Matthew Trueblood

This probably reinforces your point, rather than pushing back on it, but just to lay it out there: The main reason why the Cardinals want to get shot of O'Neill isn't the numbers. He's not a good fit there. I think a change of scenery could work, but in St. Louis, his makeup has gotten between himself and his talent.

Interesting thought. Kepler and Polanco would be some compelling one-stop shopping for them, no question. I wonder if they're thinking as much about the next year or two as a window to win as they would need to be, in order to make that kind of swap.

I do think there's a chance Gilbert will be available. It certainly wouldn't be for Kepler, unless he were a secondary piece behind an awfully impressive prospect, though.

I hadn't thought of the Dodgers as a natural trade partner. Who do you envision being involved, on either side, in such a deal? I'm interested..

Obviously, it's not a *requirement* that the replacement for Gray be a short, athletic guy with a sweepy slider and a heavy reliance on ground balls and command and a fierce combination of self-confidence and competitiveness, but it sure would make some things easier. They could probably use Sonný's old pants for Stro. :D Seriously, it's gonna be a matter of money and other options for Stroman, but I like the fit from the team's side. Some of the same things they helped Sonny learn to do, late in his career, are things Stroman could benefit from learning to do.

You're onto something, although maybe not what you think. Haha. Consider what this report implies about their level of confidence in SWR, for sure.

I'm not sure it'll be easy to change that, but it's clearly something they should be thinking about going into spring training. The team approach needs to be (slightly, but surely) tweaked.

I think the baseball offseason is just a terrible fit for the Twitter Era, right? Or maybe it's an ok one, but people just need to be more patient. We get soooo many rumors before real action happens, whereas in capped sports, the action almost comes first. (Or, in reality, the rumors start early in their prior seasons.) I actually kind of like it, but I know I'm wired differently than most in this regard. It's tough to find the balance point of enjoying the coverage of who might do what, while not agonizing over it or expecting a move at any given time. It's a slow burn. Most people, in 2023, do not like a slow burn.

I hear you on that, but I'd also say, we've seen this play from the Twins FO before. They like to start the winter by setting the floor and working on establishing depth, and then they try to be very opportunistic later in the offseason, when bigger stuff can shake loose or prices can drop, unexpectedly. So maybe they sign that 5th/6th starter this month, but then in mid-January, we get a surprise boost for the top half of the unit. As I wrote above, though: the payroll ceiling could thwart all that.

I think the price tag on a Williams trade right now would make your head spin. But you know I love Lugo as a fit for them, and Duvall is another great idea.

Thanks for the feedback, Mike! Love these thoughts. Yeah, I definitely think this can be a place where we talk a bit about what else is going on in the league, especially when it can have anything to do with the Twins.

Hey! Welcome to what we're testing as a daily feature here at Twins, er, Daily. Let's get the day started strong. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports The Winter Meetings are right around the corner, and some free agents have found new homes. So far, though, the Twins haven't waded into the hot stove action. Let's kick around a few things that are going on. Good News is No News Thursday brought the very non-revelatory, weirdly non-reassuring news that the Twins expect to add at least one starting pitcher this winter, and that they're more likely to acquire someone to compete with Louie Varland at the back end of the rotation than to try to replace Sonny Gray (i.e., add a top-end starter). That's concrete information, but it's also so negotiable as to be negligible. It can't possibly surprise any of us, by now, to hear the Twins managing expectations around who they'll land for the rotation. Even as we kick around scenarios in which the Twins jump in on Corbin Burnes (projected to earn $15-16 million in 2024 via arbitration) or Tyler Glasnow (under contract for $25 million), we have to grapple with the reality that the team's bizarrely self-confessed payroll limitations matter just as much when trying to trade for a starter as when trying to sign one. As yesterday's reports also affirmed, the front office sure is putting a lot of eggs in Chris Paddack's basket. Big News Out of Bushville First of all, remember when rivalry between the titans of the coasts and we Midwesterners was properly bare-knuckled and hostile? In 1957, the New York papers just up and nicknamed Milwaukee "Bushville" ahead of their World Series showdown with the Milwaukee team there. Wild times. Anyway, the Brewers made the biggest waves in MLB Thursday, signing elite prospect Jackson Chourio to an eight-year deal that could stretch to 10, guaranteeing him $80 million and securing his services for the entirety of his 20s. This is a huge deal for that team, but it's also sent some ripples out to other clubs. For instance, could the Brewers now be a better trade partner for the Twins, who need right-handed outfield help? Or, could this be a model for an eventual Emmanuel Rodriguez extension, if he has the season for which we're all hoping in 2024? Can the Twins Level Up Their Selective Aggression in 2024? Some of the best recent research work done in the public baseball analysis sphere has been Robert Orr's development of a metric called SEAGER--Selective Aggressive Engagement Rate, and yes it's a backronym crafted around its best practitioner--to better define the skill of attacking hittable pitches and matching swing rate to situational utility of swinging, based on count and pitch location. If you subscribe to Baseball Prospectus, you can read about it in detail here, but for everyone else, here's an interesting thing: the Twins ranked eighth in team SEAGER in 2023. I don't think that neatly matches most of our perceptions. Back in October, I wrote about how the team's sky-high strikeout rate was an outgrowth of their refusal to change their approach much based on the count. Yet, as Rocco Baldelli said in that article, the team seems to get real value out of knowing the zone and expanding it only when a particular hitter knows they can handle bad balls in a particular place. Can the Twins' rotation be good enough to win the AL Central in 2024 without reinforcing the top or middle of that corps? What has your mental gears whirring when it comes to the Chourio extension? And how can the Twins continue to adjust their approach at the plate to better realize their full potential? The table is set. Leave a comment; let's feast. View full article

