Matthew Trueblood

You can never have too much pitching, and in a season in which the playoffs will be expanded and injuries are more common than ever, you can certainly never have too much relief pitching. For a Twins team staring down an AL postseason gauntlet of right-leaning lineups like those of the Yankees, Astros, White Sox, and Blue Jays, an extra right-hander in the bullpen could make an especially big difference. The Twins have a quartet of reliable right-handed relievers at the back end of their bullpen, in Tyler Duffey, Trevor May, Sergio Romo, and Tyler Clippard. However, since the beginning of the season, Cody Stashak and Zack Littell have been hampered by injuries; Randy Dobnak has been pressed into full-time starting duty; and Jorge Alcala and Matt Wisler have proved to be electric, but not necessarily consistent. If further injuries were to diminish the team down the stretch—and it’s not as though May has a spotless health track record, and Romo and Clippard are suspect based purely on age—the team might suddenly face a surprising deficit of relief depth. Here are four guys who could solve that problem before it arises, and who would make the bullpen tangibly better even if everyone stays healthy. Chris Stratton, Pittsburgh Pirates: A 2012 first-round pick by the Giants, Stratton has always seemed to be a bit less than the sum of his parts. He was a starter in the San Francisco farm system, and pitched in their rotation at the big-league level for about a year and a half, but after being dealt to the Angels last March, he put up an 8.59 ERA in five starts and two relief appearances. In mid-May, the Angels sold Stratton’s contract to the Pirates, who made him a full-time reliever. Ever since, there have been signs of major progress. In 61 innings out of the Pittsburgh bullpen, Stratton has 65 strikeouts and 20 walks, and his DRA- of 80 suggests he’s been 20 percent better than an average pitcher overall. More importantly, and more excitingly, there’s reason to hope for even more from him. The move to relief has allowed Stratton to add about 1.5 miles per hour on his fastball, which now sits at 93.3, and mechanically, there are things the Twins could do to safely push him even higher. Not only that, but Stratton’s average spin rate on the pitch is 2,609 revolutions per minute. Stratton is a spin monster. His curveball and slider also have elite raw spin rates. So far, though, Stratton rates poorly on Active Spin leaderboards, indicating that he’s not getting much of the movement he could be getting from that spin. Again, mechanically, there are ways to shore up that shortcoming. Even in the meantime, though, the stuff is distinctly playing up, leading to a great strikeout rate and consistently weak contact by opponents. There are non-mechanical changes Stratton can still make, too. He’s still throwing his fastball more than he would if the Twins were to bring him in, especially against left-handed batters. His changeup is missing bats at a very high rate, but he’s not trusting it much. His curve is a fourth pitch right now, with his slider having taken a big step forward, and the wise thing to do might be to shelve the curve until the offseason and have him lean more on the slider and change. Under team control through 2023, Stratton wouldn’t be a rental arm. He could step right into Trevor May’s role in 2021, and could do many of the things May and Romo are doing for the team even this year. The price tag wouldn’t be exorbitant, though, because his results don’t yet speak to his full potential in this role, and because the Pirates are eagerly and aggressively rebuilding. Daniel Bard, Colorado Rockies: If Stratton’s path to this point seems serpentine, it’s nothing compared to that of Bard. After years in the pitching wilderness, his career derailed by the yips, Bard has reasserted his dominance as the Rockies’ closer in his first big-league action since 2013. There’s much less tinkering to do with Bard than there could be with Stratton. He throws 98 miles per hour, has a wicked slider, and will also mix in a changeup, but his usages of each pitch are already nearly optimal, and although he rates low on active spin, he’s not a candidate for a mechanical overhaul—for multiple reasons. What Bard can be, though, is an immediately dominant reliever and a no-questions-asked incumbent as the setup man in 2021. He’s under team control for two more years after this one, and his track record suggests so much risk (what if his control deserts him again?) that his price tag should be fairly low. The Rockies will be sellers at the deadline; they’re in freefall. It’s just a matter of whether they hear an offer that gets them interested enough to deal Bard, rather than hold onto him. Félix Peña, Los Angeles Angels: Much has been made of the Twins’ increased reliance on sliders this season, but the Angels put them to shame. Anaheim has been the slider capital of MLB for a few years now, not in terms of effectiveness, but in terms of sheer volume. Peña is one excellent example: he throws his slider about 35 percent of the time, often using it to set up his sinker, rather than vice-versa. Used as a swingman and a long reliever at various points over his three-year career, Peña has blossomed despite uncertainty about his role. He has a career DRA- of 87, marking him as clearly above-average, and this year is shaping up to be his best. Batters whiff on over half their swings against that slider, and while his sinker doesn’t miss bats the way one might hope, it hums in at 94 miles per hour and tends to avoid the barrels of opponents’ bats. Like Stratton, Peña is under team control through 2023. The Angels are a team in a very strange position, though, and might prefer to get back a similar pitcher further from free agency, or take a chance on a pair of prospects, rather than hold a solid middle reliever without much upside. Mychal Givens, Baltimore Orioles: Against right-handed batters, Givens is a monster. Though he stands not much taller than Romo, Givens weighs about 70 pounds more, and throws from a similar arm angle. That is to say, he comes down the mound with good posture, and is far from being a submariner, but his arm angle is essentially sidearm. From that slot, and with his excellent extension at release, his 94-MPH heat (which can rise to 97 when he’s going for a big strikeout) looks much faster. As most hurlers with deliveries like that do, Givens struggles against opposite-handed batters. Lefties have hit him for power since the start of 2019. In fact, he’s a bit more prone to hard contact in the air than would be ideal, even against righties. He strikes out more than enough batters to be a qualified late-inning arm, though, and because he leans heavily on his fastball against righties, he’s become a more consistent presence than he used to be. The Twins might ask Givens to try throwing his slider more, against both lefties and righties. The pitch does miss bats, but he doesn’t use it much, and particularly buries it against lefties. If he could get comfortable going to it more often, he would be less vulnerable to power. As a team, the Twins have helped multiple pitchers clear the mental hurdles to using breaking balls against opposite-handed batters since Wes Johnson came in. In fact, they’ve also gotten multiple guys to throw more changeups to same-handed batters, and Givens’s changeup could add a nice extra dimension for him against righties, too. Unlike the hurlers about, Givens is due to be a free agent after 2021. The Orioles have a dwindling number of chances to deal him, and rental relievers tend to fetch little at the deadline, so they’re likely to be active listeners until Monday afternoon. If the Twins make a move, Givens would insure them against injuries to any of their top righties, slide in opposite Clippard (with his notable reverse splits) in a middle-relief role, and make it less important that Littell and/or Stashak regain full health and effectiveness in 2020. They’d also have a solid setup arm for next year. *** Over four pieces, I’ve recommended 14 players on whom the Twins should at least inquire before Monday’s deadline. None are stars, but all of them are good fits for the team’s apparent needs, and most look like average-plus players with upside of one kind or another. Eleven of them are under team control beyond this season. Three teams have two players each in the group: the Giants, with Donovan Solano and Tony Watson; the Orioles, with Hanser Alberto and Givens; and the Pirates, with Erik González and Stratton. That creates the possibility that the Twins could do some one-stop shopping, and give up something substantial only in return for upgrading multiple roster spots and having control of at least one good player beyond 2020. Personally, I’m intrigued most by González and Stratton, and think the Twins should check in regularly with the Pirates through Monday afternoon to see if a chance to scoop them up materializes. Failing that, though, there are many ways for the team to subtly improve, positioning themselves better for the seeding fight that will be September and giving them more ways to win series once they reach the playoffs. They can be aggressive, without giving up players to whom the fan base is overly attached.

