Matthew Trueblood

I don't lean on *any* of those numbers in evaluating a pitcher, in fact. I look at each, but a good evaluation runs deeper than a couple of numbers, anyway, and I keep some homespun stats that suit my predilections better than any of them. I went with FIP for this article because that's what Zoll mentioned specifically at the press conference. The Twins are thinking about their FIP—not in simple terms, of course, but it's part of their approach to the question of what went wrong this year. That stat, specifically.

I agree that that was the premise of FIP when it was introduced, 20 years ago. We now know much better, and our usage of the figure as both a stat and a shorthand needs to be updated accordingly. No team believes, any longer, that there's a negligible difference between pitchers when it comes to outcomes on balls in play. The differences between them are complicated, though, and there's a tradeoff between value generated in plate appearances that end with something other than a BIP and value created by improving expected outcomes on BIP. That's, now, where FIP fits: It's a starting point for a conversation about whether pitchers are making the right tradeoffs or not.

Eleven pitchers threw at least 50 innings for the 2026 Minnesota Twins. Six of them—Taj Bradley, Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, Zebby Matthews, Taylor Rogers and Kody Funderburk—finished with ERAs that were essentially reflective of their fielder-independent skills, as measured by FIP (Fielder Independent Pitching). All six of those guys had FIPs within 0.20 of their ERAs. Of the other five hurlers, though, four had markedly worse ERAs than their FIPs would have predicted. Connor Prielipp's ERA was 1.14 worse than his FIP. Yoendrys Gómez's was 0.22 worse. Andrew Morris was 1.11 worse, and Travis Adams was 0.55 worse. Only Dean Kremer prevented runs better than his strikeout, walk and home-run rates would have predicted. He had a 3.48 ERA in his stint with Minnesota, against a 3.82 FIP. As a team, the Twins had a 4.23 FIP but a 4.56 ERA. The former ranked 20th in the majors; the latter ranked 25th. The failure to prevent runs as well as their pitchers' baseline skills suggested they should cost the Twins about six games in the standings; they missed the playoffs by seven games. One major reason why results fail to live up to pitchers' skills (at an individual or team level) is defensive support, and the Twins know they didn't offer their pitchers good defensive help in 2026. Brooks Lee was a great third baseman, but only moved there after six dreadful weeks at shortstop. The team didn't find an adequate defensive regular at short until mid-August, when they called up Kaelen Culpepper. Luke Keaschall began the season at second base, where he's a butcher. He's not good in the outfield, either, but moving him there mitigated the damage—too late for many Twins hurlers. Royce Lewis was a fine first baseman, but only landed there after a failure in his final trial at third base. Trevor Larnach is a bad defensive outfielder. Kody Clemens is a fine defender, but has limited range and arm strength and was often asked to do more than he's capable of—like playing center field, in one stretch. With Lee, Culpepper and Keaschall at the spots that suit them best and young legs (Walker Jenkins and Emmanuel Rodriguez) taking over in the outfield, the team is optimistic about their 2027 defense. That might improve the results their pitchers enjoy, on its own. However, pitching coach Pete Maki was still fired at the end of the season, and the team hired long-time Rays minor-league pitching coach Brian Reith to take his place. Why? Some of the answer might lie in those FIP gaps. At the end-of-year press conference, managers and executives always try to avoid saying anything about anything without being directly asked about it. It's just part of the modern team's information hygiene routine. They stay mum unless directly asked to comment on a topic, and when that happens, they try not to give away anything valuable. Jeremy Zoll made it most of the way through the press availability the team held just after the end of the regular season without breaking that rule. Here was his one wobble. "We spent a lot of time in spring talking about [how] we thought starting pitching was going to be our heartbeat," Zoll said, in response to a question about the depth of his rotation. "[We] fell short of that being true, and we need to go under the hood on these gaps between our FIP and our ERA over the last number of years, and the impact that defense is having on that, and some of the position changes we're having, but also to know that when you dream on what the rotation could look like for 2027, it's hard not to be extremely excited, knowing how strong of a foundation that would give us for the rest of the roster." No one had asked Zoll about the interaction between skills and results. That wasn't the thread of the conversation in which he was then engaged. He introduced that thought, which is telling. The Twins are concerned about the fact that their results on the mound don't match the talent they believe they've assembled. That's a big part of why Maki lost his job, and why Reith is here now. It's true that the Twins need to play better defense. Getting to more balls and converting the ones fielders reach into outs more reliably is a goal for every team, but it's especially important for teams who haven't done it well recently; that's the state of the Twins here in the fall of 2026. However, there are also ways for pitchers to affect the quality of contact they surrender and the likelihood of hits on balls in play against them, and if the team concluded that they haven't been doing enough to make their defense's job easier via savvy pitching, they reached the right conclusion—albeit a bit later than they should have. Pitchers' top objective is to miss bats. It's vital that hurlers have ways to induce weak contact (or at least to minimize hard contact) when batters do touch the ball, though, for two reasons: It's not always possible to strike people out; some contact is inevitable. The harder one has to try for a strikeout to get an out, the more susceptible one is to high pitch counts and walks, which are trouble of a different kind. We now have granular data on what happens when bat meets ball: where along the bat did the contact occur? Was it up the handle, or out on the end of the lumber? Did the hitter have the pitch timed up, and therefore have a good chance to hit the ball forward? Did they hit the top or the bottom of the ball? These are all valuable data, but one element controls exit velocity and the overall quality of contact most. It's the horizontal location of contact along the barrel. Getting a hitter to hit it off the end of the bat or up the handle a bit weakens contact and makes a hit much less likely. Last season, the Twins allowed the most centered contact on fastballs of any team in the majors. They were, simply, too much in the middle of hitters' sweet spots. That's because they've been one of the most four-seam-heavy teams in baseball over the last several seasons. They prefer a four-seamer to either of the other major fastball shapes—especially the sinker. Twins hurlers threw four-seamers on 33.5% of all their pitches in 2026. That's actually part of a downward trend, for them. As they lean ever more into breaking and offspeed stuff, the share of their pitches that were four-seamers has fallen steadily, from 41.8% in 2022 all the way to last year's number. However, the Rays are way ahead of them, on this front. They only threw four-seamers 27.2% of the time last season, and have been under 30% more often than over it in the seasons since the pandemic. Therefore, they were average in getting off the center of hitters' bats in 2026. Their team ERA (3.70) beat their FIP (4.04) by almost exactly the same margin by which the Twins' FIP beat their ERA. Reith won't be able to wave a magic wand over Twins hurlers and produce the same results. The Rays have better defenders than do the Twins, and they're the state of the art in defensive positioning—something the Twins did very poorly in 2026. The Twins also have a collection of pitchers who have developed and been taught to work with the four-seamer at the heart of their arsenal. Sinkers and cutters move off the center of hitters' bats better, though they also produce fewer whiffs than four-seamers do. Reith might be part of a change in pitching philosophy, but it won't be an overnight overhaul. Minnesota has to prevent runs better in 2027, and they need better results on contact to do it. That should and will start with better defense, but their pitchers can also induce contact that's more conducive to outs. Expect Reith to get them throwing more sinkers and/or cutters, whether that's by tinkering with a pitcher's mix or bringing in new arms with different arsenals. It's not time to abandon what the Twins have done well over the last few years, but they need to update their pitching paradigm. In Reith, they chose someone already familiar with the how and why of switching lanes (literally and figuratively) in the pursuit of better pitching outcomes. Image courtesy of Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images View full article

