Matthew Trueblood

Box Score Starting Pitcher: Pablo López - 7 IP, 4 H, 1 ER, 1 BB, 7 K (109 pitches, 68 strikes) Home Runs: Carlos Santana (14) Bottom 3 WPA: Josh Staumont (-.428), Cole Sands (-.230), Ryan Jeffers (-.216) Win Probability Chart (Via Fangraphs): As an organization, the Twins weren't thrilled to have to wait five days between games for the All-Star break, thanks to the quirk of playing one of their two-game series against the rival Brewers on this weekend coming out of that layoff. As an extra poke in the eye, then, Mother Nature dropped a brief pop-up shower on Target Field minutes before the scheduled game time, pushing the season's resumption back an extra 14 minutes. Once the action began, though, it was a little slice of Baseball Heaven--and hopefully, for Joe Pohlad (who was in attendance), a reminder of what's possible. A buzzy crowd of both Twins and visiting Brewers fans packed the place to the rafters, giving the game a charge and a self-consciously inflated sense of importance right from the first pitch. The crowd was big and enthusiastic enough, on a summer Saturday evening, to sustain the cheerful thump and palaver that makes it great to take in a game when the team is winning. It's the environment the Twins should be trying to cultivate at all times. As he always does, too, Pablo López rose to the heightened occasion, striking out the first two batters in a 1-2-3 top of the first. The early stages of the game were as even as the records of the two playoff hopefuls contesting it. Through two scoreless innings, each side's hitters could console themselves by noting some tough at-bats and walks drawn, but each defense showed its quality, too. The top of the second ended when Ryan Jeffers threw out Sal Frelick attempting to steal second, and while his throw was on the money, Willi Castro (whom Rocco Baldelli said will be the everyday shortstop in Carlos Correa's absence) matched Jeffers's effort with a deft tag. The Brewers did get to López in the third, though, and he was probably fortunate to give up just one run. A leadoff double set them up to score, and a single from ninth hitter Andruw Monasterio did bring Garrett Mitchell around, but a 108-MPH screamer off the bat of Joey Ortiz became a groundout, and a long fly ball by Brice Turang found the glove of a gliding Byron Buxton at the wall in right-center. López righted the ship with a scoreless fourth, despite more hard contact, and the game stayed taut. Meanwhile, though, Freddy Peralta frustrated the Twins at every turn. They worked two early walks and forced his pitch count to balloon, but they couldn't break through in the bottom of the third, despite putting two runners on with Buxton at bat. While the team awaits the convalescence of Correa, José Miranda, and Royce Lewis, Buxton is back in the heart of their order, and if we're honest, we have to admit that the 2-3-4 sequence of Trevor Larnach, Buxton, and Brooks Lee is conspicuously non-threatening. The team still has multiple threats and ways to score, but they're not the best lineup on the junior circuit in their current form. Working on extra rest on a perfect night, the aces of each team rode the rise and fall and clash of two fan base's cheers packed into a single venue, keeping the game 1-0 through six frames. Neither blinked, but López (slightly more economical through six) got through a tough seventh inning without letting the lead lengthen, whereas Peralta departed after 102 offerings in six frames. That would turn out to mean everything. Milwaukee reliever Bryan Hudson sailed through the seventh, but only faced two batters in the eighth, giving up well-struck balls to each. Austin Martin's fly ball nestled into the glove of Mitchell in center field, but Willi Castro laced a bounding gapper the same direction. Jackson Chourio came up throwing, and might have had a chance to nail the hustling Castro at second, but he mishandled the transfer and lost his opportunity. Next came the chess match, with Baldelli and Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy trading maneuvers. Baldelli used his second pinch-hitter of the inning and third of the game to force Murphy to lift Hudson. Elvis Peguero replaced Hudson, and on a 1-2 pitch to Diego A. Castillo, he uncorked what would turn out to be an enormous wild pitch. Castro advanced to third, forcing the Brewers infield to come up. Castillo then hit a sharp ground ball to Turang at second, but Castro was off on contact. It was an incredibly close play. Turang's throw beat the diving Castro, but Castro was aimed like a missile at the back corner of home plate. William Contreras did what catchers nearly always do on such plays, trained by years of instruction on pitch framing and following the natural momentum of a play on which they necessarily come forward to set up for the hurried throw: He snatrched it too soon. Traveling more slowly under the control of Contreras's muscles than it had been in flight, the ball didn't quite swipe Castro's side until his hand had acquired its target. A replay review confirmed the game-tying run. Castillo reached in the process, and after a Buxton strikeout, Brooks Lee reached on an infield single. It was the Twins' second-most promising rally of the game, but it didn't bear any more fruit, as Max Kepler flew out deep to center. It only felt right for the game to go to the ninth inning knotted; each team played too well to give the other a clear advantage any sooner than the game's final breath. Griffin Jax got the call for the top of the frame and took care of business, but so did Joel Payamps in the bottom half. That brought on a funny bit of baseball irony, as Frelick (who had just been picked off to record the final out of the previous inning, marking his second out on the bases in one contest) took second as the automatic runner for the 10th inning. For his sins in past innings, Frelick's penance in the extra frame was to stand mostly motionless at his station, helpless to do anything. Jhoan Durán came on (to the delight of the sellout crowd, with the effects of the lowered lights and scoreboard animations heightened by the deepening darkness) and put away three straight Milwaukee batters, without even allowing for much in the way of luck. Austin Martin was the automatic runner for the Twins' end of the 10th, but Willi Castro couldn't move him over. Leading off against