Matthew Trueblood

The Twins' ace righthander has twice as many changeups as he had when the 2024 season ended. After a slight but important change of position on the rubber, he's hoping to give hitters twice as many problems, too. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Say what he will about meditation, the nature of pressure in athletic endeavors, and being a self-possessed, well-rounded person, Pablo López is not immune to FOMO. When he came to the Twins in the offseason before the 2023 season, he and the team acted quickly to suit him up with the newest trend in pitching: a sweeper. It became, perhaps, the most important driver of his stellar first season in Minnesota, and it kept him hip to the trends of his craft. Last year, the vogue pitch of the year was the splitter, and López was left out. The Twins aren't entirely averse to throwing the splitter, but it's not the way they prefer their pitchers to achieve the desirable effects of a good changeup. López already had a strong changeup. In fact, it was his best and most talked-about pitch, before he was traded from the Marlins to the Twins. Even if he wanted to throw the splitter last year, it would have been like when you wore down your parents and got that PS2, and then the XBox came out shortly afterward. You're not selling them on that one, at least until Christmas. Happily, though, Christmas has come for the venerable Venezuelan, because this year's hot new pitch is a changeup even a nervous mother can love. The kick-change could turn out to be carcinogenic or something, but there's no evidence of that right now and it seems wildly unlikely. All your parents or López's pitching coach has to know is that it doesn't create that ominous tension in the tendons of your elbow that comes with shoving the ball deep into the 'V' of your first two fingers to throw the splitter. (Have you ever tried this? Go grab a ball, and grip it for a splitter, and just fe—oh, ok, you've heard it. Well, anyway.) The wild and fun choice López has made, though, is to add this new variant of the changeup—because of the way it kills spin without diminishing speed, it plays much like a splitter and is thus tagged by most pitch classification systems—without scrapping his old reliable one. The league is seeing a greater proliferation all the time of guys with multiple fastballs and multiple breaking balls, and now, López joins a small but growing fraternity of hurlers with multiple changeups. You know what they say, though. Change (not just changeups, but big-C Change, like the kind effected on a pitcher's whole approach and arsenal by the addition of a second changeup, am I saying 'change' too much?) can't be achieved while standing still. So, López is literally on the move. Don't adjust your screen. Yes, there are two of Pablo López there. The main López—the one native to the rest of the frame we're looking at, which is from a game at Sox Park in Chicago last August—is the guy on the left, just releasing a fastball to then-Sox batter Gavin Sheets. López′ is the one who, because I'm not as good at Canva as Jim O'Heir, looks very definitely like he's been artificially dropped in. Here's the key, though: Whatever aspects of the superimposition I did clumsily, the part I got right is alignment. López′ is about eight inches farther toward third base (away from the first-base edge of the pitching rubber, where he's lived of late) than he was last year. Why does that matter? Read on. View full article

