Matthew Trueblood

What's in a name? Would a Wild Card Series by any other name not smell as sweet? Image courtesy of © Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be. Great thinkers from the Buddhists to the Stoics to the best philosophers of the 20th century stressed that that awareness is where all human suffering lies. We can't turn a blind eye to that gap, permanently, but we need a rest from our weary knowing, sometimes. Baseball is never better than when it's providing us that respite. Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst. Fans want the team to win, and to qualify for the postseason, of course, but we all come to the game with our eyes open on that front. We all know wins can't be guaranteed. What's making watching the Twins so miserable, lately, is our inescapable awareness of the chasm between what the organization is and what it ought to be. Target Field is a jewel, and when the team is in contention, it should be brimming and buzzing and alive with excited fans. The Minnesota front office has assembled a team with several players whose ceiling is superstardom, and they should have the club in contention. And yet, the team has underachieved. We can save most of the blame game for another time, but this team isn't playing the way it should. That falls on the players, and on their manager, and on the front office's inclination toward conservatism, but most of all on ownership's foolhardy avarice and calamitous lack of real business savvy. There's somewhere between $35 million and $50 million that belongs on the field, in Twins uniforms, that is moldering away in the pockets of a family of clueless billionaires, instead. If it had been invested in this team over the last year, they would have already secured a playoff berth, instead of being on the verge of elimination--even if they had still underachieved. There's good news, though. Given the above, this might sound embittered or sarcastic, but it isn't. This is a genuine upside, of the kind Buddha and Seneca and Camus and Tversky would all encourage you to seek: In a way, the Twins are already in the playoffs. You can rebel against the impulse toward despair and rage and resentment, if you want, and embrace the fact that everything we really want out of the postseason is already coming to Target Field over the next few days--at bargain-basement prices, to boot. What makes the playoffs worth pursuing? Why are they the objective of every fan base and every player? It's partially because qualifying for them is a prerequisite for winning the World Series, of course, but we're all realistic enough to understand that the odds are against winning it all even once a team makes it to October. That's been true ever since divisional play began, more than a half-century ago. Now, in the 12-team playoff era, it's undeniable, and essential to understand. No, we like something more about the playoffs than the glimmer that comes into view on a far horizon once you clamber up onto that stage. It's the raising of the stakes of the game that changes it. It's the brightness of the lights and the national attention and the desperation that makes its way onto the field. Players can't hold anything in reserve anymore, and neither can managers. There can be no more shrugging or flushing tough losses. Everything matters. In life, hardly anything feels better than knowing you're doing or witnessing something authentically important, and whereas regular-season baseball is always of negotiable importance, the playoffs matter. Every pitch, every swing, every fielded ball, every umpire's call, every emotional response and every change in the direction of the wind has meaning and urgency. That's where the Twins are. With five games to play, they need four or five wins. Tuesday night's loss pulverized their margin for error, making all the games left playoff levels of do-or-die. Their season is on the line, right now. We might fairly hope, though we can't quite know, that several people's jobs are on the line. All that vividity and nerve-jangling danger is here. The Twins are a daily story everywhere that baseball is discussed, and they'll play on national TV this Saturday against the Orioles. All that's missing is the bunting on the railings. Well, that's not quite true. Because the Pohlad family has so methodically demoralized their customer base, there's one other vital, joyous ingredient of playoff baseball missing: the crowd. The few people who actually attended Tuesday night's game all agreed that the atmosphere was something worse than underwhelming: it was actively depressing. Playoff baseball is outrageously expensive, but fans will pay it, because those games are earned and they can be fully confident that all the other seats will be full and all the outs will be fiercely contested. It's easy to get in cheaply at Target Field this week, and given that the stakes and the odds are so clearly marked out, we can safely assume that the team will keep fighting as hard as they can to get the wins they need. In the world I want, we could all melt together into this moment, and Target Field would be full all week, because the Twins have earned this quintet of de facto playoff games--for worse, with this month-plus of harrowing collapse, but also for better, with a summer of tremendous baseball. Yet, I can't blame the fans who will stay away in droves, because the world I want is not the one we have, and this team won't stop reminding us all of that fact. No one wants to pay any amount of money to have their most hardwired soft spot poked over and over, even if it comes with some chance of seeing stirring, high-octane baseball. For the players who have to summon the energy and focus to attempt this heavy lift, it sucks. Having a small and unenthusiastic crowd makes their job harder. It's not the fans' fault, though. The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way. View full article

Counterpoint: How could anything better exemplify, better embody the last few years of the Twins franchise than a player who plays slightly over half the games on the schedule?

