Matthew Trueblood

By now, it shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that the six-man rotation is creeping in as a new normal throughout MLB. The league began trending that way half a decade ago, and the pandemic accelerated the process. In 2021, successful teams like the Astros and Brewers unapologetically turned to six-man staffs to managed workloads as their starters built back up after a truncated season. That was just one way that the trend began to take deeper root. Shohei Ohtani requires the teams for which he pitches to work on six-man rotations, to accommodate the extra recovery needed to be both an All-MLB slugger and an ace starter. The Dodgers were tending heavily toward a six-man staff even before they signed him last month, though. As imports from Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball proliferate in MLB, some rotations are also stretching out to accommodate them, because in NPB, starters work on a weekly schedule. The same is true, of course, in collegiate baseball, and in the restructured post-pandemic minor-league schedule, many teams put their prospects on a weekly one, too. Over 60 percent of starts throughout the league were made on five or more days of rest in 2023, and that's not going to change in 2024. The majority of the teams who have moved in this direction so far--the Angels, the Dodgers, the Astros, the Red Sox, the Mets, and the Padres have done it most often over the last three years--are big-spending, big-market operations. It's hard to afford six starting pitchers (and the rest of what you need to be a winning team) on a budget much smaller than $200 million, these days. The Twins certainly won't spend at that level in 2024, but they still might need to increase their commitment to the six-man rotation. They already ranked sixth in MLB in starts on long rest in 2023, and their approach will dictate that they continue to move that way.

Go back a few years, and Josh Staumont was one of the nastiest relievers in baseball. He never became a household name or racked up a bunch of saves, but in 2020 and 2021, he had a total of 91 1/3 innings pitched, with a 2.75 ERA and a 29-percent strikeout rate. Since then, however, the wheels have come off, and just when he seemed to be getting back on the right track last summer, his season ended, as he had to undergo surgery to address thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS). Even at his best, Staumont walked too many opposing batters, and he never induced many ground balls. In his halcyon stretch under the shadow of COVID, though, he had overpowering stuff. His fastball scraped 100 miles per hour and sat at 97, with relative cut and ride action that made it a whiff machine at the top of the zone against left-handed batters. Once he set batters up with that pitch, he used a high-spin curveball to induce chases and punch them out. Lefties whiffed on over 40 percent of their swings against that plunging hook in 2020 and 2021, combined. Again, the results since the start of 2022 have been ugly. Still, the Twins see something here, and it's not just the ghost of the success he enjoyed before that. He's made a couple of important changes, and one that might not even count as made yet, but which the Twins will be eager to explore. He's also a good fit for their organizational philosophies about pitching and about bullpen usage, assuming he can get healthy and back onto the mound in short order.