The Twins' slugging infielder is trying to be smart about building back up and preparing for a rehab assignment, without giving in to impatience or frustration about the number and nature of injuries that continue to pile up. Image courtesy of © Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images By now, the Twins know they can't fully trust Royce Lewis's own accounts of the severity of his injuries, or of the indicators of healing he experiences as he tries to return therefrom. Thus, they listen to his input and opinion on his own health—but apply some external constraints on the rehab process, too. "Anytime they let me do something, that’s always pretty good," said Lewis, who ran on the field for a second straight day Sunday. "They know, I think they said, like, I can tell them how I feel up to 60%, and after that, they know if I’m 80 percent, [I'll say] I’m ready to go. So they have to give me a governor per se, and so right now, the governor is we’re gonna take it easy and make sure we continue to progress." Lewis said the plan is to rest one day, then try to run for three straight days, as he continues to ramp up his baseball activities. "You know, it’s a long progression," he told reporters in the dugout at Target Field. "Running, it’s not just like ‘Run two days, and then you’re back.’ As much as I wish it was. Trust me, I would love to be playing right now. But that’s just not the case." Lewis is grateful to be around the team during this part of the rehab process, though he won't travel with them to Kansas City for the four-game series beginning Monday. Instead, he'll continue his work in Minnesota, with the goal being to progress to baserunning and changing direction by the following week. Swelling lingers in the area where he suffered a strained hamstring on March 16th, but Lewis downplayed that as a point of concern. "I talk to someone like Randy Dobnak; he deals with swelling still on that ankle that he had," Lewis said. "Everyone is different, every body’s different and every injury’s different, but especially when you’re doing high-volume stuff, that swelling will come back. So it’s more about what can you tolerate, and was it down enough? And for sure, we had it down enough, and we started right around Opening Day, actually." While Lewis reports no pain in the area of the injury since the day after he suffered it (when he wasn't even able to straighten his leg), the continued swelling could be one reason why the Twins are keeping that governor on his recovery. Another, of course, is his track record of getting hurt—and then, after returning, getting hurt again. Lewis hears the rumblings from those outside the team who would prefer to see him make changes to his playing style or his preparation, but (while he understands them in a constructive way) isn't willing to stop playing the whole game, the way he believes he's capable of playing it. "I’ve only made it here because of who I am. I’m not gonna change who I am," he said. "If I start changing who I am, then I think as a player, I’ll start diminishing my value. And what I do is very special. I think everyone’s able to see that, and I think that’s why everyone is so mad that I keep getting hurt." You can, however, hear the frustration taking a toll on the relentlessly positive Lewis. The online chatter finds its way to him, and he sounded a pained tone by comparing his highly kinetic, athletic game to those of players who might be more durable but lack the same potential for multidimensional impact. "You see guys get hurt more that tend to be more athletic and explosive, because they put themselves in those positions, because they can do things that a lot of people, frankly, can’t do," he said. "And unfortunately, I’ve joked about it, maybe I should just play more like Kyle Schwarber and be smart about it. But at the same time, if I start doing that, I’ll diminish my value. And I want to play the game and help the team win, and not worry about being hurt." Lewis also had sharp words for those who criticize his injury problems anonymously and online. "That’s just the world that we live in, man. People behind a screen, whether they’re in a basement, or I don’t know where they’re at, but then they’re on Twitter and they think they’re safe, but say something to someone’s face and see what happens." Those sentiments are unsurprising, from an extraordinarily talented player and a proud professional. As he pointed out, fans don't see the hard work he puts into conditioning and treatment off the field, and they tend to make unduly ungenerous assumptions about those things. As most big-leaguers do, Lewis works hard to reduce his risk of injury by keeping himself in great shape and preparing his body for the grind of each game, as well as the long season—sometimes, two different and competing objectives. At the same time, some of those fans might fairly observe that Schwarber has found ample ways to contribute to winning teams since changing his own style of play. When he came up as a part-time catcher and outfielder, he took the latter duties so seriously that he wrecked his knee in a collision with a teammate early in 2016. Since then (and especially since 2021), he's taken a much more cautious approach to all facets of his game, but has been a consistently superb producer at the plate. Lewis, whose pride and dedication to the whole game includes a fierce belief in his own value as a defender and baserunner, has rated out as a merely average fielder and a below-average baserunner over the parts of three seasons he's played. Schwarber has been worse in both categories, but the increased volume (and a more consistent level of offensive production) has made him more valuable over the last three-plus seasons than Lewis has been, by almost any measurement. "It’s hard to tell guys how to play Major League Baseball once they take the field—how to tell a guy to give a certain amount of effort, that never feels productive," said Rocco Baldelli, Thursday, with regard to players like Lewis and Byron Buxton. "Even if the message seems to be correct, it never feels good or productive to have to do that, or want to do that. The right message is almost always to go play. And they can regulate themselves better than a manager can ever tell a guy to do." That makes Baldelli a good fit with his pupil, in Lewis. The one doesn't want to tone down his players' effort. The other wouldn't hear of doing so, anyway. As Lewis acknowledged, though, the organization is putting some safeguards in place for him, at least during the rehabilitative process. Once he takes the field again, he'll seek maximal impact. That's the best thing for all parties—as long as he can find a way to play the full-out version of the game without continuing to get hurt at such a high rate. View full article