Six months from now, the greatest defensive center fielder of his time might be relegated to a corner, or to designated hitter. He might be in another uniform. Is the clock running out on the face of the Twins franchise? Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images He's never played an inning anywhere else, and hardly anyone has had the temerity to suggest that he might. When you think Byron Buxton, you think of center field. His picturesque athletic proportions, speed that seems to cost him less effort than it costs others, and incredible feel for making the play once the ball comes within his reach make Buxton a breathtaking defender. His nickname comes partially from the fact that his name bumps up against it, but it's also an invitation to remember that Willie Mays's teammates called him "Buck," too--first for his paradoxically ungainly grace and speed, but later with reverential respect. Buxton, like Mays, draws your eye on the field at all times, and commands his teammates' awe both with prodigious talent and with his willingness to play through maladies of all kinds. Yet, it might soon be time to dislodge the once-great fielder from a position that has contributed to his injury trouble over the years. Sadly, more than was true of Mays, Buxton's body has broken down and his athleticism has faded, even at age 30. This December, he'll turn 31, and his defense is in decline. In the only approximation of a full season he ever played afield, back in 2017, Buxton chalked up 23 Defensive Runs Saved, according to Sports Info Solutions. Over the following five seasons, he only played 2,192 1/3 innings in total, but he was worth about 20 DRS per 1,000 frames--a remarkable rate that varied little from year to year, even as he played through minor injuries and had to return the season after more serious ones. Those halcyon days, alas, are fading into memory. Infamously, Buxton didn't take up center field even once in 2023, relegated to DH duties full-time to manage a knee injury and survive the season as best he could. Coming back this year, he's played a lot out there, by his standards. His 727 innings in center are the most he's played since that 2017 campaign. Yet, he's only been worth 1 DRS--and there are some even worse indicators than that. According to Baseball Prospectus's Range Out Score, which is a defensive rate stat, Buxton was pretty safely 5% better than the league average at reaching fly balls throughout his prime. That number fell to 1.9 in 2022, though, and this season, it's a shock to the system: -4.2. Buxton's range, by one model focused on scaling that very skill carefully, is now markedly worse than average. Baseball Savant offers a spin on this called Success Rate, which basically takes all playable fly balls and asks what percentage of them an outfielder catches. Buxton's rate hovered in the range between 92 and 96 percent in every season he spent in center, prior to this one. This year, he's at 87 percent. It's a stark change, for the worse. We've still seen some moments that remind us what a wonder Buxton can be. We've still seen some heroics from him. On balance, though, the guy who changed the game for the better from his position in the outfield is gone. He'll keep running into walls, and keep hurling himself after the ball when his hips and knees allow him to get close to it, and that will still result in some incredible plays. It will also still result in some injuries, which are devastating to a franchise built so much around Buxton amid a pattern of shrinking payrolls. And worse, all that effort and speed and grace and excellence will keep becoming more infrequent--not because the spirit isn't willing, but because plainly, the body is only very intermittently able. What to do about it if Buxton can't stay in center beyond this season is a big, daunting, sad question. It's impossible to answer it right now. Nonetheless, we have to admit that it's there, staring us in the face. Could he stay healthier and resist the temptation to break himself against the walls if he moved to left or right field? Can he be the major, consistent offensive threat he's been for much of this season if he moves back to a full-fledged DH role? This week at Target Field, soak in Buxton, and pray to see some big plays from him. The Twins need them, and we all need a few more reminders of what a joy he has been over the years. There might not be any more such plays coming on the other side of a winter that suddenly both promises and ominously threatens change. View full article

What do you get when you defuse a bomba squad? As it turns out, they bomb in a different way, and hardly feel like a squad. Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images Last week, I wrote about the troubling signs around plate discipline for the weary, young, injury-depleted Twins. Too many players, especially some of the youngsters who felt the heavy burden of trying to carry an offense that had lost its dynamic leaders, started expanding their strike zones and flailing away at pitches they couldn't handle. That was especially concerning, because it fits so nicely with the best narrative we have to explain this team's crumbling play: they're tired. Studies prove the impact of fatigue on plate discipline, and the guys who aren't playing hurt on this team are playing dead tired. The silver lining, though, is that plate discipline was never this team's identity, per se. Even when they're going well, the Twins aren't the most disciplined team in baseball. The Yankees and Brewers excel in that department. The Cubs emphasize it. The Twins aren't about that, to the same extent. They're about pull power, which means taking a certain measure of aggressiveness to the plate. Now, though, comes the crushing news: It turns out that the silver lining was just another cloud, maybe darker and more dangerous than the first one, gathering