Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Daniel Kucin Jr.-Imagn Images Carlos Correa isn't right at the plate. This much, you already know. Last year, though his season was effectively cut in half by plantar fasciitis, the Twins' superstar shortstop batted .310/.388/.517, earning his third All-Star nod and powering the lineup until his feet betrayed him and he had to go on the shelf at the break. This season, he had been (nominally) healthy, until his head ran into Byron Buxton's head in Baltimore, but the numbers told a clear story even while Correa was on the field. He's hitting .236/.274/.331 for the year, barely outslugging last year's batting average. It looks every bit as bad when you shift from the numbers on the page to the player in the batter's box, too. Correa left one game in April with left wrist soreness, and wasn't available to play the following day. He's been a different hitter this year, and not at all in a good way. The temptation, given all the tools we have these days, is to hunt the topline numerical differences and point at them as the clear sources of the problem. To wit: Correa's bat speed is down 1.2 miles per hour this season, and his average exit velocity has dipped by 1.4 mph. He's hitting fewer balls hard, lifting the ball less often, and chasing more outside the zone. That's a potent cocktail, if your goal is to produce failure at the plate in the major leagues. Thanks to the latest batch of new metrics from Statcast, though, we don't have to content ourselves with seeing these things and drawing assumptions about Correa's health, or (worse) wonder about what mystical problems of timing or mentality might be wrecking him despite physical fitness for the job. A whole new suite of tools is available to us, and it allows us to drill all the way to the bedrock of the issues. So, first of all: yes, Correa's wrist is affecting him. It's slowing down his swing, and it's contributing to the tendency to hit the ball on the ground more. How do I know? I'm glad you asked. One of the new tools available at Baseball Savant is a visualizer for the entire swing, from the moment the hitter's bat begins its arc toward the ball through the moments just after contact. It's not just the bat, either. We can actually see a hitter's animated skeletal avatar, and watch the way they transfer their weight and energy throughout the swing. We can notice their posture and their hand position, in addition to their bat path itself. Here's Correa just before the contact point (left) and at the contact point (right) in 2024. I'm inviting you to look at some very granular details here, but don't be intimidated by them. The thrill of these new data is that they can make us all experts on hitting, with enough time and careful study. Right now, focus in with me on that troublesome left wrist on Correa's pseudo-skeleton. (Each white ball on the seafoam figures, of course, represents a joint. We can "see" each player's shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands at work throughout the swing. Please, by all means, visit Baseball Savant and play with this tool yourself, to see the fluid motion of it all, but stills serve our analytical needs nicely right now.) See the crook of it—the way he has his hand turned toward his pinky even just before contact? By the time he gets to the contact point, however, he's extended that wrist, using it to keep the barrel whipping through the hitting zone. Meanwhile, notice how his right wrist—leading into the top hand, the one that steers the bat through the zone—stays ever-so-slightly curled through contact. That sustains bat control and the capacity to manipulate the barrel. It also means that when he meets the ball, that wrist isn't yet rolling over, which is important. You know what rolling over means: a ground ball, or if you're lucky, a topspin liner. If you're especially early, which rolling over before contact usually indicates, you're also at more risk of a whiff. Most misses on swings come because of timing, not because the batter simply aimed for the wrong spot. Now, here's Correa's swing just before and at contact (the animated ball looks more like it's gotten all the way to the barrel in the righthand image, here, but functionally, we're seeing the same two moments within the swing) in 2025: He's extending his arms a bit more by the contact point, this year. Shouldn't that be a good thing? Don't we always hear about hitters trying to get extended on the ball? Well, there are two problems. Look at the wrists again—especially the right one, this time. With a bit less strength and stability coming from that left hand, Correa's using the top hand to try to catch up, but that means that the wrist is more fully extended at contact this year—which means more of a risk that he's rolling over; and These aren't captures of any one swing. They're composites. So, yes. on average, Correa seems to be meeting the ball cleanly here. The problem is that baseball isn't scored in composites. Every hitter needs to have an adaptable swing, to address pitches at different speeds and locations differently, and every hitter will experience a distribution of successes and failures within and across those buckets and those swing modes. Just as a pitcher who averages six inches of run on a 94-mph fastball often throws one with several inches' difference in movement and a tick or two of difference in velocity, hitters aren't replicating swings perfectly. Correa has run into trouble because of specific faults within his adaptable swing modes, rather than in a way we can see by examining a single visual or a set of averages. Here's where I offer a bit of a twist: yes, Correa's wrist seems to be a problem, feeding into multiple inefficiencies in his swing. But no, it's not doing so by diminishing his swing speed. In fact, his bat speed isn't really the problem, at all. Let's dig a layer deeper. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images The Twins and Guardians made multiple attempts to fit ballgames in between torrents of rain Monday night at Target Field. The result was a forgettable three and a half innings of baseball, with the Twins holding a 2-1 lead in a game that will be resumed (in theory) at 5:10 PM Tuesday night. After the two teams finish that contest (if, indeed, they do), they'll play a late-night second game. Except, here's the thing: no, they won't. It has rained almost nonstop since 7 PM Monday in the Twin Cities, and the forecasts all call for that to continue through Tuesday night. It does look as though the skies will finally have emptied themselves by Wednesday afternoon, when the two teams are scheduled for the final game of this three-game series. They won't want to play a doubleheader then, though, because the Guardians have to be in Detroit for the start of a four-game weekender Thursday evening. At least one game will be washed out, here. They might try to complete the suspended one Tuesday, or just bump that to Wednesday and play a not-quite twin bill Wednesday. They might not even be able to do that; there could be 14 innings of baseball to make up when Cleveland's plane takes off Wednesday evening. The good news, of course, is that the Guardians come back to Minnesota—albeit just once, rather than the two other times a division rival would have visited under the old schedule format. These teams are scheduled to play at Target Field again on Sept. 19-21, and one of those dates now looks very likely to be a doubleheader. Alternatively (or additionally), they could make up a game on Sept. 22, when the teams have a mutual off day. The Cleveland series will be the last set of a nine-game Twins homestand, but before playing in Texas on the following Tuesday, Minnesota has a travel day scheduled. So do the Guardians, who will have a home series against Detroit right after playing the Twins. Neither team wants to push off a makeup game that far, of course. If the weather is bad again in September (always a possibility), needing to fit four games into three days or giving up a travel day to fit in a contest could become truly miserable. It could become an utterly unmanageable mess. Looking at the radar, though, it's hard to see that there will be any choice in the matter. There are 23 innings (or more) of baseball left to play in this series, and nowhere near room for them in the windows between showers. Weather has poked the league in the eye quite a bit already this year. It looks like one of those years when the league will play a good 35 or 40 doubleheaders, and the Twins figure to be overrepresented in that sample. It's frustrating, because it feels like Mother Nature is the only opponent the Twins can't beat right now. On the other hand, as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa sit on the shelf with concussions and Willi Castro hobbles around the field with a knee contusion causing him obvious discomfort, maybe this isn't the worst time for some days on the calendar to be wiped blank. There's no way to make up these games that won't mess with the Twins' pitching schedules, but the Guardians will face an even more acute version of the same problem. As we wait to see whether the sky will clear at any juncture in the next 30 hours, both sides can merely gather and try to come up with ways to stay ready and minimize the impact of this inconvenience. For fans, it's not so bad. An occasional rainout is a miniature blessing, even amid a hot stretch for the team. It's extra time to think; to get something else done; to rest. The stress, for fans and for players, will come whenever the bill comes due for these lost games—when the schedule gets crowded and grueling late in a pennant race. The stress for executives and coaches comes right now. UPDATE: As we guessed they might, the Twins announced that there will be no baseball Tuesday night. The Twins and Guardians will make up the remainder of Monday night's game Wednesday afternoon, and then play the regularly-scheduled game. Tuesday night's contest will, indeed, become part of a doubleheader on Sept. 20. Here's hoping the weather will permit all the required innings Wednesday, so the September slate doesn't get any more jammed. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images The Twins finally lost on Sunday, for the first time since May 2 in Boston. Four of the five runs they allowed were let in by starter Zebby Matthews, though, so the team still boasts a 0.89 reliever ERA since May 3. That fortnight and change, in which they've gone 13-1, has been characterized by lots of timely hits and great work from their starting pitchers. Their defense has made big plays, too. Were it not for the most dominant relief work in the league, though, they wouldn't have been able to make this charge. Beginning on that Saturday at Fenway Park (admittedly, a selective endpoint, but I'm being so balanced as to include the loss Sunday in this set), the Twins have a 29.7% strikeout rate and a 5.1% walk rate in 50 1/3 innings. They've gotten 151 outs and allowed just six runs. Only the similarly torrid Cardinals have come anywhere close to matching their run prevention, and St. Louis has done it by getting lucky. The Twins, by contrast, are pitching like a well-oiled reliever machine—because that's what they were built to be. Fans can and should feel righteous indignation when the team neglects to make proactive moves to upgrade its lineup, as they've done over the last three years. They're pinning heavy hopes on light bats, and then evincing unearned dismay at the underwhelming results. They also could have done more to bolster their starting rotation this winter, even while holding onto their superb collection of young arms. You can never have too many good starters, and you can hardly ever have enough of them. The Twins have stopped short of gathering as much top-tier talent as they should have, be that via free agency (an ownership problem) or trade (a front-office problem), and the ramifications are real. Those failures are why this team finished last year 12-27 and started this one 7-15. If we levy fair criticisms, though, we also have to dispense justice by according earned praise. This team is incredibly good at developing and sustaining the success of relief pitchers. Sometimes, in our rush to explain and grasp the high degree of variation in relief pitching and the rarity of players having long, consistent careers in those roles, we minimize or misstate the difficulty and the value of creating great bullpens. The Twins have done just that, and it's not a small thing. You know about Jhoan Duran, who's changed a great deal as a pitcher but is still generating familiarly excellent results. You know about Griffin Jax, who has buzzard luck but buzzsaw stuff. This year, the key addition to the mix has been Louis Varland, who's no longer fighting his destiny and has emerged as an immediate partner to the other two relief aces in the pen. Without a strong second line, though, the Twins wouldn't be able to maximize the value of their top arms. That's where Cole Sands comes in. View full article