Every game is worth .006 in win percentage at the end of the year, and each win is only 1.1% of what you need to reach the playoffs. But not all games are created equal. The Twins desperately need a win, so every can do the important work of shutting the heck up. Image courtesy of © Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images There are two realities to everything: the objective, and the actual. They don't overlap perfectly. In fact, often, they barely touch at all. It would be great if the world and its inhabitants eventually bent themselves to the objective reality of each situation, but for the most part, we live in a world dominated by emotional and misinformed reactions to things—because the ramifications of those reactions can't be erased simply because they're misgiven. Humans are irrational, and worse, they're bad at corralling the irrationality of others. Much more often, they give in to it, because they were fighting strong impulses to be the same way before they encountered the irrational person right in front of them. Thence come the shrieks and allegations of cheating in response to the Yankees becoming one of several teams to try out slightly different-shaped baseball bats. Thence, too, comes everyone's angst about their team's performance with the bases loaded, or the way their team hits left-handed pitchers, or the reliability of their bullpen. There are fans who are very worried about the ball being juiced this spring, and there are fans who are very worried about the ball being especially dead, and the near-certain truth that the ball is playing fair will take weeks to get a full hearing—if it does, at all. This is just how our culture is wired—especially online, and especially, perhaps, in sports. Unfair as this might be, then, I'm forced to admit it: The Twins simply have to win Tuesday night. Losing a fifth straight game to start this particular season—coming off a collapse last August and September; after an unsatisfying offseason and an abortive effort to sell the team on the part of unpopular owners; and against two teams who don't even expect to post winning records this year—might just shatter the already-fragile collective mind of the Minnesota sports fan. Twins TV had a rocky launch. Carlos Correa, Byron Buxton and Matt Wallner are a combined 2-for-36 to start the season. The White Sox didn't just beat the Twins in the first game of their series. They blew their doors off, and nearly no-hit them in the process. Rocco Baldelli beat a hasty fourth-inning retreat, removing Buxton and Correa in the name of workload management in the very first week of a long season, before his team has had their first win or even their first sustained lead. The vibes are rancid, and yet, they can get worse. I'm here, and I'm more online than I care to be and I have family members who love the Twins, and I'm telling you: the truly radioactive vibes around this team can get even worse. If the Sox beat the Twins again Tuesday night, with Rule 5 Draft pick Shane Smith (see, they found a way to keep their hard-throwing Rule 5 guy in the building!) taking the mound for his first career appearance, we're all going to need contamination suits and evacuation plans. I don't want to eat Spam. I hate Spam. Will the Twins be much less likely to win the AL Central if they lose Tuesday night than they are right now? No. But that just doesn't matter. This is the same case I tried to make when the team first scaled back their payroll in late 2023—the break of containment that has led to a rising risk of radioactivity poisoning in the broader baseball population. We're not automatons. We're not even healthy, well-adjusted, balanced humans who go to our jobs during the day, read to our kids at night, and check the box score each morning or the standings each Sunday in the newspaper. We are 24-hour news cycle gremlins, constantly overstimulated and obsessed and very, very worried, and the Twins need to win, because otherwise, people are going to continue freaking out. It won't fix everything, but the Twins need to win so the deeply damaged brains of this particular set of baseball fans can be soothed for a while. Then, we can revisit the urgency of a win again Wednesday. View full article