Ahhh, interesting! I like that spin on Nick's first proposed reason. It's probably not enough to explain the choice on its own, but I could see that being a factor.

I made the case at Baseball Prospectus about a week and a half ago that the Twins just plain erred by deciding to decrease payroll at all. Given the cycle of sales and partnerships, it's especially dumb to let everyone know this is happening, but the smart move was simple to invest and realize the big gains over the next several years, anyway. Well-put here, Nick. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/86831/flyover-country-winning-and-losing-the-winter/

I also think we should stop conceptualizing him as a backup, right? It's pretty clear that the Twins view catcher as a position best shared fairly equitably, to keep everyone fresh. $10 million would be an insane amount to pay a backup to a 110-game catcher, but I'd bet they're eyeing more like a 90-72 or a 96-66 split of starts between their catchers next year. If the 72 or 66 is Jair Camargo.... I don't love that. Unless you got something other than financial relief by dealing Vázquez.

Two formulations have the lion's share of the market for Wins Above Replacement player metrics on the baseball internet. There's a third robust model out there, though, and studying it can help us see why teams' choices sometimes defy the orthodoxy prescribed by the first two. Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports Though no longer the top destination for statistically-inclined baseball fans online, Baseball Prospectus was the first site to publish and maintain what we now know as WAR--though they have always called it WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player), and continue to do so. They now have a suite of rigorously-derived, state-of-the-art metrics designed to quantify each player's contributions within pitching (Deserved Run Average, or DRA), hitting (Deserved Runs Created, or DRC), and fielding (Defensive Runs Prevented, or DRP). Unlike (for instance) Baseball Reference's and FanGraphs's offensive stats, DRC (and its well-adjusted cousin, DRC+) does not rely solely on actual results, adjusted for league and park factors. Unlike either other site's pitching value estimators, DRA (and DRA-) doesn't focus on actual runs allowed or on fielding-independent pitching (FIP). Unlike Statcast-fueled expected statistics you can find on Baseball Savant, none of these stats are directly adjusted based on the difference between actual outcomes and the average ones on similar batted balls (or opponents' batted balls). Instead, these stats take a more granular, less dogmatic approach. Every plate appearance is accounted for in full. Thus, the framework accounts for the level of opposition and the friendliness of the circumstance in every opportunity being evaluated. This can lead to numbers that deviate sharply from what we saw actually happen, and that always makes fans uneasy, but again, teams sometimes make choices we consider inscrutable. It's by digging deeper into the data and seeing when a player's latent talent and actual contribution might differ from their surface-level production that we can start to explain (or even anticipate) those seemingly peculiar calls. Let's look at some places where the Twins' D-suite numbers and Baseball Prospectus WARP tell an importantly different story than the one more widely-embraced stats have been telling. View full article