Image courtesy of © Daniel Kucin Jr.-Imagn Images They might yet extend their winning streak to 11 games and sweep the season series against should-be contenders, but the Twins are living in limbo right now. After a third-inning fly ball on which Byron Buxton charged hard as Carlos Correa backpedaled into the outfield, both players are out of the game. Twins Territory waits with bated breath to see what the prognosis on each turns out to be. On an 0-2 count, Orioles center fielder Cedric Mullins hit a pop-up with some extra carry. (For the Twins, nothing good begins with 'Cedric Mullins...'.) Buxton had been shading Mullins toward right field, and Correa had been playing up the middle. Because the ball was well beyond the infield apron and a bit toward left field, Correa hurried out after the ball, unsure whether Buxton would be able to get there. Buxton, meanwhile, read the ball well and charged hard, at a slight angle. At the last moment, Correa tried to pull off and brace for contact, but it did little good. After a lengthy visit from the trainer and the manager, Correa left the game, while Buxton stayed in. However, by the bottom of the fourth, DaShawn Keirsey Jr. had replaced Buxton in center field. There has been no update as of the time of this writing, but each player appeared to hit their heads and be badly shaken up on the play. It's safe to guess that each will at least be evaluated for possible concussions. You couldn't draw up a worse turn of events for the Twins if you tried. These are the two players in whom they are most heavily invested, financially, and Buxton has been at the heart of everything good that has happened for the team this year. Correa's season has already been a struggle, but that's certainly not more likely to turn itself around in the wake of this. We'll all await more information. Already, this is a banged-up team. Harrison Bader left Game 2 of the doubleheader Wednesday in Baltimore, after Ty France had to leave Game 1. They have a bevy of versatile position players, but it's impossible to replace the sheer talent of Buxton and Correa—and equally daunting to replace the defensive brilliance, production and energy Buxton has provided on his own, all year. Keirsey could be in line for more playing time, in the short term, but if the team wants to complete its recovery from a dreadful start to the season, they'll need to get their stars back as soon as possible. Hopefully, the substitutions turn out to have been precautionary, and both players return to the lineup this weekend. UPDATE: The Twins announced that both players have entered Major League Baseball's concussion protocol. That confirms the fears most felt when they watched the replays of the collision. As is always the case, it's impossible to predict how this will play out. They could be cleared of concussion concerns and miss minimal time, but if either does actually have a concussion—and the violence of the crash was certainly worrisome—they could suffer medium- and long-term effects, both in terms of time missed and performance diminution when they return. For now, the team and the players just need to proceed with caution. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images It's been a tough follow-up to what was a career-making year for Simeon Woods Richardson in 2024. He never exactly looked like a frontline starter, but he did yeoman's work at the back end of an injury-diminished Twins rotation, keeping them afloat until the final month. Alas, he then burned out pretty badly, and so far this season, he has looked more like the tired version of himself from the end of last year than like the guy who was so essential to the club until late August. Since Aug. 1, 2024, Woods Richardson has a 5.06 ERA and a 125 FIP- (where 100 is average and lower is better), according to FanGraphs. He's struck out 20.8% of opposing batters, walked 9.6% of them, and given up home runs in 4.2% of opponents' plate appearances. Those numbers just don't add up to (or point toward) success, and with 80 innings pitched in 18 total outings (17 of them starts), he's also not giving the team any semblance of length or protection for the bullpen. Whether he can turn things around from here is an open question; his big-league future might lie in the bullpen. For now, though, the team will turn to one of its young starters at Triple-A St. Paul, swapping Woods Richardson out with them. At first blush, the choices for the team to pitch in that rotation spot are Zebby Matthews, David Festa and Andrew Morris, any of whom could pitch on typical rest this weekend. In the meantime, they kept Kody Funderburk on the 26-man roster after he came up to be the 27th man for the doubleheader Wednesday, and will roll with a deeper bullpen for a couple days as they recuperate from the strain that twin bill placed on their pen. Festa would be joining the rotation for a second stint this year, while Morris would require a 40-man roster move to come up and fill the gap in the schedule. Length will be important; the team needs whoever comes up to be in a better position to both keep the team in low-scoring games and take a bit of pressure off the bullpen. For now, while Woods Richardson has been an important part of the team for the last year-plus, he could no longer fill that bill. View full article

Image courtesy of © Daniel Kucin Jr.-Imagn Images Kody Clemens came up big for the Twins Wednesday. with a three-run eighth-inning homer that gave the team a lead and launched them to their 10th straight win. That was fitting, because it was also a home run by Clemens (in the sixth inning of the Twins' May 3 game at Fenway Park) that effectively began the streak. A near-desperation pickup during the period when the Twins weren't sure of the statuses of either WIlli Castro or Carlos Correa and were unable to backfill their depleted roster with good options in their own system, Clemens has given them more than they might have fairly hoped for. In 25 plate appearances with the Twins, Clemens is batting .227/.320/.591. He's struck out six times, but he also has two doubles, two home runs, one walk and two times hit by pitches. Don't expect the Twins to hand him an everyday job, or anything. He's a role player, with a relatively small role, at that. If he can continue filling in this impressively, though, it will have an outsized impact on the Twins' rebound from their season's woeful start. Normally, it's a good idea to brush off a couple of big hits like this (from a player who turns 29 years old today) as fun and valuable but meaningless variance. Anchoring player evaluations to even huge homers like these two is a bad idea, and Clemens supplanting any of the younger players on the Twins roster would be foolish, if the time ever comes when several of those younger guys are hitting well and feeling healthy at the same time. In this case, though, there's some evidence that Clemens has undergone a real change. It might not make him a worthy starter, but we should try to get a firm understanding