on the horizon. The Twins live or die by pulling the ball hard in the air. It's how they set the single-season team record for home runs in 2019. It's why they were dubbed the Bomba Squad that year, and why I created what I called Bomba Rate in late 2022: the frequency with which a player lifts the ball to their pull field. At their best, the Twins hit the ball hard in the air to their pull field considerably more often than an average team. Even if they strike out often in the process, they can get to plenty of offense, because they create the most chances for quick scoring of any team in the league. Batted balls at an exit velocity of 95 miles per hour or greater and with a launch angle higher than 10 degrees hit to the pull field result in extra-base hits almost half the time. The league slugs 1.952 when they make that kind of contact. Here's a chart showing the frequency with which teams produce exit velocities of 100 MPH or greater (to any field, at any trajectory) and that with which they produce hard-hit air balls to the pull field, each on a per-plate appearance basis, by month. I've highlighted the Twins, and added arrows to show the passage of time, so the first Twins logo is for April and the one with the final arrow pointing to it is September. That's very stark. We all knew the team was struggling to hit the ball hard in April, but even then, they were above the league average in pulling the ball hard, in the air. In May and June, they were hammering the ball, although not creating potential bombas as often as they sometimes do. In July, they ran into trouble generating raw exit velocities, but the hard, pulled flies only ticked up. August saw it all come together: the air raid was on. They generated plenty of hard contact in general, and they specifically hit a lot of those long, promising flies--even though they didn't enjoy quite the level of results they deserved. September, by contrast, is a disaster for this team. Their dip from just under 10% of plate appearances ending in hard-hit, pulled flies to 6.6% means that, in the 650 trips to the plate they've accrued so far this month, they've hit 21 fewer potential bombas than they would have if they sustained their August pace. That's worth anywhere from 15 to 30 runs, based on situations, spread over 18 games. The Twins' September record would almost certainly be .500, and might be better than that, if they were still driving the ball to the pull field the way they did just one month earlier. In June and July, Royce Lewis pulled a hard fly ball in just over 14% of his plate appearances. In September, that number is 3.4%. José Miranda's season mark was 10.4% before the month began; it's down to 4.1% in September. Since coming back up from St. Paul in early July, Matt Wallner had run a rate of nearly 15.8%, hitting a ball with an even chance to be an extra-base hit about every sixth plate appearance. Since Sept. 1, he's done so 4.9% of the time. This is worse news than eroding plate discipline, although perhaps it's also easier to act on. If the Twins are healthy enough to execute something close their best swings, maybe a collective approach change--not to grind at-bats harder or be more patient, but to simply be more opportunistic and in touch with their best selves--could get them back to their slugging ways. Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa are back, and while no one is pretending they're as fresh and rested as in spring training, the team did handle them carefully. As a result, they've each made meaningful, positive contributions at the plate already. They can bring back an injection of this offensive identity, just by keeping up what they've shown they can do over the last week. It needs to happen fast, though. For the month, the Twins are slugging .356. Some teams can win, at least enough to avail themselves of the cushion the team gave itself throughout the summer, with a .356 slugging average. The Twins aren't such a team. They're not built for this. They will live or die based on whether they can drive the ball in the air to their pull fields, because that's how they score runs and their pitching staff is too thin to win a string of 2-1 and 3-2 games. The missing drives have already hurt them badly. To stop the collapse from becoming fatal, they have to erase that deficit and get back to hitting bombas. View full article

He's been a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency guy for the Twins, at most. Well, the glass is broken, and it turns out the hurler behind it might be better than a lot of us thought. Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images I'm not a betting man, but I want to make a bet. Honor system; no cheating. I will bet that, when you think "elite fastball characteristics", you don't think about Twins reliever Ronny Henriquez. And since this medium is really a one-way communicative forum, I'm going to go ahead and assume I just won my bet. In fact, you probably hardly ever think about Henriquez at all. I can't blame you for that. I don't, either. I don't think even the Twins have thought that much about Henriquez over the last two seasons. The thing is, though, we're all thinking about him now. In the Twins' last two wins, Henriquez has turned in 2 1/3 innings pitched, without allowing a run. He's pitched in high leverage in each contest, and added 0.217 in win probability for the team across the two outings. Brock Stewart and Chris Paddack are hurt. Jorge Alcalá is in St. Paul. Louie Varland isn't adjusting as smoothly to the whole reliever thing this time around, albeit in an extremely limited set of observations to date. Don't look now, but Ronny Henriquez might be part of the 'A' bullpen for Rocco Baldelli, with fewer than a dozen games left in the season and a playoff berth in the balance. No one asked for this set of circumstances, but as scary as the above might sound, Henriquez might just be up for the job. Out of nowhere, or nearly so, he's blossomed into an awfully interesting arm--maybe even one with upside akin to what Paddack, Stewart, and Varland offered the team at the tail end of 2023. That's an extraordinary-sounding claim, but give me a minute. I bet I can sell you, at least a little, on it. View full article