an extremely aggressive bunt defense from the Brewers, Castro, instead, took a full swing--but he flied out, and Martin couldn't advance. Castillo therefore got his a chance to play hero a second time, but he struck out looking. Murphy elected to intentionally walk Byron Buxton, after Trevor Megill threw two unintentional balls to him, but Brooks Lee couldn't make the visitors pay, grounding out to first base. The tension of this game--from the stands, where warring chants of "Let's Go Brewers" and "Let's Go Twins" bounced off each other every time a sequence even hinted at the possibility of runs scoring--refused to break. In the 11th, the Brewers scored on an infield-in fielder's choice (sound familiar?) and a subsequent squeeze bunt. The Brewers play that kind of game often. The Twins don't, at all. No, the Twins get their runs this way, mostly. Down to their last strike, the Twins were saved by the seemingly unstoppably clutch Carlos Santana, and though they could do no more than tie the game, they forced a 12th inning. That would, eventually, mean turning to their seventh pitcher, on a night when their starter bravely threw seven frames, but sometimes, the game grabs ahold of you and won't let go. Though those nights are less frequent, now that there are automatic runners in play as soon as the game reaches extra innings, they're even more special when they happen. Alas, someone has to win those games, and the Brewers had the depth and the energy to do it Saturday night. A pair of infield singles (one on a nearly-botched but ultimately perfectly placed pop-up bunt) ignited a rally that finally gave the Brewers real breathing room. After a Joey Ortiz sacrifice fly, Jackson Chourio stroked his third hit of the game, bringing home an insurance run against Josh Staumont. Chourio then alertly stole second, taking the double play off the table and forcing the Twins to play the infield up again against Turang. He hit a sizzling single that probably would have punched through anyway, cleanly into right field to break the game open. By the time the relentless Brewers were done, it was a five-run cushion, and the bottom half of the frame was all protracted anticlimax. The Good: I don't need the national anthem to be played before baseball games. I'm not hungry for the fight that would be required to get there, but I'd be fine with the tradition being discontinued. I often make myself busy with something else during the song, not protesting but not concelebrating, either. As a men's quartet sang the song before the game Saturday evening, though, I was struck by something I rarely think of when it comes to the anthem: It can be a very beautiful song, when prepared and performed with loving craftsmanship. It's a challenging piece of music, but in such pieces lies the opportunity to create beauty. Sports are, ultimately, an artistic endeavor, though we rarely consider them that way. The performers Saturday evening gave a rendition as pretty as a 4-6-3 double play, setting an aesthetically wonderful tone for the event. It was one of the tiny ways that the game will surprise you, even in ways that stretch beyond the game itself. On the field, there were plenty of encouraging things. Ryan Jeffers's bat seemed to have slowed down as the summer heat hit--because it did. But Jeffers's swing looked better Saturday night, from a process standpoint. His first two at-bats yielded well-struck but not torched balls, but it was the way he swung that seemed encouraging. Pair that with the great throw to nail Frelick, and he looks somewhat rejuvenated after the break, which would be welcome news for the Twins. López, too, gave encouraging returns. He held his velocity throughout the start, survived an early wobble unfazed, found feel for his sweeper late in the going and gave the team an excellent chance to win. If he can pitch like this down the stretch, the Twins not only have a chance to catch Cleveland for the AL Central leadership, but would feel supremely confident going into almost any first-round playoff matchup. The Bad: It would be grossly unfair to blame the Twins offense for being dominated by Peralta, an ace in his own right who was one of the best pitchers in baseball in the second half of last season and still possesses every bit of the talent López does. We have to return, though, to that sense that the team is more than just depleted by the absence of (arguably) their three best hitters; they seem utterly deflated without them. That's not a knock on Baldelli or the character of the team; it's just how it goes. There's a certain amount of talent and production that, added together, creates a critical mass. No club can replace guys who were doing as much for the team as Correa, Lewis, and Miranda. They just have to wait for them to return. That's a worrisome reality, though, since there's no guarantee that any of them will be back (and at full strength) soon. Once extra innings arrived, we also saw a glimpse of the lurking issue that is the soft underbelly of the bullpen. With injuries to Chris Paddack and Brock Stewart still stretching the staff a bit out of its optimal shape, they could use some reinforcement there. Otherwise, it will be important for them to play from ahead, because games like this one (and those in which they face a narrow deficit going into the late innings) will continue to get away from them. What’s Next: Though next year's schedule will restore the annual interleague rivalry series to a pair of three-game sets, this season's Border Battle with the Brewers concludes with the fourth game between the two teams on Sunday. Joe Ryan and Milwaukee trade addition Aaron Civale will toe the rubber, for a 12:05 PM local start. It's so early for a good reason, too: The game will be on Roku, so for disenfranchised fans who want to see their team, this is a rare opportunity. Postgame Interviews: Bullpen Usage Chart TUE WED THU FRI SAT TOT Sands 0 0 0 0 10 10 Jax 0 0 0 0 14 14 Durán 0 0 0 0 12 12 Staumont 0 0 0 0 20 20 Alcalá 0 0 0 0 17 17 Funderburk 0 0 0 0 0 0 Thielbar 0 0 0 0 0 0 Okert 0 0 0 0 11 11