"The Giants' problem... from everything we've heard, and everything Buster Posey told Andy Baggarly of The Athletic last night, they've got a geography problem, or a city problem, I guess I would say," said Ken Rosenthal (also of The Athletic) on the web show Foul Territory Thursday. "Players, for whatever reason, have a negative perception of San Francisco right now." Rosenthal went on to say (as, earlier in the day, Baggarly had written, with Posey's quotes as his evidence) that players were put off by the state of downtown San Francisco in the post-pandemic world, including vague allusions to crime as a concern. On its face, that argument is shaky and problematic. San Francisco is just one of several cities throughout the United States which have recently become the targets of misleading, exaggerated, and subtly bigoted critiques by people who have something to gain by implying that cities and the demographic groups who tend to populate them are inherently inferior to smaller communities. It's a false narrative driven, as often as not, by politics, which makes repeating it and lending it greater credibility a higher-stakes transgression than most bad choices in the usually low-stakes world of baseball reportage. The most important refutation for what Posey said, Baggarly wrote, and Rosenthal disseminated to a wider audience is this: it's blatantly false, and easily disproved. No one knows that better than Twins fans. Carlos Correa is a Twin for the long haul, now, but one year ago right now, we all thought he was heading to San Francisco. He agreed to a massive deal to play there, and the deal didn't fall apart because Correa or his family balked during a visit. Remember, a jersey was made up for his introductory press conference. He was ready to be a San Franciscan. It was the Giants who walked away. That's just one notable counterexample, and while it's a fitting one (since it's really a failure to sign elite free agents, not free agents in general, that Posey said was the city's fault), it's nowhere near the only or best one. Last winter, spreading around the money they elected not to give to Correa, the Giants signed Joc Pederson, Ross Stripling, Sean Manaea, Taylor Rogers, Mitch Haniger, and Michael Conforto. That's just the notable players who signed deals worth eight figures annually. They also brought in a fistful of minor leaguers and fringe guys, including some who knew they would spend much of the season rehabbing from an injury. The evidence is much closer to telling us that free agents love San Francisco and can't wait to get there than that they shy away. Those who found this narrative plausible (despite the contrary facts at hand) pointed to the fact that many baseball players are White men raised in areas friendly to the aforementioned broad-strokes criticisms of city life, and that many of those might therefore buy into those criticisms and prefer teams (like the Braves, Rangers, and Angels) who play further from supposedly dangerous city centers than ones like the Giants--or, hey, the Twins. That, though, is just as faulty a story as the notion that free agents hate the Giants at all. Like America itself, baseball is getting less White and less rural all the time. Many of the megastars who have snubbed the Giants recently (Shohei Ohtani, whose choice to sign with the Dodgers prompted this round of finger-pointing by the team, but also Aaron Judge and others) don't fit that mold at all. Some of the players they have signed do fit it, but chose the Giants, anyway. Then, there's Correa, and now Jung Hoo Lee, who agreed to a six-year deal just one day before these excuses about Ohtani began spilling forth. After both the Giants and the Mets reneged on Correa, he came to the Twins, instead. He was happy to circle back to a team who plays right in the middle of a city that has been slandered with the same nonsense many outsiders have hung on San Francisco and Chicago, among others. One could choose to call Correa the exception who proves the rule, and maybe that would be right, but it underscores a truth that gives the lie to this whole line of argument: All of these decisions, on both sides, are made by individuals, and their idiosyncrasies tend to outweigh sociological tropes. Maybe Correa is a special guy--the kind of person who can get comfortable more easily than others, and who will bloom wherever he's planted. Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, though? He's from the Andrew Friedman Dodgers, but he's not a true Friedman disciple. He's always been the rational, conservative decision-maker to Friedman's big splash-maker. Whereas Friedman famously embraces irrationality when he gets a chance to do something rare and special, Zaidi has always been most in his element when doing arbitrage. He loves the marginal win at the lowest cost in marginal dollars. He doesn't win bidding wars at the very top end of the market very often, because he doesn't want to do so. If he's letting anyone suggest that San Francisco itself is to blame for the fact that only free agents willing to sign short-term deals have come to the Giants recently, he ought to be ashamed of that. It's not the city; it's the man. Whether Zaidi sent Posey out with this message to give the team cover after Friedman reeled in the biggest fish to hit free-agent waters in a generation, or whether Posey genuinely believes it, it's wrong. That leaves us with the question: why are people saying it? Why, even once Posey said this to Baggarly, did Baggarly deem it newsworthy? And why did Rosenthal literally broadcast it? One possibility is that they share the sentiment Posey expressed, and that him saying it just gave them the cover they needed to start stating it as a fact. That, too, can vary from one individual to another. Some reporters might be saying this out of a mistrust for some of the players in question--a rather sad but not wholly unearned suspicion. Others might want to amplify the message because they honestly believe in the decrepitude of San Francisco and some other large American cities. That isn't completely baseless, either. We don't have to pretend Minneapolis is a utopia. We just need to corral the pernicious oversimplification that calls it a dangerous, dirty, or depraved place, because that oversimplification isn't an accident. It's being pushed by people with ulterior motives. The other broad possibility as to why reporters have repeated and built out this explanation for one team's failure to sign a superstar free agent is more innocent, maybe, but somehow still worse. It's that, with the value of their access for insider reporting purposes dwindling, some high-profile reporters are more eagerly parroting whatever substantial tidbits sources share with them, without interrogating the information they get or filtering it as much as they should. Be it out of layered latent bigotry or an honest but not necessarily excusable dearth of journalistic rigor, the national media is allowing a false narrative with real and far-reaching consequences in the lives of people far beyond the sphere of baseball to spread and strengthen. That's an important failure, regardless of the basis for it. "The Giants' problem... from everything we've heard, and everything Buster Posey told Andy Baggarly of The Athletic last night, they've got a geography problem, or a city problem, I guess I would say." Maybe you would, Ken. But you shouldn't.

In 2022, the Minnesota Twins used an infield shift in MLB's sixth-highest share of all plate appearances against them. They had Carlos Correa at shortstop, but as usual, their overall infield defense reflected their team-building priorities--that is, it was weak, because they sacrificed a bit of glove for the thump they could find in the exchange. Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Baseball saw a handful of important rule changes in 2023, though, including a ban on the defensive shift as we had previously known it. No longer could teams put more than two infielders on one side of second base. Nor could those infielders set up with their feet on the outfield grass, be it by a step or two or by dozens of feet, as they had done so often throughout history--but especially over the previous 20 years. As will always happen when new constraints are put in place, teams adjusted and innovated, pushing those limits as far as they could but also bending to the new reality. Instead of the extreme shift, teams merely employed heavy shading--something used more often than is generally remembered, even as far back at the 1950s and certainly since the 1980s. With a left-handed batter at the plate, it wasn't uncommon to find a second baseman with his heels kissing the sides of the first blades of the grass, and wheeled over toward first base. The shortstop could be found, in those cases, lining themselves up as close to the imaginary line passing through the keystone en route to center field as the second-base umpire allowed. After trading for Kyle Farmer over the winter and with Jorge Polanco turning 30 during the season, the team had an aging infield, and as they broke in Royce Lewis as a full-time third baseman and rookie Edouard Julien at second, they were again consciously trading off some defensive prowess for thump in the lineup. When injuries and ineffectiveness forced them to turn to Donovan Solano more often, and when Correa developed plantar fasciitis that limited his range, they got even more unathletic around the horn. Shading was the team's way of making up for that. No team in baseball utilized Shades more often, overall, than the Twins did this past season. Team Shade % v RHB Team Shade % v LHB Atlanta 24.3 Texas 74.1 Miami 23.1 Minnesota 62.9 Tampa Bay 22.5 Detroit 58.6 Minnesota 18.3 Los Angeles (N) 56.3 Cincinnati 11.5 Houston 56.3 This method made sense. It was a way for the team to get the bats of both Polanco and Julien in the lineup at some times, and to get both Polanco and Solano in the lineup at others. It reflected the team's strong lean toward fly balls and emphasis on strikeouts from the pitching staff. Why put your resources into bulking up an infield defense that will, by design, be depended on less than any of its counterparts throughout the league? All that skirts the most important question, though: Did it work?