The Twins have set themselves some difficult constraints for offseason shopping, but they still need to make additions. Looking at the things the team does well and the things they look for in pitchers of whom they can make projects, we can try to identify some viable targets on the free-agent starting pitching market, given various payroll possibilities. Image courtesy of © Scott Taetsch-USA TODAY Sports Though they've made the occasional attempt to do so, the Derek Falvey and Thad Levine-led Twins have yet to pay full freight for an established starting pitcher via free agency. The price at which they're comfortable never seems to match up with the one guys like that eventually command. Instead, in addition to the higher-level arms they've successfully targeted in trades, the front office has tried to find free agents who give them a backstop in the last two slots in their rotation. Those guys tend to have warts of various kinds, and the team's success in removing those warts has been mixed, but the idea is to find value by accepting risk. When they go looking for those kinds of pitchers, the team still sticks to its broad preferences in terms of pitch mix and profile. In February, I wrote about a new way to think about and classify pitch types, using the lateral direction of their movement. The Twins, I noted then, heavily prefer pitches that mostly work vertically and have little horizontal movement: four-seamers, curveballs, and splitters. In 2022, they were much less likely than most other teams to use Armside offerings (sinkers and traditional changeups) or Gloveside ones (sliders, sweepers, and cutters). We can update that a bit. The Twins have gotten, if anything, even more of a leader in emphasizing vertical offerings. Only the Astros used four-seamers, splitters, and curves on a higher percentage of their pitches than did the Twins last year. They also remain extreme in their distaste for sinkers and standard-issue changeups, with only two teams using those less often. However, they've made a small move toward the middle of the pack in the frequency with which they use Gloveside stuff. Here's the breakdown, for the last two years. You can see the subtle shift, which mirrors the league-wide trends. Season Armside Vertical Gloveside 2022 18.8 57.6 23.1 2023 19.4 54.3 26.1 It certainly isn't as though the Twins hate the slider, sweeper or cutter. As we know, their work to develop one for Pablo López was a key to his ace-level breakout in 2023. Nor do their preferences in this respect guide every single acquisition. They also have some things they like mechanically, and in terms of athleticism, and even if a pitcher doesn't yet check their boxes in terms of pitch mix, they know they can sometimes add or tweak an offering. These preferences can guide decisions about whom to target, but also about what to do once a player is acquired. Let's talk about who the team could focus on in free agency this winter, even given their payroll limitations, while keeping their organizational predilections in mind. View full article

If you don’t look closely enough, you’ll miss it. The differences between Sonny Gray’s 2022 and 2023 seasons are so subtle that you could fool yourself into thinking he’s the same guy, only healthier. It ain’t so. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports Last December, I wrote about Sonny Gray and the Twins’ persistent problem with seizing the platoon advantage on the mound. We discussed the two distinct pitchers living within Gray, because every pitcher needs to have a bifurcated approach with which they can succeed against two very different opponents: left- and right-handed batters. At the time, as I wrote, he was largely a two-pitch pitcher against lefties, and only a little more than that against righties. He worked, mostly, north and south, and he got plenty of strikeouts but was somewhat vulnerable to power. By now, everyone has heard about Gray’s embrace of the sweeper, which is the same pitch that has transmogrified Pablo Lopez into an ace. Last week, our Parker Hageman delivered a deep dive on Lopez, with heavy emphasis on that sweeper and its unique utility. As Parker shared, Lopez’s breakthrough came when the Twins helped him understand that throwing a good sweeper doesn’t require the same hand or wrist action–the same manipulation of the baseball–as a typical slider. Much of the magic of the sweeper lies in the confluence of grip and arm angle. That allows a pitcher to add it to their suite of breaking balls without cannibalizing the rest of the set, as often happened in the past when a hurler who specialized in either the curve or the slider tried to mix in the other. After a year of tinkering and blending it in with his former, truer slider, Gray has made the full conversion to the sweeper in 2023. It’s been a smashing success. Gray has achieved: A swing rate of 54.3 percent on sweepers (7th-best of 98 pitchers who have thrown at least 200 sweepers) A Whiff rate (as a percentage of swings) of 41.8 percent (19th) A Called Strike Probability (an estimate of a pitcher’s tendency to be around the zone with a pitch, expressed as the chances that an average pitch in the sample would be called a strike if the batter doesn’t swing) of 30 percent (97th on the aforementioned list of 98) He’s getting a lot of chases on the offering, and many of those swings are coming up empty. The sweeper has been a lethal weapon for Gray. Note that hitters are waving at it often, despite the fact that it’s rarely even especially close to the strike zone by the time it arrives at home plate. That doesn’t make sense. Usually, especially with a breaking ball, a pitcher has to establish both an ability and a willingness to land the ball in the strike zone, to induce hitters to take the bat off their shoulders. Gray isn’t around the zone with the sweeper very much at all, but he’s getting an above-average swing rate against it, anyway. How? Unfortunately, the deep-dive into this topic is for Caretakers only. We need to reserve this deep-dive content for Caretakers because these types of stories cost more to produce, and Caretakers support them. So if you're a Caretaker, just scroll down. If you're not, maybe consider becoming a Caretaker? There are lots of other benefits, like a free Winter Meltdown ticket and early access for guests, special callouts on the site, and lots more inside or in-depth content like this. So please consider joining our little club. The money is going to a site you love, to support coverage you love, and writers you value. Thank you so much. View full article