I don't think Larnach has much trade value. But it's more than zero. If you limit yourself to hoping for a decent reliever who has minor-league options left—rather than, say, one with late-innings, high-leverage stuff—I think you'll be happier.

No, trading Ryan for six years' worth of Ramírez is about converting short-term value into long-term value. And while pinning too much hope on López would be folly, nor has it proved profitable to count on Ryan delivering a full season of above-average work.

Twins general manager Jeremy Zoll faces a tall order this winter. Owner Tom Pohlad has loudly proclaimed that expectations around the team are rising, and while Pohlad has also pledged to boost the payroll in support of grander goals, not all problems can be solved with money. If the Twins want to make the playoffs in 2027, they need to make some significant changes this winter. I believe they will, but they might well stop a step or two short of where they really need to go—or simply be outbid for a player who's key to their plans. Using our Offseason Blueprint tool, I've sketched out what I think would be the ideal Twins offseason. It's no small set of changes; this would mark the end of one Twins era and the dawn of a new one. Not Counting on Victor Caratini, and Not Waiting on Vahn Lackey Ryan Jeffers will depart via free agency. That's not for certain, but it's a prediction I offer confidently. I wrote late last week about why the Twins might not even extend the qualifying offer to Jeffers, and even why that might be the right choice. One way or another, I expect Jeffers to leave, but that doesn't mean the team should or will leave the position in the hands of veteran Victor Caratini. I have the team signing erstwhile Reds backstop Tyler Stephenson, whom the Blueprint tool assigns a salary of $8 million for 2027. I think that's about right; he would get that amount each year on a two-year pact. The idea is to bridge the gap from Jeffers to top prospect Vahn Lackey, whom the Twins selected with the third overall pick in July's MLB Draft. Caratini is miscast as anything above a complementary option. Stephenson, a solid righty bat with a shaky defensive profile, is similarly limited, but the two players fit nicely into the team's longstanding preference for balanced playing time between two catchers. Caratini will slough off the roster after 2027, but in this scenario, Stephenson would still be in position to support Lackey and keep him fresh in 2028. Jettisoning Royce Lewis, and Aiming a Whole Lot Higher at First Base I don't think the Twins face an interesting dilemma or a crossroads with Royce Lewis this fall. I think Lewis is just a bad player whom the team needs to get rid of, whether that's via trade or non-tender. The raw talent remains somewhat in evidence, but Lewis is too flawed a hitter for so limited a defender, and injuries have dimmed his former athletic brilliance. The team shouldn't put itself in any position to pay him significant money in 2027. Nor should they let him stand in the way of needed improvements, including at the positions where he's been such an underwhelming presence over the last three seasons. My plan includes getting rid of Lewis and signing top free-agent first baseman Jake Bauers, whom the Blueprint values at $18 million. I think it's possible Bauers makes even more than that, but let's imagine a four-year, $72-million deal and call it good. For a player with elite bat speed, excellent plate discipline and a positive clubhouse presence, that's still a great deal. The Twins need more reliable thump in the middle of their lineup; Bauers is capable of providing it. He might also cost the team a draft pick—the Brewers should extend Bauers a qualifying offer late Monday afternoon—but Bauers can be an anchor of the batting order for multiple seasons to come. There's another noteworthy change to the 2027 infield picture on my Blueprint: current Cubs infielder Pedro Ramírez. We'll talk more about how he could become the 2027 Twins' second baseman later. Not much later, though! A Starting Rotation Reset Although the bullpen came in for criticism all season, quietly, the Twins' starting rotation wasn't good enough, either. That's been true in each of the last three years, as the names in the team's starting mix outdid the production each year. This winter, rather than hold onto the group that has ill-served them of late, I propose resetting the starting unit and reallocating some resources. In this scenario, the Twins would deal Joe Ryan to the Cubs, in exchange for Ramírez and outfielder Kevin Alcántara. Ramírez, 22, batted .261/.321/.402 as a rookie in 2026, and is under team control through 2032. He has a bit of speed and power, but no place in the Cubs' long-term plans, after they locked themselves into several years of Nico Hoerner and Alex Bregman at second and third base, respectively. Alcántara is toolsy but strikeout-prone, and he's out of options next spring. The Twins would have to keep him on the big-league roster in order to retain him, but he's a right-handed batter who mashes lefty pitching, so there's at least a chance he's a solid fit. I also have the team trading or non-tendering starter Bailey Ober, though not for a substantial return. With the money they save on Ryan and Ober, the club then signs (in my vision) Michael Soroka, who turned down his side of a mutual option with the Diamondbacks to become a free agent over the weekend. Soroka, 29, had a 3.41 ERA in 116 innings for Arizona in 2026. He profiles as a solid back-end starter and a possible mid-rotation guy, with an arsenal (and, in particular, a capacity for missing bats) that should appeal to the Twins. Pablo López anchors the rotation as I envision it, with Taj Bradley, Dean Kremer, Connor Prielipp and Soroka backing him up. Two Major Bullpen Upgrades Finally, I foresee two more forays into free agency for the team, to shore up that aforementioned relief corps. Jeff Hoffman should be ready to deliver a full season at the back end of the pen, but the Twins need more upside than they'll get from the likes of Andrew Morris and Tommy Nance in the middle innings. I'm predicting that they sign Jonathan Loáisiga, another free agent wrapping up a successful stint with Arizona, and lefty JoJo Romero, a teammate of Bauers's at the end of the season with the World Series-winning Brewers. Loáisiga underwent an impressive transformation this year with the Snakes, with a well-conceived move to the first-base side of the rubber and a few corresponding tweaks to his pitch mix. He doesn't miss bats the way one might expect a hard-throwing righty reliever to do, but he induces weak contact well and still has the stuff to see the strikeout rate tick back up. Meanwhile, Romero showed late in the season that he has more sheer power than he might have initially let on. He frequently touched 96 miles per hour with his heavy sinker during Milwaukee's title run, and might be a sneaky high-leverage option at a middle-reliever price this offseason. The Big Picture I'm advocating for an offseason in which the Twins pivot hard toward a future centered on their top young players. Kaelen Culpepper, Brooks Lee, Emmanuel Rodríguez, Walker Jenkins, Luke Keaschall and the newcomer Ramírez each play as close to every day as their health permits, in this scenario. Prielipp is guaranteed a rotation spot when he's able to fill it, and space is left for Kendry Rojas, Mick Abel and David Festa, given the inevitable attrition that will affect the rest of the projected group. At the same time, Stephenson, Bauers, Soroka, Loáisiga and Romero constitute a significant investment in the team's short-term future. The 2026 Twins were only slightly better than the 2025 version. The organization hasn't fielded a legitimate winner since 2023. They have a young core in place, and they ought to seize their opportunity to win with it. With these five players replacing (on the whole) less expensive ones like Lewis, Ryan, Ober and Trevor Larnach, I have the Twins committing $150 million to their 2027 payroll, including the money they'll send to Houston as part of last summer's Carlos Correa trade. That's relatively ambitious, but if the Twins can't summon at least that much gumption, they're in for another disappointing year. Image courtesy of Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images View full article

