Matthew Trueblood

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? 😆

Hahaha. Of course not! Only the pitchers get this kind of deference. Thence comes my beef with it.

On Saturday, the Twins eked out a 6-5 win over the Rays in Grapefruit League play. Along the way, though, the rules of spring training denied them a much more meaningful victory. Image courtesy of © Nick Wosika-USA TODAY Sports The Minnesota Twins ambushed Ryan Pepiot Saturday. They put together great at-bats against him and built themselves a crooked inning. Edouard Julien walked, and after a Carlos Correa strikeout, Byron Buxton singled and Royce Lewis doubled, each on line drives that were virtually certain hits right off the bat. Max Kepler popped out, but Carlos Correa followed with a single that scored Lewis, making it 3-2 Twins. Right then, the Bally Sports North cameras caught one of my favorite things about baseball--one of the wonderful and valuable aspects of this sport. After Lewis scored, and as he circled back toward the dugout, he and on-deck batter Ryan Jeffers had a long, engaged conversation. It's not a mystery what they were talking about. Lewis had just scorched a two-strike pitch into the corner for that double. He had something good on Pepiot, and he was passing it along to Jeffers, who was asking questions and trying to translate the wisdom Lewis had gleaned from Lewis's mental framework for hitting cues into his own. Baseball is often a somewhat isolated, individualistic game, at least on the surface. Players take their turns and try to get their hits, or at least avoid making outs, and then it's up to the next guy to do the same. Yes, scoring is often a team effort, but it's made up of lonely plays that don't have an obvious linkage to one another. Beneath the surface, you can see that that isn't true. These are the kinds of insights we rarely get from players in public statements, because they don't want to give up whatever edge they've gained, but great offenses separate themselves from good ones because teammates communicate. In the dugout, in the on-deck circle, or even in the handoff of spent lumber from the next batter up to one just coming in to score or freshly retired, hitters talk. They spot something in a pitcher's release or their setup, or they just notice a real example of a pattern the coaches told them to seek out before the game. The challenge, then, is to share that information from hitter to hitter in a way they each understand. Putting what we see into concise, clear words is hard, and rapidly absorbing what someone shares with us in a way that lets us prepare our own eyes and minds for the thing they're telling us about can be equally so. This is why relationships and clubhouse conversations and team chemistry matter. It's the quintessentially human thing that makes baseball games more than the computer simulations the more cynical pundits out there would have you conceive them to be, even in 2024, as the computers march forward in all aspects of our lives. Alas, Jeffers never got to test his new knowledge. He didn't get to try to put anything Lewis saw into action, to see whether he was properly understanding his teammate and could see and utilize what his teammate had seen and utilized. The Rays pulled Pepiot at that point, six batters into his penultimate preparatory start for the season. Pepiot is an important part of the Tampa rotation for the coming campaign. They can't afford for him to only get two outs and face six batters in a ramp-up appearance, but they did take him out at that moment. That was, of course, only because they could bring him back the next inning. They did just that, and Pepiot ended up getting nine more uneventful outs in the game. Jeffers did finally see him, in the fourth inning, and hit a hard fly ball, but it was too high and it died well short of the fence. The Grapefruit and Cactus League rules now allow teams to lift their pitchers and re-insert them the following inning, to keep them out of overlong innings and massive pitch counts, and the Rays did just that. I get it. The first objective for spring training is to minimize injury risk, and throwing 35 or 40 pitches in a single frame does introduce some of that. The secondary objective, from teams' perspective, is getting their starting pitchers ready for the season. Ask position players or relievers, and they'll tell you spring training is too long. It only stretches as far as it does because starters need the time to build up, so the rules cater to starters and the managers who are overseeing their prep work. The offense should get a turn to properly practice, too, though. They deserve a chance to test their information and their application of good tips. They deserve to get looks at opponents they'll see during the regular season in realistic scenarios and situations, and they deserve a chance to inflict inconvenience on an opposing pitcher trying to get ready. The Rays could have taken Pepiot out after six batters even in the absence of this re-entry rule, but they'd have had to move the rest of his work for the day down to the bullpen, where he'd only be able to do a thin, watery imitation of the intense work of ramping up with game-level intensity. This same type of thing could play out with a Twins starter tomorrow, and I'd feel the same way. Spring training wins and losses don't matter, but that doesn't mean that game flow and the concatenation of events within and across innings don't matter. We should treat the game with more respect, not for its own old-timey sake, but because things like this--things we think of only as an easy courtesy, without serious implications--matter more than we realize. Lewis and Jeffers will find some other opportunity for communication reps before Opening Day, but that was a good chance for the team to learn something about itself, and it was denied by a rule that favors pitchers too much. Indeed, much of the modern game favors them too much, anyway. View full article

