Matthew Trueblood

Star power isn't everything in baseball. Still, do the Twins need a bit more of it?This month, a group of 30 Baseball Prospectus writers has wheeled through four rounds, drafting “franchise players” with whom to begin an imaginary organization. Contributor Kazuto Yamazaki proposed the exercise, an unusually expansive spin on a familiar idea. It’s still not complete, but the draft has been illuminating, not least in the way it’s helped me conceptualize the Twins’ current standing among MLB teams. For the purposes of this draft, we imagined that all contracts were thrown out. Participants were instructed not to ponder a player’s current salary or service time; the only criteria were present and future performance. As one would imagine, there remained a strong bias in favor of younger players (who wants to start their franchise with a 35-year-old, even if they’re a surefire Hall of Famer?), but without the universe of current contracts as an overriding consideration, we were free to weigh players’ strengths and weaknesses with unusual clarity. At present, BP has no plan to present this draft as a full-fledged public project, as other outlets have done with similar prompts in the past. However, the participants have taken it admirably seriously, and by going four rounds, we’ve pushed the concept further than most of those past efforts. It’s been eye-opening, because it’s forced us all to spend some time mulling the merits of a wide swath of candidates, and we’ve continued past the point at which obvious names ran out. Here are the Twins who have been taken so far, with less than half of one round remaining in the draft: José Berríos, 41stJorge Polanco, 79thMitch Garver, 96thRoyce Lewis, 100thByron Buxton, 104thObviously, in addition to those five players, the team has a handful of clear candidates to go in the 15 picks which remain as of this writing: Max Kepler, Luis Arráez, Miguel Sanó, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, and Jordan Balazovic. Even if none of them are selected, though, the Twins will have been more than proportionally represented in the draft, overall, at least from a quantity perspective. Still, it’s interesting to note that no Twin cracked the top 30 (the threshold above which, ostensibly, a player is necessarily the envy of every team in the league to whom they don’t belong), and that only Berríos even fit into the top two rounds. Nor is that an especially controversial way for things to break down. A big believer in Lewis could have pushed him up the draft board. He certainly has a chance, in a few years, to make the group’s collective valuation of him look too conservative. For now, however, his star is a bit dimmed by the struggles he experienced at the plate in 2019, and by scouting reports that suggest there are tangible, persistent reasons for those problems. I’m particularly bullish on Kepler, and would have taken him before Buxton, let alone prospects Cristian Pache and Dylan Carlson, all of whom have been selected in the fourth round. Given his years of experience and demonstrated limitations in terms of hitting for average, though, it’s easy to see why he’s slipped down the board. Could Berríos have been taken higher? There’s a strong case to be made that he’s better (and of a sufficiently similar age and ceiling) to have gone above both Mike Soroka and Frankie Montas, the two hurlers taken just ahead of him in the second round. On the other hand, the two starters taken just after him (Shane Bieber and Jacob deGrom) are both much more accomplished than Berríos at this point, and seem to have plenty of miles left in their arms. One theme that pervaded the draft was that, without existing contracts as anchors and tiebreakers, large differences emerged between participants in terms of valuing pitchers. That was true not only with regard to weighing hitters against pitchers, but with regard to what drafters were looking for in the pitchers they did take. In general, the exercise made clear the extent to which the Twins’ chances in the foreseeable future hinge on depth, rather than star power. The Indians had two players drafted ahead of Berríos, and one (Bieber) immediately after him. The White Sox also clustered three draftees into the top 46 picks, and after them, had two additional players plucked before Polanco got the Twins back onto the board. It was clear, even as last season unfolded, that the Twins’ success was designed to be considerably less sexy than that of their divisional rivals. Their model centers on a unified offensive approach, an overhauled player development system, and betting wisely on veterans, rather than on finding and building around individual superstars. That’s wise; baseball generally rewards that approach. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy way to do things. The Dodgers had five players taken within the top 32 picks in this draft. The defending champion Nationals had four of the top 50, not counting Anthony Rendon, who just departed after the championship, nor Bryce Harper, who departed one year earlier. Superstars give teams with great processes and protocols in place a greater margin for error, and margin for error matters a great deal in baseball. That’s why the Twins were smart to pony up for the star power of Josh Donaldson this winter. They exposed themselves to some risk—even without his fresh contract to consider, Donaldson hasn’t been taken in the franchise player draft, because of his age and injury history—but made themselves less reliant on continued good luck in developing homegrown players into stars. Now, as this draft underscores, they need to keep trusting those processes, and hope that one of those players (Lewis, of course, being the obvious candidate) can become the centerpiece they currently lack. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The Twins' left fielder might not be around much longer, unless he can adjust his mechanics to suit his approach—and go back to a plan of attack that suits his skills.In each of the last three seasons, Eddie Rosario has hit like a star for about half a year, then been average (or considerably worse) for about as long. That, more than his somewhat old-fashioned approach or his lack of fielding or baserunning value, is why he’s broadly seen more as a trade candidate than as a likely mainstay for the Twins. Yet, the dichotomy in his half-season splits speaks to the impact potential he still has. One key question underpins any effort to tell whether he can sustain more consistent success in the future: Can Rosario go the other way? Everywhere one turns (including here at Twins Daily!), there’s a simulation of the 2020 season happening, in one form or another and through one vendor or another. Visit Rosario’s Baseball Reference page, and the news is grim: his (real) brutal spring training has carried over into his (non-real) regular season, and he’s no longer a Twins regular. This imagined Rosario has a .404 OPS in 41 plate appearances. That feels dauntingly plausible, because when one watches Rosario at the plate during one of his slumps, it’s little stretch to say that he appears to have forgotten how to hit. An exceptionally aggressive hitter at the best of times, he seems to swipe hopelessly at the ball when going badly, missing some pitches badly and weakly mis-hitting others. Still, the primary problem isn’t how Rosario looks when going badly, just as evaluating him can’t be boiled down to how he looks (usually, great) when going well. The main issue, in forecasting Rosario’s near and medium-term future, is whether he can get himself going well more frequently, and going badly less often. To do so, he’s going to have to solve