Matthew Trueblood

The Minnesota Twins announced Wednesday night that their Thursday afternoon starter would be rookie Simeon Woods Richardson. Is this finally the time that the up-and-down prospect gets a chance to stick around a while? Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports When Simeon Woods Richardson started half of a rain-necessitated doubleheader for the Twins earlier this month, it marked the third season in which he's made an appearance for the team. When they sent him back down to Triple-A St. Paul immediately afterward, it marked the third time that the visit to the big leagues had lasted exactly one outing. Woods Richardson's career has seen a lot of change and a lot of peaks and valleys already, but this time, he might stick on the MLB roster for a little while. Earlier this week, the Twins demoted Louie Varland to St. Paul, ending a failed experiment to make him one of their back-end starters this season. Woods Richardson is taking the first start in the rotation vacancy created by that change, and he's positioned himself to be taken seriously as a candidate to keep this job for a while. Our John Bonnes wrote about the boost in Woods Richardson's velocity this year back in spring training. After a disappointing 2023 in which he and the Twins tried to reinvent him by giving him a very cutterish fastball and saw his velocity slip south of 90 miles per hour, he came to Fort Myers throwing freer and more naturally, and the ball started exploding out of his hand. Woods Richardson's average fastball velocity this year is 93 miles per hour, and he's touched 95 more than once. He doesn't have a radical shape on the pitch anymore, but it's still shown good cut-ride action. This is how Woods Richardson had success against the Tigers in Detroit two weeks ago; that newfound velocity is the foundation for everything. The rest of his arsenal is also interesting, though, and could be good enough to keep him ahead of the adjustment curve for a bit as he matriculates to the majors in a more complete way. He doesn't have an elite collection of secondary pitches. Woods Richardson's slider is a bit like a cutter, really. It's thrown 85-88 miles per hour, with some unusual lift for a slider but plenty of movement separation from the fastball. One way to see why it's unusual is to study the direction of the spin he imparts out of the hand, on all his pitches. The idea with charts like this is to communicate the direction of spin around a clock, akin to going around a baseball. Vertical breaking balls (like Woods Richardson's curveball, hanging off the bottom of the clock) have topspin, and thus tend to have a lot of downward movement. Some sliders are basically hard curves, with spin direction almost that low. More often, they're on the side of the clock (it'd be on the left side, between 8 and 10 o'clock, for a righty like Woods Richardson), showing the sidespin that creates horizontal sweep on the pitch. Not so for Woods Richardson. His slider has something close to true backspin, like a four-seam fastball--or, more saliently, like many pitchers' cutters. It looks more like a fastball out of the hand this way, but the movement separation between the two offerings should tend to be smaller than for a slider with notably disparate spin direction from a guy's fastball. As we've seen, though, there's a fair amount of that separation for Woods Richardson. Let's put that separation onto the same clock-style diagram, to visualize it better. (These charts are based solely on spin and/or movement direction and the frequency of pitches that move that way; don't confuse the size of a bar with the magnitude of movement.) Because of Woods Richardson's arm slot, and thanks to the way he positions the seams as he grips his slider, the ball swerves more than the spin tells the hitter it will. That's a good thing. There's still a lack of vertical differential between the two offerings and a smallish velocity gap to consider, and those things will cap the swing-and-miss potential of the pitch, but Woods Richardson should be able to be effective with this fastball-slider tandem. There's a bit more in the way of bad news about his curveball and changeup. The curve has a lovely, aesthetically pleasing shape, but because it sits in the mid-70s, the hitter has a lot of time to recognize it and hold back, or adjust their swing. When he deploys it well in sequence, he can and does steal called strikes with the curve, but he hasn't gotten a whiff on that pitch all year, in MLB or Triple-A. The changeup, meanwhile, does give an opposite-handed hitter a cue right out of Woods Richardson's hand; his spin direction on the change is noticeably different than on the fastball. The best changeups either create a huge amount of movement separation or disguise themselves well by having a similar spin axis out of the hand, then tailing off the fastball's line because of seam orientation and the way the seams interact with the air. Woods Richardson doesn't have either thing going for him, so he has to sell the change with his arm action and command it finely. I would expect the tall righty to have a hard time against left-handed batters for a while in MLB. So far, taking both levels of competition together, lefties have posted a .353 wOBA against Woods Richardson, while he's held righties to an anemic .227. He's made enough changes to give himself a legitimate chance to survive as a starter, though, and given the level of the Twins' current need, that might be enough to earn Woods Richardson a window within which to make further adjustments. View full article