of it. In 2024, Clemens had 208 tracked, competitive swings in the big leagues. They averaged 70.5 mph of swing speed, and a 7.3-foot swing length. Only 4.3% of his swings topped 75 mph, where real damage becomes much more frequent. He generated an average exit velocity of 89.4 mph, and maxed out at 108.4 mph. His production was lousy, even for a bench player, because he strikes out too much and hits for too low a batting average to make up for such modest power indicators. This year, things are different. It's only been 42 tracked, competitive swings, but he's averaged 73.1 mph of swing speed and a slightly shorter swing length of 7.2 feet. A solid 16.7% of his swings have crossed that 75-mph threshold. His average exit velocity is 92 mph, and he's already set a new career max for exit velocity on an individual batted ball (109.0 mph), albeit by a tiny amount. Clemens doesn't have enough plate appearances to qualify for the leaderboard on Baseball Savant, but if he did, he'd have the fourth-largest change in bat speed from 2024 to 2025, behind only Nolan Schanuel, Brice Turang and Anthony Volpe. Those three younger hitters are all varying degrees of famous for having come into this season with overhauled swings, new quasi-magical bats, or a mere intention to do more damage. Turang hit just seven home runs all last season. This year, he's already cracked three. Volpe is already halfway to his total of 12 home runs from last year, and has 12 doubles to his name, too. Bat speed is good. Increasing bat speed, as long as it doesn't cost one the ability to put the bat on the ball, is a key way to reach a new gear at the plate. Without an overhauled approach, Clemens still doesn't need to be part of the regular lineup. He strikes out a lot and walks very rarely. He's a bit of a mess at the plate. This season, though, he's become a much more dangerous mess. That's worth celebrating. The Twins helped him start going out and getting the ball better; his contact point has moved 2.9 inches toward the pitcher and 1.9 inches away from his center of mass than it was when he was with the Phillies, even earlier this year. That number is still likely to fluctuate quite a bit, given how small his sample of work with Minnesota is, so let's not get bogged down in it. The change in bat speed, however, can already be said to be very real. Because it's almost entirely within the hitter's control and not something that intentionally varies as widely from one pitch to the next as, say, pitch velocity, bat speed becomes telling over even very small samples. Right now, Clemens is switching a quick stick—so much faster than in the past, and so far beyond the big-league average, that he can't help but run into some power. He's done it at truly perfect times for the Twins over the last week and a half. At this point, they have to expand his role just a little bit, to see how well he holds onto this progress and what further game-breaking value they can extract from it. This great an improvement in bat speed is worth a full scouting grade on the power scale, and if he keeps it, that pop will come in handy again before long. View full article

If he ever stayed healthy enough to play as much as he's played so far this year, he'd have finished similarly high in that regard in other seasons. He's struck out in roughly 30% of his PAs since the start of 2022.

We've seen them do that anyway, but I did wonder if that was a way to save him a few breaths and set him up to be able to play Game 2—only then, of course, he's not in the lineup for it. Go figure.

Image courtesy of © Daniel Kucin Jr.-Imagn Images Box Score: Starting Pitcher: Bailey Ober - 4 2/3 IP, 2 H, 3 R, 3 BB, 3 K, 1 HR (102 pitches; 57 strikes) Home Runs: Brooks Lee (4), Christian Vázquez (1) Top 3 WPA: Vázquez .322, Trevor Larnach .164, Griffin Jax .135 Win Probability Chart (Via FanGraphs): It doesn't exactly feel restful, when they come this way, but the Twins got two days off in a row before taking the field Wednesday. That's the good news. The tougher news is, they have to play twice, at the front end of a stretch in which they play three consecutive series without a day off. That means nine games in eight days, which will require some roster maneuvering and some heroic pitching performances. Tougher still, the first two pitchers tasked with delivering those innings-eating outings are Bailey Ober and Simeon Woods Richardson, each of whom just faced the Orioles last week in Minnesota. As Cody Christie documented here earlier today, that poses an especially thorny challenge for a starting pitcher. Early on, though, Ober was up to it and then some. He largely kept Baltimore batters off-balance over the first two frames, aided by a self-sacrificing, diving catch by Harrison Bader in the first on a foul ball that took him hard into the sidewall in foul territory. Ober cleverly mixed his stuff, as he always does, with some special wrinkles designed to confound Orioles hitters hunting familiar sequences. For instance, he started Ramón Laureano with three straight changeups to lead off the bottom of the third, then showed him one high heater and went back to the change for an easy groundout. Four changeups in five pitches to a right-handed batter is not the typical approach for Ober; it's emblematic of the adjustments he made to frustrate anyone sitting on a particular pitch they saw too often last week at Target Field. Immediately thereafter, though, he got himself into trouble. Against No. 9 hitter Ramón Urías (who wasn't seeing him for a second time in a short window; he was on the IL when the O's were in Minneapolis last week), Ober went back to trying to mix his fastball with the changeup, but his command of the heater faltered. On a 3-2 pitch, he missed low and away, committing the cardinal sin of issuing a bases-empty walk as the Orioles flipped over the lineup card. Jackson Holliday couldn't make him pay, but Ryan Mountcastle came up with Urías on first and two outs. He'd notched a sacrifice fly and a ringing fifth-inning double against Ober last week, the latter creating a big jame the big righty had to work out of. That double came on a slider, and when Ober fell behind 3-1 and tried to sneak another slider in the zone by him, Mountcastle did it again. Urías, running on contact with two outs, was always going to try to score, but the pace of the ball and the skill of Bader (pursuing it into the corner) made the success of that endeavor far from assured. Sadly, the ball caught a corner and dropped against the wall, whereas Bader had been anticipating a hard bounce off the barrier. By the time he reversed his deceleration and chased it all the way to its resting place, there wasn't