the shift. Last year, only seven batters saw more shifts than did Rosario, according to Baseball Info Solutions. Freddie Freeman, Anthony Rizzo, Cody Bellinger, Kyle Schwarber, Brandon Belt, Kole Calhoun, and Charlie Blackmon were those seven hitters, and the two immediately behind Rosario were Carlos Santana and Bryce Harper. It’s no surprise that all of those are left-handed batters (save Santana, who is a slow-footed switch hitter), but interestingly, most of the group is similar in other ways, especially in terms of approach. These are, by and large, patient hitters. Certainly, their patience correlates strongly with their success. It’s very hard to be a shift-prone (pull-happy) left-handed hitter and succeed, without being patient at the plate. That’s been true since long before the shift became widely used, though. It’s part of the design of baseball. Thus, the real question isn’t whether Rosario can conquer the shift (he actually hit better against it than against non-shifted defenses last year), but whether he can change the thing that led to all those shifts in the first place: his pull rate. Rosario hasn’t always been such a pull-conscious hitter. According to Baseball Savant, he pulled just 32.1 percent of his batted balls in 2017, but that number rose to 40.6 percent in 2018, and in 2019, it soared all the way to 44.4 percent. He’s becoming more one-dimensional, and given his ability to consistently make contact on such a wide array of pitches, that seems like the kind of concession he could avoid making if he rearranged his approach. Worse news: on pitches on the inner part of the plate (and just off it), Rosario has gotten steadily less productive over the last three years. In 2017, his wOBA on such pitches was .447. In 2018, it rose to .477. In 2019, though, it plunged to .391. A would-be left-handed slugger, especially one without the discipline to draw walks consistently, needs to do more damage than that on the inside pitch. Rosario hit those pitches harder than ever, on average, in 2019, but elevated it less, and the result was considerably less production—and more groundouts into the shift. Rosario hasn’t been hit by a pitch since July 29, 2016. That’s a little surprising, initially, because he has that familiar, closed stance, with his front foot near the inner line of the batter's box. To begin his swing, though, Rosario uses a toe tap, then strides forward and opens his front hip. In watching video of him, it sure looks like he’s become increasingly prone to letting the transition from his toe tap to his real stride carry him away from home plate, opening him up too much. As a result, he’s not hammering pitches on the inner half of the plate, and he’s not reaching pitches on the outer portion as cleanly. Opening up this way occasionally allows Rosario to yank a pitch on the outer part of the plate out of the park, but for that rare gain, he’s given away his ability to drive the ball to the opposite field. The effects on his handling of inside pitches help illustrate the problem, but it’s pitches down the middle and away from him that he could handle much better, and to do so, he’s going to need to clean up his stride pattern. If he does so, he can get a better look at the ball, keep opposing defenses honest, and give himself more chances to reach base. If he doesn’t, he’s going to end up on some other team soon after baseball resumes. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

One accounting shows that the Twins shifted inefficiently in 2019. They might need to tweak their shifting paradigm in order to thrive defensively in the future.Only two teams used more total defensive shifts than the Minnesota Twins in 2019, but the team was barely above-average in terms of net outs created by the shift, according to Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). That might mean that the team needs to be more careful and precise in their deployment of shifts going forward—or it might not. Based on video analysis and batted-ball data, BIS estimated the Twins lost 162 outs on balls that would not have been hits had they not been in the shift, the second-highest total in MLB. That kind of miss rate, even given the 185 outs the company estimated the team gained through shifting, is frustrating and counterproductive. Among Twins pitchers, as individuals, José Berríos lost 21 outs because of the shift (though he gained 29). Jake Odorizzi and Taylor Rogers each lost 13 outs that way, and together, they only gained 26 outs through shifts, breaking even. Nor, surely, did it even feel like breaking even, for any of them. Our brains operate in fairly predictable, imperfect ways, and the principles of loss aversion and negativity dominance tell us those three hurlers experienced the frustration and disappointment of losing would-be outs because of the shift much more saliently than they felt the relief and affirmation of hits turned into outs by shifting. Other aspects of behavioral psychology come into play here, too. When an individual pitcher retroactively assesses their performance on a given day, they will do so with a biased internal eye. They’ll mentally treat the outs generated by shifts as having been a given, or as the product of their own successful pitching to the defense behind them. However, they’ll attribute the balls hit through empty infield halves to poor positional decision-making by the team. Because shifts are still counted as a separate strategy from the traditional defensive alignment, players, fans, and even members of the coaching staff and front office will tend to treat traditional alignments as the default. That leads to the false notion that deploying a shift is a more proactive decision than not doing so, and by extension, that hits created by the shift are errors of commission by the coaching staff, whereas hits through traditionally aligned defenses are errors of omission. Our minds forgive the latter much more readily than the former. As I chronicled for the Twins Daily Offseason Handbook back in the fall, the Twins were one of baseball’s most aggressive shifting teams early in the season, but that became less true during the middle and latter portions of the campaign. In particular, the team cut down its shift rate behind its starting pitchers. In light of the data above, that shouldn’t be terribly surprising. It’s likely that several influential members of the pitching staff grew frustrated and pessimistic about shifts, because the team’s shifts seemed to be relatively inefficient. It’s not clear that that’s true. The numbers from BIS say so, but those numbers are imperfect, themselves. The company uses video analysis and batted-ball data, and compares batted balls against shifts to similar ones without a shift in place, in order to estimate when a hit has been gained or lost due to the shift. However, the applied definition of shifts for this data set isn’t granular enough for us to be sure that apples are really being compared to apples, and oranges to oranges. More importantly, perhaps, the Twins had a porous defensive infield in 2019, with arguably the worst left side in baseball when Miguel Sanó and Jorge Polanco played side-by-side. Luis Arráez was a valuable addition to the regular lineup, thanks to his bat, but is not a strong defender at second base. It’s perfectly possible that the system, because of the way BIS designed and deploys it, counted as lost a healthy number of outs that the team would not have been able to convert even if they weren’t shifted—that is, that the system blames strategic choices for what were really the shortcomings of the personnel on hand. Josh Donaldson’s arrival pushes Sanó to first base, a dramatic upgrade when it comes to glovework at third base. In all likelihood, it will also permit the team to position Polanco a bit differently, and there could be cascading effects that make the Twins’ infield defense more effective, whether they’re in the shift or not. In the meantime, though, the overhauled coaching staff (absent Derek Shelton, Jeremy Hefner, and others) will need to communicate openly and consistently with the players, to assure full faith in shifts as a viable defensive strategy. Broadly, MLB teams need to continue to erode the idea (especially in the minds of players and coaches) that a shift is an active choice, while a traditional alignment is not one. If they can do so, they won’t need to wonder as much about what BIS (or any other data source) says about the efficacy of their shifts, and will be better able to position defenders optimally, according to the tendencies of the pitcher and opposing batter. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