It's not really the fault of American League manager Bruce Bochy, or of the commentators or production team at FOX Sports, that Willi Castro passed only briefly across the screens of watching fans Tuesday night, without a meaningful mention of his presence or his story. Late in the MLB All-Star Game, there's a scramble to get everyone who was selected for the first (or perhaps last) time onto the field to fully enjoy and celebrate their moment, and the teams covering the game have to make quick choices about which players to profile and highlight in specific at-bats. If we're being honest with ourselves, Castro was a fringe All-Star. Without diminishing what he's done, we can acknowledge that he was added to what is already a 30-man roster only as an injury replacement, and that that was fair; he wasn't snubbed in the initial voting or anything. Castro is not as bright a star as almost every other player who took the field Tuesday night, even though he's been one of the best players on the field for most of the Twins' season. He was the victim of simple math. Someone's screen time was going to get squeezed. Twins fans needn't be disappointed about the lack of a shining moment for the team Tuesday night, though, because soon enough, Castro will be back to filling up the screen and the box score in games that count. As fun and flashy as he often is, this season hasn't been about his style. It's been about his substance, and he'll get to showcase that again starting Saturday. For the moment, though, let's fill the adulation gap left by FOX. Prior to 2023, Castro had a career .245/.292/.381 batting line, with rangy but erratic defense at various positions. That was the track record that prompted a new Detroit Tigers front office to move on from him at the non-tender deadline in November 2022, and while it now looks a bit silly, it was a perfectly defensible choice at that time. The Twins, after all, only signed Castro to a minor-league deal before last season. His 2023 was fun, chaotic, and encouraging. He was a pleasant surprise for a team perennially fighting injury issues, plugging in at multiple spots and hitting .257/.339/.411, with 33 stolen bases. That's a good campaign, and it's a meaningful step forward. It's why Castro's position with the team was never really in doubt after midseason, and why he came to camp this spring with a clear path to at least similar playing time. It was good, but it was also normal. Players Castro's age improve the way he did from 2022 to 2023 all the time. They also, frequently, regress in the wake of those step-up seasons, especially when their increased production is fueled by a .328 BABIP and includes a strikeout rate on the high side of average. That's why what Castro has done this season, while superficially similar to last year, is not normal, and why we need to be sure we properly appreciate it. At .265/.352/.422, his production doesn't look wildly altered from last year, but you have to widen the lens to see the full scope of what he's done. Castro already has 386 plate appearances this year, which is just 23 fewer than all of last season. He's not being deployed strategically or selectively; he's the guy who facilitates strategic, selective usage of other players throughout the roster. That's not purely out of necessity, either. Castro has made material changes that made it possible (even preferable) for Rocco Baldelli to trust him with full-time playing time. From 2021-23, the switch-hitter averaged just under 130 plate appearances as a righty batter, facing left-handed pitchers, and his OPS was just over .660. In none of those campaigns did that number crack .700. This season, he's taken such huge strides that Baldelli has already entrusted him with 92 plate appearances against lefties. In them, he's hitting .333/.370/.540. His power has exploded. Here's a swing Castro put on a good pitch to hit against a lefty last summer. Willi Lefty Swing 23 2.mp4 Unfortunately, that's what Castro has looked like against lefties for much of his career. You can see that the hands work, and that this is still a tooled-up player, but the whole operation looked rushed, uneasy, and unintimidating. Here's Castro taking a hack at a similar offering this year. Willi Lefty Swing 24 2.mp4 You don't see changes much bigger than that, especially from a switch-hitter on his less-used side. Brooks Lee has garnered headlines for his work to be more formidable as a righty over the winter. Castro hasn't gotten quite the same credit, but he should. This is a more hitterish setup, with the almost impatient front foot and the aggressiveness of the load. Most importantly, though, his contact point has moved. He's embraced the Twins' organizational prerogative to pull the ball in the air and hit it hard, even from his weaker side of the plate. You can see him working the barrel out in front of him more than in the past, and the result is a ferocity on contact that was absent until this season. That change comes with some drawbacks, and anyway, lefties only make up about 25% of Castro's opposing batters. This is far from the only adaptation he's made this year. From the left side, he's become more patient, with a chase rate under 30% on pitches outside the zone. He's never been below 34.7% before. Thus, without any major mechanical changes on that side, he's also hitting it harder (and hitting it hard more often) from his historically stronger position. We covered the fact that he was showing power upside far beyond his previous career levels way back in spring training, and the regular season has borne that out starkly. His average exit velocity is up a whopping 2.7 miles per hour this year. His Barrel rate is way up. His weighted sweet-spot exit velocity is way up. Is Castro quite as successful on the bases as he was last year? No. Has he become a superstar? No. Still, what he's done this year isn't just a welcome development; it's genuinely remarkable. The Twins would be adrift without him. He provides versatility, value in multiple facets, and an energy that has been the missing ingredient every time the team has struggled over the last few years. They'll have to find ways to keep him fresh and healthy down the stretch. Late in 2022, he suffered a hamstring strain, and he missed time with an oblique strain last summer. There are, shockingly, few players the team could less afford to lose than Castro. That very fact, though, is a testament to the wonderful season he's having, and even if Tuesday didn't find him in a national spotlight, we can spend a bit of the remaining interstitial time before the season resumes giving him much-deserved praise for an extraordinary first half.