Boy, that Bowden estimate is extra-strength crazy. That dude has no IDEA what's going on anymore. Incredible. But broadly, this is so helpful; thank you. I think the outside view is important here. Jeffers really isn't a premium commodity, league-wide. That makes giving him the QO more of a risk than people on here tend to think, IMO.

The MLB offseason is here, and teams have until 4 PM Central time on Monday to extend qualifying offers to eligible free agents. That's also when the exclusive negotiating window between players and their previous teams expires, opening free agency in full. For the Twins, that means that they need to decide whether to issue that offer to catcher Ryan Jeffers. If he were to accept it, he would receive $23.15 million on a one-year deal. If he declined, the Twins would receive a 2027 draft pick if and when he signs with another team. Jeffers, 29, batted .256/.353/.461 in his walk year, with 14 home runs, 46 walks and 66 strikeouts in 369 plate appearances. It was the second-best offensive season of his career, trailing only 2023, and most fans expect the Twins to make at least a nominal effort to retain him by extending the QO on the back of that strong performance. That might well happen. However, there are a few things pushing against the simple logic of his good performance, as the team weighs its options with regard to what would be a major investment. Jeffers's Doubtful Durability and the Twins' Payroll Utility As the offseason begins, one still-unanswered question is how much the team is willing to back up owner Tom Pohlad's big talk about spending more on payroll than they have over the last two seasons. Based on their end-of-season press conference, the team wants fans to expect significant outlays and a boost to somewhere north of $135 million in spending in 2027. A pessimist might point out, though, that they have every reason to raise expectations that way in October and November. Many ticket sales for the following season (especially season-ticket and group sales, which are teams' major revenue drivers) happen during that early phase of the offseason, so setting high expectations can be helpful even if you're unable (or unwilling) to deliver on them. Presumably, the team has at least some good-faith intention to spend this winter, but they also have plenty of money spoken for already, and that needs to inform their decisions this winter. Pablo López is due $21.5 million in 2027, and while there's optimism (at the moment) that he'll be ready for Opening Day, the reality of recent cases in which pitchers underwent second Tommy John surgeries is that most aren't back on the mound and up to speed until 16 or 17 months after their operation. Justin Steele had surgery in April 2025 and didn't pitch at all in the majors in 2026. Jordan Montgomery had it shortly before Steele and only made it back to the bigs the following August. López had his operation in February, so barring a significant setback, he should be on the mound before the end of June, but that's different than giving the team a full complement of front-of-the-rotation innings. López's case is similar to that of Byron Buxton, who faces a long recovery from surgery on the labrum in his hip. The team hopes he'll be back for Opening Day; the smart money says he won't be. Buxton's base salary for 2027, as with the other years of his contract, is $15 million. The club is also sending $10 million to the Astros again next year, to defray the costs of the Carlos Correa contract they dumped at the 2025 trade deadline. That's nearly $50 million that the team will spend next year on players who either won't play for them or can't be counted upon for a full season's work. A good over/under for batters faced by López is 600. A good one for Buxton's plate appearances is 400. That's not much volume in return for what looks likely to be a third of their payroll. Paying Jeffers another $23 million and change would risk exacerbating that problem. Though he did cobble together 465 plate appearances in 2024 and 464 in 2025, he's never been a durable, high-volume player. Over the last five seasons, there have been 79 player-seasons in which a catcher caught at least 800 innings for their team. Jeffers has never reached that milestone. It's possible that changes next year. Carson Kelly, for instance, had never gotten to 800 innings in a season before joining the Cubs two years ago, and caught more than 860 in each of the last two years, in his early 30s. It's never wise to bet on a catcher becoming suddenly more durable as they cross into their 30s. Can the Twins afford to pay QO-level money for a player who is unlikely to qualify for the batting title? When he's on the field, Jeffers is generally good, but he's not a plus defensive catcher, and if were a semi-regular designated hitter, he wouldn't be an especially impressive one. It might be that the money they're already spending on players who can't stay on the field makes it impossible to justify doing more of the same. The Twins' Approach to Keeping Catchers Fresh Of course, one thing that held down Jeffers's playing time totals during his Twins tenure was outside his control. In the last two seasons of Rocco Baldelli's tenure, the team used the most careful alternating pattern of catcher starts in the history of the sport. Jeffers would start one day; Christian Vázquez would start the next. That worked nicely, too. It exposed the weakness of Vázquez's bat, but it also protected each backstop from overuse and reduced their risk of injury. Neither has otherwise ever been as healthy or as consistent as