More great lessons, and some modern Twins implications, from Rod Carew's handbook to hitting.Last week, I wrote about some of the mechanical concepts that jumped out to me while I was reading “Hit to Win,” Twins legend Rod Carew’s book on the craft at which he became such a master. Carew is no modern swing guru, but while his style was distinct from those of most modern hitters, many nuggets of his wisdom can be applied to current Twins. Today, let’s look at a few such items. The sharp differences between Carew and Ted Williams were a theme last week, but we must return there to begin this conversation, too. Williams and Carew didn’t only differ on how to swing, but at which pitches. Famously, Williams credited much of his success in baseball to his successful adoption of Rogers Hornsby’s first principle of hitting: get a good pitch to hit. Williams believed he could thrive only by having the discipline to lay off pitches low and away from him, and especially, to lay off anything outside the strike zone. Carew mentions Williams by name in refuting that notion. He writes in the book about his firm belief that a batter should be able to make good contact on as varied a selection of pitches as possible, and that if a hitter believed they could hit a ball squarely, they shouldn’t waste any time considering whether or not it was a strike. To modern hitters, that in itself is antithetical. Consider the 2020 Twins. Last year, Mitch Garver swung at just 17.9 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, one of the lowest rates in baseball. Josh Donaldson chased 24.9 percent of non-strikes, but that was compared to a 67.5-percent swing rate within the zone. Garver and Donaldson are exemplars of the pervasive modern philosophy of hitting. Swings are, increasingly, grooved to maximize contact on a certain launch trajectory, within the strike zone, and batters are willingly trading looking bad when they do expand the zone for increased damage when they stay within it. In that regard, the Williams School has won the old debate. In the book, however, Carew provides a road map for hitters to take a different tack, and some of what he teaches can even be put into action by those who eschew his broader outlook. Whereas Williams (whose vision was famously preternatural) emphasized pitch selection, Carew focuses more on pitch recognition, believing that doing that well can allow a hitter to hit a wider array of pitches. Methodologically, what Carew proposes makes sense, and can be done even by those without a fighter pilot’s eyes. He details, in the book, the visual path he would create, in order to pick the ball up right out of the pitcher’s hand. He discusses simple cues for reading spin, but for batters who can’t manage that, he also provides some secondary cues. Pitch by pitch, Carew talks about where to look for the pitcher’s fingertips, in relation to the ball at release, and he frames the idea of pitch selection by encouraging batters to establish a visual tunnel from the pitcher’s hand outward. If the ball leaves that tunnel, it can be a cue not to swing. Otherwise, the tunnel should help the batter read the pitch well enough to put a good swing on it. Unlike some hitters (even modern ones) who emphasize hitting to the opposite field, Carew is adamant that good contact happens out in front of home plate. In that sense, he’s in step with the science of hitting in 2020, even if his objectives and technique are less so. He talks about aiming to hit the top and inner halves of the baseball, but whereas some hitters repeat those old saws as paths to hitting hard ground balls and maximizing contact, Carew makes the concepts fit with what we now know about hitting. In his passage about aiming for the top half of the ball, what Carew emphasizes is the apparent rising action created by the backspin on big-league pitches. He doesn’t actually advocate hitting the top of the ball; he just wants hitters to aim there, in order to hit the center of it and maximize the quality of contact. Something similar underpins his advice to hit the inside half of the ball. It’s not about actually hitting that inner half, but about being sure not to cast one’s hands too soon. Time is not on a hitter’s side, as Carew (and every other hitter) well knows. If a hitter wants to get around the ball all the time, they’re likely to try to rush their hands through the hitting zone, sapping the natural power flowing from their hip and shoulder rotation, and from the forward shift of their weight. A properly executed swing, as described by Carew, will get the barrel of the bat into the hitting zone on time, going at the highest possible speed. To do so, however, the hitter has to be loose, and they have to trust they can do that. If they’re worried about being beaten by speed, they’re likely to use counterproductive movements that will only guarantee that outcome. Nelson Cruz is, then, an almost perfect adherent of Carew’s essential teachings. He has the power to chase homers in a way Carew would never teach most hitters to do, but he, too, contents himself with aiming to hit line drives and stay inside the ball. That approach still begets plenty of quickness and power to the pull field, but Cruz doesn’t have to wait out pitchers as excruciatingly as do Donaldson or Garver. Obviously, the hitter in the Twins’ prospective lineup most reminiscent of Carew is Luis Arráez. It’s not even close. Arráez lives Carew’s most important principles, especially when it comes to picking up the pitch as early as possible and being ready to swing until it becomes wholly clear he shouldn’t. Arráez’s weight transfer and hands also look more like those of Carew than like those of his current teammates. Because he was never a true slugger, it’s easy to remember Carew as a pure singles hitter, reliant on exceptional contact skills and irreproducible in the modern game. In reality, though, Carew had the same relative strikeout rate, given his league and era, as Jorge Polanco has thus far in his career. Polanco is a fine contact hitter, but what made Carew special wasn’t avoiding strikeouts like Polanco; it was that he had the highest era-adjusted BABIP in baseball history. Polanco is unlikely to replicate that, but as we’ve noted in the past, it’s possible that Arráez could be that kind of high-BABIP guy. Moreover, to this point, he’s been a much better pure contact hitter than Carew was. He won’t match the modest power or the impressive walk rates Carew had, but if there’s a hitter in the modern game ideally suited to the things Carew wrote about in “Hit to Win,” it’s Arráez, and if there’s a person in baseball ideally suited to give Arráez guidance in developing his unique skill set, it’s Carew. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