There's a false binary, sometimes, in thinking about generalists and specialists; We all have to specialize a little, lest we end up standing in the middle of a room spinning in circles, remarking blandly on the great doings being done off in each corner. We also all have to be able to act as generalists, to some extent, or we corner ourselves into feeling out of our depth when we're really working on something we should be able to handle. Still and all, there's validity in the distinction between the two approaches to anything, not least because they're required in different measure when attempting things of different difficulties. The Minnesota Twins are in a highly competitive field, where the things they need to do are difficult. Like most teams, they do have to choose places where they specialize, and that means emphasizing certain skills and competencies at the expense of others. To wit: Whatever their insistence to the contrary, the Twins show less interest than any other organization in baseball in throwing the sinker. As a result of that strong preference for four-seamers and cutters when it comes to velocity-oriented offerings, they just don't seem to be very good at teaching the sinker when they do attempt to do so. That's fine, but it's an important thing to understand about what is, nonetheless, one of the better pitching development infrastructures in the league. It's hard to overstate (and, at first, hard even to conceptualize) how much of an outlier the Twins are when it comes to abstaining from the sinker. They are the team who throws the fewest sinkers in baseball, at just 5.7% of all pitches, but that doesn't quite capture it. They're also the team who throws the fewest total hard pitches (four-seamers, cutters, and sinkers, as a group), at just 48.8% of all their pitches. So is their apparent disuse of the pitch just a product of their preference for heavy use of breaking and offspeed stuff, at the expense of all types of fastballs? Or at least, is that part of the story? No. Emphatically, no. The average team makes the sinker about 29 percent of all their hard pitches. The Guardians are second-lowest in baseball in this regard, at 15.2%. The sinker only makes up 11.7% of the Twins' hard pitches. Here's a chart showing each team's use of the three hard pitch types, individually and in total. They're ranked according to the share of their hard pitches taken up by the sinker. They've chosen this as a way to maximize strikeouts--not only with all those four-seamers, but by using so much spin and changing speeds. The big question is: what happens when they do want or need to have a pitcher develop a sinker?

Box Score: Starting Pitcher: Chris Paddack: 2 1/3 IP, 5 H, 5 ER, 1 BB, 0 K (46 Pitches, 31 Strikes, 67.4%) Home Runs: Royce Lewis (7), Trevor Larnach (7), José Miranda (7) Top 3 WPA: Miranda 0.267, Josh Staumont 0.194, Griffin Jax 0.160 Win Probability Chart (Via Fangraphs): At the very bottom of it, under all the complexities and loyalties and emotional superstructures we lay on top, you go to the park to see a major-league game in the hopes of seeing a special ball player do something truly special. Through a huge number of complex interactions between on-field talent and front-office machination; through the vicious emotional wreckage of a protracted playoff losing streak and seasons ruined by injuries to talented players; and through plenty of well-earned grumbling about a family of billionaires refusing to invest the way they should have in a team with a chance to break through, the last half-decade has featured a lot of chances to step through the gates of Target Field and see something truly special. Right now, that's Royce Lewis, and what he's doing might be not only the most special thing the Twins have offered their fans this side of Joe Mauer, but one of the most remarkable things anywhere on any MLB diamond. Lewis entered Sunday's doubleheader having played 10 games this season and clubbed five home runs. Then he homered in the first game, on the heels of Carlos Correa's first-inning two-run shot. It's not just that Lewis is doing this, but that he's doing it yet again, coming back over and over from injuries ranging from significant but moderate to career-threatening and slugging like he hadn't missed a single game. There are very few examples of this kind of relentless offensive explosiveness from a player whose career is disrupted as often and as momentously as Lewis's has been; the ones that do exist are folk heroes. Think Bo Jackson. Think Josh Hamilton. Think Mickey Mantle. When Lewis stepped in for his turn in the first inning of Game Two, you could feel that slight gather of breath in the sparse but buzzing crowd--that unfair but happy expectation that somehow, in defiance of the law of averages and the mathematical gravity of the game, the guy in the box is going to put on his cape again and be super. It's a nearly forgotten sensation, in this day and age. Fans know better. The stats and their weight sit front and center in front of the game with us. Plus, the run environment has transformed. We're more than a quarter-century past the last expansion of the league, and almost 20 years clear of what I call the Double Expansion Era (but which others call the Steroid Era). If you didn't grow up watching Ken Griffey Jr., Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds, you can't quite imagine how much people expected of them every day, and how (improbably) they kept meeting those insane expectations. No player since 2010 has had the same kind of anticipation attached to them, because no one has conditioned people to feel that way. Lewis is becoming the exception. Your brain knows he can't homer in every game, let alone every time he steps to the plate, but it's increasingly difficult to banish the tickle of hope from your mind, because he keeps beating the odds and blasting the ball. That's why fans got even more ecstatic than usual when Lewis launched a long fly ball down the left-field line, and were more than usually crestfallen when it hooked just foul. For a moment, it felt like another proof of Lewis's exceptionalism. Then, it was just a strike, and (how cruel!) fans knew they might have to wait another few innings to see their hero hit a dinger that counted. Or, you know, he could do it on the next pitch. Just missing once and then doing the thing immediately afterward is freakish stuff. It's the kind of showstopping moment you should only be allowed to do in the first inning or the last. Anything else would be like Skynyrd playing 'Freebird' right in the middle of the set. Lewis set a tone, as he always seems to be doing. This game, though, would be a bit less of a free-spirited frolic than the first game of the twinbill was. This time, the A's actually showed up, and Chris Paddack continued what has been a deeply troubling trend of ineffectiveness, albeit not an uninterrupted one. This would be his third start in the last four that were somewhere between disappointing and underwhelming, and the only good one mixed in there came against the Road Rockies, perennially the worst offensive team in baseball. The A's thwacked Paddack for two homers and erased two Twins leads before Rocco Baldelli had to go get his starter, who looked rather upset to be leaving despite not having had much fun at the party. Things would have been worse--much worse--but for some extraordinary defense from Austin Martin in the second inning. Some home run robberies