they were under that playing-time arrangement. That setup allowed Jeffers to get the playing time he did at DH, too. It was part of why the team spent a significant amount on their second catcher again last winter, replacing Vázquez with Victor Caratini. They believe in playing-time parity at catcher, as much as the roster allows, so they try to have a stronger-than-average second option at the position. The natural extension of that mindset, though, is that you don't pay market rates for your first catcher, because other teams will price that player in a way very different from you. They're thinking of using them for 25 more games behind the plate than you are. They're planning on giving them at least 50 more plate appearances than you are. In this case, that means (simply) that paying $23 million for a first catcher is incompatible with the team's approach to the position. That approach isn't set in stone. Derek Shelton, unlike Baldelli, is a former catcher, and he was much more willing to let his backstops play several days in a row in 2026. Then again, that got them into some trouble, in multiple ways, so the organization might try to nudge him back toward their preferred style in 2027. One argument here would be to extend the QO, knowing other teams might see Jeffers as a more important and high-volume piece than the Twins do, and then let him walk away. The risk that Jeffers might accept the offer is not minimal, though. Even fellow Scott Boras client Nick Martinez accepted one for 2025. The Twins can't give a QO unless they're willing to actually pony up that money for Jeffers. Besides, the rest of the league might like to play Jeffers more, but they're unlikely to be keen on giving up a draft pick to do it. Players with durability or role-size questions are exactly the types who often get stranded on the market if they have a QO attached to them. That's why similar hitters to Jeffers, like Trent Grisham and Gleyber Torres, each took the QO last fall. Kelly, the aforementioned comp to Jeffers as a late-blooming catcher, signed with the Cubs for just $11 million over two years, and had no draft compensation encumbrance. The market might dry up as soon as Jeffers is tagged with that offer, so again, the Twins have to anticipate that he might accept it, and plan their choice about whether to give it accordingly. Losing Jeffers for nothing would hurt. It's why he was viewed as a trade candidate right up to the deadline in August, despite the Twins assuming a buying posture. However, the Twins can't extend the QO just because the alternative is painful. They have to view the offer as the right choice, weighing the upside and risks of each option. That might lead them to what would be a very unpopular choice. They can't worry about that. They have to make the right one. Image courtesy of Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images View full article

Anthony Banda, Tristan Gray and Aaron Sabato each cleared waivers and were outrighted to the minor leagues Thursday, the Twins announced. They will each elect free agency or be released, as the MLB offseason begins. It's a slightly sad ending to the tenures of each player, but not unexpected in any of the three cases. Banda, 33, had a 4.46 ERA in 39 appearances for the Twins, after the team acquired him from the Los Angeles Dodgers in February. An emergency patch for a neglected bullpen, Banda initially struggled to get his feet under him in Minnesota, but by mid-season, he'd become an important part of the team's relief corps. Alas, he suffered a lat injury and underwent season-ending surgery in early July, and his prognosis for a return to the mound is muddy enough that the Twins felt it best to move on. He had been on the 60-day injured list at the end of the year and would have had to be added back to the 40-man roster in order to be retained. He had one more year of arbitration eligibility remaining, but given the likelihood that he'll miss at least the early stages of the 2027 season, giving him a spot on the crowded reserve list over the winter was not worth the team's prospective investment. Out of necessity and desperation, the Twins turned to Gray for a fistful of starts at shortstop this season. He never rewarded their faith, though. His bat speed went to waste due to poor swing decisions, and although he came to the team with a sterling defensive reputation, his glovework at short was little better than that of Brooks Lee. The lefty batter is 30 years old, and though he has (theoretically) five years of club control remaining and would not have been arbitration-eligible this winter, he's out of options and can't be sent to the minors without being outrighted. That made him too inflexible a piece for a team that hopes to aim higher on the bench in 2027, particularly after the matriculation of Kaelen Culpepper. Being optionable wasn't a problem for Sabato, who was just added to the 40-man roster upon his September promotion to the major leagues. However, the former first-round pick long ago ceased to be viewed as a legitimate prospect, and giving him a cup of big-league coffee was a courtesy, not a commitment. He failed to record a hit in his six plate appearances and was the easiest cut to see coming on the team's roster, as they declutter and prepare for an active offseason. The team will have to do more roster-clearing in coming days and weeks, but this early pruning adds some clarity to their upcoming search for bullpen help and their still-fluid infield picture. Image courtesy of Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images View full article