Historically, left-handed relievers go hand-in-hand with the trade deadline. Almost every contending team could use one more good lefty for tough matchups in middle relief, and yet, teams in rebuilding modes still often have such a pitcher lurking on their roster. This season, thanks to the three-batter minimum rule and its constraints on reliever usage, the demand figures to be a bit dampened, but the Twins are among the teams who could still be in the market. Here are four left-handed pen men who could add something meaningful to Minnesota’s pitching staff, without costing too much. Tony Watson, San Francisco Giants: Let’s start with the bad news on Watson: his velocity is down. Like, way down, from the mid-90s at his peak, to 93 miles per hour over the past two seasons, to an unimpressive 90 miles per hour. Watson is 35, so a velocity drop isn’t exactly unexpected, but this one is severe, even given the interrupted ramp-up to this strange season. Watson’s success has never been rooted in overpowering speed, though, and he’s making up for the lost zip on his heat by doing the other things he’s always done well. He’s leaning more on his changeup (against righties) and his slider (against lefties), and he’s pitching from a lower arm slot than ever. Watson has always excelled at matching his release point on all of his pitches, creating deception even without wicked movement. He throws plenty of strikes, and gets ground balls. He’s only making the prorated share of $3 million, on a one-year deal, so the Twins could take him on without any major financial concerns, and given that he’s a rental, the Giants have little leverage in trade negotiations. Adam Morgan, Philadelphia Phillies: When healthy, Morgan has been an above-average reliever for each of the last three seasons, across a total of 134 innings. He’s well on his way to making that a four-year streak this year, mostly by ratcheting up the usage of his wipeout slider. Opposing hitters have whiffed on over 30 percent of the sliders Morgan has thrown in 2020, and that makes him an excellent fit for the Twins’ bullpen. They’re a team that loves good sliders and pitchers who throw them at a high rate, and Morgan is even starting to show confidence in the pitch against right-handed batters. Just 30 years old and with a fastball that can still scrape 95 miles per hour, Morgan could be a medium-term investment for the team. He’s under team control through 2021, making him a potential, partial replacement for Trevor May or Sergio Romo in a setup role for next season. He doesn’t require heavy engineering in order to be effective, but with an unusually deep repertoire for a reliever, he offers Wes Johnson plenty with which to work. In the short term, he could be a bridge between the Twins’ high-octane right-handed arms, including coming into messy situations and pitching out of them, thereby circumventing the three-batter rule. Given the Phillies’ place in the standings and their fan base’s feelings toward their bullpen, prying Morgan loose doesn’t figure to take a major haul. Justin Wilson, New York Mets: Wilson sports a hideous ERA, but that belies his real performance for the Mets, both this season and throughout last year. In fact, in all but half of one year over the last half-decade, Wilson has been a fairly fearsome power arm, relying heavily on a riding four-seamer and a cutter that can neutralize both left- and right-handed batters. Wilson has seven holds for the Mets this season. In their first two games of the season, he entered in the eighth inning, with New York nursing one-run leads, and each time, he struck out Ronald Acuña, Jr. on four pitches to end the frame, with the tying run on base. At his best, Wilson focuses solely on the four-seamer and the cutter, each of which have high spin rates and force unproductive contact at the top of the strike zone. His problems, when they do crop up, tend to be in mechanical rhythm and alignment, and those are precisely the problems Johnson has been adept at solving over the last two years. The cutter has been a minor specialty of the Twins, too, although more so among starting pitchers. Wilson’s ability to handle batters on either side of the plate (and the remaining potential for the team to reintroduce the true slider into his arsenal) make Wilson an appealing potential addition, and his impending free agency should make him a cheap target. Angel Perdomo, Milwaukee Brewers: Let’s get weird, and dare to have a little bit of fun. Imagining the Twins paying a princely sum for arbitration-eligible, Taylor Rogers-redundant Josh Hader isn’t that fun. Imagining them swooping in to grab a pitcher who could still have major upside and be under team control for even longer, at virtually no cost, is fun. Angel Perdomo is fun. Twins fans who remember Perdomo’s unsuccessful and soporific (and, literally, balky) appearance during Kenta Maeda’s near-no-hitter might not think so, but there’s a ton to like about the gigantic left-hander. His fastball sits at 95 miles per hour, and touches 97. He has a slider with two-plane movement and a decent changeup. The Brewers signed him as a minor-league free agent in November 2018, and in 2019, he split his season between Double- and Triple-A. He pitched 69 innings, struck out 107, and walked 44. Obviously, Perdomo’s control issues are the major drawback for any team considering relying on him in the short- or long-term future. There are good reasons to wonder whether he’ll ever be able to fix those problems, but there’s also plenty for Wes Johnson to work with. Perdomo stays closed as he strides down the mound, but could delay trunk rotation better through landing with his front foot. If he did so, he would also be able to achieve more stability and better posture from foot strike through release, and he’d therefore be more likely to throw consistent strikes. Mechanically, those are things the Brewers don’t necessarily emphasize, but we’ve seen multiple pitchers get better in these areas since Johnson came aboard. Perdomo would be a bit of a project, and for that reason, he’d cost very little. Having a six-foot-eight lefty figure out control late and blossom in their mid- to late-20s is hardly unheard-of, though, and if the Twins could land him and help him implement key tweaks, he’d be under team control for six more years, in addition to lightening the load of key relievers down the stretch. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

While it might be tempting to stand pat, given the potential that the Twins will get Josh Donaldson, Byron Buxton, and Mitch Garver back over the next two weeks, the team would do well to think a bit more aggressively. Because of the way seeding is determined in this year’s 16-team playoff format, finishing first in the tight AL Central race does matter. Anyone the team can acquire over the next few days could not only help them accomplish that goal, and thus better position them for October, but play a bigger and more helpful role when that time of year comes, relative to players like Jake Cave and Ehire Adrianza. Here are three guys whom the Twins could acquire cheaply, but who fit really well on the team’s roster as it stands right now. Hanser Alberto, IF, Baltimore Orioles: My last piece focused on players (Donovan Solano, Erik González, and Howie Kendrick) who consistently hit the ball especially hard, or cluster their batted balls into the highest-value launch-angle band, or both. Alberto is not that kind of hitter. He’s posted one of the league’s lowest average exit velocities and hard-hit rates in each of the last two seasons. Yet, he’s batted .306 since the start of 2019, and his BABIP is .323. He does it, first and foremost, by being able to make contact at an exceptional rate. He’s one of the most aggressive hitters in baseball, chasing pitches outside the zone almost half the time and swinging over 70 percent of the time when pitchers do throw him strikes. He’s not a dead pull hitter, so teams can’t shift effectively against him. Even when they try, though, Alberto is good at foiling the strategy. He shares the skill apparently possessed by Luis Arraez, to see where the defense is positioned and aim batted balls to open spots. He has multiple swings, really, and switches between them according to the situation and his vision of the field in front of him. At 27 and with decent overall athleticism, Alberto plays above-average defense at both second and third base. He’d fit perfectly into the holes created by Adrianza’s ineffectiveness, Donaldson’s absence, and Arraez’s balky knee. He’s also a capable corner outfielder, and the team could certainly use a right-handed backup to Max Kepler and Eddie Rosario at those positions. Under team control through 2022, Alberto is nonetheless a low-cost target, because the Orioles are unlikely to tender him contracts all the way from here to his free agency, and they’re eager to continue rebuilding through trades and high draft picks. Phillip Ervin, OF, Cincinnati Reds: Ervin is one of the great buy-low opportunities available in baseball right now, even if his ultimate ceiling is quite low. The 28-year-old former first-round pick has dreadful numbers so far, his swing still out of whack as he tries to get untracked. Still, his core skills make him a great potential fit for the Twins. Ervin has great plate discipline, rarely expanding his strike zone. He has a short, line-drive swing, but there’s room for him to generate much