are, secretly, pretty easy. They just require you to meander back to the wall and time up a jump, with plenty of time to do both. This was the other kind. Martin had to choose his angle wisely, feel for the wall, and get pretty high to pull the ball back. Martin looked fine in left field in his previous stint with the team, but if he can get more comfortable in center this time around, he might have more staying power with the team. Still, Paddack's outing hangs like a bit of a dark cloud over the excitement of this stretch. He's been inconsistent not only in terms of results (that's inevitable, to some extent), but in terms of sheer movements and performance. His fastball velocity has sat 90-93 MPH in three starts this year; 92-94 in three others; 93-95 in five more; and 94-97 in the other three. That's a maddening degree of inconsistency, and it's just one illustration of a rougher-grain unreliability that has plagued the righty this year. Twins Daily's winning "Make It Official!" game recaps are sponsored by Official Fried Chicken, which you can find in center field of Target Field. With a name like "Official," we know we have to be the best in the game every day, and from your first bite, you'll know that's a promise we make good on. Fortunately, Louie Varland restored order. Taking over for Paddack, he pitched out of a third-inning jam, then gave the team four scoreless innings before cracking a bit in the seventh. It was an impressive showing from Varland in his second outing of the week, helping patch and fill some innings for the busy staff, although he still hasn't faced a truly MLB-caliber lineup since he was demoted to St. Paul in the first place. Lewis wasn't alone in slugging in the nightcap for the Twins. Trevor Larnach launched a huge three-run homer in the bottom of the second, and the team pushed across single runs in the third and sixth that looked like they might stand up. Instead, after Varland wobbled badly in the seventh, the game came down to the final two frames. José Miranda had pinch-hit for Larnach in the sixth, and he came up again in the eighth. He put the right finishing touch on the masterpiece of a game Lewis started painting in the first. That just left a relatively easy clean-up for Griffin Jax, and he finished the sweep ably. The Twins are winners of five games in a row, and the vibes are very, very good. What’s Next: After an off day Monday, the Twins will welcome the Rays to town for a three-game set, with Pablo López starting the series opener. Longtime AL Central nemesis Aaron Civale will start for Tampa. Postgame Interviews: Bullpen Usage Chart: WED THU FRI SAT SUN TOT Sands 0 0 25 0 27 52 Jax 0 19 23 0 12 42 Thielbar 22 0 0 0 0 22 Durán 16 0 20 0 9 45 Staumont 0 0 15 0 15 15 Alcalá 10 13 0 0 22 45 Jackson 22 0 0 0 0 22 Okert 18 0 0 0 0 18

In a move that will surprise some, the Twins are recalling Jay Jackson to join their bullpen Wednesday. They had to designate Diego Castillo for assignment to do it, which the team is always loath to do, but those who read Theo Tollefson's piece here at Twins Daily earlier this week know why they made this call. Jackson has rediscovered the slider that is, more or less, his whole career. He couldn't consistently execute that offering during his first stint with the big-league team, and when that's the case, he's not an MLB-caliber pitcher. While he was in St. Paul, though, he maintained a good attitude and found the shape on that pitch that makes him not only MLB-caliber, but a valuable middle reliever. Theo gave you all you needed to realize Jackson was primed for a return, and it's no surprise that Varland is headed back to the minors after his spot start. All that remains to explain is the choice to let Castillo go in the process, but that's not a galloping shock, either. Castillo filled in adequately as the last arm on the staff for a short time, but he's past his best utility in the big leagues. Jackson is a better fit for the roster, now that he has his best weapon back. Why the Twins Can't Beat the Yankees Tuesday night, while the Twins struggled against the Rockies, the Yankees were busy thoroughly bashing the Royals. They've made a habit of that, over a not-insignificant stretch. In fact, while the Twins get the headlines, the Yankees' 116-49 record against Kansas City since the year 2000 is even better than their 114-51 against the Twins. That doesn't count their dominance over the Twins in the playoffs, of course, but not coincidentally, the Royals' two playoff appearances during that span (2014 and 2015) each came in seasons when the Yankees just didn't make it. It feels less notable that the Yankees lay such a whupping on the Royals than that they consistently drub the Twins, because the Twins have been much better than the Royals over those 25 seasons. Because the Twins are a winning team when not playing New York, their inability to beat the Bombers has become a popular enigma on which to muse. Here's the thing: it's not really a mystery at all. Ask yourself two important questions, any time one team seems to have special mastery over another: What does the team with the upper hand do especially well? What does the team getting beaten do poorly? If the answer to those two questions is the same, it makes plenty of sense for one team to dominate the other. In this case, the overlap couldn't be more perfect. The 2024 Twins are the perfect illustration of this point. Their pitching staff strikes out batters as well as almost any in baseball, and issues very, very few walks. That's what they do well. What do they do poorly? It's the same thing they've done poorly for the last 30 years, in otherwise good times and in bad ones. The Twins give up home runs. They give up lots and lots of home runs. An assemblage of fly-ball pitchers, they're vulnerable to power, even in seasons in which they do everything else well. What do the Yankees do well? They hit home runs. Much about that team has changed over the last quarter-century, just as much has changed about the Twins, but the Yankees still (always, forever) hit home runs. When one team has one of the league's greatest vulnerabilities to a particular outcome, and the other team has one of its greatest proclivities to produce that outcome, and when that outcome is the most extremely valuable (or damaging) one in baseball, it's a recipe for trouble. The Yankees' .466 SLG against the Twins since 2000 is the sixth-highest for any team against an opponent they've played at least 100 times. Three of the top five involve the Rockies. The other two are the Yankees against the Royals, and the Red Sox against the Royals. When you're just plain bad, you're going to give up power to great power-hitting teams. When you're otherwise above-average, it feels like that should be avoidable, but because the Twins remain a team that gives up power in exchange for more whiffs and fewer walks, they run into the same trouble as worse pitching staffs. No team in baseball throws fewer sinkers than the Twins. They work vertically within the zone, rather than horizontally. They do a lot of things well, but when they face the team who most consistently does well what they do a poor job of preventing, they lose. That's not a mystery, and the Yankees don't have a special hold on the team. The Twins can get the upper hand, or at least stop losing five or six games a year to the Bombers. They just have to make some adjustments that will frustrate the Yankee offense more effectively.