Whenever a new stream of information about the way baseball is played at the highest level becomes available, it reveals something new about a facet of the game we've always sought to understand better. What have we learned this week? Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images It's been a week since Statcast released public-facing data on batter's box position and contact points for batters throughout the league. It's been a fascinating new source of insight into the pitcher-batter confrontation, and it's also just a fun toy. We've seen, for instance, how Willi Castro's extreme proximity to the plate continues to his tendency to get hit by so many pitches, or how Ryan Jeffers makes a major change of approach when he reaches two strikes in the count. More epiphanies await, though. For instance, we can break down where a hitter sets up and where they tend to make contact with the ball (or, at least, where their swing path would lead them to do so; the theoretical intercept point is tracked even when the batter whiffs on the pitch) not only by count, but by the handedness of the opposing pitcher—and doing so tells us much about how contact points interact with platoon splits. I wrote a piece introducing this idea at a more basic level at our sister site for the Boston Red Sox Monday morning; check that out here. Last season, the Twins had some of the right-handed hitters who handled right-handed pitching best, in all of baseball. As a whole, after adjusting for park effects, their righties hit righty hurlers 11% better than average. Carlos Correa (.884 OPS), Byron Buxton (.859) and Jose Miranda (.856) were each at least 45% better than a typical righty when facing same-handed pitchers. For Correa and Buxton, that was still worse than their overall numbers, meaning they were even more dangerous against lefties—but Miranda was actually considerably better against same-handed hurlers. The idea of a hitter with true-talent reverse platoon splits has been largely rebuffed throughout the sabermetric era, and with good reason. The only modern hitters to retire with better numbers against same-handed pitchers over long careers were extremely unusual lefty batters Ichiro Suzuki and Kelly Johnson. It's just not how baseball works. You hit opposite-handed pitchers better, because their breaking stuff moves toward you instead of away, and because you can usually pick up the ball sooner and clearer out of those pitchers' h ands. Now, though, we have a new way to see the question of platoon skills, and Miranda is an instructive example. His average contact point against righty hurlers is 6.7 inches in front of home plate. For context, the average right-handed batter's contact point in those matchups is just 3.4" in front. Some of the righty batters who handled righties best last year shared that trait with Miranda—they go get the ball well in front of home. The 25 best righty batters against righties last year averaged a contact point 4.1" in front of the plate, despite the fact that (in general) there are diminishing returns once you get some distance from the average: you're likely to be too early on a lot of balls. The edge for the righty who catches it out front, when facing same-handed hurlers, is that they can get to the ball before it's finished dipping below the zone or sliding off the plate away. There's danger in that ability, since it sometimes prompts such hitters to make bad swing decisions and chase too many of those pitches, but being able to get the barrel to a slider before it reaches a location where that kind of barreling-up would be impossible is a skill, rooted in that natural (or organically practiced) contact point. Hitters whose swings do best when they go get the ball early anyway make it harder for same-handed opponents to sneak a breaking ball past. Miranda captures all of this nicely. He chases too much for his own good, but still managed to pull the ball in the air at an above-average rate in 2024. He makes more contact than you'd expect, based on the pitches he sees and swings at, and does a good amount of damage on breaking stuff. Where he struggles—and this is another layer to examine when it comes to contact points and platoon skills—is with offspeed stuff from lefties. On those pitches, Miranda was below average last season, which is why he doesn't crush lefties the way you'd expect such a competent righty batter to. His swing is about going and getting the ball, not waiting for it, but that often means jumping at a changeup that would have faded out of the zone, or seeing it right in terms of location but having to decelerate the swing to make contact. Contact point informs plate discipline, but doesn't determine it. To figure out how well a batter will handle both same- and opposite-handed batters, you need to assess their swing decisions and their swing itself, understanding that they're related but distinct. Miranda's vulnerability to lefty changeups might be fixable, if he can learn to tone down his aggressiveness against them. He might even do well to move his own contact point deeper against lefties, as most hitters do. Right now, he belongs to a small set of players (guys like Christopher Morel, Tyler O'Neill, and Randy Arozarena) who both catch the ball out front from the right side and let it travel deeper against righties than against lefties. Unlike those guys, though, Miranda has one more wrinkle: he's a full-extension hitter. In addition to seeing where a hitter tends to strike the ball relative to the front edge of the plate, we have data on how far their contact point is from their center of mass. Of the 294 batters who swung at least 500 times in 2024, Miranda ranked 23rd with a contact point almost three full feet (35.3") away from his center of mass. It's hard to stay back on the changeup and hit it hard if your swing is designed to make contact with such a big stride and long forward swing. Miranda has a (excuse the pun; it's halfway intended) twin elsewhere in the league to whom we can compare him, for these purposes. Austin Riley, the slugging Atlanta third baseman, sets up at the same depth in the box, averages almost identical contact points against both lefties and righties, and gets almost identical extension from his center of mass at contact. Yet, Riley not only holds his own against righties, but lays waste to lefties. On offspeed stuff from lefties, specifically, he was 5 runs better per 100 pitches seen than Miranda in 2024, according to Baseball Savant. How? There are two reasons. First, Riley stands about three inches closer to the plate, which makes it easier for him to get the barrel to outside pitches. This is a mixed blessing, though. Riley had his hand broken when he was hit by a pitch last year, and just had a similar scare near the end of spring training. Miranda could and should stand a bit closer to the plate, but the nature of swings like these is such that each inch of such movement increases the risk of a pitch running inside that the hitter can't avoid taking in a vulnerable spot. The other difference, of course, is this. Miranda probably won't ever have Riley's power, so the ability to blast off on that lefty changeup even as one gives up a little bit of bat speed might never be there. Again, we see an interplay between a swing path (in this case, more in terms of the forward-sweeping arc of the swing from its start to the contact point, and less about the matching of pitch trajectory in the vertical plane that we usually mean by this) and another skill, this time power. There are still confounding factors, then, when we try to read platoon skills and glean as much intelligence as possible about a hitter's profile by looking at their contact points. Nonetheless, these insights are invaluable. Why does Miranda handle righties well? Because he catches the ball out front, with a swing that remains controlled and adaptable. Why does he struggle to match the production you might hope to get from such a hitter, against lefties? Because his plate discipline and power are each a bit less impressive than those of similar hitters who do better. These nuggets give us something to watch and root for. If Miranda does scoot a bit closer to the plate, that might matter. If he makes better swing decisions on the outer edge, that might matter, too. And when Rocco Baldelli writes Miranda's name into the lineup regularly against righties, even at the expense of Edouard Julien or Mickey Gasper, we can understand that it's because of physical data that underpins and reinforces the outcome-centered numbers around his platoon splits. View full article