When one of the best hitters in baseball history writes about their craft, it's worth revisiting every so often to mine for wisdom.As has virtually every baseball fan, I’ve spent much of the last six weeks reading. Unlike Rogers Hornsby’s, my eyes were ruined before I ever picked up a book, so I stopped playing the game at age nine and started reading voraciously about it during the offseason. This year, the offseason just keeps going, so there’s been extra time for that treasured work. Let’s dig in, then, to a decade-old tome on the art and science of hitting by Twins legend Rod Carew. Firstly, of course, one must know what not to expect from the book. It’s not a perfectly modern perspective. It’s not on the cutting edge of the home-run revolution. There is an entire chapter devoted to what Carew calls “situational hitting,” focused wholly on directional batting aimed at making productive outs to move runners along. Another whole chapter details, in minute detail, the mentality and techniques required to bunt successfully. The cover shows Carew near the point of contact with a pitch, and diagrams his swing in a parabolic arc that should be familiar to modern fans, with his imaginary bat working uphill through the latter portion of the swing. Within, however, Carew largely espouses keeping the swing flat, and emphasizes both using the opposite field and keeping the ball on the ground. The seven-time batting champion exhorts readers to stay within themselves, usually in the context of resisting the temptation to try for more power than that of which they’re capable. Mechanically, Carew’s most urgent teaching point is a principle he calls ‘flat hands’, a concept echoed in the Charley Lau school of hitting. The idea is simple and (to a reader in 2020) highly intuitive, almost obvious one: keep the bottom hand above the bat and facing down, and the top hand below the bat and facing upward, for as long as possible. Carew is insistent that the top hand act as a guide, but not the power source of the swing, and that, too, is a principle shared with Lau’s system. Carew and Lau share a common foil: Ted Williams. While Carew reiterates his respect and admiration for Williams, and mentions having talked hitting with him at length, he underscores two key aspects of hitting about which he and Williams disagree. For one thing, Williams famously believed in the primacy of the top hand—believing that the power in a swing came from that arm. Carew contends that all the power in a swing comes from bat speed (with which Williams would agree), and argues that becoming overly dependent upon the top hand puts a hitter at risk of rolling over and grounding the ball to the pull side too often. Lau disciples, even more insistent on the bottom hand as the key to the swing, would agree there. Yet, Carew departs from Lau on the other key tenet of that school, the one that most sharply divided Lau from Williams. Whereas Williams was a firm believer in back-foot hitting, believing keeping his weight back was vital to generating power and maintaining stability, Lau’s school took the side of many other hitters who came up later in Williams’s career, and who shifted their weight aggressively to the front foot when hitting—hitters like Henry Aaron and Willie Mays. Lau’s school decried the old-school mantra of pivoting on the back foot, but keeping the balls of the feet down, encouraging hitters instead to get up onto the toes of their cleats or come off the ground entirely with that foot. Carew, however, traces a middle road between Williams and Lau: he supports the concept of a weight shift, but wants batters to keep their stride controlled and keep their back foot under them. Interestingly, he denies the popular conception that he was prone to moving around the batter’s box frequently, insisting that he would set up with his back foot in the same place (near the plate, at the back of the box) almost every time he stepped in, and merely moved his front foot around to modulate his stance based on situations he was facing. There’s plenty more that makes Carew’s book interesting, and that might be applicable to current Twins, even if many of them seem to ascribe to very different philosophies than those Carew outlines. We’ll discuss more takeaways from the volume next week. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

To watch a Jake Odorizzi start in 2019 was to see a talented hurler finally learn to pitch. One newfangled number helps tell the story.For appreciators of the pure craft of pitching, there must be few pitchers whose 2019 seasons were more enjoyable than that of Jake Odorizzi. He did so many new and nuanced things on the mound, forcing batters into tougher guessing games and dominating with the very command that had been absent for so much of his career to that point. One way to summarize that brilliance in a single number, without attempting to confine it to that number, is to look at the improvement in the spin efficiency on Odorizzi’s fastballs. Spin efficiency is a decidedly unbeautiful term, more technical than aesthetic, but it’s a vital statistic. Baseball Savant reports the Statcast-estimated efficiency of the spin on every pitcher’s pitches, breaking it out by pitch type. Here, one can see that Rich Hill has the most spin-efficient curveball in the game—that is, the one that most closely approximates perfect topspin, meaning that all of the spin he generates with the pitch creates what the batter perceives as movement. While complicated on the surface, it’s very much a measure of style, and by extension, we can use it to appreciate Odorizzi. As an over-the-top thrower who has always relied on elevating his fastball, Odorizzi already rated well in spin efficiency, before his mechanical and approach adjustments last year. In 2018, he had a spin efficiency of 89.2 percent on his heater, putting him in the 75th percentile among pitchers with at least 1,000 pitches thrown on the year. However, there was more in his tank. Odorizzi’s more aggressive, cleaner mechanics, which he honed at the Florida Baseball Ranch prior to 2019, led to increased velocity. However, they also allowed him to demonstrate better command, and part of that was improved spin efficiency. In 2019, Odorizzi had a fastball spin efficiency of 91.4 percent, putting him in the league’s 86th percentile. Baked into that number is Odorizzi’s increased use of his sinker, a pitch that rarely rates well in terms of spin efficiency. Sinkers, because of the seam position and the way the pitcher releases them, usually have an element of sidespin, which can become “wasted” spin. It’s not unfair, in the modern game, to think of many sinkers as flat fastballs—ones that lack the apparent rising action of four-seamers, and don’t make up for it with enough lateral movement to wiggle off the barrel of opponents’ bats. That’s why, league-wide, sinker usage has been in freefall for half a decade. As anyone who watched Odorizzi last year surely noticed, though, his sinker was no mere flat heater. If thrown properly and with intention, a sinker can maintain plenty of active spin, with the changed alignment of the seams creating ample movement to the arm side. That’s what Odorizzi’s did, as he subtly lowered his release point. Paired with his four-seamer, splitter, cutter, curve, and slider, the sinker became a weapon, because Odorizzi was able to command it better. On each of his pitches, Odorizzi had better command, which grew out of the entire mechanical process of his delivery, but also out of the relationship between his hand and the baseball. The improved spin efficiency was just an effect of that, but it was an important one. Small manipulations, ones for which Odorizzi lacked the requisite feel the previous season, allowed him to move the ball around the strike zone, and even lead hitters out of it. His movement pattern, prior to 2019, was problematically two-dimensional: he could move the ball up and down, but struggled to throw to both sides of the plate and to surprise batters with varied pairs of pitches and locations, laterally. It’s a tired line, but Odorizzi truly matured into a pitcher in 2019, as he learned to induce weak contact even when he wasn’t missing bats, and to stay around the strike zone even when he didn’t want to fill it up. Fastball spin can help us understand the way that paid off for him, because it was an outgrowth of his improvements in other areas, and because without the command that comes with improved spin efficiency, those other improvements might not have played out as nicely. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