Monday night's Twins-Rockies tilt was a crisp affair, played in 2 hours, 9 minutes and with a bevy of balls in play. Twins pitchers struck out 10 Colorado batters, but only issued one walk, and on the flip side, they only struck out and walked twice each on offense. That wasn't surprising, because Monday's home-plate umpire, Alfonso Márquez, is one of the game's more hitter-friendly (and balls in play-friendly) arbiters. Of 77 qualifying umps since the start of 2023, Márquez is 67th in Adjusted Strikes Looking (SL+), at 96.6. For that stat, 100 is average, and higher means more called strikes than expected, based on the location of pitches not swung at while they're behind the plate. He's also 19th in In Play% among those 77, meaning that when Márquez is back there, the ball tends to keep moving. It's hard to come by a much larger change than the two teams will see tonight, as Lance Barrett dons the mask and chest protector instead of Márquez. Barrett is third in SL+, at 106.3. Whereas Márquez's calls have added 9.8 runs to scoreboards since the beginning of last season, Barrett's have prevented 17.7. Barrett's games also tend to involve more of the two least interesting true outcomes. Since the best umpires have the least impact on the runs in either direction, it probably won't shock you to learn that Márquez ranks 55th in Adjusted Correct Call % over this sample, and that Barrett is even worse, at 72nd. For the very patient Twins offense, there's either a quick adjustment or an evening of frustration ahead. In four games with Barrett behind the dish over the last two seasons, they're 2-2, but have batted just .211/.264/.398, striking out 25.5 percent of the time and walking just 5.5 percent of the time. Life With Louie It's just a spot start for Louie Varland Tuesday night; he's not guaranteed anything beyond this chance to help the team stretch its starting rotation and get key pitchers some rest. However, this feels like a golden opportunity for the young righthander to have some success and reestablish his confidence at the MLB level. After the exceptionally tight zone that governs Triple-A baseball, Barrett's will feel positively oceanic. It's up to Varland, who has admirably lowered his walk rate during a St. Paul sojourn, to show he can make use of that space. As you've heard by now, Varland has tweaked his pitch mix to optimize his development while pitching for the Saints, with more sinkers and changeups. The idea is to finally get him comfortable attacking the arm side of the plate, inside on righty batters and away from lefties. The focus has also been on reshaping the changeup. Varland has seen a drop in the velocity difference between that pitch and his fastball while with St. Paul, but it's also moving more, both vertically and horizontally. That's a good trade for Varland. Tuesday will give him a chance to test some of his changes, and then he figures to get another chance to hone things in the minors. It's Not Your Day, Kid No less a luminary than Bill James once suggested that, for player safety and conflict management reasons, a pitcher be ejected automatically if they hit a second batter in any game. His theory was, if you plunk two guys in one game, you don't have adequate control that day--or there's something nefarious afoot. That's too extreme, but as I watched the frustration (and injury risk) mount and tensions wind unnecessarily high Sunday afternoon, I couldn't help thinking that James was on the right track. Ben Heller of the Pirates didn't have any semblance of command that day, and it put the Twins in danger. It also invited anger that could have boiled over into a brawl. Heller had already done some damage and angered some people in the Minnesota dugout by the time he hit Kyle Farmer, the third HBP of his day, and the game was over. The Pirates left him in, though, to continue absorbing a beating and spare their bullpen. It's not really fair to Heller that he was forced to do that, and it's even more unfair to the Twins that they were subjected to that risk longer than anyone would have called acceptable, except that the Pirates didn't want to use any more arms in a lost cause. I wanted to see what it would look like to draw a line, somewhere, and automatically eject pitchers who plunk three batters in a game. For my money, it's viable. There have been 46 outings since the start of 2021 in which a pitcher did hit at least three batters, and in 18 of those, the hurler in question worked at least into the sixth inning. That's where we need to check on this, because if the rule were going to push a bunch of pitchers out of starts unnecessarily, it would be a no-go. Instead, of those 18 appearances, only four would have been curtailed sharply by this rule. An automatic ejection after a third HBP would have knocked Yu Darvish out of a 2022 start in the first inning, and Zac Gallen out of one in the second. Both Chris Bassitt and Alex Wood would have been thrown out of starts in the third in 2021, even though they went on to at least see the sixth. Much more often, though, third plunkings act as a sign to a skipper that his guy has lost it, anyway. While with the Marlins in 2022, Pablo López was voluntarily removed after hitting his third batter of the game, in the seventh inning. Tanner Houck has twice been lifted immediately after hitting his third batter of the game in the sixth inning, and Carlos Carrasco got the same treatment in one game last season. Another handful of times, pitchers got between one and three more batters after their third HBP. Were this rule instituted, umpires would have to be slightly more strict in their enforcement of the rule against batters leaning into pitches. You don't want hitters forcing pitchers out of the game by trying desperately to get hit. At the same time, it would make each hit-by-pitch more interesting, and hitters could still find ways to draw an extra plunking here and there, to apply pressure to the pitcher and their manager. Games like the one Heller had are inevitable. Their potential negative impact on the game and its players can be blunted, though, and I think we should seriously consider doing it.