As badly as everyone wanted it to work for the Minnesota Twins' homegrown, home-state righthander in the starting rotation for 2024, he seems destined for a tune-up at the other end of the Green Line. What does he need to fix to find success again in MLB? Image courtesy of © Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports Don't take Louie Varland's intensity, his work ethic, or his open-minded efforts to fix what went wrong for him last year for granted. The Twins have had multiple pitching prospects fall by the wayside over the past half-decade because they lacked those very qualities, and the fact that Varland is (by all accounts) desperate to be great will serve him well in the difficult weeks ahead. Those trials are no longer avoidable, though. Manager Rocco Baldelli demurred on Varland's status as a member of the team's starting rotation after the latest in a string of brutal outings to begin what has been a brutal season in Twins Territory Sunday. It was a message sent as much in the reticence as in the recitation, because Baldelli's default posture is to back up and build up a struggling player. He knows his team can't continue to scramble for coverage early in what become blowout losses twice each time through the rotation, though, and for multiple reasons, demoting Varland (probably to Triple-A St. Paul, where he can remain stretched out and try to answer the troubling questions raised by this early turbulence) is much easier and more likely than doing the same with the unimpressive Chris Paddack. Varland has a 9.18 ERA, and the Twins have lost all four of his starts. His velocity is actually up about one mile per hour, relative to his time as a starter last season, but it's done no good whatsoever. Other than that theoretical bit of good news, there is no good news at all. Of the 175 pitchers who have faced at least 50 batters this year, only 17 have a lower whiff rate on opponents' swings than Varland has. Only two hurlers have a lower chase rate on pitches outside the strike zone. As we well documented this spring, Varland worked hard at some changes to his arsenal this winter that were designed to make him a more viable starter. He added a sinker, and he swapped out the sweeper he used in 2023 for a curveball, with a much more vertical movement profile. The sinkers were supposed to keep right-handed hitters honest, and looking inside more often. The curves were supposed to help him achieve greater split neutrality. He's hardly thrown the sinker, which is a problem, but we'll come back to it shortly. The change of breaking ball profiles has worked out nicely, in a vacuum: the curve is outperforming last year's sweeper. His changeup, too, is getting fine results. It's just that everyone--lefties, righties, everyone--is obliterating Varland's four-seam fastball and cutter. It's clear that Varland never got comfortable with the sinker, and while the Twins are trying not to be as mono-fastball as they've been for the last handful of years, they're still not going to be the team forcing a pitcher to go that direction. They like fastballs, especially ones with average ride from a low release point and with great extension, like Varland's. His four-seamer is, in some ways, what the Twins want all of their hurlers' fastballs to look like. That's what makes this so scary. The heater itself hasn't changed shape this year, and as we said before, it's coming in harder. Hitters are hammering it, though, because Varland lacks command of the pitch. It wanders over the heart of the plate sometimes, and it misses the zone altogether sometimes. It rarely finds the nice, pitcher-friendly edges of the zone, this year. His cutter has a bit more of a concrete issue with which to deal. That pitch has taken on a bit more velocity and a bit more horizontal movement. He's been trying to use it in the place of the sweeper from last year, against righties. He keeps missing with it to his arm side, which means right over the middle of the plate. Ditto for lefties, because he's trying to jam them with the pitch inside. The results, all the way around, are a devastating failure. A sinker might, at least, engender a bit lower-quality contact. I spun up a statistic to measure the inverse of the sweet spot rate you sometimes see cited for hitters. It's the percentage of a pitcher's opponents' batted balls that leave the bat at an angle either below -10 degrees or above 45. Anything hit that way tends to turn into an easy grounder or a can of corn, so I named this metric Harmless %. Of the 175 pitchers mentioned above, Varland's Harmless % for 2024 ranks dead last. Hitters are generating power against him, and when they hit him hard, they're doing it right in the band of launch angles within which the damage is greatest. This might yet be fixable, but there's a long road ahead for Varland. He's unlikely to find the same success as a starter that he had as a reliever, without changing his mix to reflect the different realities of those jobs. As enticing as the cutter seemed last year, it's not working in longer outings, without a triple-digit fastball to set it up. It'll be interesting to see whether the Twins elect to test their charge's feel a bit, by having him bring back the sweeper but keep the curve. A four-seamer like Varland's could set up the sweeper to righties and the curve to lefties, without much need for the cutter. The changeup is just enough of a wrench in the works against lefties, and the sweeper and curve can work to righties in tandem, with the right pitch-calling. None of this will matter if he can't find a way to get outs with his fastball, but there's still plenty here. The Twins need to ask Varland to put the pieces of the puzzle back together elsewhere, but he's unlikely to fall out of their plans for the rest of the season. He just needs a chance to reset and evaluate the mistakes mixed into his latest round of adjustments. View full article