The stretched-out southpaw has some upside, but had lost his place in the Orioles' pitching hierarchy. Now, he'll try to help the Twins work around the sputters and struggles of their young back-end starters. Image courtesy of © Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images With Zebby Matthews, David Festa, and Simeon Woods Richardson all appearing to hit a wall near the end of their longest professional campaigns to date, the Twins went outside the organization for a last-minute reinforcement to their pitching staff Monday afternoon. In Cole Irvin, 30, they scooped up a pitcher who has pitched all the way to the ends of MLB seasons before, and who was an important cog for the Orioles as recently as early this season. Irvin was a late-bloomer with the A's a few years ago and an upside play when Baltimore dealt for him prior to 2023, but now, he's just a stopgap in a rotation that has shown too much wear and weariness lately. Irvin has a legitimate six-pitch mix, with all three flavors of fastball (four-seam, cutter, and sinker), a slider, a curveball, and a changeup. His cutter is a bit more of a true bridge than it is for most pitchers, behaving neither as a true heater nor as a de facto breaking pitch. He's had a very hard time finding the utility of that pitch, or of his change, despite being a lefty starter and seeing a lot of right-handed batters. His best offerings have been the four-seamer, sinker, and curveball, this season. Were this more of a long-term acquisition or made earlier in the season, you could envision the Twins making some substantial tweaks here. Instead, it's likely that they'll mostly allow Irvin to do what he's been doing, albeit with a slightly greater emphasis on the gyro slider that has played up since his recent move to the bullpen for Baltimore. That's the pitch that best suits what the Twins like to do in terms of pitch types and shapes, and it's the one with which he can be an effective flipper of the lineup card. Irvin 1.mp4 Irvin won't be eligible to pitch for the Twins in the playoffs. This move is purely about ensuring that they get that far, by making up for the walls into which their younger starters all seem to have run recently. They'll try to get everyone the rest to which they've been accustomed--the Twins have sent 111 starters out on at least five days' rest this year, fourth-most in MLB--even as they put the pedal down to get across the finish line of the regular season ahead of the Tigers, Mariners, and Red Sox. Irvin can round out their rotation mix, and/or act as a long reliever to patch a bullpen short on healthy, live arms. He doesn't throw hard, and won't rack up strikeouts. In his most recent outing against the Red Sox, he gave up two homers in an inning of work. However, Irvin has just enough in his tank to make him appealing to a team chockablock with right-handed starters who appear not to have much in theirs. To make room for him on the 40-man roster, the team designated Randy Dobnak for assignment, and they'll wait until Tuesday to create an open space on their 28-man active roster. At that point, Irvin could come in for immediate use, as he last pitched on Sept. 9. It's a low-wattage addition, but when a team is scrambling to secure a playoff spot, all additions are welcome. If things pan out especially nicely, despite not being able to pitch for them this October, Irvin could be under team control for two more seasons. View full article

Strictly speaking, the Twins come back to win games in which they once trailed at an above-average rate. Speaking a bit more broadly, they've been persistently unable to come back after falling behind by multiple runs, even in the middle of games. Why? Image courtesy of © Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images A raging Rocco Baldelli was supposed to wake the Twins up, and make them remember who they are. That was last Sunday; they lost Monday night to the hapless Halos. They won the next two days, though, and then a returning Byron Buxton was supposed to give the team a semblance of its real identity back. That was Friday night; they got thwacked by the Reds. The next big red button in the line was to reactivate Carlos Correa, which the team did Saturday; they got well and truly shellacked by the Reds. Things just aren't working, right now. That's not news. The most troubling trend, though, isn't that the team's grand gestures seem to keep coming to nothing. It's that they keep losing, and losing in dispirited, dispiriting, helpless-looking, hopeless-looking ways. It doesn't feel like this team has a big comeback in it, and so every time they fall behind, it might as well be a loss, even when there are plenty of outs left in the game, in theory. Some of that is an illusion, of course. That's how baseball works. We can feel a certain way, watching a team play over a few weeks or even a couple of months, but reality is not obligated to conform to our feelings. The Twins are 36-70 in games in which, at some point, they trailed. That .340 winning percentage is actually above the league average in such games. They haven't come back from a deficit greater than four runs all season, which is interesting, but it's not exactly shocking. The Brewers, to grab another random good team, have not come back from down by more than three all year. Having a good pitching staff means rarely falling behind by such a wide margin at all. Some teams, too, choose not to chase wins from behind, which means a lot of low-leverage relievers parading in when the team