more power without losing much in the way of contact rate. He’s short and thickset, and his athleticism allows him to play very good defense in either outfield corner. Like Kepler, he always looks a bit uncomfortable in center field, not out of a dearth of speed or athleticism, but based on angles and reads. Still, as a lefty-mashing corner outfielder, he’d fill an important need for Minnesota. If the Twins could make a few of the changes they’d certainly try to make with Ervin, over the offseason to come, they’d have years to reap the rewards. He’s under team control through 2025. In the meantime, he’d cover the team in case of a tough matchup against a lefty, allow them to keep both Rosario and Kepler fresher down the stretch, and give the team an option off the bench if the right situation arises come October. Thanks to the ugly numbers he’s put up and the Reds’ outfield logjam, however, he’d be available at a bargain rate this week. Charlie Culberson, SS/2B, Atlanta Braves: The grandson of Ted Williams-era Red Sox outfielder Leon Culberson is now playing in his eighth MLB season, making him the longest-tenured big-leaguer in the family. He’s never had more than 322 plate appearances in a season, and has been on the brink of being pushed out of the game multiple times, but Culberson has shown a knack for hitting left-handed pitching, comes up with clutch hits at a surprising rate, and acquits himself well at any infield position. Since his modest reinvention in the Dodgers system half a decade ago, Culberson has been more about power than contact or plate discipline, and he only has average power. Still, he’s been a competent hitter each of the last two seasons with Atlanta (as his 93 DRC+ since the start of 2018 attests). He’d be an upgrade over Adrianza, and good insurance against an injury to Jorge Polanco. He signed a minor-league deal this winter, and although technically under team control through 2021, he’s a non-tender candidate come the offseason. The Braves are contenders, but they have such a crowded infield picture that Culberson (despite being active all season) has just seven plate appearances to date. He’s the cheapest potential acquisition the Twins could make, while still clearly improving the roster spot currently occupied by Adrianza, once the club regains relatively full health. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

This trade deadline will be much quieter than most, and it’s hard to guess or gauge what kinds of deals will happen. Certainly, teams will approach the possibility of trading for players on expiring contracts differently than they would in other years, since this truncated season and the expanded playoffs change the payoff for a successful short-term upgrade. Clubs also figure to be a bit more wary to take on big contracts, because of the widespread uncertainty about the medium-term future of free agency and team finances. Still, moves will happen, and the Twins are a surefire playoff team with clear, low-grade needs. That could position them well to make a deal or two. It’s not just the fact that Garver, Buxton, and Donaldson are sidelined right now that puts the Twins in a position of needing some extra right-handed hitting help. Ehire Adrianza, who was a pleasant surprise as a versatile bench option in 2018 and 2019, has faded, and now looks more like the poor hitter who first made his way to Minnesota. Adrianza is also aging, with his defensive prowess fading and his speed gone, so he offers little for the Twins at this point. Luis Arraez continues to play on a sore knee, and it’s affecting his game. Marwin Gonzalez has a .673 OPS. The team should try to hedge their bets, in case some significant subset of this sextet remains unable to help the club much come October. Here are the three best guys who should be available and could fill key needs. We’ll discuss three more tomorrow. Donovan Solano, IF, San Francisco Giants: Though some teammates have nicknamed him Donny Barrels, Solano doesn’t actually generate much power. That’s almost where the bad news ends, though, because Solano has become a genuinely interesting right-handed hitter, capable of squaring the ball up as consistently as anyone in baseball and of playing all over the infield. Solano uses a toe tap/leg kick hybrid, so his swing sometimes looks a bit arrhythmic, but he makes contact within the zone and uses the whole field. He’s also one of the best players in baseball at clustering his batted balls within the launch-angle band that leads to the best outcomes. Among players with 100 or more batted balls in 2019, the Twins had the seventh-, ninth-, and 10th-best hitters at that, in Arraez, Jorge Polanco, and Jason Castro. Solano, however, was first, in a group that included 406 total players. He’s among the leaders thus far in 2020, too, which is part of the reason for his .340 batting average since the start of 2019. At either second or third base, Solano is a roughly average fielder. He’s played shortstop for 150 innings over the last two seasons, too. He’s not a good baserunner, but Solano would be a massive upgrade over Adrianza and Gonzalez, pushing the former off the roster and letting the latter play more outfield as needed. He would even make a fine platoon partner for Arraez, and failing that, he would provide insurance against Arraez needing to sit for a prolonged period with that nagging knee problem. With the ability to use the whole field but a tendency to pull the ball, and with his emphasis on getting on plane with the incoming pitch so frequently, Solano’s a perfect fit for this team and its philosophy. The only real drawback in dealing for Solano is that the Giants are in a position to ask for something meaningful in return. That doesn’t mean the Twins would need to part with any of their name-brand prospects, but Solano has a year of team control remaining beyond this year, so Minnesota would have to offer enough not only to outbid other interested teams, but to make Giants general manager Scott Harris and president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi decide to pull the trigger now, rather than wait and see what offers they get over the winter. Erik González, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates: Twins fans are familiar with González, who was an Indians farmhand and Francisco Lindor understudy until he was traded to Pittsburgh in November 2018. He’s long been considered a good-glove, no-hit shortstop, and fairly so. He’s not a match for the physical stereotype of such players, though: he’s tall and strong. That’s why what’s happening this year is pretty exciting. Here’s the quicksheet box atop González’s player page at Baseball Savant: That’s shocking. González, who has just one home run in 2020 and seven in 497 career plate appearances, is among the league leaders in average exit velocity and in hard-hit rate this year. He’s even elevating the ball more. Nor is all of that happening by accident. He’s genuinely hammering the baseball, and it’s thanks to a new swing path. González hits with a high, early leg kick, and in the past, that led to a somewhat lunging swing in which he swung down through the point of contact. Watching his swing, especially over the last two seasons, was oddly jarring: it’s a very familiar swing path to anyone who grew up watching baseball even in the 1990s or early 2000s, but there are few players left in the game who swing that way. This year, the leg kick is the same, though he’s doing some different things with his back leg as he drives forward. He’s also creating more torque, by keeping his front shoulder closed and starting his bat barrel with a rearward movement to get his swing going. For the most part, though, he’s just changed that swing plane. He’s still not a fly-ball hitter, but he’s getting his hands down and creating a path up into the strike zone. Plate discipline is far from a strength for González; he has 14 strikeouts and no walks this year. That’s not a bad strikeout rate, though, for a hitter who is generating plenty of potential power. González’s swing is fairly grooved, at this point, with a high in-zone contact rate but a lot of whiffs when he expands the zone. The Twins have taught precisely that style of hitting recently, though, so he’d be a good fit for them, philosophically. More than Solano, González would be an option at shortstop even if Polanco were to get hurt, requiring a longer-term stopgap. He’s also a superior defender at second base. The Pirates have control over González through 2022, but they’re already trying to find playing time for Kevin Newman, Cole Tucker, and Adam Frazier, and infield prospects Ke’Bryan Hayes and Oneil Cruz are knocking on the door. That his surface-level production doesn’t yet match the change in the batted-ball data could help keep his price tag down. Pittsburgh desperately needs pitching help, and the Twins have enough depth in that area to get a deal done without feeling a major pang. Howie Kendrick, 1B/2B, Washington Nationals: No serious baseball fan needs an introduction to Kendrick at this point. If his 15-year career hadn’t previously exposed you to him, his game-winning homer in Game 7 of last year’s World Series ought to have done so. Kendrick is the prototypical “professional hitter,” with far more pure hit tool than power, but enough of the latter to come through when that’s what the team needs. At 37 years old, Kendrick is painfully slow afoot, and he hasn’t played a meaningful amount anywhere but first or second base in over half a decade. His lack of versatility would make him an imperfect replacement for Adrianza, and would limit his ability to help the team cope with Donaldson’s continued absence, but his bat is valuable all by itself. He’s exceptionally good at avoiding strikeouts. He uses the big part of the field, especially when he has an opportunity to move a runner over. He has good enough plate discipline to draw walks, especially because he’ll foul off good pitches on the edges of the zone if necessary. When the Twins face a tough left-handed pitcher in a playoff setting, either as a starter or in a key late-game situation, it’d be awfully nice to have Kendrick available. He has a mutual option for 2021, which the bizarre market might actually bring into play, but the price tag to acquire him would be lower than those on either Solano or González. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