Image courtesy of Thomas Shea-Imagn Images The Minnesota Twins hired Rays Triple-A pitching coach Brian Reith as the team's new major-league pitching coach, the team announced Wednesday. Reith, 48, spent the last five seasons as the pitching coach of the Durham Bulls, and brings a long track record as a pitching and former hurler to the role. Reith appeared in parts of three seasons with the Reds from 2001 through 2004, with a 5.92 ERA in 127 career innings. After finishing his playing career in 2009, he transitioned into coaching and instruction. The Rays hired him as a pitching coach in A ball in 2015, and he spent three seasons with the Hudson Valley Renegades, then two with the Bowling Green Hot Rods. After spending time around the major-league team in 2021, he got the bump to Triple-A Durham in 2022 and had served as their pitching coach ever since. When Reith joined the Rays organization, Josh Kalk was still a top pitching mind in the organization. Kalk is now an assistant general manager with the Twins, and his relationship with Reith should help the team get the messages they feel need to be relayed from the front office out to the mound more smoothly than ever. Reith replaces Pete Maki, with whom the team parted ways at the end of the season after four and a half years in the same role. No word yet on whether or when the team will name an assistant pitching coach to replace Luis Ramirez, who was also let go. View full article

Image courtesy of Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images The Twins started the 2026 season with Brooks Lee at shortstop, Royce Lewis at third base, and Luke Keaschall at second. That, to say the least, didn't work. By mid-May, Lewis was at Triple-A St. Paul, and it was clear that Lee needed to move to the hot corner. Keaschall slowly got pushed to the outfield. That left a vacuum on the infield, and whne Tristan Gray proved a poor stopper for that gap, in stepped Ryan Kreidler. Over the offseason, Kreidler underwent a major swing change. He flattened the plane of his stroke, boosting his bat speed, and the early returns on those adjustments were superb. He played only sparingly, but at the end of June, Kreidler was batting .287/.357/.505. In 112 plate appearances, he had 10 extra-base hits (half of which were homers), 10 walks and just 19 strikeouts. The team never treated him like the solution to all their problems, exactly, but he certainly looked like a solution to some problems as the calendar turned to July. Meanwhile, Victor Caratini actually did look like the solution to the Twins' problems. They didn't have a choice but to install him as a regular, but when Ryan Jeffers broke his hamate bone on May 18, Caratini took over full-time catching duty, and he took off like a shot. Before Jeffers went down, Caratini had batted an execrable .192/.294/.231, but he stepped up in a huge way in Jeffers's stead. From the game in which Jeffers got hurt through the All-Star break, Caratini got 138 plate appearances. He batted .282/.370/496, with 13 extra-base hits, 16 walks and 26 strikeouts. He was the linchpin of the lineup as they improbably stayed afloat. Then, the clock struck midnight on the Cinderella stories for both Kreidler and Caratini. From July 1 through the end of the season, Kreidler was catastrophically bad. He got 155 plate appearances, but batted .169/.234/.289. In 43 more trips to the dish than he'd had in his superb first half, he produced no more extra-base hits and just one more walk, while whiffing 23 more times. He looked like a late-blooming, dynamic (albeit flawed) role player, until he didn't. Caratini's ascent was never quite as improbable. He was a low-wattage signing over the winter, but he did get a two-year deal. Depending on your feelings about him as an individual and the class as a whole, he was either the best backup available or a quasi-regular; that's why he merited more than a one-year offer. He's been around a long time. Still, his summer surge was thrilling—which made his late-season spiral even more deflating than it would otherwise have been. Caratini made Kreidler look like a fearsome slugger in the second half. After the break, he batted .179/.263/.198, with just two extra-base hits in 118 plate appearances. He walked eight times in that span; he struck out 30 times. The closest thing to a functioning offensive skill he had was getting in the way of the ball; he was hit by four pitches. These two players symbolize the Twins' season, in some ways. They performed better than expected for a while, but when they ran out of gas, it wasn't pretty. Specifically, they seemed to benefit from the Twins' offensive instruction for a while. The new hitting coach coalition the team assembled in the first year under Derek Shelton had several successes, and for a while, Kreidler and Caratini looked like they would number among them. Eventually, though, both guys ran into the same problem: a grooved swing. Unfortunately, the Twins have to come in for some of the blame on that. They helped each develop and approach and a stroke that would maximize the damage they could do when they got their pitch. Teams eventually learned not to give them that pitch, though, and neither player had the plasticity to respond successfully. Of the 338 batters with the most swings this year, Kreidler had the smallest range in average swing tilt from hacks at low pitches to those against high ones. Swing tilt is the angle between an imaginary horizontal line drawn through the handle of the bat and the actual bat position, just before contact, and while it sounds like a small thing, it's important. How much tilt a hitter has in their swing influences where they can most effectively meet the ball, and to what parts of the field they can effectively hit it. It shapes the margin for error of the swing, in a sense, and the ability to manipulate that tilt is an important part of maximizing margin for error, overall. At the opposite end of the leaderboard from Kreidler, in this metric, is exactly the person you'd expect: Luis Arraez. When he geared up to produce more bat speed and flattened out his swing this year, Kreidler lost the ability to bend that swing and hit pitches in all areas of the zone, vertically. Caratini was second-worst in the league, right behind Kreidler. Each player took some good advice from Twins coaches this year, but they also got waylaid. By engineering their swings to hammer pitches between the mid-thigh and the belly button, they made themselves more vulnerable to everything else—and, eventually, to manipulations of timing, too, as they tried to make changes but fell short. Adaptability is a vital part of hitting, and neither Caratini nor Kreidler did it well this year. They did find some benefits in the process. For a stretch, each was the best version of himself. If the Twins want to get more sustained success from next year's crop of reclamation or development projects, though, they'll need to be emphasize more flexibility as they provide feedback on mechanics and approach—or get some players with a bit more pure talent than Kreidler and Caratini possess. Both hitters focused an above-average share of their swings in the middle of the zone, which is good. They were aware that their swings weren't especially maneuverable, and they tried to devise a plan to survive that shortcoming. They couldn't outrun it, though. As the team heads into the offseason, the front office has been enthusiastic about what they achieved on the hitting side this year. There were some unequivocal successes, along with these qualified ones, so much of that self-satisfaction is justified. If they want to know where they still have some heavy lifting to do, though, they need look no further than the craters left by the way Caratini and Kreidler crashed to Earth late in the year. View full article

Absolutely correct! Certainly, to listen to him talk about it and having been around him even a little bit, I think that's right. AND, There's still no chance he comes back to play those games if there's any injury that actually forced him to be placed on the IL, as opposed to merely making him eligible to be.