We all get into bad situations sometimes. The surest path to happiness is to make the best of those bad spots, and the Twins' catcher is good at that. Image courtesy of © Dave Nelson-Imagn Images On Sunday night, Baseball Savant rolled out their latest set of new data, offering us a new kind of insight into baseball. The numbers indicate where a batter sets up in the batter's box, how they orient their body, and where they make contact with the ball. It's immensely valuable, because it lets us see how hitters move en route to the ball—not just their bats, but the players themselves. Over time, this will unfold a whole new dimension of understanding of the game. For now, though, it's also just lots of fun. For instance: We can now visualize what I call The Lew Step—Royce Lewis's near-unique two-phase stride. It's a delicate hitting signature, but when it's right, it can be lethal, and these data help us see how unusual it really is. Screen Recording 2025-03-23 214253.mp4 But hey!, you say. This article didn't bill itself as being about Lewis. And you're right. It billed itself as being about Ryan Jeffers, because it is. Of all the early glimpses into the processes of Twins hitters from this new trove of information, it's Jeffers who stands out the most. Whatever problems they did have at the plate in 2024, it's hard to criticize the Twins' two-strike approach. They had seven different batters who got to two strikes in at least 160 plate appearances and had an OPS at least 16% better than the league's average in those counts. That doesn't mean any of them were truly productive with two strikes, of course. It's extremely hard to do that. League-wide, batters hit .168/.244/.264 with two strikes on them in 2024. Strikeouts are a major risk, of course, but hitters also tend to be more defensive in those moments, and therefore, they generate less power. The ceiling is very low. Jeffers, however, batted .179/.240/.350 in those seemingly desperate counts. Adjusting for parks and other factors, that was 31% better than average. How did he do it? By transforming. You hear hitters talk about spreading out in the box a bit with two strikes all the time—and fascinatingly, most of them do so, this new data shows. Most of them do it by about an inch, though. Not Jeffers. View full article

Heh. To be fair, I think that term gets thrown out there because of his build, his complexion, his facial hair, and his unusually advanced age for a rookie. The coaches don't view defense itself (nor versatility) as old-fashioned, and obviously, they're not even *consciously* saying if for those reasons I listed. What they think they see is an unusually strong work ethic, openness to lots of different roles and assignments, etc. I'm just not sure if that's actually what they're seeing or not. It's impossible to tell, sometimes, because if they're misleading us, it's purely accidental. They believe what they're peddling.

Yes, except two clarifications: 1. 26-man active roster, not 40-man roster; and 2. At no point can he be offered directly and solely back to the Phillies. That's always how it's been phrased, in public, which is weird, because it's not how it works or has ever worked. What has to happen is that he has to be waived, and clear waivers, AND THEN be offered back to the team. Often, the difference is functionally nil, because these guys are (by definition) not in high demand. Their own team already declined to put them on the 40-man after several years in the organization, and now they come with this extra burden if you do claim them. But just so we all understand that part, the Phillies don't get to jump the line to get him back if the Twins don't want him. The other 28 teams get a chance to take him instead, if they're dealing with injuries or something and like what they've seen.