Rogers is an unusual pitcher, in terms of pitch mix. In an age in which most of the league is moving away from sinkers and toward four-seam fastballs, Rogers is a sinkerballer. More unusually still, he throws two distinct breaking balls, a slider and a curveball. As I wrote in May, he’s better-suited to doing so than most pitchers are, but it’s hard to maintain two breaking pitches without having them cannibalize one another. This year, Rogers has spoken openly about being uncomfortable with and unable to throw his curveball. However, his slider has also been hittable, and batters are averaging almost 95 miles per hour in exit velocity against his sinker. In every possible way, Rogers is struggling to match the dominance he displayed from mid-2018 through the end of last season. To see why this is happening, one can look back at that article from May. Many of the things that were true then remain true now. Rogers is a pitcher with tremendous stability and alignment in his delivery, but less-than-excellent timing in terms of getting to his ideal release point on every pitch. That makes his misses small, but it means that they tend to be up and to Rogers’s arm side, usually within the strike zone. As was the case last year, Rogers isn’t walking anyone. The big elements of his delivery—the big muscles and the way they work together, in sequence—remain solid, so he’s around the plate as much as ever, and as much as any pitcher in baseball. The problems he’s encountered have to do, instead, with small things, but those can lead to big problems. The most significant problem is that Rogers’s release point is down, especially on the breaking stuff. He’s getting around both the slider and the curveball a bit. The somewhat humped-up position he usually reaches with his shoulder at release, getting his fingers on top of the ball to create the spin he wants, hasn’t quite been there this season. The issues are mostly about hand position, and the differences are so small they can be tough to spot even on video, but they lead to an inability to get the ball down consistently and hit the spots he wants to hit, especially outside the strike zone. Rogers’s slider, especially, is not supposed to finish in the strike zone. The sinker is most effective when kept close to the bottom of it, and the curveball has to be able to tumble out of the zone on occasion, in addition to sometimes falling in for a strike after appearing to be high. (With the lower release, the curve also isn’t as deceptive in that regard; it never looks like it’s going to be as high as Rogers wants it to look.) A little bit of hand position seems like a relatively easy thing to correct, but it might not be so. Let’s loop back to the pitch mix, and to the fact that he throws both the curve and the slider, in defiance of convention. As I wrote in May, throwing the two pitches requires different arm actions and a different mindset, even though he slightly simplifies the difference by throwing them both with the same grip. Here’s one more layer: when it comes to the arm action, the sinker requires something different than either pitch. At release, the sinker requires the inner forearm to be facing the plate almost perfectly, or to very slightly point toward the on-deck circle on the first base side. The curve requires the forearm to be highly supinated, with the inner portion of it facing toward Rogers’s body (or the third-base dugout). The slider, which is what Rogers is leaning on right now as the curve remains troublesome, requires the forearm angle to be about halfway between those of the other two offerings at release. When juggling those three motions, it’s not easy to fix even a slight problem with a release point. Rogers is supinating too much on the breaking balls, and modulating that can be tricky, especially when one has tinkered with muscle memory by creating multiple motions to accommodate multiple breaking pitches. It’s far from impossible for Rogers to regain his form. He’s likely to do so, because the foundations of his delivery are solid and he has shown the feel to manipulate all three of his key pitches in the past. For now, however, his struggles are real. Despite the fact that he can still strike batters out at a high rate and hardly ever issues a walk, he will continue to give up hard contact until he can make the small mechanical adjustments necessary to get his stuff down in and below the zone more consistently. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

When the Twins traded for Kenta Maeda in February, he looked like an immediate candidate to become the ace of their rotation. Just a handful of starts into his Minnesota career, that seems to have come to fruition. His near-no-hitter on Tuesday night was just another chapter in a fascinating reinvention, by a pitcher who manifestly did not need to reinvent himself. As I chronicled in February, Maeda was a stud for the Dodgers over the four seasons prior to this trade. His contract and the Los Angeles depth chart dictated annual mid-stream role changes, as he would slide from the starting rotation to the bullpen, but he flashed the ability to be a dominant, front-of-the-rotation starter throughout that period. Yet, it’s clear that the Twins saw some things Maeda could still do to take another step forward, and that Maeda was eager to explore his full potential, rather than operating within the framework of the Dodgers’ needs and preferences. As I said on last night’s Postgame Pint, there were adjustments of which Maeda was obviously capable, but which the Dodgers just never needed him to make. He threw a cutter in 2016 and 2017 that Los Angeles encouraged him to abandon thereafter, because it was only eating into his effectiveness as a two- or three-pitch short reliever and semi-starter. Let’s talk about how the Twins and Maeda worked together to unlock the potential for dominance that the Dodgers left untapped, out of a lack of necessity for it. Here’s Maeda’s horizontal movement profile, over time—in other words, the amount of lateral movement on each of his pitches. Notice that Maeda’s curveball, this year, has lost the big lateral sweep it had in previous seasons, until it fits into the same lane as his slider. In fact, the curve has also been an average of about two miles per hour harder this year. What’s really happened is, Maeda has stopped throwing a pure curveball. The pitch now occasionally registering as a curve is really one of his many sliders (more on that shortly), thrown from a higher arm slot, giving the pitch a more vertical shape than its fellows. Notice, too, that there’s considerable lateral separation between Maeda’s cutter (again, we’ll come back to that pitch) and his four-seamer (accentuated by slightly more armside run on the four-seamer this year), between the four-seamer and the changeup, between the four-seamer and the sinker, and even between the changeup and the sinker. Few pitchers enjoy that last characteristic. In fact, if a guy’s sinker and changeup don’t have virtually identical horizontal movement, the changeup will usually be the one with more run. We’ll talk more about why the reversal there is helpful to Maeda, in a bit. Here’s his vertical movement profile, over time. The cutter’s ability to consistently ride higher than the slider, of which it is just a modified version itself, is crucial. It gives Maeda two pitches (the sinker and the cutter) that move in disparate lateral directions, but work on the same plane, making them hard to read for left-handed hitters. If they read the spin on the cutter, they’re still not getting much help, because they have the unenviable job of distinguishing that pitch from the true slider. Maeda’s changeup has significantly more depth than it’s had in the past, which is a game-changing development, as we’ve seen. His split-fingered grip on the pitch is the kind that generates more depth and less lateral movement, but he’s used that grip in the past, so the improvement isn’t attributable to that kind of change. Rather, it seems as though Maeda is throwing the pitch with more conviction, using the same arm speed but getting on top of the ball a hair better, and that’s giving it some extra tumble, without steering it out of the horizontal lane in which he wants it or giving it away to the hitter out of his hand. With all of these unique things going for him, Maeda can be more adventurous and aggressive with his pitch mixing than he ever was in LA. Here’s how his pitch usage has changed, against