Didn't expect to read that headline before we even reached May Day, did you? But hey, maybe May Day is here, even while it's April on the calendar. Image courtesy of © David Reginek-USA TODAY Sports The 2024 season is off to a nightmarish start for the Minnesota Twins. They've lost their two best position players to injuries and the two guys they hoped would be upside plays at the back end of the starting rotation are showing off their downsides, instead, but worst of all, the team's offensive approach looks broken again. The Twins are 27th in MLB in wOBA and have the third-highest strikeout rate in the league. Coming into the season, we knew this team would strike out a lot. It's wired into their approach at the plate, and by consciously refusing to make major changes to that approach when the count reaches two strikes, they're leaning into the risk of strikeouts. When they're going right, though, they make up for that with the walks and power that are part of that same approach. They lay off pitches on the edges of the zone as a matter of policy, and if that means taking a lot of called third strikes, so be it. Philosophically, they want to wait for a pitch they can crush and then crush it. The good news, if you're feeling generous, is that that is working, as far as it goes. On four-seam fastballs, the Twins have the seventh-highest wOBA in MLB. They're second-best against curveballs, too. What are they looking for? Stuff without a lot of wiggle, that both starts and ends over the white of the plate. What happens when they get it? They hit it hard. The bad news, as you've already guessed, is everything else. The Twins are 29th in wOBA against sinkers, 27th against sliders and sweepers, and dead last against splitters and changeups. In Harmon Killebrew's time, executing this strategy this well would have led to one of the best offenses in baseball, because most pitchers threw fastballs that we'd now consider pretty straight, and paired it with curveballs. As any calendar and at least one grave marker will tell you, though, this is not Harmon Killebrew's time. How do you fix this problem? How do you take a studied and carefully crafted but insufficiently nuanced team approach and make it more flexible, more dynamic, and more effective? And how on Earth is the answer to that question a guy whom no one wanted to see be a lineup fixture until a handful of days ago? View full article