Just work with me here. If this happened, how different would it make things? And who'd benefit?This is an article breaking down the four players I view as legitimate candidates to be the Twins’ best player if the bases were 81 feet apart. If the bases were 10 percent closer to one another, and their distance thus better fit baseball’s fervent devotion to multiples of three (three strikes, three outs, nine innings, and now, 81-foot basepaths), which Twin would best help the team hang on to its primacy in the AL Central? A former editor of mine, Sam Miller, was a genius. When he wrote an article at Baseball Prospectus about where to put a pit on a baseball field, if there was to be a pit, he knew better than to engage on the question of whether there should be a pit. Too messy. Right up front, he made it clear: the article was about where to put a pit, if there was a pit, operating under the assumption that that was just the way it was going to be. Same here: we’re not debating whether the distance between all bases should be shortened to 81 feet. That’s a given, until you depart this page. The question is: Which Twin would be the most valuable, if the bases were 81 feet apart? Obviously, it wouldn’t be a pitcher. There might be pitchers who would be the most valuable player on their team if the bases were 81 feet apart, like Max Scherzer or Jacob deGrom, but no Twins hurler combines strikeouts, a low walk rate, and the ability to induce weak contact well enough to be a candidate. A game with 81-foot basepaths is a game focused on speed, contact, and defense, not on that weird little bump in the back half of the infield. Among the position players, there are four guys with legitimate cases: Byron Buxton, Luis Arráez, Max Kepler, and Josh Donaldson. Back in the old days, when the basepaths were long and the game was slower, there were cases to be made that Miguel Sanó, Nelson Cruz, Mitch Garver, and Jorge Polanco were as valuable as this quartet, but now, forget about it. Sanó’s trouble making contact is a more costly disadvantage than ever, and he has no positional or defensive value. Cruz is just a hitter, and his power is a smaller relative edge now, thanks to all the hits and extra bases to be found all over the diamond even without elite pop. Garver’s framing is great, but he runs poorly, and his below-average throwing arm is a bigger deal. Great throwing catchers will take advantage of a throw 13 feet shorter than their former one, despite their fielders needing to range further to cover the bag on steal attempts, but Garver isn’t going to be able to do it. Besides, robot umpires can’t be far off, and then framing becomes a dead issue. Polanco simply doesn’t play the kind of defense now required of a shortstop, even as the league takes shifting to a new level. He doesn’t have the range or the arm to get batters out when they have just 81 feet to cover between home plate and first base. On, then, to the real contenders: Buxton Strengths: Absolutely every ground ball he hits is now a likely hit. It takes a perfect play on a ball hit right at a shallowly-positioned infielder to get him, and even then, it has to be a strong-armed infielder. Remember, each base is 81 feet from the next, so he’s also going to start racking up hustle doubles, line-drive triples, and more inside-the-park home runs than a Dead Ball shortstop facing Little Leaguers. In addition to all of that, it’s never been more important to have a defensive whiz in center field, and Buxton’s strong arm will come into play often, too. Weaknesses: Strikeouts still hurt, and through every iteration of Buxton’s maturation, he’s been vulnerable to them. Pitchers are going to be pitching for the strikeout in practically every plate appearance, especially with Buxton up there, and he’s exploitable. Arráez Strengths: Even using the old-fashioned dimensions, Arráez was a tough hitter to defend. Now, he’s virtually unstoppable. The reliable outs are harmless fly balls, ground outs hit to predictable places, and strikeouts, and hardly any of Arráez’s plate appearances end with any of those outcomes. He’ll frustrate strikeout-hungry opponents to no end with his ability to spoil pitches. He’s also on the right side of the infield, where the impact of weak defense is slightly lower. Weaknesses: He still isn’t a great fielder, and it’s still a problem to have anything short of a brilliant infield defense with these dimensions in place. Arráez also doesn’t run well, making him a dreaded baseclogger atop the lineup. Kepler Strengths: Kepler is such a good right fielder that, as five-man infields become more common, he and Buxton allow the Twins to feel comfortable going with two-man outfields from time to time. He’s not just fast on the bases, but quick in his changes of direction, allowing him to take the extra base, and that’s a bigger part of the game than ever. More than that, though, Kepler’s balanced offensive skill set is so appealing. He’s a left-handed batter with speed, so putting the ball in play is a good mathematical move in itself, and he’s sustained a well below-average strikeout rate for the last two years, while also demonstrating above-average power and plate discipline. Weaknesses: Kepler did show some vulnerability, some new holes in his swing, during the season half of last season. He’s also become a dead pull hitter, and teams will force him to change that habit by populating as much of the right side as possible until he starts consistently driving the ball to left field again. Donaldson Strengths: A great athlete with a rocket arm, Donaldson is the kind of third baseman who can still turn batted balls to the left side into outs. He’s always shown a special penchant for charging bunts and throwing with oomph on the run, which should help the Twins control the opponents’ bunting game. He also has the plate discipline to get on base very consistently, and under these new dimensions, having a runner on base puts more pressure on the defense than it did before. Of course, he’s also an excellent power hitter, and pitchers don’t figure to suddenly find a way to shut down that aspect of his game. Weaknesses: Slow-footed and aging, Donaldson can’t take advantage of the basepaths. He’s also swung and missed within the zone at a fairly high rate in recent years, and as pitchers hunt for strikeouts, he might see his own whiff rate rise to a troubling extent. The Verdict The pitchers are still 60 feet, six inches away. They still have nasty sliders, and changeups, and fastballs with such extraordinary spin that they hop over bats. Buxton will still strike out too much, and though he’ll take extra bases on hits and outs with awesome, hilarious frequency, he won’t be able to steal more, because the catchers will get bigger advantages in those isolated cases than runners will. Arráez won’t help the team prevent runs, and won’t develop power any time soon. That leaves the two more balanced options, and of them, Kepler seems to have the edge. His impact will be more two-sided; the outfield is really the place where teams’ fates will be decided. His ability to make contact so often without sacrificing power is also more valuable than ever, now that the bases are only 81 feet apart. This change should bring balance and action back to baseball, and it should make Max Kepler a superstar. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The question hits like a line drive to the shin, but if baseball won't be back this year, it's an important and legitimate one.The persistent uncertainty over when (or if) MLB will have a season in 2020 continues to invite questions about the futures of almost every player, in various ways. One of the most serious and potentially painful forms these questions take pertains to longtime veterans in their late 30s. In the case of Twins reliever Sergio Romo, it’s a reasonable (though cruel) question: will he ever pitch in the big leagues again? At first blush, that might seem a foolish question. Romo had a terrific second half with the Twins last year, and signed a contract for 2020 that includes a team option for 2021, at an affordable $5 million. Under the surface, though, there are signs that Romo, one of the best relievers of his generation, is headed for troubled water, even if and when baseball resumes. Among hurlers with at least 500 innings pitched since 1950, Romo has the 20th-best career DRA-, according to Baseball Prospectus. He’s in virtual lockstep with Max Scherzer. Obviously, Scherzer’s role as a workhorse starter makes him much, much more valuable than Romo, a one-inning reliever, but the fact remains that Romo has been a dominant pitcher (perhaps more so than most people even realized) for over a decade. He does it in a few ways, and the details shift with each passing year, reflecting the right-hander’s savvy and willingness to evolve as he ages. For one thing, while his four-seam fastball sat at just 86.5 miles per hour in 2019, he spun it at over 2,300 revolutions per minute. His low arm slot and the way he releases the pitch preclude him from getting the rising action pitchers look for when spinning their fastball so efficiently, but the spin isn’t wasted: both his four-seamer and his sinker have exceptional run to the arm side. Romo threw his changeup more often last season than ever, helping him extend a trend of neutralizing left-handed batters better late in his career. He hardly ever throws the pitch against righties, but to lefties, it’s become a steady part of the diet, a pitch he throws fully 30 percent of the time. It has enough velocity separation from his sinker to fool batters, despite strikingly similar movement, and crucially, he adjusted his targets after joining the Twins. He began hitting the bottom of the zone with his sinker, and absolutely burying his changeup, as never before. Batters were slow to adjust, and he got plentiful whiffs from the pitch down the stretch. Then, of course, there’s that slider. Romo unabashedly drops down and gets around the pitch, which drops less than his sinker and only slightly more than his four-seamer on the way to the plate. Its spin effectively mirrors that of his sinker, though, and the 20-inch difference in their horizontal movement makes misreads by opposing hitters costly mistakes. Great lateral movement, but minimal vertical separation, tends to beget weak contact rather than swings and misses, and while Romo’s strikeout rate has sagged recently, he was one of the best hurlers in baseball at avoiding hard contact in 2019. Why, then, do we say there are signs of trouble? For one thing, Romo’s become an extreme flyball pitcher. For another, he’s avoiding barrels by nibbling on the edges of the strike zone. His command and control remain solid; he just doesn’t have the sheer stuff to attack within the zone anymore. When hitters do swing, despite getting less desirable pitches to hit, they are making contact more and more often. Even with good command, the willingness to throw his slider over 60 percent of the time, and improved depth on his change, Romo is becoming a more comfortable at-bat, because he utterly lacks the ability to overpower big-league hitters. Even with his sterling showing for the Twins mixed in, Romo had his worst season in 2019. For the first time ever, he registered a DRA- above 78—and it was 95, meaning he was just five percent better than an average pitcher. His cFIP, a more skill-centric and predictive measurement of a pitcher’s performance, was 101, meaning he was (if anything) worse than average. Meanwhile, as teams develop increasingly advanced player development tools, the importance of lost games for minor leaguers still on the way up the chain is diminishing. Whenever baseball resumes, top prospects with big stuff are going to be much less affected by the layoff than those of old veteran hurlers, even though those hurlers, like Romo, will benefit marginally from not bearing a year of wear and tear. Romo’s competitive advantage over young arms was already shrinking rapidly; it might disappear entirely before 2021 begins. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

After a promising rookie showing, Stashak looks likely to be part of the Twins' bullpen in the near term. But he could be more than 'likely' with a successful tweak or two.Cody Stashak had an impressive 2019, rising from fringy prospect status as a Double-A reliever to an occasionally high-leverage arm in the bullpen for the Twins. Across three levels, he faced 321 batters (not counting the ALDS against the Yankees), struck out 99 of them, and walked just 10. He’s already proved he can be a good relief pitcher. However, there are mechanical and mental changes he could make to take another step forward, whenever baseball finally resumes. Stashak made five appearances in the Grapefruit League, prior to it being shuttered due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. In them, he pitched seven scoreless innings. He faced 23 batters, struck out nine of them, and issued no walks. Batters managed just three hits against him. Even when the ball was put in play, it tended not to be well-struck. Between that showing and the team’s decision to trade Brusdar Graterol at the beginning of spring training, Stashak had positioned himself well to open the season in the Minnesota bullpen. Obviously, it’s an open (and difficult) question whether baseball will or should be played at all in 2020, and if the season happens, the Twins will have a deep pitching staff. Stashak isn’t guaranteed to be on the roster at all times, let alone to have an important role in the club’s relief corps. Since Stashak is still a young and fresh arm, though, there’s room to dream on him as an important long-term piece of that puzzle, including and especially as a potential replacement for impending free agent Trevor May. First, a quick reintroduction to Stashak’s background and skill set. He’s a former 13th-round pick, though he signed for a bonus that indicated the team believed in him more than that. For the first two and a half seasons of his professional career, he was a starter, and a fairly effective one. The Twins elected to move him to a relief role in 2018, not as a response to failure, but as a proactive effort to get the most possible out of him. Neither a hard thrower nor one with an especially deep repertoire, Stashak immediately benefited from the switch. His high arm slot gives his fastball