It won't be like this all year. Simeon Woods Richardson is not a true-talent 2.57 ERA pitcher in MLB, and his strong showing since joining the Twins rotation is due for some measure of regression. However, the success he's had isn't unearned. He's made material changes since last season, and he's crafted a versatile arsenal--partially by making two of the pitches within that mix versatile in and of themselves. After tweaking his mechanics this winter to unlock his former velocity and be more athletic throughout his delivery, Woods Richardson has established a four-pitch repertoire this spring: four-seam fastball, slider, changeup, and curveball. Neither the changeup nor the curve is especially effective, though, so his fastball and slider need to do a lot of different things. It's hard to have lasting success as a starter with two pitches driving the bus; you need the ability to manipulate those offerings. Thankfully, then, Woods Richardson has fostered just that kind of flexibility this year. Here's the movement chart for all of his offerings for the season to date: It's hard, at a glance, to see what makes this unique, so firstly, let's compare Woods Richardson to one of his teammates. Here's the same chart for Twins starter Bailey Ober. In analyzing pitch movement, the default tends to be to study the average of all pitches of a given type. How much does that offering typically move, and in which direction(s)? Our brains aren't supercomputers, so to break these things down, we try to take a single number. The average is the intuitive one to use. When you look at the charts above, though, something should jump out right away: the shape of the distribution of movement is different, and the size of the spread for each is different. Ober has a tight cluster of fastballs; his heaters all move relatively similarly. Woods Richardson, by contrast, has a big spread--but only in one direction. The band of vertical movement he gets on his heaters is pretty small, but the band of horizontal movement is quite wide. This actually is something we can measure, and relatively easily; it's just not often taken into account. Here are all the pitchers who have thrown at least 200 four-seam fastballs so far in 2024, plotted based on the range of movement they show on those pitches, both horizontally and vertically. (The range, here, is defined as the difference between their 90th-percentile movement in that dimension and their 10th-percentile movement in it.) This isn't a set of data in which you necessarily want to have as small or as big a number as possible. Were we examining the standard deviation of movement, we'd probably view smaller values as better ones, because that might stand in for command, but that's not what we're doing here, exactly. Rather, we're seeing how far a pitcher can stretch and move their movement in each dimension. As you can see, Woods Richardson has one of the largest horizontal movement ranges in the sport, but a below-average vertical range. While it's not clear in all cases how these numbers reflect value, for Woods Richardson, that's a clearly positive thing. Why? Because he pitches like this: cThMN2xfWGw0TUFRPT1fVndjQVVWTU5YbFFBRGdFQlhnQUFWUVpTQUZrRlUxUUFCVklDVmdZR1VBTUdCQUJR.mp4 That's not as dramatic an overhand delivery as Woods Richardson used last year, when he was interfering with his own arm strength and cutting the ball at under 90 miles per hour, but it's still a high arm slot. Based on throwing that way, we would normally expect his errors--the balls that don't move the way he wants them to--to be in the vertical dimension. In other words, when he gives the pitch more lateral movement from one offering to the next, he's not just missing. He's manipulating the pitch, to attack different parts of the zone and/or give hitters different looks. Here's Woods Richardson's movement chart for last season's stint with the Twins. Again, you can see that dramatically different average movement profile, but you can also see less of a scatter--less maneuverability with the fastball. Now, let's talk about the slider. That pitch has significant two-plane separation from the fastball, but it also has a different orientation in terms of the spray of its movements. This time, compares to the average hurler, he has a greater vertical movement range, but a smaller horizontal one. Obviously, in keeping with the above, this indicates more difficulty with command, and the risk is that it means leaving too many sliders up; those might get crushed. However, a pitcher who needs to attack hitters two or three times within a game needs the ability to do more than one thing with their breaking ball. Woods Richardson has to be able to throw the slider for a strike (strike to strike, starting out looking like a high fastball and ending up low in the zone), for chases (strike to ball, diving below the zone), and to steal called strikes (ball to strike, dropping into the zone unexpectedly). Thus, the ability to change how much vertical movement a pitch gets from one to the next is important to Woods Richardson, and he's demonstrating that valuable skill. Again, he's going to give up more runs at some point. He's going to hang a slider or two, and he's going to miss out over the plate with a fastball meant for a corner. His ERA is more likely to start with a 4, the rest of the way, than to start with a 2. Still, this is pitchability in a nutshell. Woods Richardson is young, but he's also mature, thoughtful, and talented. This year, he's getting a chance to show it, and he's seized that opportunity so far.