quite time for even the well-executed relay to Carlos Correa and Christian Vázquez. That made it 1-0 Orioles. It also brought up Gunnar Henderson, the hottest hitter in the Orioles' lineup, after he'd smashed a ground ball at 106 mph in his first at-bat. Ober worked a 2-2 count on him, but (perhaps getting too cute) tried a curveball to finish the inning. It wasn't a true hanger, but Henderson was ready for it, and smashed it well over the right-field wall. Suddenly, the Twins were in a 3-0 hole. Happily, though, it didn't last even a half-inning. Brooks Lee took the first pitch of the fourth over the wall in center, just off the skyward-reaching glove of Cedric Mullins. A well-placed dribbler got Correa aboard, and Willi Castro drew a walk. Then, however, Royce Lewis struck out and Bader flied out to left. It could have been a wasted rally, and the game probably takes a very different shape from there if it had been. Instead, the most unlikely hero of this long winning streak emerged. Vázquez, also getting a meaty curveball, launched it out to left-center field for a lead the team would not relinquish. Ober didn't even make it through five innings, which is unfortunate, under these circumstances. Other than that bad wobble in the third, though, he held Baltimore at bay. Danny Coulombe got him out of a jam in the fifth, and the team's deep bullpen followed its familiar formula thereafter. Some shaky defense by Lee at second and Correa at short threatened to result in another blown lead with Griffin Jax on the mound, but Jax gutted his way through and kept the 4-3 edge. Two insurance runs (the direct result of a Trevor Larnach double against a lefty, in a showdown the Orioles created on purpose by pitching around Byron Buxton) made the bottom of the ninth low-stress for Jhoan Duran. Notes In addition to Bader's great catch (one which briefly looked like it would knock him out of the game; he hobbled around a while and looks like he'll sport a bruise on his right knee after his collision with the wall), Buxton made a fine diving play later in the game to rob what would have been a game-tying single. Those two continue to be a sparkling defensive duo, and the Twins' fly ball-oriented pitching staff really positions them to have an outsized impact. Ty France left mid-game after fouling a ball off his left instep. The initial diagnosis is a foot contusion. We'll see if he can get back into the lineup for Game 2. Kody Funderburk is the 27th man for the double-dip. Expect him to pitch in this second contest. What’s Next: The turnaround is so tight that Game 2 might be in progress by the time you read this. Simeon Woods Richardson takes the ball and will try to stretch the streak to double digits. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images As Twins fans know far too well, injuries have been the bane of Byron Buxton throughout his professional career. They've kept him off the field for long stretches—usually at least half of any given season—and sometimes diminished him even when he's been able to gut his way through and keep playing with them. They've denied both fans and the man himself the opportunity to see just how much this extraordinary player, with a once-in-a-generation blend of tools and lovingly honed baseball skills, is capable of. Funnily, though, injuries have also sometimes shielded Buxton, in a way. They've taken him off the field, at times, just when you could see an inevitable slump developing, or they've forced him to play a more controlled, less outlandish version of his game—something better resembling what the rest of the baseball universe has to play. Players with unique talent can take unique approaches to their craft, but there's a reason why even the best players in history tended to operate in certain ways. Buxton belongs to that class of player, like Mickey Mantle and Alex Rodriguez but also like, say, Bo Jackson, who have so much talent that the challenge becomes understanding where the game does and doesn't permit extreme approaches to flourish. This year, we've gotten arguably the longest stretch of uninterrupted, undiluted healthy Buxton of his entire career—and it's not even the middle of May. He's not merely feeling well enough to stay on the field. He's actually played at his full capacity for a full quarter of a season, starting every day in center field, batting near the top of the order, and running at full speed. Naturally, therefore, he's trending toward an MVP-caliber season (albeit in a league where that award itself is already virtually locked up, by Aaron Judge). According to Baseball Reference, he's already been: 3 runs better than average at bat 2 runs better than average on the bases 1 run better than average due to his ability to avoid hitting into double plays 2 runs better than average on defense That's despite a horrendous start in which he batted .171/.209/.293 over his first 11 games, with the shadow of an illness in his family hanging over him. At the end of that stretch, when the family member passed, he was away from the team for two games to attend the funeral and be with his loved ones. Since his return, he's hitting .299/.339/.607. This is Peak Buxton, at age 31 and on the other side of such a litany of injuries. He's pushing even his own profile to new extremes, though—perhaps because the restrictor plates are off, for the moment. Buxton is swinging at the first pitch 46.3% of the time, which is the highest rate of his career (save 2020, his playing time during which he's already exceeded this year) and more than half again the league average (29.6%). He's not swinging as often as he sometimes has, overall, showing decent plate discipline: He's swung at 74.7% of the pitches he's seen inside the zone, and 29.2% of those outside it. Those numbers are typical of his last few seasons, marking him as much more aggressive than the average hitter on strikes but not especially prone to chasing. However, when he does chase, Buxton is coming up empty at a truly remarkable rate. He's only made contact on 34.8% of his swings at out-of-zone pitches this season, which is not only a career-low, but the fourth-lowest among qualified batters this year. Only Brandon Lowe, Judge, and Ryan McMahon have made less contact outside the zone, and they all chase less often than Buxton, anyway. This is why Buxton leads the majors in strikeouts. He's swinging with reckless abandon when he sees what he believes to be his pitch. He's not modulating his swing or reshaping it to make contact if it turns out to be something other than what he thought he saw. That's leading to lots and lots of whiffs, and not very many walks, and he would need to make a major approach change to see those