Image courtesy of Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images When the Twins called up Kaelen Culpepper to take over as their shortstop on August 7, one of the noteworthy things about the decision was that they forfeited an (admittedly remote) shot at scooping up some significant future value. Because Culpepper came up with 52 days left in the season, he was all but guaranteed to exceed the thresholds that exhaust a player's rookie eligibility: 130 at-bats, or 45 days on the active roster. That meant Culpepper would not be eligible for the 2027 Rookie of the Year Award, and that he could not net the team a prospect promotion incentive (PPI) draft pick by winning that honor or finishing well in MVP voting over the first two or three years of his career. For most players, this is a minor consideration, but it was a major talking point. Some fans believed the Twins were holding Culpepper and Walker Jenkins back from being called up purely to preserve the possibility that they might someday net them a draft pick. Calling up Culpepper just a week before the date at which they could have done so without compromising that chance was another indication that the organization felt a sense of urgency to win in 2026, adding to the indications they'd given by being moderately aggressive at the August 3 trade deadline. Then, something a little funny happened. On September 15, on a ground ball to shortstop, Culpepper came up limping slightly. He left that night's game against the Yankees, and the next day, the Twins placed him on the 10-day injured list with a left hamstring strain. By then, it was abundantly clear that the team was not going to make the playoffs, so it was equally clear that Culpepper's rookie season was over. Or was it? "I think it’s one of those situations that we think it’s best for him to make sure" it doesn't become a bigger issue, Shelton told reporters that day. “Now, on the flipside, there is a possibility he could come back with two games left. Our goal right now is that. Now, if it doesn’t happen, obviously, we will make those kind of arrangements. But the goal we’ve had for him, because it is a mild strain, is to see if the last two games are available.” In a vacuum, that was very, very strange. It jibes a bit with Shelton's unusual approach to managing the team and the clubhouse, but even taking that into account, it was strange. Teams don't bring back injured players who are important to the long-term outlook of the organization for a couple of games at the end of the season. At the time, it felt like Shelton was merely paying lip service to that option, as a way of underscoring how mild the strain was. It still seemed extremely unlikely Culpepper would play again before the year was over. He did. Throughout his minimum-length stay on the shelf, the team and the player were unwavering in their belief that he would return, and he played the final two games of the season, despite the Twins having been officially eliminated from playoff contention the previous weekend. He finished the season with a .274/.328/.393 line in 117 at-bats. He also finished, thanks to that 10-day stay on the IL, with 42 days of active roster time. Culpepper will appear on top prospect lists this winter, and he'll be Rookie of the Year- and PPI-eligible next season, after all. There is no chance—none whatsoever; do not take this to Conspiracy Theory Town—that Culpepper was not actually injured, or that the Twins acted improperly by putting him on the IL in the wake of his hamstring tweak. Now, though, I think we can safely say a couple of things: "Tweak" is a better word for it than "strain". It was as mild an issue as a high-level athlete is ever likely to have with that muscle, which is always so troublesome. If the Twins had still been in serious contention when he got hurt, Culpepper would have played through the problem. Baseball people are fond of reminding everyone that no one is 100% healthy in September, at the end of a grueling 162-game season. This is the kind of injury to which they're alluding, and it's one players push through all the time. Culpepper could have pushed through this one, too. If that weren't true—if it were actually an injury severe enough to unequivocally require 10 days off—there is no chance he would have come back for the two meaningless games at the end of the year. This highlights something that's good to keep in mind, anyway, when it comes to injuries in sports: there's almost always ambiguity. There are often perfectly sound cases for or against any particular course of action, from a routine day off to an IL placement to surgery. Health is a skill for big-league athletes, made up of two component skills: avoiding injuries, and playing through ones minor enough to permit that. The former has much to do with one's genetics, conditioning and playing style. The latter depends on those things, too, but it's a tricky needle to thread. One must be careful not to increase the chances of a more severe injury, without losing time that doesn't need to be lost. Culpepper was never going to push through this particular injury, extremely mild though it clearly was—not because he couldn't have or didn't want to, but because once that issue arose, the Twins saw an opportunity. It's unlikely that Culpepper wins an award or garners enough MVP votes to earn them a PPI draft pick someday, but it's not impossible. Why foreclose the possibility, when you've been given a sudden and unexpected chance to maintain it? You don't have to love that there were incentives for the Twins to err so much on the side of caution, but they were there. It was a kelp-and-sailboat situation—kind of. The Twins didn't fudge anything or make any unethical choices; they didn't have to. This was just a very fortuitous hamstring tweak, as well as a very mild one. It gave them a chance to add a bit of value to their long-term portfolio, and while they're unlikely to realize any actual value from it, it cost them nothing to take the opportunity. Culpepper could, perhaps, have learned a little about playing through mild injuries by staying on the field for those 10 days, but that's the kind of thing you'd rather have players learn when it's necessary—when the stakes are much higher, that is. Besides, that would have involved some risk of worsening the injury. They minimized any chance of having to worry about Culpepper's legs going into the winter, and they gave him a slightly greater chance to make extra money next season (there are bonuses for Rookie of the Year Award vote-getters, as well as value going to the winner's team in the form of a future pick) while helping themselves. They even got him back onto the field to enjoy a few last cheers from the fans at Target Field, before the campaign ended—though if those two days had tipped him over to no longer being rookie-eligible, it feels safe to guess that his hamstring issue would have been season-ending, after all. View full article

Cool.