On one level, this is all pretty simple. Has Pablo López been good enough this season? There's a nuanced, layered, difficult, even self-contradictory answer, but there's also a pretty simple one: his ERA is 4.72. That's not good enough--not for a hurler the Twins needed to pitch like the ace he was down the stretch last season, and not as a highly-paid veteran on a team that cut back its payroll for 2024 and doesn't seem eager to raise it again for 2025 and beyond. That doesn't mean López isn't a good pitcher. By no means does he seem to have totally lost his good stuff, and despite a couple of starts in which his fastball has been noticeably diminished, both he and manager Rocco Baldelli insist that he's healthy. He's struck out 27.9% of opposing batters, and walked just 4.0% of them. That's ace-caliber work, and his stuff remains ace-caliber, when he's commanding it. We can sum up the "yeah, but" pretty succinctly: he's giving up home runs at exactly the same rate at which he's issuing walks, and as a result, opponents are slugging .437 against him. Preventing home runs is the least stable of the three bedrock skills a pitcher can demonstrate, but when you struggle to do it, the other skills don't matter as much as one might like. López is giving up harder contact and getting fewer ground balls this year, and when hitters hit him hard, they're getting a lot of juice out of the squeeze. Evaluating López is difficult, then, because he's winning as many at-bats as ever--as many pitches as ever. Sometimes, baseball is a game defined by probabilities. Win more matchups than the average pitcher (or batter, if that's your role), and you help the team win. This is why batting average was the first metric by which fans measured players for the first 70 or 80 years of professional baseball, and why on-base percentage is now recognized as the best individual indicator of a hitter's performance. Now, however, we live in a somewhat different era. On-base percentage still matters a lot, and (flipping the image to read it from the pitcher's side) strikeout-to-walk ratio is still an excellent barometer of pitching ability. More than in the past, though, danger lurks throughout a big-league lineup, and runs are scored in sudden thunderclaps, rather than insistent showers of singles and runner advancements. The game is less about probabilities and more about payoffs than it used to be, which means that a vulnerability to the home run on the mound is more damaging and limiting than it used to be. López and the Twins are feeling that in a big way right now. The gopheritis afflicting López lately is not a merely abstract concept, though, and we don't have to treat it as an inscrutable mystery. There are a couple of material problems at play. Let's identify them, so we can watch for signs of López fixing them in future starts.

Bat-tracking data has been the next big thing for which lovers of baseball data hungered for over a year, and on Sunday, Baseball Savant went live with new numbers that let us measure and compare players' bat speed, the solidity of their contact, and their directness to the ball. There's still nore coming, but let's take a look at three things we can learn by glancing at the new data through Twins-colored glasses. Alex Kirilloff's Early-Season Surge, and Subsequent Struggles Increasingly, the Twins' former top prospect's offensive performance is a topic of concern and conversation. Last week, Cody Pirkl broke down the way Kirilloff has fallen off after a very exciting hot start, and now, we can take a closer look at how that has happened. Through April 15, Kirilloff's average swing speed was 72.9 miles per hour, and his average swing length (the distance traveled in three-dimensional space by the tip of the bat from the start of the swing to the contact point, whether contact is actually made or not) was 7.7 feet. In the second half of April, the latter number held steady, but the former one fell to 72.1 MPH. Since May 1, Kirilloff is down to 71.9 MPH in average swing speed, and his swing length has crept up to 7.8 feet. In a vacuum, a shorter swing is better, but because shorter swings tend to be slower ones, we have to balance swing speed and swing length in evaluating a hitter's choices at the plate. Here, though, Kirilloff is losing swing speed without shortening up at all. If anything, the swing is getting a hair loopier, as well as slower. That's bad news, though it's too early in both the season and the public lifespan of this data to know how unusual it is or to assess whether it means Kirilloff is hurt again.

For those who didn't see the Twins' 10-6 loss to the Mariners Tuesday night, here's all you need to know to catch up for this particular piece: In the bottom of the eighth inning, on a dribbler to the right side of the diamond, Austin Martin legged out an infield single. In the process, he slid headfirst, trying to avoid both a potential tag and a potential collision with Mariners pitcher Taylor Saucedo, but (in one of those cruel twists that fate sometimes dispenses, on diamonds and elsewhere) he ended up causing an injury, instead. Martin slid into Saucedo, who badly injured his knee and crumpled to the ground. Max Kepler was at third base, having scampered there from his starting station at second when the ball went to the right side. The score was 6-5 Mariners, at the time, and as Saucedo fell and the ball rolled away, Kepler briefly hesitated, then took off for home plate. He scored the tying run, uncontested. As far as it goes, that's a reasonable stance. It's an especially tough call late in a close game. Kepler's run was important, and in this day and age, we (regrettably) have to consider the implications for the perceived integrity of the contest if a player doesn't seize every opportunity to score, given the way the league facilitates and even invites gambling on its product. Kepler's wiring, and that of Tommy Watkins, told him scoring there was non-optional. I want to make something clear, though: he did have a choice. In that moment, even though it was impossible to know whether Saucedo's injury will be career-altering and no reason to think it will be life-altering, he could have stopped and let Saucedo be more important than the tying run. We can, and I think we should, make other people more important than the vehicles through which we interact with them, like sports or business transactions or parties or city buses. It's not Martin's fault that Saucedo got hurt, and Kepler is more right than he is wrong about what the majority of people inside Target Field Tuesday night expected of him once Saucedo went down. I just think we should change that. In our society, the broad assumption is that other people's misfortune is (if not their own fault) their own problem. In many, many instances throughout our daily lives, we instinctively reject the notion that those misfortunes should be allowed to inconvenience us--partially because we fear (with some sound basis) that no one would allow our misfortune to inconvenience them, were the roles reversed. Sports are an especially (even unavoidably) dog-eat-dog world. They're partially about finding out who wants it more, and that makes it especially hard to prioritize people over runs and points and wins in moments like that one. Sports aren't as valuable or engaging if we permit the possibility that anything else matters more than winning. It does, though. In that moment, Kepler could have stayed at third. He didn't do anything wrong, by our current norms and expectations. Nonetheless, I think he missed an opportunity to do something truly right--or, maybe, righteous. He'd have been at third with one out, anyway. He might well have still come around to score, although we can't come anywhere near assuming he would have. It doesn't matter. I want to call this out now, so that next time a similar situation arises, we can come a little bit closer to expecting better of people. Eventually, we can play a version of sports in which everyone wants to win, and everyone knows it, but everyone also understands when someone's pain (or triumph) transcends the outcome of a given game or inning. I don't think we're all that close to that, yet, but we should try to get there.