trends reverse themselves. On the other hand, it's also leading to 55.2% of his batted balls jumping off the bat at 95 miles per hour or more, a career-high mark. He's been able to use his legs to grab extra bases and beat out a few infield hits. He's been such a menace for opposing defenses that his BABIP is a whopping .341, despite his extreme fly-ball tendencies. It's not clear how long one can play this high-octane a level of offensive baseball. It's not as neat or orderly or obviously sustainable as the way Judge is thriving—not by a long shot. Indeed, Baseball Prospectus's Deserved Runs Created model assigns him a DRC+ (where 100 is average and higher is better) of 89 this year, indicating that these fundamentals aren't supposed to add up to production this good. Buxton's talent is breaking baseball a little bit, as it often does, when he's healthy enough to put it on full display. Now, there are two questions remaining: Can he keep this up, despite the gravity of the game and its tendency to pull players back toward less extreme combinations of process and outcome? And the scarier one: can he stay healthy long enough to allow us to get an answer to the first thing? View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images At a glance, it doesn't look like Trevor Larnach is doing any of the things you'd hope to see from him this season. He's hitting it on the ground more; he's pulling it in the air less. His swing speed is down; his chase rate is up. He's generating lower batting and slugging averages on contact, which makes sense, because he's not hitting it hard as often as he has in the past, and he's walking less, which makes sense because he's swinging more. When you look at his full line, though—he's hitting .245/.321/.395 for the season—things don't look so dreary. In fact, he's on a tear lately, right in line with some of the best work he did last year. Larnach credits a more balanced, consistent approach for this success, which has coincided with the Twins' rebound from a terrible start to the season that threatened to end their playoff hopes before they could even mature. "The goal is to be consistent with your moves as much as you possibly can," Larnach said Saturday. "The more you’re consistent, the more you’ll see consistent results." That day, his results were tremendous, as they've often been in recent days. He doubled and homered, and has two of each of those in the last five contests. During the Twins' current eight-game winning streak, their slugging corner outfielder is hitting .303 and slugging .545. He's struck out more lately than he did over the first five or six weeks of the campaign, but is making up for it with increased power. Under new hitting coach Matt Borgschulte, he's enjoying the fruits of a team-oriented approach. "I think each hitting coach has their own kind of philosophy that they like to follow, and Borgs’s is very simple. He tries to simplify things. Each hitting coach is different," Larnach said. "You’re gonna have a guy who likes mechanics, you’re gonna have a guy who likes approach, you’re gonna have a guy who might like both. But Borgs, specifically, I think he likes to take a team approach and help guys out in the team sense, to simplify, ‘Ok, this is what the pitcher does. Let’s all try to pass the batons, and do the right things.’" It's taken time for that collective mentality to take root, and for the team's production to match their projections. That's been happening lately, though, and it comes as no surprise to Rocco Baldelli. "Borgs is an extremely intelligent hitting guy. He’s very prepared, but he’s really good, more than anything, at how do you help guys train to prepare for what’s to come? As opposed to just honing a swing, he’s actually honing a swing combined with what a team is about to see on a given night," Baldelli said Tuesday. "He’s really into, not just taking swings, but practicing things that are going to help with things like decision-making and improving guys’ approaches at the plate." Under Borgschulte, Larnach's using the opposite field more often than in the past, and pulling the ball less than ever. On the other hand, his 20.5% strikeout rate is the lowest of his career, too. He's making contact with over 87% of the strikes at which he swings, a career-best and a mark of thorough strike zone control. The skipper believes that's a natural result of the process the team has implemented this spring. "He’s a very process-oriented guy, who’s not just there to create an ideal swing that’s going to hit a pull-side homer," Baldelli said. "Yes, that’s important, but he’s really interested in the flexibility of a swing—the ability to help a swing adapt to all the things that a pitcher is going to do. And he makes a lot of these things that are somewhat complicated really simple, as the guys are trying to prepare. He’s trying to help these guys get ready to hit major-league pitching, which is totally different than just breaking down a swing on video. It’s not a static thing, in Borgs’s mind. It’s like a living, breathing thing, the major-league swing." That flexibility is exactly what Larnach has largely lacked during his big-league career. Famously, he struggles mightily against offspeed and breaking stuff. He's also been a dead pull hitter. The new and (hopefully) improved Larnach is better able to cover the whole plate and use the whole field, which he credits not only to good coaching, but to subtle adjustments facilitated by getting to play more often against left-handed pitching this year. In the past, Larnach has strode closed, which ensured that he wouldn't lose coverage of the outer edge but also cost him some bat speed. "That happens over time, but it’s not something I’m always trying to do—because eventually, that leads you to cutting yourself off. And that’s not what you want," Larnach said of that stride pattern. "So sometimes, if I get pitched away a lot from right-handed pitchers—even last year, it happened—but if it happens a lot, it’ll be extensive. So the adjustment is to try and get back. So then, everyone is different, but sometimes for me, seeing a lot of left-handed sided stuff, that helps me even back out." Whether it's specific instruction or just more opportunities to handle varied opposition, Larnach is rounding out nicely at the plate—even if the results so far are more encouraging than outright dazzling. The team mindset has filtered through the roster. Until Matt Wallner returns to the lineup, Larnach will be badly needed as a left-handed bat, and his new hitting coach has him in a good state of mind to meet that need. View full article