is behind in the middle innings--even by just a run or two. Baldelli is a big believer in that managerial paradigm. Then, too, there's the fact that the Minnesota bullpen hasn't turned out to be as deep as we all hoped. If a team has seven or eight reliable relievers, even the least of them can keep them in the game and facilitate the occasional comeback. This year's relief corps has not been that kind of group. When Baldelli sighs and flips his mental switch from the 'A' bullpen to the 'B' bullpen, the guys upon whom he calls more often turn the game into a blowout than freeze the opponent where they are. The Twins have lost 32 games by at least four runs this year, including the last two. Unless the Red Sox storm past them to claim a playoff spot, no team will qualify for the postseason with more such defeats on their record. The Brewers have only lost by that much 16 times. The Guardians have only lost that way 23 times. It's been an unfortunate habit of this team not only to fall behind, but to let things get out of hand once they do. In 37 games this year, the Twins have trailed by at least three runs after six innings. Only six teams--none of them any good at all--have been in such a lousy position going into the final innings more often. Minnesota is 1-36 in those games. All season, in 47 games in which they trailed by at least two tallies after seven frames, the Twins have no wins. The only other teams not to win a game in which they were more than a run behind with two innings to play are the White Sox, Nationals, and Blue Jays. The funny thing is, from the seventh inning to the end of a game, only the Diamondbacks average more runs per game than the Twins. Removing extra innings, the Twins score 1.59 runs per game from the seventh onward, joining Arizona, the Royals, the Yankees, and the Padres as the only teams putting up more than 1.5 runs per contest during that phase. Why can't a team who scores that much come back from down even a couple of runs, even once or twice? Why can't they finish off close wins? Some of it is managerial choices, although they're sound ones. Some of it is roster construction, constrained by bad ownership choices. Some of it is, surely, dumb luck. The frustrating feeling that another part of it is some shortfall in terms of heart or offensive intensity is probably another illusion, like the idea that they don't come back at all when they fall behind. That one, though, is harder to shake. Sometimes feelings carry a reality of their own, and sometimes there's a reality that numbers don't capture neatly. The Twins aren't good at making comebacks. They'd better change that reality, though, because they need some gut-check wins down the stretch, and the deficits keep coming. View full article

The Twins' long-time manager didn't take lightly the decision to tear into his team and make his displeasure with their effort public. Now, we all understand each other. The stakes are high, and so are the seas. Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images By no means did Rocco Baldelli do anything wrong when he excoriated his struggling club after a weekend sweep in Kansas City. In fact, he timed his philippic perfectly. You don't want that negative energy in your home clubhouse. You don't even want your team stewing in it for the remainder of a series. You do it at the end of a road trip, to make sure everyone understands that what just happened isn't acceptable, but also that it's over. You give them every chance to come to the park the next day and get things right. Good managers don't push that big red button until they're left with no real choice, though. It's not about being performative or saying anything one doesn't mean; it's about managing carefully how much you let yourself emote, and how outwardly, and then choosing only the moment when urgency and a dwindling set of alternatives make it appropriate to release more of that withheld emotion. Thus, when Baldelli elected to cut loose on his team Sunday afternoon, he was sending a message: I'm running out of ways to convey the seriousness of this to you. I know you're tired. I know this is hard. You have to do better, anyway. You're not meeting the standard. That's not an unfair set of things to say, even to a team fighting its annual injury apocalypse right now. It's the kind of sharp-edged, dangerous thing that ought to ensure maximal concentration, maximal effort, and maximal preparation from everyone involved the rest of the way. It was a reasonable time to take those relatively drastic measures. Here's the problem: that doesn't guarantee that it will work. In fact, in the first game of the Twins' should-be get-right series at home against the Angels Monday night, they looked as bad as ever--as flat, as tired, as weak. That's not an indictment of Baldelli; you don't evaluate a managerial tirade on its instantaneous aftereffects, any more than you evaluate a rookie based on their debut. However, it was a stern reminder that the team has shown a bit of habitual give-up this year, not necessarily from a lack of character or toughness or culture or even talent, but perhaps as an unfortunate characteristic. The Angels jumped out to a 4-0 lead Monday night. The Twins have only come back from four runs down twice all season, and not since June. They're a strong offense, but they don't seem to have it in them to rush back when they fall behind early. Baldelli's outburst was meant to give them the kind of fearless fire required for that kind of fight, but they still didn't show it Monday night. When a skipper does demand more of a team this way, everything comes under a microscope. Again, unless you accidentally hired some old-fashioned hothead loser, this is a move reserved for moments of great need. When it happens, the manager is acknowledging that they're in a corner. If the team doesn't respond, the implication is serious: the boss has lost the ability to direct and motivate his people adequately. Right now, the Twins are only three games up on the Red Sox, Tigers, and Mariners. When your three-game lead is over three different teams, it's not really a three-game lead. One of those teams getting hot would be enough to cause the Twins a lot of trouble, unless they can pull out of this tailspin in short order. If they blow the lead and miss the playoffs, Baldelli has put himself in position to be fired. As far as we know, he's under contract only through next season, and when a skipper is a year from free agency, teams usually move either to extend them or to dismiss them. Baldelli and the team might have worked out an extension already; we wouldn't know. But he went forward with this gambit knowing the perception if it failed would be that he is incapable of drawing more out of his team down the stretch. For some, this fade--a second one in three years, whether it ends as badly as 2022 did or not--is confirmation that Baldelli is not a good manager. I disagree, vehemently. However, this tendency to struggle late in seasons--to go along with the grind and let it wear them to a nub, which we saw even to some extent in 2019 and 2020--does seem to be a pattern for his teams. That might be because, given the shape of the team they're trying to build, the organization has chosen the wrong model for the manager role. Baldelli is not hands-off; no MLB manager is. He is, however, very much a middle manager, delegating to coaches with whom he vests most positional specialist powers and implementing front-office plans based on his own conversations with Derek Falvey and Thad Levine. Though a former player, he's more like an executive than an instructor. He might not be as well-suited to the task of keeping together a young team with a lot of players still in need of pointers, still looking for experience and advice about handling the big leagues, as managers who take a more detail-oriented approach to the job. Right now, the main problem for the Twins is the players. They're exhausted, and the best of them are missing from the lineup altogether. Baldelli did a crucial part of his job, by both sending them a wakeup call and putting himself in the harsh spotlight instead of them. In the version of his job the team has carved out for him, though, he can't do much more to push his team across the finish line, and if they don't get there, this could be the final season in the Twin Cities for one or more key member of Twins leadership. View full article

It's hard to blame Rocco Baldelli for disliking the approach he's seen from his team lately. Unfortunately, it's also hard to tell how they'll get right in the short term. Image courtesy of © Peter Aiken-Imagn Images Rocco Baldelli didn't just call his team's performance over the weekend in Kansas City disappointing or weak. He chose the word 'unprofessional'. To a hard-nosed New England baseball man, the cardinal sin in the game is not a failure to be good enough, but a failure to show adequate intensity, purpose, or intelligence. A series in which his team scored only two runs was just the latest example of their growing ineptitude at the plate, and it wasn't the product of fly balls dying on the warning track or close calls going the wrong way. No, the Twins swung early, and often, and they made lousy contact. Give the stellar Royals pitching staff some credit for that, but be sure not to apportion the responsibility for it all to them. The Twins are on a woeful jag in this regard. So far this month, as a team, the Twins are chasing just over 36% of pitches outside the strike zone. That's the worst showing for any team in any month all year. Obviously, that's very misleading, because we're only eight days into this month, so outliers are bound to be more common, but the truth of it can't be easily erased. The difference between their in-zone swing rate and their chase rate is also the lowest any team has posted in any month of the season, by a comfortable margin. They're swinging indiscriminately, and it's killing any chances they might otherwise have of producing consistent offense. On this chart, you can see April and May in a cluster on the left, where the Twins were too passive and struggled out to an uneven start. On the right, clustered just as nicely, are June, July, and August, when the team was healthier and more aggressive and consistently producing superb offensive numbers, even if it came with a little more chase. But right now, as that top data point so clearly tells us, they're a mess. That's not entirely their fault, of course. They're nearing the end of a long season. Almost 10 years ago, Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus did a landmark study about the management of the difficult grind that is an MLB campaign. In it, he found that players show worse plate discipline as they wear down, and that without days off to shield them from the effects of the grind, those effects pile up and materially damage an offense's production. View full article