Image courtesy of Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images Nobody who arrives in the major leagues wants to be called 'adorable'. That's a word you use for a puppy or a kid. It's good for scarves and craft projects. It fits a brawny young athlete like a mid-2000s NBA draftee's suit. These guys are tenacious and resilient. They're competitive. They're often handsome, but they don't want to be cute. Surely, they don't want to be called 'adorable'. So, to Emmanuel Rodríguez: I'm sorry. I don't mean this as condescending or infantilizing. If I could come up with a better word for this, I would. But the English language hasn't yet found a better term for what happens when Rodríguez connects cleanly on one of his picture-perfect swings and sends a ball sailing toward the gap. It's adorable, man. First, let's go to the tape. Here's Rodríguez hitting a gorgeous two-run triple to flip the scoreboard against the Yankees on September 14. ek13azBfWGw0TUFRPT1fQUZKU1UxMEZBd1VBWFFOUlVnQUhCQVJVQUZrR1VRUUFCbFVIVWdFTUF3SlNDVk5X.mp4 We will—I promise, we will—return to an analysis of Rodríguez's swing itself; that's what I thought this article was going to be all about. But for now, just absorb that, aesthetically. Now, enjoy this double, the very next night. OTdQOEdfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFrRFhRRlFYZ01BRDFNRkFnQUhCQVlIQUFOUlVnY0FBbGNFQXdRQUNGZFVVMVpV.mp4 I wonder if maybe you've already spotted it, but I won't assume that you have, or demand that you go back and find it. Here's another example, when he doubled (to break a miniature slump) Sunday in Anaheim. QXc3MDJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQlZkV1hBVUNVQVFBQUFRRlZBQUhCRlVIQUZrQkFnQUFWRnhYQndzQkJGRlFVd1JW.mp4 And finally, here's the homer Rodríguez hit late in Monday night's loss to the Giants. What a swing. What a hitter. ZFh2WlBfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdFQVZnVU5YZ2NBQ0FNQlh3QUhWVkpUQUFNQVVRY0FDd1lOQ0ZjREJsY0FCd3RU.mp4 Already, it's clear that this guy will be a dynamic presence in the Twins lineup. There's some really interesting data on his swing, which we can evaluate sooner and better than ever thanks to Statcast's ever-deepening trove of great numbers. But I don't want to talk about all of that just yet. We need to talk about this, instead. You offer me a better word than 'adorable,' and I'll take it, but I'm defying you. I don't think it exists. When Rodríguez catches the sweet spot—when he really gets through one the way he wants to—he absolutely cannot help himself. Involuntarily (sometimes just momentarily; he occasionally catches himself and shuts it down fast), before he's even done following through but as he sees the ball jump off his bat the way he felt sure it would, he breaks into a big old smile. Hitting in the majors is serious business. It's damn hard, and it's no fun when you're piling up rollover grounders or strikeouts. The culture of the game still expects quite a bit of decorum, really. You're expected to be so intense that you often look dour or angry, even at your moment of triumph. But anyone who's ever picked up a bat and squeezed out the sawdust—anyone who's wiggled their fingers and swished the stick and stepped into a box and waited and watched and given their best pass at a ball—knows the truth under all that professionalism. There's maybe one better feeling in this world than hitting a baseball pure, and if you want to talk about it, you need to open an incognito tab and go discuss it on a very different website. The tactile joy of hitting a ball so cleanly that you don't really feel the contact is as close to the thrill of flight as most of us will ever feel. If you know that feeling, you're either smiling even as you read this, or fighting your own cheek muscles to stop it. Rodríguez knows that feeling when it comes, and he doesn't bother fighting his own face. The delight spreads across his visage, and we all get to share in his moment of happiness. That's a huge part of what being a sports fan should be. It's a wonderful service he's doing for Twins fans, even at the disappointing end of a squandered season. You really don't see this that much. Most hitters can hit a ball 450 feet and maintain a glower. Rodríguez can't. I propose we all agree to nickname him 'Sparkle,' because the flash of his teeth on this handful of swings has been the brightest set of scintillations to hit Twins Territory since the first time the sunlight hit the limestone at Target Field. The best part is that it's utterly unpretentious. Not one bit of it is a put-on; Rodríguez is doing it without making a conscious decision. It's just the love of the game spilling out of him, at the very moment when we all sympathize with that feeling the most. While we're here, let's talk just a little about why he's already cracked five extra-base hits and has gotten so many chances to show off the pearly whites. Rodríguez has an outlier of a swing, in addition to the impressive plate discipline that everyone knew about long before he reached the majors. By and large, the shorter a hitter's swing, the slower it is. Creating torque and bat speed takes space, and most hitters with fast swings also have long ones. Not Rodríguez, though. See that red X in the lower right portion of this chart? That's Rodríguez. For a guy who's so direct to the ball, he's shockingly good at getting the bat moving fast by the time he gets to the hitting zone. The only player with a similarly fast swing who's close to being as short to the ball as Rodríguez is the Brewers' Garrett Mitchell. You might be surprised to hear this about Rodríguez (and Mitchell, for that matter), because in general, short swings are expected to produce high contact rates. Rodríguez (and Mitchell, for that matter) whiffs a lot, which doesn't fit the narrative. The problem is pretty simple: the tradeoff he's making by getting from 0 to 76 MPH in such a short space is that he has fairly little control of the barrel when he gets near the contact point. He also hits it farther in front of his body than most players with short swings, and again, it's not a coincidence. His directness allows him to wait a long time to decide to swing, and contributes to his patience. However, it also means that if he's even slightly wrong about the pitch speed or movement he perceives, he'll be unable to make an adjustment and catch the ball with his bat, let alone his barrel. That might mean a long adjustment curve for Rodríguez as he settles into a full-time job in the majors. Hitting in the majors is hard, and his approach from the minors won't quite work here. However, his swing is a lethal, thrilling thing—and that reaction to the times when it produces the results he's looking for is (sorry) adorable. View full article