some natural rising action, and his slider can be a wipeout pitch, as evidenced by batters’ 47.3-percent whiff rate on swings against it when he reached the big leagues last season. He only gets his fastball above 92 miles per hour when really reaching back for something extra, though, and his changeup (right now) lacks sufficient movement or velocity separation. Becoming a reliever also helped paper over one of Stashak’s remaining weaknesses as a pitcher: he doesn’t have great command. Because he has considerable spine tilt during the latter phase of his delivery, he doesn’t show a consistent ability to hit his catcher’s target. His misses tend strongly to be up or down, rather than lateral, which helps him avoid walks exceptionally well. However, missing vertically so often makes him highly vulnerable to hard contact. In 2019, 10 of the 77 batted balls against Stashak were what Statcast classifies as Barrels—the most valuable bucket into which the system places hits. Batters had a .351 BABIP and slugged .475 against him, and the patterns were similar in the minor leagues. That’s why, despite his tremendous strikeout and walk numbers, he had an ERA of 3.22 for the entire season, and 3.24 in the big leagues, marking him as good, but not great at actually preventing runs. Part of the problem might be that Stashak still has certain remnants of his effort to be a starter baked into the way he pitches. For one thing, he sets up on the first-base edge of the rubber. That’s somewhat common for a right-handed starter, because they tend to have pitches that run to their arm side, as well as ones that move to the glove side, and because that can sometimes create tough angles for opposing left-handed batters. Now that he works in relief, though, Stashak should consider sliding over on the rubber. Despite his high slot and largely vertical movement profile, his slider has a natural sweep to the glove side, so moving to the middle or the third-base side of the rubber might allow him to more aggressively use the slider—especially against left-handers. He threw the slider almost exactly half the time against fellow righties in MLB last season, but against lefties, his slider usage was under 23 percent. In the modern game, even a reliever needs the conviction to throw a breaking ball to opposite-handed batters, and to do it relatively often. Stashak, without an overpowering fastball or pinpoint command, needs to do so especially acutely. Moving on the rubber could help with that, and because Stashak’s fastball lacks much run to the arm side anyway, it wouldn’t much harm his ability to attack hitters with that pitch. More importantly, though, Stashak needs to quiet down some of the spine tilt he shows at release, in order to harness his stuff better and avoid hard contact. Some of that tilt comes from his stride pattern, one that keeps him closed and allows him to maximize torque, but some of it is the result of insufficient functional strength. He showed signs of having improved his posture during delivery during the spring, contributing to better command, so he might already be on the way to achieving that. If Stashak does improve his posture and enjoy better command, he might lose some of the rise on his fastball, as his release angle will drop slightly even if his arm slot remains the same. The arm might move more freely, though, in which case he could make up the loss of movement in one dimension with some armside run or even extra spin. He’d be far from the first hurler to see an uptick in spin or velocity after improving the same mechanical flaw. He might also get better movement (and thus, better results) with his changeup from that altered release point, especially because the pitch would be better able to work toward or past the outside corner against left-handed batters. This point of caution always deserves mention: Stashak has had an improbably successful pro career. He might not be inclined to make a significant change, lest he lose whatever magic (deception, perhaps, or effective wildness born of the sheer unpredictability of his misses) has carried him so far. If he embraces data-driven adjustments, though, he could blossom into an even better reliever, and thereby transform from a competent big-leaguer forever on the shuttle to the International League into a borderline relief ace, with a chance to reach free agency and leave the game a decade from now, his family set for life. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The Twins are in a particularly rough spot if the season is canceled. These three players help illustrate why.It seems likely that the coronavirus will define the calendar year of 2020, in all facets of life throughout the world, let alone the United States. In several years, the mention of 2020 is likely to be connected to almost nothing else, because of the sheer enormity of the situation we continue to face. In such a context, lost baseball games are obviously trivial. Still, those lost games are a tiny kind of tragedy, one that becomes and remains important to fans of the game long afterward. This piece is aimed at contemporaneously observing and documenting the Twins’ share of that space, by discussing in real time what the team and certain of its players are losing. Yesterday, Nick Nelson wrote an article here at Twins Daily that I heartily recommend, if you haven’t already read it. Within, he made the case that the 2020 season should be considered something wholly separate from a traditional season of record, if any baseball happens at all. It’s a painful truth, but I share Nick’s assessment. That said, the cancellation of a full season would be a disaster for the Twins, and today, we’ll examine three players whose individual predicaments make that especially clear. In the future, we might undertake a similar exercise with every player on the roster, but for now, we can begin with these three. (For today, we’ll leave aside the cases of Nelson Cruz, Trevor May, and Jake Odorizzi, who would be free agents before playing another game for the Twins if this took place. That’s a whole different can of worms.) Byron Buxton: The developmental clock is ticking more loudly on Buxton than on any other Twin, both because of his skill set and because of his service time stage. Remember, an agreement between the league and the MLB Players Association last month made clear that if the season is canceled, players will be granted exactly the same amount of service time they received in 2019, so a non-season would still push Buxton one year closer to free agency. More importantly, Buxton is 26. Given his profile, there’s no reason to expect him to be better in any future season than he projects to be in this one. He’s had extra time to recuperate from his season-ending shoulder injury from last year, but now, further lost time threatens to waste the youth in his elite legs. Moreover, his offensive approach (and especially his swing, which has undergone so many tweaks and reversions over the last several seasons) figures to be hurt more by the time off than most players’ will be. Buxton has had to fight to find consistency throughout his big-league career. Now, he’s in danger of losing what should be a prime season, and the Twins are in danger of losing a crucial season in the evaluation and instruction both of the player and of his health prospects. Mitch Garver: If Trevor Plouffe and Brian Dozier didn’t drive home the point hard enough, Twins fans could get another lesson in the cruel truths of aging curves from Garver. Here’s the thing: blooming late doesn’t earn one good karma, and thereby guarantee a long, graceful prime that lasts into one’s mid-30s. Plouffe and Dozier each became