right-handed batters, over time. Right away, the Twins (while keeping his excellent slider at the head of his repertoire) helped Maeda expand his usage of his lesser weapons. Good horizontal movement can fool same-handed batters very effectively, and Maeda has that, with the sinker having enough separation from the fastball to work as a distinct offering. Because Maeda also throws the slider and changeup at similar speeds, he can use them off of one another as well, just on a movement basis. Batters have to beware of both changing speeds and changing locations, and when Maeda is willing to go to all four of these pitches, his opponents end up in a very defensive mindset at the plate. Here’s how Maeda’s usage has changed over time, against lefties. This makes for the most dramatic visual yet. Against left-handed batters, Maeda is now a full-fledged six-pitch pitcher, and opponents have no chance to sit on anything truly hittable. By ramping up his slider usage against lefties, Maeda has forced them to look inside more often, and it’s gotten him called strikes and bad swings with fastballs and changeups on the outer edge. When a lefty does start to look away, the cutter comes in and breaks his bat or forces a pop-up. (Maeda is throwing the cutter at the same average height as his four-seamer, against lefties, so whether they’re seeing a fat, hanging slider or an elevated fastball over the middle of the plate, they’re ending up with a pitch they can’t handle.) As recently as 2017, he was using all six of these pitches, but lefties hit him well that year, and the Dodgers encouraged him to shelve the sinker and cutter. That, as it turns out, wasn’t why he was struggling against lefties. The key has been becoming primarily a changeup-and-slider pitcher against them. To see some of the granular ways in which Maeda’s changed his approach, let’s look at last year’s pitch usage against each species of batter, broken down by count. Against lefties, Maeda mainly threw four-seamers and curves on the first pitch, trying to steal strikes and get into a count where he could throw them a changeup. Breaking pitches were mostly backdoored, with the idea of getting a called strike to set up the change. It’s fair to say that, in 2019, Maeda felt he had just one out pitch against lefties. Against righties, he was even simpler in his approach, though harder to hit. He still went to the changeup occasionally when well ahead in the count, but for the most part, he fed right-handers a steady, balanced diet of fastballs and sliders, with the blend shifting toward sliders as he got ahead in the count. Hitters still had to deal with two pretty impressive pitches, especially when Maeda was working in relief and boasted high-spin, mid-90s heat, but they didn’t have to have many intricacies in mind. Here’s the same chart for 2020. On the first pitch, batters still tend to see something hard, but they can no longer count on it being the relatively straight four-seamer. Maeda’s comfort sinking the ball, especially early in counts, makes it hard even for hitters who decide to sit dead-red to square anything up. If they don’t make early contact, however, they’re unlikely to see anything straight late in the at-bat. Maeda’s comfort using his slider to get himself out of trouble stands out, as does the roughly mirrored ratio of sliders and changeups in two-strike counts, based on handedness. Lefties are more likely to get changeups. Righties are more likely to get sliders. Yet, neither type of batter can bank on getting either type of pitch. Maeda’s utterly unpredictable. Execution has also been a huge part of his success so far, and Maeda will certainly have stretches (be it this season, in the playoffs, or next year) during which he’s much less able to consistently command all of his offerings. By no means is he solely a product of these tweaks, as his success in Los Angeles attests. However, he’s found another gear, and it’s largely because he and the Twins have been brave enough to take something that wasn’t broken, and fix it.

According to Baseball Prospectus, Mitch Garver has a 61 DRC+ through the first 30 percent of the Twins’ season. For DRC+, 100 is average, and higher is better. Garver’s award-winning 2019 campaign saw him post a 149 DRC+. Even granting that this is a small sample and a bizarre season, this slump is a red flag for a player who acted as a linchpin to the Bomba Squad last year. If you ask an average Twins fan what they know about Garver, it might be that he hit 31 homers last year, or it might be that he walks to the plate to “Shining Star,” by Earth, Wind & Fire. If you ask an average Twins Daily reader the same, they might mention Garver’s approach. Famously, he waits for his pitch, works for it, and then tries to crush it. He came in for lots of love for that throughout 2019, and with good reason. When that kind of approach is working, it can be a thing of beauty. As it happens, though, the average fan’s observation and the analytically-savvy one share something important: grooviness. There’s no denying that “Shining Star” is a groovy song, but Garver lives deep in the groove even at the plate—as in, he has a grooved swing, and he finds all of his success within it. It’s not the case that Garver only hits mistakes. Rather, he tries to use good plate discipline to force pitchers into situations wherein even when they execute a pitch well, he can hit the ball hard. That’s a good approach, when he’s going right. When he’s executing his swing well, that approach will lead to plenty of walks and hard contact, and that will make up for a large number of strikeouts. However, Garver will always strike out, because that approach and that swing are not designed to hit pitches outside the zone, or even in certain areas within the zone. Since the start of last season, 297 batters have amassed at least 300 plate appearances. Among them, Luis Arraez has the highest contact rate when swinging at pitches outside the zone, at 87.9 percent. Garver ranks 279th, at 42.1 percent. That’s a notable number by itself, but we can make it even more telling. Inside the strike zone, Garver’s contact rate since the start of 2019 is 85.2 percent, which is exactly average. As you might guess, it’s unusual to be average in one of these numbers, but extreme in the other. The correlation factor between in- and out-of-zone contact rates in the sample is 0.71, which is very strong. Here are the players with the largest ratios between the two rates. Highest Ratio of In-Zone to Out-of-Zone Contact Rate, 2019-20 (min. 300 PA) Luke Voit 2.63 Aaron Judge 2.51 Miguel Sanó 2.43 Hunter Dozier 2.21 Joey Gallo 2.20 Chris Taylor 2.04 Mitch Garver 2.02 Jorge Soler 2.02 Chris Davis 2.01 Adalberto Mondesi 1.98 Fernando Tatis, Jr. 1.97 Brandon Lowe 1.97 Michael Chavis 1.97 Tim Beckham 1.96 Kole Calhoun 1.94 Right away, you can see the type of hitter who can make this profile work, and some of the ones who can’t. Any ratio higher than 2.1-to-1 is reserved for the game’s truly elite power hitters—the guys who produce the highest average exit velocities and most home runs, and freely trade contact for the ability to do so. The tier just below them, however, is almost as homogenous, but more interesting. Soler and Garver have obvious similarities: Soler was as selective and ruthless last year as Garver was. However, Taylor is a hitter of very different physical stature, with a different plan at the plate. Mondesi and Tatis are comparatively free swingers. Even within the group, Garver belongs to a select company. The only hitter in the set who has made contact on a higher percentage of swings within the zone than Garver is Dozier. No one on the list has swung at a lower percentage of pitches outside the zone, so in that way, Garver’s creating fewer whiffs that most of the others on this list. The ratio of his swing rate within the zone to the same outside the zone is seventh-highest in baseball, and the highest in this group of 15. That, though, might be part of the problem. Garver might be so patient as to interfere with his own consistency at the plate. Because he swings so little, even within the zone, pitchers can too easily get ahead of him in the count. Because he shrinks his zone to certain parts of the actual strike zone in most situations, he can be pitched too safely in other areas of the zone. Contrast him with Tatis, who is also right-handed, has all-fields power, shows good plate discipline, and has a nearly identical ratio of in-zone to out-of-zone contact rates. Garver swings at just over 53 percent of pitches within the zone. Tatis swings at 70 percent of such pitches. His swing, like Garver’s, has holes, and pitchers have found them at times. However, even when he’s not fully locked in, Tatis can be lethal to opposing pitchers. His aggressiveness lowers his risk of getting into deep counts, where his lowish contact rate becomes a real liability, and allows him to tap fully into his power. For Garver, the approach that brought him such success in 2019 was the result of years of professional evolution, of becoming a more complete and intelligent hitter. If a radically simpler, more primal approach were viable for him, he probably would have found it sooner. It’s unlikely that he can simply flip a mental switch and become a clone of Tatis at the plate, and of course, Tatis’s superior athleticism allows him to do some things Garver couldn’t do even if he perfectly matched that approach. Still, there’s always another difficult adjustment ahead for a big-league hitter, and for Garver, the tricky thing will be threading the needle between getting his pitch every time and not letting it go by when it comes—even if that means widening his definition of what ‘his pitch’ is. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