He's been a solid contributor over a long tenure in the organization. He's on the doorstep of free agency, but he's already gotten his biggest payday. Tuesday night, he seemed to make a business decision, at a moment that demanded less business and more carefree #want. Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-USA TODAY Sports There are still managers left in MLB who will throw their players under the bus. Some do it when they sense that it's the only (or simply the most appropriate) way to motivate a player who responds only to certain styles of confrontation or accountability. Some do it when they simply lose composure and can't hold onto their own turbid frustrations any longer. For some, of course, it's a mix of the two. The salient fact, here, is that Rocco Baldelli is not that type of old-school. Like the majority of managers coming into the game over the last decade or so, he maintains a code of professionalism that doesn't permit making an example of anyone, or pointing fingers. When he feels it's fair, he will sometimes call out the overall effort or focus of his team, but even that is reserved only for time when he truly feels there's been a collective sag that requires a collective rededication. He doesn't ever lay one of his own players bare for media or fan criticism. He came about as close as he ever will, though, in response to a question after Tuesday night's loss about a play on which outfielder Max Kepler should have attempted to score, but stopped at third. The choice probably cost the Twins a run, and it was a bad, bad look. The mention of Kepler's lingering knee soreness isn't to be ignored. Kepler is, undoubtedly, playing at a bit less than 100%, something he doesn't do especially well, and it's only fair to account for that issue when evaluating choices or moves he makes on the field. When Baldelli says there was more to a conversation that he'll keep private, though, he's speaking in the code he's gradually developed with Twins media and fans. He was upset with Kepler, and outside the public limelight, he let his player know it. bkdSMnlfVjBZQUhRPT1fVkZJQ0FGZFNYbFFBVzFJRVVRQUFVbE1DQUZrQ0JsUUFWbFVNQ0ZkVFVsQUhDQVZR.mp4 Well he should have, too. That was an inexcusable failure of effort, from a player who has shown too strong a tendency toward self-preservation before. It was a tricky play, with the ball behind him in the right-field corner, and given the pace with which it was hit, much about the go/stay decision for a runner depends on the prior positioning of the defense and the cleanness of their collection and relay process. Kepler had to count on Tommy Watkins, his third-base coach, for that, and it looked like Watkins was a bit indecisive. He gave his player the wave, but it did come slightly later than might be typical. The problem is clear, when you see Kepler approaching third base as the camera cuts to him: he was breaking it down even as he approached the bag. A right fielder himself, he knows that corner better than anyone else alive, and he knew that Carlos Santana had hit it so hard into the corner that he would get there very quickly most of the time. He made an independent decision not to extend himself and test his knee. If he had adequately assessed Atlanta's positioning before the play, though, he would have seen that Jorge Soler was playing well off the line before the pitch. Soler also isn't as fast as even this aged version of Kepler. He does have a strong arm, but he wasn't in a position to use it. Kepler should have scored on the play. If he had kept running, he almost certainly would have been safe. In any scenario in which he was out, the Atlanta defenders would have made such a good play that you just shrug and move on. Instead, Kepler seemed to shrink from the potential damage of turning on the afterburners with his knee still balking; the danger of a possible collision at the plate; and the difficulty of changing gears after starting to decelerate a bit. He can see free agency from here, and he didn't want to hit the market as damaged goods. Unfortunately, that's as good an explanation for his willingness to play through this issue (when he's so often gone on the shelf with similar ones) as the fact that his star teammates Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa are already out. At this point, Kepler is a marginal contributor. Giving him playing time instead of any of Matt Wallner, Trevor Larnach, or José Miranda feels like a losing proposition for the Twins, though it occasionally happens, just for the maintenance of all four players' health and out of deference to Kepler's veteran status. It's fair for him to want to protect his own health, but he has to have the situational awareness and baseline hustle to be in position to score on a play like that. With one out, stopping at third could have been harmless; the Twins were a bit unlucky not to score for the balance of the inning. That factor might also have been in Kepler's mind; he's generally been a smart player. On balance, though, this was an egregious failure of effort, at a juncture of the season when the Twins can't afford it. This is a rough stretch of the schedule, going very badly for the team, and they need to seek out and occasionally force good moments, rather than sit and wait and hope things come round right. It's a stretch that tests what you really want, and how badly. Modern baseball analysis leans hard toward the mechanical, the strategic, and the antiseptic. There is, however, still a significant role for emotion, intensity, and desire in the game, especially as August tilts toward September and the stakes of every game steadily rise. Great teams need talent and data-driven feedback, but they also need energy, selflessness, and leadership. Kepler is a deeply respected player, and a tone-setter, even if he's not often a vocal leader. On Tuesday night, his energy and his selflessness--and, by extension, his leadership--was insufficient. View full article