At least with the batch of example deals Cody offered here, there *was* a DFA and a waiver clearance. Teams just weren't eager to scoop up any of those players with Rule 5 restrictions attached at that time—and, you never know, that could be the case with Castellano too. It seems, at least, to have been a more perfunctory process in the past. Teams have gotten steadily more hawkish about waiver pickups over the last two decades, and this might be part of that, rather than a true rule change. Norms have shifted. If a team thinks a guy can help them, they'll snare them, whereas they might have been a bit less aggressive in the past.

IMPORTANT: No, this isn't true. I've had a hard time running down whether it's the result of a change to the process or whether it's always been this way and some combination of gentlemen's agreements or circumstances allowed previous deals to happen, but I've confirmed this with a high-ranking baseball official. The player DOES have to pass through waivers and (technically) first be returned to the original team before a trade to remove their Rule 5 restrictions can be executed. No workaround. The ONLY way for Rule 5 restrictions to lift is if the player clears waivers.

As we wrestle with his ever-changing name, maybe we need to try 'Luke' next—because this version of his curveball is going to hang a lot of new Ks. Image courtesy of © Chris Tilley-Imagn Images Whether he and the Twins are ready to say so out loud or not, Louis Varland is now a reliever, in full. He was the (count 'em) fifth pitcher into the fray in Tuesday afternoon's spring training contest with the Yankees, working a clean sixth inning and striking out two. That's not bad news, though, because as Varland has flipped that switch, he also appears to have revved up his curveball into the kind of out pitch every dominant high-leverage reliever needs. Varland threw four knuckle-curves Tuesday, and all of them met the following criteria: 86 mph or faster (specifically, 86.6 or better, in this case) Between 2 and 6 inches of glove-side horizontal movement Between -4 and -8 inches of induced vertical break For those who don't intimately know the context of pitch movement data, that's a very hard curveball, with a small amount of movement away from a same-handed batter and a roughly medium amount of vertical depth. On video, it looks like a very sharp pitch, especially because of the speed on it. The league only threw a total of 330 curveballs that met those criteria last season. Varland himself threw nine of those, though that was just 6.4% of the 140 total curves he threw while in the majors. Curves like the ones Varland threw Tuesday are outlier pitches—even within the arsenals of most of the pitchers who throw them. Four pitchers did meet those criteria on over 10% of their curves last season, though: Brendon Little, LHP, Blue Jays - 28.1% Trevor Megill, RHP, Brewers - 20.5% Ben Brown, RHP, Cubs - 11.9% Jhoan Durán, RHP, Twins - 10.2% Ohp. Hey! We know him! View full article

I think that was somewhat common back then, but specifically, Tony O did it, after learning to do so from Rod Carew. Carew was fanatical about bat weights and unafraid to change things up when he sensed a need for that.

This is a great set of questions, JB. Yes, we have all of that, with a bit of digging! I (foolishly) take reviewing it a bit for granted; we should do better at bringing you that kind of detailed info. I think we'll do a piece centered on this soon. In the meantime: Byron Buxton, Swing Speed: 0 Strikes: 75.0 MPH 1 Strike: 74.5 2 Strikes: 73.4 Royce Lewis: 0 Strikes: 74.0 1 Strike: 74.0 2 Strikes: 72.1 Like most hitters, they *do* slow down their swings a bit to increase their contact rates with two strikes. This is why it's important to get ahead in counts; most guys give up some power when they fall behind.