Admittedly, the Minnesota Twins' longtime right fielder was off to a rough start in 2024. Nonetheless, now that he's landed on the injured list for at least another week's stay, the magnitude of the void he leaves in the lineup feels vast. Image courtesy of © Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports Since he hit his stride in the middle of 2023, it has been up to Max Kepler to deliver a certain element of opportunism and danger to the Twins lineup. When Royce Lewis has been available and when Byron Buxton has been within a Sunday drive of healthy, they've added to that dynamic, but Kepler quietly became the centerpiece of the Minnesota attack late last season, precisely because he made opposing pitchers pay for coming into the meat of the strike zone against him. The Twins have grinders and they have sluggers, but they're short on pure hit tool even on their best days. With Kepler down, they're woefully short on it. At a surface level, bringing in Carlos Santana this winter made sense. It was even one way to ameliorate the problem outlined above. I praised that move at the time, on the premise that Santana (who has a long and decorated service record in the big leagues and has nearly always found ways to get on base and fatten up the heart of a team's batting order) would balance the team's strikeout-besotted, subtly sclerotic collection of bats. Santana not only draws walks at one of the best rates in baseball, but avoids strikeouts surprisingly well--at least, that's been the story throughout that long career, stretching up even to last season. It might be turning from a news story to a fairytale, though, fading into memory and legend before our very eyes. Santana still knows better than to expand his strike zone, but he's losing the ability to adequately defend it when pitchers come right after him. Given that he just turned 38 years old, it's fair to wonder whether he'll ever recover that capacity. Consider a fistful of players, based on how often they swing at pitches that are well within the strike zone (those having a 99-percent or higher called strike probability; basically, every bit of the zone except edges and corners) and how often they make contact on those swings. These aren't borderline pitches, so there's extremely low utility in watching them go by. Maybe you're holding out for a pitch in your preferred part of the zone, or were sitting on a particular pitch type and are willing to wait and see if you get it next, but in a vacuum, the more you swing at these pitches, the better. Obviously, it's not good to whiff on pitches in this zone, either. Whiffing at stuff outside the zone can be ok; it spares you weak and unproductive contact. But when the ball is thrown where all the ones considered in this data set were, you should always want your swing to connect. Corey Seager swings the most at these pitches. Mookie Betts whiffs the least often. That, alone, should tell you where you want to be on this chart: lower, and farther right. Hey, look, there's a friendly face there! Kepler didn't watch strikes go by during the second half last year, and when he swung, he hardly ever missed. That's a sign of a hitter who's locked in, and who is ready to do damage. It's the combination of proactive and skilled that Kepler worked toward for years, as he followed his breakout in 2019 with some frustrating campaigns. He's keeping good company on that part of the chart, including old friend Luis Arráez. Being in the lower left quadrant is second-best, because the less you whiff, the more selective you can afford to be. There, I've highlighted a few players who were free agents this winter. but whom the Twins didn't bring in, for one reason or another--or a few million others, as the case might be in places. Justin Turner, Tommy Pham, and Randal Grichuk all nestle into the lower left side of the graph. Grichuk might have some big strikeout problems, but they don't come on pitches in the zone. When he gets his pitch, he rarely misses it, either by not offering at it or by not making contact. Matt Wallner is the most whiff-prone hitter in baseball, on pitches inside the zone, but he does mimic Kepler in his eagerness to attack them. The rest of the Twins, though, reside in a medium-sized cluster just on the wrong side of average. Carlos Correa is good at making contact on these pitches, but he's more the relentlessly patient, exacting type than the pouncing slugger the good version of Kepler can be. Meanwhile, in this particular way of looking at things, Santana doesn't bring anything especially new to the team. He's strikingly similar to both Willi Castro and Edouard Julien. To fully understand what we're looking at, though, we have to know not only how often a batter swings and how often that swing finds its target, but how cleanly that's done--in other words, how much value he generates when he does make contact. This time, we'll only highlight Kepler and Santana. Oh no. This time, the top right is definitely the best quadrant to be in, and Kepler is there again. He hits the ball hard with above-average frequency, and keeps it in the most productive possible launch angle band in the process. When he's swinging at pitches well inside the zone, he does damage. Santana? Not so much. The league hammers these pitches, because they're pitches with plenty of the plate. The standard is very high, but the fact is that Santana isn't meeting it. His ability to drive the ball is deserting him in old age, leaving him open to pitchers pounding the strike zone without fear. Absent Kepler, the Twins will need Santana more than ever, but he hasn't looked up to the task so far this season. His bat looks slow. He's only going to deliver a fairly empty (though creditable) on-base percentage, unless and until he finds some way to unlock the power and productivity he's enjoyed within the zone in the past. Last summer, he traded some of his previously inviolate bat control to get to a little more power, and it worked. Now, he'll need to assess whether he can make the same trade twice, or whether some other adjustment is due. In either case, don't expect things to be smooth while Kepler is gone. View full article

Almost no one loves nuance more than I do but there is no worthwhile word for a 30% swing rate against a 50% zone rate except 'passive'. Or, if there are, they're MORE pejorative, not less so.

Joey Votto hits. If you're lucky, *you* hit Joey Lotto.