Image courtesy of © Brad Rempel-Imagn Images For much of the last two-plus seasons, Pablo López has been the Twins rotation's Super-Man. The bad news is, the first inning has been kryptonite. Since the start of 2023, and prior to Tuesday's tangle with the visiting Orioles, López had allowed a .270/.308/.474 batting line in the first inning, with 15 home runs in 293 batters faced and a 4.43 ERA. Because the best hitters hit at the top of teams' lineups, the first inning is always higher-scoring than the rest of the game (taken as a whole), but true aces tamp down that effect. López, though stellar the rest of the time, has been milquetoast in his first frame of games since joining the Twins. That changed on Tuesday night, setting the tone for a dominant outing and a blowout Twins win. The first step was being willing to move off his fastball. The Orioles' first two hitters, Cedric Mullins and Gunnar Henderson, tried to sit on his heater—as teams often do early against López, with good reason. In general, he starts the game with heavy fastball usage, in the grand pitching tradition of establishing the heater. Here's his pitch usage by inning for the season, entering last night. This time, though, López, catcher Ryan Jeffers and pitching coach Pete Maki had a more varied plan, and it worked. The veteran righty struck out the side in order, and only seven of the 18 pitches he threw in the frame were fastballs. "The first step is just having a good plan—knowing your enemy," López said after the game. "We want to know ourselves, and we want to know our enemy. The pregame meeting with Pete and Jeffers was very specific and very thorough, which, I like to think of myself as a thorough person, so that gave me a lot of confidence." As the game progressed, the fastball took more of a leading role, reversing the pattern we saw from him before Tuesday. He was pitching backward, not just on an atomic plate appearance level, but within the game. As he discovered ways to get the Orioles looking for something else, he realized the fastball would play as a putaway pitch on this particular evening. "The fastball is traditionally the pitch that we're supposed to use the most. It's just the pitch that we should be able to command, control. Everything works off your fastball," López said. "But when you are trying to pepper the zone, and you're getting uncomfortable swings, uncomfortable takes, reads, weak contact, it's like, 'Ok, it's not only working to set things up. It's actually working today to put people away. Identifying that is really important—especially the batters that we can maneuver or exploit that a little better. So it's fun when you know it's more than a setup pitch, specific nights." At one stretch, López went with a breaking or offspeed pitch on 0-0 to seven of nine batters. He wasn't leading with his heater, against the young hands and dangerous bat speed of the Orioles lineup. He first forced them to think about his whole arsenal, then zipped in the fastball when they weren't ready. Of his 44 two-strike pitches, 18 were fastballs, and he earned seven of his 11 strikeouts with the heater. That was partially a product of that detailed pregame plan, but it was also because his new kick-change is doing some truly devastating things—thus far, alas, too devastating to be tempting. He threw seven kick-changes Tuesday night, most in leveraged counts with the hope of putting away Orioles batters, but all seven went for balls. "You look at the 11 strikeouts, and they're nice. Obviously, I didn't get the length that I like to provide the team, but a lot of times, you have to take what the game gives you," López said. "I just tried to be on the mound, competing, competing, competing." There were positives to take from the pitch even on a night when it yielded no positive results, because it's showing up as the best offering in his arsenal, according to StuffPro (Baseball Prospectus's pitch-modeling metric). Because the kick-change is not yet its own, distinct pitch classification and because López throws a separate changeup, the kick-change is labeled below as a splitter (FS). That pitch caught Rocco Baldelli's eye, even though the Orioles didn't bite on it Tuesday night. "The way that Pablo was getting swing-and-miss in the game today, you knew it was good. He put together an outing where he was missing bats with his fastball," Baldelli said in his postgame press conference. "He had some really interesting movement today on his changeup. It seemed like it was moving even more than in other outings. It almost looked like it was a curveball from the side, the way it was dropping. He had something going on today that was a little different from some of his other starts, in a good way. He wished he had a few more pitches to work with after the outing, but overall, just a fantastic outing by him." Indeed, if López wants to get deeper into games, he needs to be able to put hitters away more efficiently when he gets ahead in the count. His new changeup is nastier than his old one, but seems much harder to place where hitters will feel any need to swing at it. Maybe throwing it helps set up the fastball, but even if so, it means taking two pitches to get from strike 2 to strike 3, instead of one. The Orioles are prone to strikeouts, but one thing they do quite well is draw out at-bats in just the way we witnessed Tuesday night. The next step for the Twins' ace is to figure out why his kick-change isn't drawing swings, and see whether that can be amended. In the meantime, though, he had everything he needed to get great results, and at least for an evening, a tweak to his approach fixed his first-inning problem. With a wicked new weapon in the mix, we might see more high-strikeout performances from him in the near future. View full article

This is almost certainly just me, but I LOVE when the Twins play the Orioles. It just feels good. I have to say, it feels slightly wrong having this series in May. I like it when there's a hint of October in the air (although that pageantry was spoiled when they visited last year). Something that goes all the way back to the Weaver O's running into the Twins in '69 and '70? The way they've almost perfectly matched up their winning windows so as never to be good at the same time, but always in a position to play spoiler? I dunno. It might just be the uniform colors. But I love it.

Funny you should pose the possibility. Royce to reporters a couple hours ago: "Oh, man, I just need the opportunity. You know, I might not even be 100 percent, but I'm not worried about that. I'm just worried about playing and giving it my all each and every day. And, you know, I'm looking forward to, you know, maybe hit one out. That’d be great. You know, that'd be awesome. But, you know, just have fun."