On the eve of spring training, the Twins have made their annual spring training signing of a right-hitting, 30-something infielder. Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images The Minnesota Twins have added another bat to their array of infield options, agreeing to sign Ty France to a one-year deal, according to Phil Miller of the Minnesota Star-Tribune. France, 30, figures to fill some version of the role that went to Carlos Santana in 2024 and Donovan Solano in 2023. He's coming off a tough season with the Mariners and Reds, but is a .263/.337/.407 career hitter and a right-handed batter who's comfortable at first base. For the moment, he becomes the presumptive regular at that position, though he's not good enough to force Edouard Julien or Jose Miranda entirely out of the picture. Earlier Tuesday afternoon, the Twins lost left-handed pitcher Brent Headrick to the Yankees via waivers, so there was already room on the 40-man roster for France. Unlike, for instance, Harrison Bader, France is not a natural candidate for platooning. For his career, he's more of a line-drive hitter with good-not-great power, plate discipline, and contact skills, and his .741 and .753 OPSes against righties and lefties, respectively, don't scream "shelter me from righties". That doesn't mean France is in line for 600 plate appearances, especially after a campaign in which he didn't get to much of his power. It does mean that, like Santana and Solano, he needn't be confined to a small, bench-style role, and it does put newfound pressure on the roster spots and projected playing time for Miranda and Julien. It will be interesting to hear how the Twins envision utilizing him, but there's no doubt that France brings a slightly higher floor to their first-base projection. If you're hoping for the same kind of defense the Twins got from Santana, though, prepare for disappointment, France is a stocky converted second baseman without great mobility or especially soft hands. He rates poorly with the glove, and does nothing for the team's league-worst speed and athleticism. This signing, which figures to be for a low seven-figure amount, is a gamble by the Twins front office on a bat with some upside in a market increasingly bereft of such players. It's unsexy, and France is likely to be a one-dimensional contributor. Still, he provides stability, and the team clearly felt more reliable depth was needed. View full article

Though the entity formerly known as Bally Sports Net lives on, the regional sports network as we once knew it is dead. Baseball has departed the formerly safe, rapidly disappearing cocoon of cable, with its vague ratings demands. Being high-octane entertainment is no longer optional. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-Imagn Images Don't get it twisted: It has always been important to make good TV, in order to make money in TV. Beginning around the year 2000, when MLB settled in as a cable product and teams started making deals to sell their broadcast rights to various partners for production and distribution, it did matter how good they were, and how much fans wanted to watch them. The more urgent and widespread that demand was, the more teams could charge for their rights—because their partners knew they would have more willing, even clamorous buyers when they turned around to sell the product to cable and satellite providers. For a while, though, that need was somewhat ill-defined, and it could be inelastic over a period of several years. If a team struck a 10-year rights deal, they could afford to be pretty bad for about the first half of that deal, without seeing it materially affect the fees they could command the next time that deal came up for renewal. That was because, while flagging ratings might destabilize some of the relationships between RSNs and cable or satellite providers, both the networks and the carriers needed inventory, as much as they needed hits. Cable companies knew well that their customers retained their services partially for access to live sports, but also for constant access to something—as opposed to access to any particular thing. When cable was a fairly affordable product and people paid for it fairly blithely, the idea was just to keep them vaguely satisfied with the options they found whenever they pulled up the guide on their screens. Of course, we know what happened, over time. Cable's need for inventory and the increasing appetite for high-caliber programming led to more expensive shows being produced there, and the networks producing those shows then started fighting for higher carriage fees. So did live sports networks, and after a few years of having those cost increases passed on to them in monolithic blocks, customers began to balk. Not wanting to lose clients, the carriers turned around and passed the complaints they were getting right back to the entities who (they felt) had caused them in the first place: networks, including and especially RSNs. Ever since that happened, there has been a steady and inexorable climb in the need to rate well to make money airing sports on TV. While even some big-market teams have had nasty carriage disputes, note that neither the Yankees nor the Dodgers have ever come off the air in large swaths of their markets. The Red Sox don't have this problem, either. Although the corporate greed and incompetence of Diamond Sports Group and distribution partner Sinclair Media are not to be overlooked or forgotten, they're not the main reason why RSNs ran into trouble. That writing has been on the wall since before they entered the picture. If you're not relentlessly entertaining—which, in sports, usually just means winning, but more on that in a bit—then people will not relentlessly pay for your entertainment product. Ever since carriers started demanding lower carriage fees or bumping RSNs to premium tiers and a la carte sections of their offerings, the year-to-year sensitivity of medium-term profitability from TV has skyrocketed. Now, with teams (including the Twins) abandoning the cable model almost altogether and selling Twins.TV directly to consumers, that elasticity has gone through the roof like Willy Wonka in that glass elevator. How much money can you make broadcasting your team's games? Exactly as much as you earn by being a lot of fun to watch. This is not a problem unique to the Twins, and to their credit, the entire sport has realized it, too. It's an insatiable need to rate that helped bring about the shift ban and the pitch timer in 2023. It's also why, for some teams, there are considerations percolating that go beyond simply winning and losing. Because, yes, it is possible to win in boring ways—and even to lose in interesting ones. That doesn't mean that any front office is out to play really exciting, really bad baseball. The most enduring and reliable way to draw eyes and sell subscriptions is to win. It's just that we're likely to keep seeing teams chase the splash, a bit. When Dan Hayes of The Athletic writes that the Twins are considering a trade for Dylan Cease, despite the reasons why it might seem far-fetched or even nonsensical, keep this in mind: We now live in an era where you have to rate. Few teams have properly adjusted to this, so far. In the next half-decade, that will change. There will probably be more rules changes, although they might be minor ones, compared to those that went into effect in 2023. There will probably be playoff and league expansion, not to create more inventory for national postseason broadcast partners (that was the old reason), but to give each team's fan base longer to believe that they might be in contention. There will probably be less tanking, not because owners or front offices are getting any less cynical, but because it's a pretty bad idea in a world where your broadcast revenue fluctuates right along with your ticket sales—and that's the world toward which we're hurtling. There will also be fewer quiet offseasons and trade deadlines, though that change might take longer. Generally speaking, billionaires keep "spend money to make money" far down their list of go-to expressions. They have plenty of money, thank you, and would like it to make them more money without their having to spend anything, really. Still, in the long run, we'll see teams contemplate bigger moves, and become much less likely to go long stretches without making any. Fans are alive all 12 months of the year, and they're always making decisions about whether to keep subscribing to their team's streaming service. Teams will eventually have to grasp that moves like the two Carlos Correa signings and the Pablo López trade (yes, even that one, which surely angered as many fans as it thrilled when it first happened) have value that extends beyond the games they help the team win. Those wins definitely matter, but so does getting to wins in exciting, interesting ways. The future is, blessedly, a bit more elastic, and that should make baseball teams have a little more fun. View full article