It was just an unsuccessful pinch-hitting appearance, and it didn't help the Minnesota Twins escape another disheartening loss Monday night, but there's finally some hope that one of the team's key hitters is adjusting a catastrophic early-season approach. Image courtesy of © Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports It's great to be patient. Whatever Edouard Julien has been so far in 2024, 'patient' doesn't begin to cover it, and it's not great. The sophomore second baseman has an anemic .125/.222/.292 batting line over his first 27 plate appearances, but it's not the results that are worrisome; it's a deeply broken process. Somewhere in the air over Tennessee or Arkansas, as the team flew from Ft. Myers to Kansas City to begin the regular season, Julien forgot that you have to swing the bat to hit the ball. Of course, Julien has always been radically patient. He's the French-Canadian God of Walks. His plate discipline keeps his OBP sky-high, and makes him a potentially excellent leadoff man for this Twins team. This spring, he only seemed to be honing that even better, with the right balance of refusal to expand the strike zone and aggressiveness within that zone. His numbers were great in the Grapefruit League, and so was his process. So far this season, though, he's gone way, way too far toward selective, and his aggressiveness has melted into stubborn passivity. Of the 287 batters who have come to bat at least 287 times, Julien has swung his stick less often (30.5% of all pitches) than all but one--Mookie Betts, whom Twins fans got to watch at work on Monday. Betts has only swung at a 30.3% clip. Here's the difference: because Betts is lethal within the zone (not just in terms of power, but in the frequency with which he makes solid contact), pitchers throw him very few strikes. Just 42.8 percent of the pitches he's seen this year have been inside the zone. When he swings, he makes contact 83.8 percent of the time. Betts, Julien ain't. Though he brings some thunder of his own into the box, pitchers attack him fearlessly. Over half (50.8%) of the pitches he sees are inside the zone. When he swings, he makes contact at a 77.8% rate, which isn't disastrous, but which does mean some vulnerability to deep counts. It's not often talked about in these terms, but the more you whiff on swings, the more proactive you have to be at bat. That doesn't mean expanding the zone, but it does mean not letting a hittable offering go by. If a hitter with a weakness where contact rate is concerned violates that axiom, they get themselves in trouble. Selectivity is, in part, the privilege of those who make a lot of contact. The approach Julien has taken in the early going this year is downright insane. It hasn't worked, but more to the point, it could not possibly have worked. No one seeing this many strikes should be swinging this infrequently, and given that Julien doesn't even excel at meeting the ball when he swings, it's an especially glaring miscalculation to be so choosy. Swing rates throughout the league tend to be lower in April than during the rest of the season, so count Julien as just one of many trying to take the measure of pitchers he didn't get to see during the spring, or to test and fight for the right strike zone for themselves, or both. Still, he needs to get the bat moving. To that end, it was encouraging to see him take a more aggressive tack in his pinch-hit appearance Monday. We're far from the point in the season where every plate appearance has to be judged by its outcome. Pinch-hitting tends to make hitters a little bit more swing-happy. For a bit, whenever he doesn't start against a lefty, maybe Rocco Baldelli needs to stick him in there are a pinch-hitter at the first opportunity, to help him change his overall thought process at the plate. In the meantime, Monday was a tiny indicator that better things lie ahead for a gifted hitter on whom the Twins are heavily reliant. It's early, yet. He just has to get into the swing of things. View full article

You didn't think it was going to be smooth sailing, did you? The Minnesota Twins are already facing a worst-case injury scenario, though hopefully, that will turn out to be only in terms of who is hurt, rather than how badly. The Twins have to have been expecting some missed time for either Byron Buxton or Carlos Correa. Those guys have battled injuries that are often chronic over the last few years, and each is now getting into their 30s. Lewis, though, had to be the healthy ancho for the middle of this lineup. Almost two years clear of his second torn ACL, and given the way he hammered opposing pitching before and after missing time with an oblique strain last summer, it was reasonable to hope that the still-young former first overall pick would finally get a chance to pile up 550 plate appearances in a season and prove his superstar upside. Now, that (and a whole lot more about the Twins' season) is in very real doubt. We'll have to wait to hear more, as the team undertakes tests and examines their should-be star third baseman. View full article