Image courtesy of © Paul Rutherford-Imagn Images The simplest and most effective hitter's credo goes: swing at strikes, lay off balls. It's the surest way to find success at any level of baseball, and nowhere is it invalid. It just becomes less helpful with each rung of the ladder of competition one climbs, because by the time you reach the majors, pitchers have good enough stuff and command to both bully you within the zone (even when you swing with gusto there) and lure you into bad swings beyond it. The task of every player, team, and coaching staff is to fight back against the pressure applied by such sensational pitching. You have to find ways to win within and around the zone. About 70% of pitches thrown in the majors are either squarely within the zone or close enough to the edges of it to force a difficult swing decision, even for a polished hitter. Statcast bins such pitches under the headers "Heart," which is what it sounds like, and "Shadow," which is a rectangular frame around the Heart zone that shadows the invisible edges of the rulebook strike zone. Beyond those lie "Chase," a frame around the Shadow area that identifies places pitchers might intentionally throw the ball to induce a swing but in which a hitter is unlikely to produce anything good. Finally, there is the "Waste" zone, a space so far beyond the hittable pitch territory that no one should ever swing there—and hardly anyone ever does. Because Baseball Savant presents those four categories for pitch locations, one might be tempted to treat all four zones as equally important. We often face a similar impulse with in-zone and out-of-zone pitches: to treat that binary as real and the two subsets it creates as equally worthy of our attention. Neither is a good instinct, though, of course. In the case of Heart, Shadow, Chase, and Waste, there are two reasons why the first two categories matter far, far more than the latter two: The aforementioned fact that many more pitches are thrown within them than in Chase and Waste. It's more than 2-to-1; and There's little elasticity in what happens in the Waste zone, from player to player or team to team, based on talent. You just have to not swing at those pitches, and mostly, hitters don't. All takes, at least in that area, have the same value. Aaron Judge isn't deriving more value from spitting on a slider in the dirt than Brooks Lee is, unless Judge does so more consistently and Lee occasionally goes fishing. On the other hand, when a ball is right in the heart of the zone, there's likely to be little difference in the quality of Judge's and Lee's swing decisions—but a big difference in the value of the swings they put on those pitches. When evaluating a team or a player at a glance, then, it's a pretty good idea to exclude at least the Waste category from your examination. You can winnow down to true talent (and good overall process, since the latter should lead to a more robust tapping of the former) even better by cutting out Chase pitches, too. Let's do that, for all teams in each of the last two full seasons and the early going of this one, to see where the Twins stand. Firstly, you'll notice that even the very best team in this sample (the 2023 team from unincorporated territory in Cobb County, Ga.) has a negative run value on those pitches. That's not surprising, when you think about, right? At their core, the pitches we're studying here are basically strikes. An exceptionally well-calibrated, patient approach can earn a team meaningful value from pitches taken for balls just off one corner or another, but these are mostly strikes, so the Run Value metric we're using is measuring mostly the ability to actually hit the ball and do damage. It's baking in some plate discipline, but that plays a small role here. The 2023 Twins were one of the best teams in the league at fighting back when pitchers came into the zone. They weren't quite the 2019 Bomba Squad (no team in any uniform has topped them in this metric since that season), but they could rake, and specifically, they made pitchers pay for trying to live over the plate. Last year, there was still some of that danger to them, but they faded to 13th in the majors. It wasn't an outright disaster, but the team did treat it a bit like one, firing hitting coaches and changing out their preparation paradigm for hitters. That hasn't worked, at all. The 2025 team is getting beaten in and around the zone, with a prorated Run Value that ranks 21st in baseball on those offerings. You can be a tolerable offense with that kind of ranking, but even that isn't easy. Most of the time, below-average teams in the Heart and Shadow zones are bad overall lineups. But, are the Twins making up ground by being more disciplined on the truly unworthy pitches, well beyond the bounds of the strike zone? Here's the equivalent chart for all teams since the start of 2023, in the Chase and Waste spaces. Uh, nope. As you can see, this chart is basically a mirror of the other, not with regard to the order and identity of the teams, but with regard to shape and scale. This Run Value statistic is anchored to average production, so for every run destroyed, one must be created. When pitchers work far outside the zone, they tend to issue walks—or fall behind, and end up needing to come back to the middle of the plate. Either way, it's bad for the pitchers, so the runs prevented within and around the zone are allowed on the truly errant offerings. For batters, that means what the headline of the chart says: Just don't swing, baby. There are, of course, players who hit bad balls better than others, and that can make up for some otherwise lousy swing decisions, but by and large, the teams who chase most will rank lowest here. The Twins are, in a sense, an interesting counterpoint. They were 23rd in 2023, when their offense was humming, and 14th in 2024, when things went sour. They're back to 23rd this year, but the problem isn't solely that they expand the zone too much. They do, given their skill sets, but that's not the whole story here. The Twins have built a lineup that strongly tends toward grooved swings. Their guys are wired to hammer mistakes, rather than to fight off or flare pitches outside the zone to the opposite field. The Twins might chase less than some of the teams ahead of them, especially this year, but they also produce less when they do chase than most of their rivals do. It's a double-whammy. A functioning Carlos Correa would solve a few of these problems. A healthy Royce Lewis should address them, too. Lewis and Matt Wallner are (other than Byron Buxton, perhaps) the players the team most counts on to make it hurt whenever a pitcher tries to sneak a strike by. Right now, though, the pivot to Matt Borgschulte doesn't seem to be paying any new dividends. In the places where they most need to be good (and usually have been, even in tough times), the Twins are just getting dominated at the plate. View full article