How many competent players would the Royals need to sign to go from 106 losses in 2023 to being genuinely competitive in 2024? It's probably an unrealistic number, but they've decided to try some things. Giants Make Splash, Sign Jung Hoo Lee The huge news of Tuesday was the Giants' six-year, $113-million deal with Jung Hoo Lee, by far the most enticing player ever to come straight out of the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO), as evidenced by the record dimensions of that contract. This is a massive risk on their part, but the reward could be equally great. Lee is a lefty-swinging outfielder with some real power questions. He's a career .340 hitter (yes, those still exist, somewhere in the world) in the KBO, but that league is famous for its inflationary offense and it's not as deep with good talent as MLB. Many people question whether he'll be able to generate any real jolt against Stateside big-leaguers, and if he doesn't, the pressure to stick in center field will ratchet up. That's worrisome, because whether he can do that is a matter of some debate among scouts. All of that is true, but so is this: Lee has 1,014 plate appearances in the KBO since the start of 2022. Even with his 2023 interrupted and dimmed by injury, in those trips to the plate over the last two years, he's thumped 100 extra-base hits, drawn 115 walks, and struck out a grand total of 55 times. Merely touching the ball won't be enough in MLB, but Lee has the contact skills to threaten Luis Arraez for batting titles if the tools translate. This doesn't quite count as a blow to the hopes of Twins fans, because only a select few held out any hope of landing Lee this winter. Given the local nine's payroll situation, though, this kind of deal was never within the realm of possibility. It's considerably more than most prognosticators expected Lee to get. Seth Lugo Finally Hits it Big By contrast, Seth Lugo is a name I identified as a good fit with the Twins' pitching predilections and their position in the market, weeks ago. Of course, there's a bit of the Twins' pitching DNA in Kansas City now, after they hired away former Twins minor-league pitching coordinator Zach Bove a year ago. That's where Lugo has landed, on a two-year deal with a player option for 2026. If Lugo exercises that option in two years, the final terms of the deal will be $45 million over three years. That would be more than this Twins front office has ever spent on an external starting pitcher in free agency, so it's not a surprise that they didn't go there. The Royals paid a premium to lure the lanky righthander to a small market and a losing situation. Still, it's one of the first moves of the winter that could make a Twins fan feel genuinely left out. Lugo could have made them better, at a reasonable price. Joe Mauer, Byron Buxton, and the Whole Game I've been thinking often, lately, about Byron Buxton's foggy future in center field. No matter how promising the reports are right now, we can't say for sure whether Buxton will ever play center field again--let alone do so on a regular basis. That's not a pessimistic answer to all that optimism; it's just a realist reading of the healthy history of a man who just spent an entire season confined to designated-hitter duties. It makes me genuinely ache to see players who play baseball as well and as beautifully as Buxton plays center be rendered unable to participate in some major part of the game. It's not a new ache, to me or to any Twins fan, of course. As I think about Buxton and feel Schrödinger's grief over the possible loss of the defensive part of his game, I'm led back to Joe Mauer. Watching him be forced out from behind the plate by concussions and have to take up residence at first base for the final half-decade of his career hurt. It was limiting. It was beneath Mauer, who played the game with such grace and unexpected agility. Remember the play on which Miguel Sanó most clearly affirmed the stupidity of the experiment to put him in right field, early in 2016? On that play, amid the carnage of the collision in shallow right, Mauer raced out, seized the ball, and threw a gorgeous strike to third base for an unlikely out. It's one of my favorite plays ever, because for just a moment, Mauer had been released from his sentence to a safe, boring life at the cold corner. He got to play the full game, with all its speed and difficulty. When I think back on his career, in addition to any number of hits or that hustle double in Game 163 in 2009 or his deke and diving tag at the plate or the poignancy of his momentary return to catching in his final game, I think of that play Mauer made. I hope we don't have just a couple of poignant vignettes like those for the second half of his career. He deserves better, just as Mauer did. Anyway, I wrote about that Mauer play (from a very personal lens) at the time, and the archives at Baseball Prospectus are free, so go read it if you'd like. And if you see a Hall of Fame voter today, tell them to vote for Mauer. Would you have wanted to see the Twins wade in and take the risk the Giants took on Lee? Who's your preferred target, now that Lugo is off the board? Do the Royals worry you at all? Let's talk some ball.