It's Opening Day, which means it's prime time for some bold predictions. What unexpected developments lie in store for the 2024 Minnesota Twins? Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports There's always danger in setting out to make bold predictions. Most predictions that come true are not bold. They're conservative. It's tautological, but important, to say it: you only get most guesses right if you guess that statistically probable things will happen. It's much more fun, though, to try to predict the improbable. Let's leave probability-driven forecasting to computer models, meteorologists, and tarot card scam artists. I want to try to guess against the grain. That doesn't mean we have to be wild and crazy, though--at least not in a way detached from reality. On the contrary, I hope to ground all of my predictions in some concrete reality, even if the numbers still say that what I project is unlikely. Ok, here we go. 1. Griffin Jax will strike out 91 or more batters. In 2004, Juan Rincón struck out 106 batters as a reliever for the Twins. He pitched 82 innings in 77 appearances that season. In each of the next two seasons, Joe Nathan came up not far short of Rincón, with 94 and 95 strikeouts, respectively. When the strikeout surge among relievers really took root and began to grow, the Twins were right in the thick of it. Just as has happened with starters, though, relievers have steadily lost a percentage of their formerly typical workload in the seasons since then. As a result, even while strikeout rates have climbed, the frequency of individual hurlers compiling gaudy strikeout totals in a season out of the pen has plateaued. Since Nathan's 2006, the most strikeouts by a Twins reliever in any campaign is the 90 managed by Taylor Rogers in 2019. That will change this season. Jax, who seems so well-suited to the role of high-leverage relief and hardly ever throws a let-up fastball, has had nasty stuff ever since making his complete conversion to the bullpen. He's underachieved in terms of punchouts, though, because of the predominantly horizontal movement profile of his stuff. He's tweaked that this spring, and I'm expecting his strikeout rate to soar past 30%. Given how badly the team needs him in the absence of Jhoan Durán and the durability I expect him to continue to exhibit, Jax has a chance to pitch enough and get enough whiffs to threaten triple digits with his strikeout tally for 2024. 2. Byron Buxton will have a WAR under 2.0. You didn't expect these all to be positive, did you? While Buxton is the feel-good story of spring training for Twins Territory, the actuarial charts are all against him, and I just don't trust him to have the kind of season we would all like to see. While I'm eager to see him take the field as a defender again, I harbor severe doubt that he can stay both fresh and healthy as a center fielder at this point in his career. Buxton is a big guy who has dealt with injuries to virtually every part of his body. He's dealt with some back pain during camp. That's unlikely to help a player who has already struggled at times because of a grooved swing and difficulty covering some parts of the strike zone. Since the start of 2022, you've been able to get Buxton out at the bottom of the zone, or by busting him inside. Mistakes go a long, long way against him, but his strikeout rate over the last two years is north of 30% and plate coverage is not a skill that ages well. Because he needs to see meatballs clearly out of the hand and convert them into barreled balls at such a high rate, Buxton has been a rhythm hitter over the last couple seasons. His wOBA when playing for at least the second day in a row is .364. If he's had at least one day off, though, it's .335, and if it's been three or more, it's under .250. The samples there are small and desperately noisy, because Buxton playing after one or more days off usually means Buxton is playing at something less than 100 percent, but he's 30 now. He's never going to be 100 percent again. Such is baseball; such is life. I suspect Buxton will get hurt if he tries to play regularly in the outfield, but I'm also not at all sure he'll be the dazzling defender he was in his 20s, even while he's able to take his station there. A full year away from defensive duties is not an easy thing from which to recover, at this age. Between what I suspect will be mostly unsuccessful attempts to keep him fresh and the demands of playing both halves of an inning for the first time since 2022, I expect a rough season for the Twins' franchise player. In fact, I doubt he finishes the season with that mantle still around his shoulders. 3. Royce Lewis will start the All-Star Game at third base. This one takes some doing. It's an expression of my profound faith in Lewis as a hitter, and of appreciation for his charisma and watchability. Rafael Devers and José Ramírez might both be future Hall of Famers. Alex Bregman is a perennial playoff playmaker heading for a highly lucrative free agency at season's end. Lewis, though, has a chance to outshine them all. The grand slams and the playoff bombs are fun, but it's the coordinated aggression of Lewis's swing that excites me most. He has the blend of approach and mechanics to be a hitter who consistently not only keeps the line moving in big moments, but hits the telling drive. In the player comment I wrote about him for Baseball Prospectus 2024, I compared Lewis to Juan González at his peak, and I stand by that parallel, in terms of swing style and strength. The difference is that Lewis is also a very good athlete, whom I expect to add value as a defender at third base in his first full campaign at the position. View full article

The Minnesota Twins have not reached an agreement with reliever Jesse Chavez, despite our earlier report. We deeply regret the error and apologize to any people impacted by our errant report. Image courtesy of © Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports Earlier today, based on multiple sources within the Twins organization, we misreported that the Twins had reached a major league deal with reliever Jesse Chavez with whom they were in discussions. Based on new information, we now believe that a deal is not in place and is unlikely to happen. We would never have run this if we weren't confident that an agreement had been reached, but we failed to get a more exact understanding of an inherently fluid situation. We feel terrible and want to apologize to anyone impacted by our inaccurate story. We're sorry we let you down and Twins Daily's community down. We will keep the comments open to discuss our mistake and respond to your feedback as we strive to get better and prevent this from happening again. We are listening to your comments. View full article