You, sobbing: You can't just call every good pitcher with plus stuff and a deep arsenal a starter! It doesn't wor that way! Me, pointing at Cole Sands: Starter Image courtesy of © David Richard-Imagn Images The transformation of Cole Sands might, in a crowded field of contenders, be the most impressive thing an already-impressive Twins pitching development group did last year. He began the season as a fringe guy and ended it as, arguably, the second-most reliable reliever on the team. A big boost in velocity made a big difference, and so did a rejiggered pitch mix. Sands, 27, has four years of team control remaining and can still be optioned to the minor leagues this coming season, but by the second half of 2024, sending him to St. Paul felt out of the question. In his first two partial seasons in the majors, he'd posted DRA- figures of 106 and 109, respectively. DRA- is Baseball Prospectus's league-indexed holistic pitching metric, where 100 is average and lower is better. In 2024, Sands's went from the wrong side of average all the way to 82. He struck out 29.1% of opposing batters and walked just 4.1% of them. I say it's the perfect time to shake things up for him. Earlier this winter, I was among the chorus calling for the team to consider making this conversion with Griffin Jax. By the reckoning of most fans I encountered, though, the risks of that move—of disrupting or even forfeiting what Jax has found in short-burst relief, of thinning the bullpen—outweighed the benefits, which basically boil down to: Creating extra total value within the roster; Insulating the team better against the eventuality of an injury to Joe Ryan or one of the Twins' other starters; and Rolling the dice on the chance of creating an ace. Ultimately, it seems, the team and Jax agreed. There are no current plans to move him to the rotation, and when former Twins play-by-play announcer Dick Bremer asked Jax which role he would prefer at last week's annual Diamond Awards, Jax's answer only very slightly hedged. He sounded emotionally and mentally committed to being the high-adrenaline relief guy, and indeed, that matches what we've heard in the past about how he approaches his outings and why he doesn't like to go back out for second innings from the pen, fearing the loss of that raw edge. Maybe, though, there's still a starter conversion to consider. The chances that Sands could emerge from the pen and become an ace starter are not as high as the same chances were with Jax. However, trying this with him would be less obviously dangerous than moving Jax, because he has been a starter more recently (16 starts in 2022) and is not as essential to the structure of the bullpen. It would also have a chance to create value in an interesting way, for a team still operating with artificially stringent limits on their spending and ability to acquire value from without. Sands is a year further from free agency than Jax, so if a conversion were successful, it would make him either a longer-term valuable piece or a more valuable trade chip. Those are reasons why it makes sense to try it. What reasons do we have to think it would actually work? View full article