Image courtesy of Denis Poroy-Imagn Images Don't look now, but Bailey Ober has (essentially) a league-average ERA. His 4.28 mark this season is about 0.82 better than the one he put up last year, and his ERA+ of 98 puts him within a whisker of the league average. He's made 22 starts, and figures to make at least two more, including one Tuesday night at Target Field. The Twins are 12-10 when he takes the mound; he's not the problem with this deeply flawed team. However, if you've watched closely of late, it's evident that the Twins are trusting him less than they did a few months ago. On August 11, Ober worked six innings, threw 100 pitches and faced 26 batters, but since then, he hasn't seen the sixth or gone past 22 batters faced. In his last three outings, Derek Shelton has removed him shy of 90 pitches. That's despite Ober allowing just six runs (five of them earned) in 18 2/3 pitches over those four appearances. August 11 was also the last time he worked on four days' rest; he's gotten five days or more between outings ever since. Why? It's relatively simple. Ober is surviving by his wits, with great feel and command but virtually no real stuff left with which to work. His fastball has lost velocity not only year by year, but month by month, which has also reduced the velocity gap between his heater and his best secondary offerings, the slider and changeup: Even that slight recovery you see at the far right of the graph above is an illusion. Ober only seems to be throwing his fastballs harder this month because he's being lifted so proactively, and because he's using that pitch less than he ever has before. His changeup isn't even a secondary pitch anymore; it's become his bread and butter. In a fairly obvious way, that loss of speed and separation produces a degradation in fastball efficacy and stuff ratings. Less obviously, though, it also compromises those slower offerings. Hitters can cover the change and the breaking stuff better because Ober is throwing considerably slower. Using FanGraphs's PitchingBot Visualizer tool (part of their wonderful FanGraphs Lab suite), we can now show more clearly how that's happening—how the loss of velocity and raw stuff reduces Ober's margin for error and has diminished the team's confidence in him late in the season. Here's a set of visualizations that illustrate his 2024 season, before he lost his velocity and when he was still striking out 26% of opposing batters with an ERA under 3.30. As the headers indicate, this shows (from left to right) the command, stuff and overall ratings of each pitch Ober threw that year, with red meaning good and blue meaning bad. On the left, you see what you should expect to see from such a model: lots of red around the edges of the strike zone, lots of blue far outside it and in the heart, and relatively little grayish in-between stuff. In the middle panel, we're looking only at the caliber of his stuff, based on velocity, release, movement and spin, so location isn't automatically governing the results. As you might guess, though, the higher you go in that graphic, the bluer things get. PitchingBot has always given Ober's fastball a low grade, even when it drew rave reviews for its deceptiveness from his low arm angle. Really, the heater has always benefited from Ober's command and execution on his other offerings, and those others are the ones that tend to show up in red on the middle panel. The right side is where the most interesting results show up, for this year and the other two we'll consider. Notice that it looks roughly (but not exactly) like the command chart. Throwing the ball well outside the zone is almost always bad; throwing it right down the middle can be even worse if you have subpar stuff. There's wiggle room, though. Mostly, it works against Ober, but not in a devastating way. There's a little more blue in what you could think of as the innermost ring around the center of the zone than there is on the command chart. Even then, Ober's underwhelming stuff could get hit pretty hard in spots that might have been safe for more electric arms. Ober is good at hitting his spots, though. You already knew that. This chart looks the way it does because he fills up those edges. In 2024, the Visualizer tells us, 4.0% of the pitches he threw were classified as Dangerous Misses—pitches with below-average stuff ratings that were in the hitter's happy zone. The league average for that is closer to 5%, so count him as ahead of the curve at avoiding hard contact for that season, at least process-wise. His Waste Miss (below-average stuff on offerings outside the zone) rate was 29.8%, which is also below the league average (around 31%). Only 8.0% of his pitches were Squandered ones, where he achieved a stuff rating in the top third of his own range but was outside the zone. That's (you guesssed it) lower than the league average, which is more like 10%. Overall, thanks to his sterling command, Ober earned a 53.3 PitchingBot rating for that season, a tick above the average of 50. Here's the same set of visuals for 2025. The middle panel says plenty, because there's both less red and lighter shades of red where it does appear. But Ober's big problem last season—as he was always quick to say—was command. He stopped hitting the edges as consistently, as he battled multiple physical issues that led to mechanical ones. His Danger Miss rate rose to 6.6%; his Waste Miss rate to 31.7%; and his Squandered rate to 9.9%. Worse stuff ratings hurt him even when he did successfully locate at the bottom and top of the zone, and being able to work east and west became more important; that's part of why his strikeout rate went down. He never adequately compensated for all that, though, which is why he ended the season with an ERA over 5.00 and an orange-flag PitchingBot rating of 48.7. Now, for 2026: There's nothing left in Ober's arsenal that grades out as above-average by stuff. He's recovered some of his command, though. He's hitting spots better, but there's a practical limit to how well anyone can do so, and at the level of lifelessness he's dealing with, that ceiling is too low. Look how big the blue in the center of the strike zone has gotten. That's not because Ober is missing there much more often, but because he's been forced to go there a bit more often after falling behind in counts (due to hitters not chasing or whiffing on his tepid stuff) and because pitches that used to be lively enough to work if he kept them out of that middle-middle zone are now just as hittable even a few inches farther in any given direction. This season, Ober's Waste Miss rate is down slightly, to 30.9%. His Squandered rate is lower, too: 9.4%. But his Danger Miss rate has spiked to 7.5%, meaning that one in every 12 pitches he throws is begging to be hit for extra bases. That's untenable. That's why the Twins are slowly giving up on him. Ober is a thoughtful and dedicated hurler. He's added a sinker and increased his comfort with the slider, to try to counteract these trends. Right now, though, he's too much of a sitting duck for Shelton to leave him in the third time through an opposing lineup—and the Twins need to start looking at other options for their 2027 starting rotation. Hopefully, further tinkering can unlock something for Ober, as he tries to change to more of a lateral-movement approach to pitching. For now, though, it's hard to fault the Twins for thinking it's time to move on. View full article