The Twins strike out, walk, and hit home runs. It's mostly worked for them thus far. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports Infamously, Twins batters not only struck out more than any other team in MLB this season, but set the all-time record in that category. We live in the age of the strikeout, but even within it, this season has marked a foray into uncharted terrain. The Twins struck out in over 26.5 percent of their plate appearances this year. Yet, they’ve also hit the third-most homers in baseball, and drawn the fourth-most walks. They’re an extreme three-true-outcomes offense, even without Joey Gallo in the mix. They have a consciously constructed team approach, and they stick to it throughout an at-bat. It’s why they strike out so much, but it might also be why they’re a good overall lineup. Over the 35 years for which we have pitch-by-pitch records of all MLB games, the frequency with which plate appearances reach two-strike counts has risen steadily. The rate of change isn’t quite identical, but the rate at which hitters strike out once the count reaches that state has risen, too. At this point, over 53 percent of plate appearances reach a two-strike count, and once that happens, the odds of a strikeout are around 42 percent. It’s good to understand these base rates, because they illustrate how the game has changed even further under the surface than we realize. It seems obvious to say that a league that sees more strikeouts also sees many more strikes, but without taking a moment to meditate on that and to check the assumption, we might miss it, and the implications of it. Why is hitting so much harder than it used to be? In some major part, it’s because pitchers throw a lot of strikes and put hitters in bad situations. Then, they have better putaway stuff once they have the batter cornered. Unfortunately, the deep-dive into this topic is for Caretakers only. We need to reserve this deep-dive content for Caretakers because these types of stories cost more to produce, and Caretakers support them. So if you're a Caretaker, just scroll down. If you're not, maybe consider becoming a Caretaker? There are lots of other benefits, like a free Winter Meltdown ticket and early access for guests, special callouts on the site, and lots more inside or in-depth content like this. So please consider joining our little club. The money is going to a site you love, to support coverage you love, and writers you value. Thank you so much. View full article

Let's quit playing checkers and start playing chess with the Twins' October catching opportunities. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports Over the last few months, the Twins have quietly undertaken a unique experiment in catcher usage. In the last few weeks, it’s taken a truly historic turn. Christian Vázquez and Ryan Jeffers have exactly alternated starts behind the plate for the last 23 games (as of Sept. 19). One starts one game, and the other starts the next. It’s as rigid (yet creative) a division of the labor of the men behind the plate as any team has attempted in recent memory, but it invites the question: How will the catchers be deployed come the playoffs? Of course, that window–”the playoffs”--could turn out to be a grandiose term for as little as two games of real baseball. We all hope, though, that this will be the year when the Twins have to manage something much more lasting and complicated than that. If it does, how will the team decide when to start which catcher? During the long grind of an MLB regular season, alternating backstops makes a world of sense. It keeps both men fresh, and that objective is at least as worthy as squeezing out a potential run prevented (or scored) here or there. In the postseason, that’s no longer a primary decision driver. Even small margins are worth fighting over in October, and everyone stays fresh enough, anyway, thanks to the off days baked into the postseason schedule. Happily, the Twins don’t have to lurch around blindfolded here. Their two catchers are both good receivers and game-callers, but they do things slightly differently, and that can help inform the pairings the team should pursue when the stakes are high. After all, the catcher is only half the battery on a given night, and the way their skills as framers and game-callers align with those of the pitchers with whom they work is important information. Vázquez is the superior pitch framer between these two, overall. He’s also slightly better at controlling the running game. The latter only becomes important if runners start populating the bases, though, and the nobler purpose of a good catcher is to prevent that from happening in the first place. Let’s start, then, by being more specific about what each man does well as a framer. Thanks to the data collected via Statcast and released to the public via Baseball Savant, we can see that Vázquez isn’t fractionally better than Jeffers at framing all pitches. Instead, he’s considerably better when catching balls on the right side of home plate (from the catcher’s perspective; that makes it the backhand side for right-handed catchers, reaching across with their mitts) and along the bottom edge of the zone. Jeffers is better, however, to the left side of the plate, and especially along the top edge of the zone, as can be seen in the graphic below. This article continues with a deeper dive into the nuances the Twins will consider for October starts, but it is exclusively for Twins Daily caretakers. To become a Caretaker and read the rest of the piece, you can subscribe here. You'll support the writers that provide you free Twins stories and analysis everyday, both in-season and offseason. View full article