape this season. Let’s start with some cold, hard numbers, courtesy of Statcast’s new arm angle metrics. As you can see, the angle of Duran’s weird, black arm has fallen five degrees from last season. His vertical release point has fallen from 6.09 feet to 5.96 feet, a difference of 1.56 inches. To be clear, things aren't quite as simple as the graphic above makes them appear. Over the past two seasons, his release point has tended to fall throughout the year. Still, generally speaking, when a pitcher lowers their arm angle, they should expect less vertical break, more horizontal break, and less velocity. That’s exactly what happened to Duran’s four-seamer. View full article