José Berríos defies the modern trend among the best pitchers in the big leagues. As the league throws ever fewer sinkers and favors the four-seam fastball more strongly than it has in 50 years, Berríos has remained committed to throwing both the four-seamer and the sinker. Indeed, the sinker is an important part of his repertoire. Unfortunately, right now, it’s a pitch on which he can’t rely at all, and his four-seamer is little better. On Monday, Parker Hageman wrote a great post about Berríos creating more velocity, a project that has been ongoing for the pitcher and coach Wes Johnson since before 2019. Parker broke down Berríos’s mechanics in granular detail, and even mentioned drills that promote the kind of power the hurler has found this year. Yet, Parker also touched on the ugly numbers attached to Berríos’s fastball and his sinker thus far this year, and we should dig deeper into them, because there’s reason to believe that power just isn’t the key to success for Berríos. His efforts to throw 96 or 97 miles per hour might be doing more harm than good. So far this season, most of Berríos’s fastballs have fallen between 93 and 95 miles per hour. Let’s look at his results on those, and on heaters (for these purposes, the sinker and the four-seamer go together) at higher and lower velocities. It’s true that, when he throws harder, Berríos is able to miss bats with his hard stuff, which isn’t true in the lower velocity band where he spent much of last season. The problem is especially pronounced on his sinker, which he throws about 1.0 miles per hour less hard than the four-seamer: his whiff rate on that pitch is currently at a career-low 10.8 percent of all swings against it. However, opponents have been better able to elevate against him when he throws harder, and they’re hitting the ball harder, too. The league has just a .200 slugging average when Berríos throws less than 93, but a 1.500 mark when he cranks it up past 95. Parker isn’t wrong to observe that opening his hips a hair earlier has allowed Berríos to generate more power. However, that tweak might be causing two problems, while solving just one. Berríos is clearly fighting to command both variations of the fastball, and the more explosive delivery he’s using this year is a culprit in that. He’s sometimes late, and therefore, missing up and to the arm side. He’s sometimes overcorrecting for that, feeling the earlier release of his hips, hurrying his release, and missing down and to the glove side. The other problem this adjustment might be creating is harder to see, from a center-field camera, but the hitters are doing all they can to tell us that it’s there: Berríos has lost some of the deception he got from striding across his body and staying closed so long last year. Parker rightly wrote that that mechanical signature led to throwing around his front side, costing him power, and I wrote about the barriers to long-term success with such an unorthodox delivery this spring. On the other hand, there are clear advantages to that delivery, and deception is at the top of the list. Hitters who pick up the ball later in a pitcher’s delivery make weaker contact, when they make contact at all, because they’re a bit later getting their barrel to the hitting zone. Sheer power can make up for a loss of deception, especially if one has a good, riding four-seamer, but Berríos’s arm slot has always allowed him to create more lateral than vertical movement, and again, the sinker is an important piece of the puzzle for him. If batters are getting an earlier and more confident look at Berríos as he delivers, they’re gaining a bigger advantage than he’s gaining by throwing harder. Their bats, which might normally meet the ball at the end or the handle, especially on a good sinker, are meeting it at the barrel this year, and it’s not just bad luck. Maybe there’s another adjustment Berríos can make to unlock ace-caliber stuff and command in tandem, but in the meantime, throwing harder has made him worse, and the Twins are without a true top-of-the-rotation starter.

When the Twins snapped up Matt Wisler as a free agent back in November, there was little thought that he would become an important high-leverage arm for them. In fact, if spring training had gone according to plan and everyone had stayed healthy, Wisler might well have been squeezed out of the picture before he even appeared for the Twins. He could easily be elsewhere right now, trying to make things work with a sixth team in three seasons. Instead, Wisler has pitched six scoreless innings already for the mighty Minnesota relief corps. He’s fanned nine of the 23 batters he’s faced, and he’s only allowed six total baserunners. Coming in, we knew he was a slider monster, but his track record suggested he would struggle to convert that into elite strikeout rates, let alone to manage contact and attack the zone well enough to dominate. The Twins’ vaunted pitching development machine has gotten ahold of him, though, and Wisler has made changes that give him a great chance to remain a top-tier right-handed reliever. As recently as early 2018, Wisler was a 25-year-old starter whose stuff and prospect cachet still tantalized both the Braves and other interested teams. After he was dealt to the Reds, he finally moved to the bullpen, but neither the Reds nor the Padres (to where he returned, after they’d drafted him in 2011 and traded him to Atlanta in the Craig Kimbrel deal in April 2015) could help him tap fully into his potential for missing bats and keeping the ball in the park. Both teams did help him, though, because as he got comfortable in a relief role, he started throwing his slider much, much more often. That pitch is his ticket to success in the big leagues, and throwing it well over 50 percent of the time is his only chance to be more than a fringe arm. After the Mariners purchased his contract in mid-2019, he took another small step forward, fanning 29 of the 95 batters he faced for Seattle. He also brought his walk rate down. However, he continued to give up way too many homers, and his ERA ballooned to over 6.00. That’s why he was freely available when the Twins called in November. Let’s talk about where that vulnerability came from, and how he’s worked to address it. Since moving to relief, Wisler has eliminated his windup, working out of the stretch with or without runners on base. In the past, his delivery was very quick, and often, it was hurried. He had a modified slide step, a low leg kick designed to shorten his time to home plate and control the running game, but it had knock-on effects. He would break his hands almost as soon as he lifted his leg, and before sinking into his legs, he would already be moving down the mound. He could sometimes get away with this, especially while he was younger and his arm was a bit faster, because he has a very short-arm action early in his delivery, keeping the ball fairly close to his body and his arm bent. At release, Wisler has considerable spine tilt, artificially raising his release point and arm angle but forcing him to fall off toward the first-base side of home plate. His stride pattern is fairly open, meaning that as he comes down the mound, his momentum carries him toward the first-base dugout anyway. (The spine tilt and stride pattern haven’t changed in Minnesota.) In combination with the early hand-break and rushed leg kick, that progress down the mound often led to Wisler leaving pitches up and in the middle of the strike zone. Here’s Wisler with San Diego, just as he’s begun his delivery. Note that his foot is barely off the ground, but he’s already pulled the ball out of his glove. That front leg is already starting to drift downhill. He’s a different pitcher, at the beginning of his delivery, in 2020. Here he is at the moment when he breaks his hands. The leg kick isn’t just higher. It comes with a kind of gathering, balancing tilt, before he shifts into gear and heads down the mound. As he takes the ball out of the glove, his upper body is turned more from home plate, and (because he now has time to) he tucks the ball slightly in toward his rib cage before starting the spiral-staircase arm swing that gets him to his release point. He hides the ball a bit better, but more importantly, he’s giving himself time to get his arm through to his desired release point more consistently. Even as he went slider-heavy in 2019, Wisler threw two variations of his fastball, and he rarely targeted anything more specific than “the strike zone” with it. This year, he’s purely using his slider and four-seamer, and he’s using the heat only high and on the third-base side of the plate, setting up the slider (or, as is often the case, letting the slider set up the heat). Wisler will never be a control artist or a ground-ball guy. If you’re watching him rack up strikeouts and wondering whether that success is sustainable, though, you should lean toward believing in it. The tangible mechanical and mental changes here suggest the Twins went after him for a very specific reason, and that Wisler has put together some of the pieces that refused to gel in his previous stops.