Every winter, pitchers throughout MLB set out to improve or add some offering to increase their effectiveness. Every spring, teams work with pitchers--old and new--to lock in tweaks made over the winter and to add new things under the eyes and guidance of the coaching staff. Let's take a look at some examples of the Twins doing that this spring. Image courtesy of © Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports The key seasons for baseball, of course, aren't the winter or the spring, but what happens in summer and fall can depend heavily on the work done in those two seasons of preparation. For the Twins under Derek Falvey and company, that means (in part) pitch design work. Minnesota has one of the most philosophically dedicated, proactive pitching infrastructures in baseball, which means that (in addition to developing homegrown hurlers a certain way) they can be reliably expected to make certain changes when they acquire a pitcher from outside the organization. That doesn't mean applying one-size-fits-all solutions to all pitchers and their problems. The team still understands the individuality of their charges, and tailors changes they make to those individuals. It just means that the solutions they choose among a set of alternatives will usually reflect their organizational principles. Sometimes, those solutions can still be very broad, and not unique. Consider Ryan Jensen, whom the team claimed on waivers over the winter and was able to keep as a non-roster invitee after deisgnating him for assignment during the ensuing roster churn. This spring, he's not throwing harder, and he hasn't added a pitch. On the contrary, he's eliminated one. Yet, he's made one important change. Jensen has been tinkering with and trying various flavors of the breaking ball since he first entered professional baseball, half a decade ago. None have been very effective, though, and the Twins were able to get through to him with a simple message: take what's not working, and scrap it. This spring, Jensen has been a purely hard-stuff hurler, utilizing a four-seam fastball, sinker, and cutter. Whereas those three pitches are often overlapping or difficult to distinguish for a given pitcher, though, Jensen has very different looks with the three. That's been made more dramatic this spring, too, because Jensen is getting (on average) three more inches of ride (rising action, relative to the expected action of gravity on a spinless pitch) with the four-seamer than he got last year. That's an enormous jump, from essentially average to markedly above-average. As you can see, the pitches being classified as a sinker for him are also sinking more, looking more like... aha! A changeup. Jensen's so-called sinker is coming in five miles per hour slower than his four-seamer. While we don't yet have confirmation of this, I'm here to tell you: that's a changeup. The Twins have Jensen going away from the sinker and toward a hard changeup, with plenty of tumble underneath such a high-riding four-seamer. Jensen's spring results have been spotty, and as a non-roster arm, he's not guaranteed to see time with the team this year. After these tweaks, though, he's in a much-improved position. It wouldn't be remotely surprising to see him come up because of some injury this summer and contribute unexpectedly in middle relief. Jensen is far from alone, though. Let's take a look at three other Twins relievers making adjustments of varying degrees of omen this spring. View full article

For the last half-decade, the Minnesota Twins have had about as distinct and persistent an offensive identity as any team in MLB. They want to hit the ball hard, in the air, to the pull field, and they don't want to break down and give up on that with two strikes. There's more to the story, though. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports This winter, the Twins were strapped for cash. They needed to upgrade their positional corps, but they didn't have many options, thanks to the financial constraints imposed on them by uncertainty about the future of their TV rights deal and by the conservatism of the Pohlad family. To beef up their first base and DH spots, they turned to veteran slugger Carlos Santana, partially because he was relatively affordable--but partially, too, because he beautifully fits their offensive philosophy. If you want to know what a hitter is trying to do at the plate, break down where they swing, and when. Situational hitting and late-count plate protecting aside, hitters demonstrate preferences for swinging in certain zones and laying off in others, and that often has as much to do with what their optimal outcome for a given pitch or at-bat is as it does with their bat path or where they anticipate being pitched. You might be tempted to guess that, as a switch-hitter with power and great career walk rates, Santana is the type of batter who seeks to turn on and crunch the ball. He's pull-oriented, as most sluggers are, and pitchers will naturally find their breaking stuff running inside on him, so they'll often try to jam him inside with four-seamers and cutters, too. Perhaps because he knows that, though, those aren't the pitches Santana prefers. Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023 Inner Third Middle Third Outer Third MLB 42.9 57.1 32.5 Santana 29.2 55.3 38.7 Santana might not be an all-or-nothing slugger, but he likes to get the bat head out on pitches out away from him, rather than try to spin and be so quick that he can do damage with his hands pulled in. The other notable addition to the Twins' collection of hitters this year is Manuel Margot, whom they acquired as much for his defensive prowess as for his stick, but while he doesn't cut the same patient figure as Santana, the shape of his distribution isn't so dissimilar. Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023 Inner Third Middle Third Outer Third MLB 42.9 57.1 32.5 Margot 44.9 56.1 33.7 Margot is much more aggressive on the inner third, but he's also pretty eager to hit stuff on the outer third. Again, these numbers are all early in counts, before the hitter has to worry about protecting the plate. We're seeing two different swing profiles, but they share something in common: they both attack that outside pitch, but show less interest in letting the pitcher induce them to swing high or low over the middle of the dish. This probably won't surprise you, but the Twins are eager swingers on the outer third, as a team. Swing Rate By Horizontal Pitch Location, Less Than 2 Strikes in Count, 2023 Inner Third Middle Third Outer Third MLB 42.9 57.1 32.5 Twins 40.8 56.4 34.7 They swing less often, even in early in counts, than the average team on inside and down-the-middle offerings. Out on the edge of the plate (and beyond), though, they swing fifth-most in MLB. What does that tell us? View full article