In bringing back the journeyman righthander for a third stint with the team (and second this year), the team is hoping to regain some reliability in a unit ravaged by injuries. Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports His first stint with the 2024 Twins could hardly have been a less fulfilling homecoming for Michael Tonkin, whom the team drafted in the now-defunct 30th round back in 2008 and who pitched his first five big-league seasons in Minnesota. This time, he comes back with a real chance to make the playoff roster and contribute substantial, medium-leverage relief innings. After being let go by the Mets early this season, Tonkin landed with the Twins only for a couple of days, making one forgettable appearance. After that, he was designated for assignment again, and the Yankees scooped him up--whereupon he found a new way to succeed against big-league hitters, at age 34. Now, he's back with Minnesota, after being a victim of the perpetual roster crunch faced by big-market teams who invest in redundancy. While he called the Bronx home, though, Tonkin did a lot of good work. He piled up 56 innings with a 3.38 ERA, largely supported by peripheral indicators. He struck out 24.6% of opposing batters and walked 9.1%, thanks in part (albeit indirectly) to an increased reliance on his sinker. The Twins were never going to be the place where Tonkin discovered the utility of that pitch; almost no team in baseball throws fewer sinkers. They don't teach it often, or especially well. However, the Yankees do, and Tonkin discovered that he could play off the naturally significant arm-side run of his four-seamer to make the heavy sinker a highly effective alternative look. Having two flavors of slider only made that play up more nicely. None of his four offerings misses bats the way you want a relief pitcher's out pitch to do so, and both versions of his fastball are a little underheated, sitting 91-94 and touching only a tick higher. As a four-pitch mix, though, it plays like a small-town symphony--less grand than the big-city version, a bit less technically brilliant, but more accessible. Tonkin can slot right into the middle of Rocco Baldelli's bullpen depth chart, and as long as his new, old team doesn't mess with what he's been doing lately, it should be a fruitful new, old partnership. This is the kind of pickup the team has been craving: a bit of newfound versatility and stability in the bridge from their young starters to their fireballing relief aces. View full article

It's the one apparent knock on a pitcher emerging as the unlikely ace of a team headed for a second straight playoff appearance. And it might not even be real. Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports The visitors from an unincorporated community in the northern suburbs of Atlanta put a hurting on Bailey Ober Monday night. Mother Nature provided plenty of fireworks and loud noises, but before those even arrived, Atlanta batters did their share of the same. The Twins' starter might not have pitched past the second inning even if the weather were perfect; he gave up a whopping nine runs in those two frames. When games like these have happened to Ober, you can pretty readily find Twins fans philosophizing about them, by saying that he's a bit prone to them. The Royals seemed to gain a tell on Ober and lit him up twice early this season. He's generally a very steady starting pitcher, but nearly by consensus, close observers of the Twins believe that he's unusually vulnerable to the blowup start, given how good he is on the whole. Here's the thing: No, he isn't. While Ober's blowups might be a hair more ugly than others', it's important to realize that the difference between giving up nine runs in two innings and six runs in three is functionally nil. If you give up five or more runs within the first 12 outs, as a starting pitcher, you're putting your team behind the 8-ball for that contest. Ober's especially visible hiccups are no fun to watch, but they're not more costly than other, less glaring outings. So, I created two statistical categories: Strong Starts: Unlike Quality Starts, a slightly old-fashioned metric that counts as "quality" any outing with at least six innings pitched and no more than three earned runs allowed, Strong Starts reflect the shifting priorities of teams playing in MLB in the 2020s. A Strong Start is any outing in which a pitcher works at least into the sixth and allows no more than two runs--earned or otherwise. Blowups: The opposite of a Strong Start, and considerably more rare, a Blowup is any start in which a pitcher allows at least five runs in the first four innings. Teams who score at least that many times in those innings win 86,3% of their games, so as a starter, giving up that much in such a short time is as good as giving up the game. Ober is, as you would guess, excellent at compiling Strong Starts. Among the 77 pitchers with at least 60 regular-season starts in MLB since the start of the 2022 season, he ranks 12th in Strong Start Rate, at 59.7%. This cohort of oft-used starters comes up with a Strong Start 51.9 percent of the time, on average. Meanwhile, the same group averages a blowup in 17.6 percent of their outings. Ober, though, comes in at 13.9%, 13th-lowest in the group. In other words, he's right in line with where you would expect him to be, given his overall quality and tendency to turn in Strong Starts. Here's a scatterplot showing all 77 of those pitchers' Strong Start and Blowup rates, with the Twins-tied qualifying hurlers highlighted. While Ober might be more likely to give up eight runs than Joe Ryan or Pablo López, he's no more likely to put his team in an overwhelmingly unfavorable position. In fact, he's less so. Meanwhile, he's more likely than either to set them up with an especially good chance to win. The only pitchers in this group of 77 who best Ober in both Strong Start rate and Blowup rate are Blake Snell, Michael Wacha, and Max Fried. In other words, don't sweat Ober's bizarre stumbles. Unless and until he has more than an isolated instance of ineffectiveness every few months, he should be regarded as a legitimate top-of-the-rotation starter, albeit without quite the ceiling of some true aces. He's as consistently solid as almost any starter in baseball, and the goriness of his worst defeats don't make them more actually damaging than other hurlers' less dramatic failures. View full article

Saw that; considered removing the link!; decided to roll with it. No one--not even you!--can *prove* you're not the same person, reincarnated. Famously, reincarnated people switch handedness. That's just science.