The Twins’ center fielder has a multi-faceted strategy for avoiding the shoulder-subluxing, skull-scrambling wall collisions that have plagued him recently. The numbers show how he’s dramatically changed his defensive positioning to minimize those risks. Now, the question will be how much he can change his actions, without losing the adventurousness that helped make him an elite defender. There was a particular fly ball in Saturday night’s game against Cleveland on which Buxton’s chief adjustment was thrown into sharp relief. Franmil Reyes tagged a Kenta Maeda slider to dead center field, hit at 100.3 miles per hour. It flew 396 feet, but Buxton caught it easily. Here’s how Statcast mapped the play: Obviously, Reyes has great power, so Buxton was playing deep against him anyway. Still, the positioning that made that an easy play has been a hallmark of Buxton’s approach to his defense all season. Here are his average starting depths for each season of his career. Byron Buxton, Average Starting Distance, 2015-20 Season Distance 2015 310 2016 313 2017 314 2018 314 2019 321 2020 334 In order to make going back on deep fly balls less threatening to his health (and, for that matter, to the structural integrity of outfield walls throughout the big leagues), Buxton has moved a full two dozen feet deeper (on average) than he played as a rookie. He began to make the adjustment last year, but as you can see, he’s gone from adjusting to fully reimagining his own position in 2020. The only center fielder who plays deeper than Buxton, on average, is Atlanta’s Ender Inciarte. This is in keeping with league-wide trends, at a collective level, even if it’s a bit unorthodox at an individual one. The fastest center fielders in the game still tend to play shallower than slower ones, and Buxton’s move certainly bucks that notion, but in general, the league has steadily been nudging its outfielders further out for at least half a decade. Anecdotally, it seems to have been going on longer than that. Some of the change, to be sure, is a response to the highly aerodynamic baseball, and to the profusion of power across all teams and positions. There are very few hitters left in the majors who can’t hit the ball 375 or 400 feet often enough to justify a respectful outfield depth. However, teams have also used Statcast data to better understand defense itself, and they’ve realized that playing outfielders shallow rarely steals enough bloop singles to make up for the extra doubles and triples that can happen on deep flies and line drives to the gaps. Outfielders who play deeper usually make more plays, prevent opponents from taking extra bases better, and stay healthier. If the Derek Falvey-Thad Levine regime has one trademark, it’s that in every season since they’ve arrived in Minnesota, the team has found a new way to get better, or has doubled down on some previous area of improvement. They never call any aspect of their organization good enough, and stop trying to improve it. They never make half the necessary changes, hit a wall, and stop. The Twins are a franchise dedicated to the growth mindset. They don’t ask whether they’ve made adequate progress, but rather, what progress might still reasonably be made. Keeping Buxton healthy is one area in which they still had room to make progress. Now, they (and Buxton himself) have done just about all they can do.

May has always been a cerebral hurler, as interested in the craft and the theory of pitching as in the sheer force of his fastball or the filthiness of his changeup. Through a career interrupted repeatedly by injuries, May fought to find the best possible blend of pitches to suit his talents, including his body. It was well-intentioned, but like former teammate Phil Hughes, May sometimes got criticized for spending too much time making changes and too little time perfecting what he already did. Like Hughes, though, May was undeterred by outside opinions. Last spring, he made a potentially big realization: his high arm slot didn’t need to stop him from throwing an effective slider. Long a fastball-changeup guy in a perpetual search for a more workable breaking ball, May ditched the cutter-style slider he had previously tried, opting instead for a harder variant of his curveball. He achieved more depth with the pitch, increased its spin rate, and knew he had the makings of an important fix. However, as May reflected at the time, the change had little immediate utility, because he lacked the command to maximize it. He could throw the “ball-to-strike” version of the pitch, dropping it into the zone for called strikes when batters weren’t expecting it, and he could bury it in the dirt to induce chases from extremely anxious hitters when ahead in the count, but he didn’t develop feel for the “strike-to-ball” version of the pitch—the one hitters would see as a fastball with plenty of the zone out of the hand, only to dip toward their ankles and miss their bats. That’s why, late last season, May put his breaking ball project on the shelf and threw his fastball at a career-high frequency, dominating with sheer power. In the long run, though, it was clear he would need to make another adjustment in order to take the next step toward becoming a true relief ace. (The secret is, even for pitchers who don’t realize it, the need for another adjustment is always right around the corner.) Through two appearances, it’s already clear that the tinkerer has been tinkering again, and that he’s done his homework. May’s slider has now wholly replaced his curveball, at least so far, and it’s for the best. The slider he’s throwing now has the best of his last two versions: it’s about two miles per hour harder than it was last season, but still has the vertical movement he found after making the grip change. More importantly, though, he has full command of this version. He threw the “strike-to-ball” slider a handful of times against St. Louis Tuesday night, leading to two of his strikeouts. May’s changeup is also back in the mix, more than it had been late in 2019. He’s throwing it without the armside run that allowed hitters to differentiate it from his fastball, and thus, he’s fooling them better even without a big movement differential. If he can continue using both the slider and the changeup as this season progresses, May will hit free agency as a full-fledged relief ace with big earning potential, and the Twins will have a pitcher finally comfortable enough with his full arsenal to stop tinkering. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email

Last season, Luis Arraez hit .334, showing an extraordinary feel for contact, a disciplined approach, and the uncanny ability to find open spaces in the defense where he could turn batted balls into hits. However, the weakness that kept him from becoming a higher-profile prospect during his time in the minors leagues remained clear: Arraez doesn’t hit for power. In the year of the turbocharged aeroball, Arraez hit only four homers in 366 plate appearances with the parent club. The Statcast numbers state the case even more clearly. Arraez’s average exit velocity was in the bottom sixth of the league, among all batters with at least 250 plate appearances, but even that understates the extent to which he was underpowered. There were 320 players with at least those 250 plate appearances. Arraez ranked 288th in Barrel rate, meaning he made less of the highest-value contact than 90 percent of the league, and he ranked 308th in Hard Hit rate. In no game last season did Arraez have three different balls Statcast counted as Hard Hit, meaning they left his bat at 95 miles per hour or faster. He only had six batted balls, all season, that registered at 100 miles per hour or harder. While Arraez clustered his batted balls in the optimal launch-angle band better than all but three other hitters in the game, and while he hits to all fields so well that teams can’t easily align defenses against him, his lack of power made it hard to guess how well he could sustain the high batting average so vital to his overall profile. That’s why Sunday’s game was a huge breakthrough. Arraez had two hits, just as he did in Friday night’s opener. This time, though, he did it with more hard contact, even on his outs. In the first inning, Arraez spanked a line drive into left field, a clean single in front of left fielder Eloy Jiménez, at 100.5 miles per hour. In the second, he lifted a liner slightly higher, and although he hit it more softly, he landed a single that left the bat at 83.9 miles per hour, down the left-field line. In the fourth, Gio Gonzalez threw Arraez a high fastball, and Arraez got under it. He hit it so hard, though, that Luis Robert had to run the ball down on the warning track, slightly to the left of dead center. The ball left the bat at 100.4 miles per hour. After a groundout in the seventh inning, Arraez faced Kelvin Herrera in the final frame of the Twins’ blowout win. Herrera threw him a sinker up and in, and Arraez got under it again. He flew out lazily to center field, partially because of the 45-degree launch angle. Still, the exit velocity on that batted ball was 96.3 miles per hour. Arraez’s swing gets on plane with the incoming pitch extremely well, at least on pitches down in the zone. He’ll continue to square up the ball and hit the ball on valuable trajectories, though he has an adjustment yet to make when it comes to handling high fastballs. However, his data from Sunday demonstrates that Arraez has the potential to hit for more power than he has thus far. He can also continue to run a high BABIP, because of his ability to hit the ball this hard. Showing this capacity will force outfielders to play him at normal depth, rather than pinch in and try to start stealing the flared singles he’s been dropping between infielders and outfielders since reaching the big leagues. He’s shown an unbelievable knack for making the field seem larger than it is, and impossible to defend. If he can sustain this uptick in pop off the bat while making contact and spraying the ball as consistently as he has, Arraez can still improve slightly as a hitter. Given how good he already is, that’s no small thing.