It's been a common theme for the Twins lately, from the farm system up to the parent club. They keep finding ways to add extra velocity to various pitchers. What if I told you that's (partially, kind of) a ruse? Obviously, the Twins really have gotten some extra velocity out of a handful of arms taken in the later rounds of the draft over recent years. Just as obviously, they really have helped Jhoan Durán morph into the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball, and they've helped Jorge Alcalá work his way up to the cusp of triple digits with his heat at times. Through technology-informed strength training and mechanical work, they unlock plenty of pitchers and get them throwing harder than they knew they could throw, without compromising their health or command. That, however, is only part of the story. When we talk about fastball velocity, we nearly always talk about average fastball velocity, because we think and see in three dimensions and listing the velocity of every fastball a pitcher throws would be a grossly inefficient way to communicate how hard they throw. Averages work. Averages condense a lot of information into a single number. That number can be noisy, though. After all, hitters don't see an average fastball every time the pitcher winds and fires. They see one baseball, and if that pitch has an extra tick on it, they might be tied up. If it's a tick slow, on the other hand, they might get out ahead of it. Famously, in the 2022 NLDS, Spencer Strider threw the slowest fastball of his career (before or since) to Rhys Hoskins, and Hoskins unloaded on it in a way that was grossly unfamiliar to Strider fans up to that point. Adding and subtracting on the fastball can be a good thing, too. Throwing slower by accident is nearly always bad, but taking a bit off to get better movement or change a hitter's timing without changing pitch selection can be valuable. So can keeping a little bit in the tank, so as to be able to reach back for that pivotal extra yard on the ball when the game is on the line. Still, on balance, adding is a lot more valuable than subtracting. That's the lesson at the heart of the Twins' plans for increasing hurlers' velocity, and it's the secret to the success they've had with it. View full article

Alas: Ryu signed a long-term deal to return to the KBO, last month.

The big, joyous storyline of spring training for the 2024 Minnesota Twins was the good health of many key pieces of the team, including some for whom injury has been a constant problem. Ten days shy of Opening Day, that narrative is cracking. Image courtesy of © Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK In a flurry of updates Monday afternoon, the Twins announced a couple of things that had already grown apparent to attentive fans--but there were an extra couple of scoops on the tsuris sundae. Anthony DeSclafani, who was pretty clearly not in line to start the season on the active roster, has a forearm strain and will see Dr. Keith Meister to determine the next steps in his treatment. That's bad news. So is the fact that Caleb Thielbar and his balky 37-year-old hamstring will be on the shelf to open the season. Those were expected blows, though. Neither DeSclafani nor Thielbar has seemed to be on track for Opening Day since they arrived at camp. DeSclafani's update portends ill for his whole season; I think "Tommy John" is one of the autocomplete options when you start Googling "pitcher forearm strain". Still, both developments are what we anticipated they would be. Jhoan Durán's status, though, comes as a nasty shock. He suffered a moderate oblique strain, and will also begin the season on the injured list. An oblique strain (especially for a flamethrower like Durán) is often a 4-6 week injury, so Durán might be out for all of April. Setbacks with those injuries aren't as uncommon as we'd all like, either. The Twins' relief ace will be absent on Opening Day, and their overall relief depth is thinning fast. Both Zack Weiss (still recovering from a teres major strain) and Matt Canterino (sub-scapula strain) have injuries in the upper back/shoulder structural complex and will also be sidelined to begin the year, with Weiss on the MLB injured list and Canterino on the Triple-A version. There are a bunch of new opportunities for other relievers who had been on the roster bubble, but this is a very unfortunate quintet of updates. The one silver lining is the bullet the team seems to have dodged, for now. Byron Buxton was scratched from Monday's lineup with tightness in his lower back, but the team says that issue is very minor. That can always change, and with Buxton, it's always cause for alarm when he's pushed off the field by any malady, but this isn't one of the areas of his body have cost him considerable time recently, and all parties seem hopeful that he'll be back in action very soon. Overall, this was a miserable day for injury updates. The Twins' bullpen, especially, is in a state of newly clarified pandemonium. Hopefully, this is the big bite from the injury bug, and the rest of spring goes fairly smoothly, but some damage is already done for the short term. Which of these injuries concerns you most? What moves or in-house options are you eyeing now? Join the discussion as we try to figure out how the Twins will rejigger their bullpen. View full article

I've never liked that Rocco Baldelli. What does he know, anyway? 😆