Will batters start to pick up Dobnak better in his second trip around the league? With the schedule compressed to include just 60 games, there’s little time for teams to make big adjustments against pitchers. However, that compression also brings the Twins’ total number of opponents for the season down to nine, and four of those teams saw him down the stretch in 2019. That matters, because Dobnak isn’t a model of release-point matching and tunneling. He tweaks his arm slot and release point to maximize his control and command of each of his four pitches. Here are his average release points for each pitch type in 2019. On its own, that graphic isn’t overwhelmingly damning. We can see the distinctions between the points clearly, but that’s partially because I’ve zoomed in to allow us to do so; the sheer separation between each point is a few inches. However, there are two things that make it somewhat more telling in Dobnak’s case than in others. One is that he doesn’t vary his arm slot or delivery on any particular pitch, so if batters do start to figure out the keyhole for a given pitch, they can be pretty confident about what they’re looking for. His fastballs all look roughly the same out of the hand; so do his sliders. The other problem for Dobnak is that, with his low arm slot, left-handed batters get a long look at his arm action. That will make the small differences between certain pitches easier to see for them. Last year, Dobnak got good mileage out of his changeup, but that pitch doesn’t have a big movement or velocity differential from his fastball. If hitters start to recognize that change more readily as they get more looks at Dobnak, he might suddenly see opponents chase and whiff on the offering less often. In fact, more broadly, Dobnak relies on deception that might turn out to be fragile, because of his arm slot and release points. Can Dobnak change eye levels effectively? Given his low arm angle, it’s no surprise that Dobnak relies more heavily on his sinker than on his four-seamer. Some pitchers can offset that reliance by having fastballs that ride more than they appear to, even when studying the numbers. Almost any rising action on a four-seamer from a low three-quarter delivery can fool a batter. Alas, Dobnak doesn’t even have that. He has fringe-average velocity, a low average spin rate on both his fastball and his sinker, and relatively heavy action on each. That’s not bad, when he’s executing and locating both pitches effectively, but if he struggles with either on a given night, the pressure on the other becomes more than its quality can handle. Dobnak’s four-seamer is too slow, comes from too low a release and has too little rise to miss bats or induce pop-ups when thrown above the belt. He has to locate the pitch from the belt down, and keep it on the corners, except when he’s able to set it up with his other offerings. That’s the first test he’ll face, in this regard, in 2020: Can he pitch backward? If Dobnak can start lefties with the changeup or righties with the slider at times, or find counts in which they anticipate those pitches especially confidently, he should be able to sneak a fastball in at the top of the zone without having them hammer it. If he can steal strikes that way, terrific, but merely showing that pitch to opponents (without getting hurt in the process) would be huge for Dobnak. Once he’s established the ability to go up there, he can more effectively throw the turbo version of his sinker, the one that tumbles and runs right out of the strike zone. He can get called strikes with the slider. He can force hitters to cover the entire strike zone, instead of keying in on something down. Will Dobnak find both corners of the plate with his hard stuff? The other axis of movement and command is at least as important, though. Last year, Dobnak showed little ability to command his four-seamer to his arm side (inside to right-handed batters, away from lefties), and even less comfort using the sinker over the opposite edge of the plate. He needs to get more comfortable with each, in order to keep inducing weak contact and getting ground balls the way he did in 2019. Vertical movement tends to help generate whiffs; horizontal movement tends to help generate bad contact. Dobnak doesn’t have exceptional movement in either direction, but his pitches form a much more interesting and difficult array for hitters in terms of horizontal movement, which is why he allowed just one home run in 28 innings last year. However, batters will only ever need to pay cursory attention to the top half of the zone when Dobnak is on the mound. That makes it especially important that he make them guard all 17 inches of home plate, and a couple on either side. His slider works well in contrast with both his fastball and his sinker, in terms of tempting opponents to expand the zone, but they’ll have too many opportunities to square up his straight stuff if he doesn’t keep them guessing about where to hunt for it. Throwing any pitch to both sides of the plate with equal comfort and command is hard for any pitcher. It’s even harder for guys like Dobnak, who throw from a lower angle and have to wrestle with horizontal movement than others. He already sets up on the first-base side of the rubber, giving his sinker room to work back toward right-handed hitters, and that’s why he’s been able to locate his four-seamer to the opposite side. His next step will need to be finding the release point that allows him to start an occasional sinker heading right at the hip of a left-handed batter, only to run back over the inside corner, and to start painting the outside corner (to lefties) with the four-seamer. For a guy who has demonstrated excellent control, it’s possible, and neither pitch has to be one to which he turns very often. The four-seamer won’t sneak past righties on the inner part of the plate; it isn’t hard enough. If a lefty sits on the front-hip sinker, or if Dobnak misses even a bit and it wanders over the middle of the plate, it becomes a go-fer ball. Situationally, though, the ability to throw each pitch a time or two per outing, locating and sequencing them well enough not to get hurt with them, will keep hitters off-balance and unprepared when Dobnak goes back to the pitches and locations with which he’s more comfortable. With Jake Odorizzi’s back barking, Jhoulys Chacín having taken his release, and Michael Pineda still suspended, it’s not hard to imagine Dobnak being needed as a starter, and soon. In the meantime, he’ll be a key source of long relief innings. No matter which role he fills in a given appearance, these dynamics will come into play, and in a 60-game season, even small things like these could determine a division title. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email