average-plus players only in their late 20s, but both then declined sharply as they entered their 30s. This is why good, proactive, fast-acting player development is so important, from the player’s perspective: becoming a star at 23 or 24 is wildly profitable, compared to doing the same at 28, as Garver just did. It also tends to lead to a kinder overall assessment of a player; guys who have just a great season or two before fading back to the fringe tend to be unfairly viewed as lucky or insubstantial. Garver is already 29. He’s four years from free agency, and (as a catcher) very unlikely to find friendly bidding if and when he does get there, even if he gets full credit for 2020 and reaches the open market at 33. More to the point, for Twins fans, it was never likely that Garver would replicate his rate-stat production of 2020 in any future season, but the prospective loss of his age-29 season makes it harder to envision that he could even retain his place as one of the AL’s best catchers. All of Garver’s improvements, at the plate and a few feet behind it, were real. That doesn’t mean they’ll survive his body getting a year older, even without a year of being beaten up behind the plate, given where he is on the aging curve and how his career has progressed to date. Michael Pineda: What a fragmented, bizarre, pockmarked career Pineda has had. His season as a rookie sensation in Seattle was nine years ago; it feels like 15. Now 31, Pineda still faces another 39 games worth of PED suspension, whenever baseball resumes. (If you think it will be wiped out, I invite you to consider more closely the attitudes of both the league and the union toward all PED suspensions and the men who incur them.) Pineda’s stuff has declined, shifted, been adjusted, and then been honed to work for him in the best way his command will allow. He’s found ways to stay healthy, after years and years of persistent injuries, but that hasn’t stopped him from struggling with inconsistency. Now, the Twins could lose Year One of a two-year deal in which year One was certainly the one on which they were betting more heavily. A year off might do Pineda’s arm some good, but often, his injury problems haven’t been confined to his arm, and his performance problems haven’t been tied to insufficient arm strength. If he doesn’t ever have another healthy, average-or-better season in the big leagues again, it will come as little surprise. For the Twins, that would be an important and painful disappointment, because he represents a key part of the bridge to their upcoming wave of young pitching. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

In 2019, Kepler appeared to be having a monster breakout, before an injury marred his final several weeks. However, there might be more to that regression than sheer health problems.If the Twins expected anything more than they got from Max Kepler in 2019, they did so unfairly. He was a star, not only playing his usual, laudable right field, and not only filling in admirably in center field for Byron Buxton, but bashing his way to 36 home runs and a 126 DRC+, according to Baseball Prospectus. Down the stretch, however, Kepler struggled, and it might not just have been because of the nagging injury to his left shoulder. Start chopping up Kepler’s exemplary seasonal stats, and some surprising things emerge. For one, he had a better season (in a small sample, of course) against left-handed pitchers than against righties. He lit up fellow lefties, hitting .293/.356/.524 against them. His BABIP with southpaws on the mound was a sturdy .296. Against righties, he was a solid-but-unspectacular .236/.328/.517 hitter, with an ugly .223 BABIP. Yet, throughout the first half, Kepler hit righties hard, too. At the All-Star break, Kepler stood at .263/.348/.543 against right-handers, despite an unimpressive .254 BABIP. Thereafter, however, he would hit righties at a meager .193/.295/.476 clip. In 166 plate appearances, he had a .168 second-half BABIP against righties. Some of the compromised contact, of course, likely stemmed from the weakness and limitations of his shoulder during the final several weeks. Still, he had low ground-ball and pop-up rates, pulled the ball consistently, and had a very high Hard contact rate, according to FanGraphs, north of 41 percent. The rest of the gap, then, might more easily be explained by a change in the way right-handed hurlers pitched Kepler—and that change, in turn, might be viewed as a reaction to adjustments Kepler made in 2019, which unlocked his full power potential but left him vulnerable in certain areas of the zone. After a series of important and valuable adjustments in 2018, Kepler came back in 2019 with even more exaggerated versions of those swing and approach changes in place. He stood more upright in the batter’s box, started his hands a hair higher, and lengthened his stride, creating more torque and generating a steeper bat path as he entered the strike zone. That’s how he had the highest average launch angle of his career, and how he so easily accessed his full power. It also opened up some holes in Kepler’s swing. He struggled with pitches at the top of the zone, and even with pitches in the lower, inner segment of the zone. By becoming selective enough to look for pitches on which he could extend his increasingly violent swing and slam the ball out of the park, Kepler made himself vulnerable on high and inside stuff. Here’s where righties pitched Kepler in the first half of 2019: Download attachment: Kepler.gif After the break, here’s the breakdown: Download attachment: Kepler 2.gif In addition to becoming much more careful in the areas of the zone where Kepler was most capable of doing damage, and thereby throwing more junk below the zone and off the plate away, right-handers began to look for opportunities to attack the top of the zone, and even to work down and in on Kepler. That’s a counterintuitive place for a righty to pitch to a lefty, and it undoubtedly led to some of the mistakes Kepler crushed for his 11 second-half homers against righties, but on balance, it paid off. If a 2020 season happens, it’s hard to predict whether Kepler will have worked to close this hole, or whether his fully healthy left shoulder will have allowed him to close it without a significant adjustment. There’s undeniable value in the approach he took last season, one lefties will continue to struggle to exploit, and one that allows him to have success even while vulnerable in certain ways. Still, it’s interesting to track the cat-and-mouse game between a good hitter like Kepler and the pitchers trying to gameplan against him. There will be opportunities, whether in 2020 or in 2021, for the league to target the weaknesses he showed late in 2019 even more acutely, and it might be up to Kepler to find a new movement pattern in the box that allows him response flexibility even as he maintains his damage-focused, highly successful work from 2019. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

Anytime you’re asked whether a sports record will ever fall, it’s a good idea to bet that it will. In this case, though, it’s a lot more complicated than that.In 1969, Harmon Killebrew tied his career best with 49 home runs. He also topped 700 plate appearances, for the only time in his career. For most of the season, he batted cleanup, although Billy Martin flipped Killebrew and Tony Oliva when the Twins faced left-handed pitchers. All told, Killebrew drove in 140 runs, which was not only a career high, but the Senators-cum-Twins’ record. Forty years later, that record stands, and only Justin Morneau has gotten within 10 of it. Will anyone ever break Killebrew’s record? The short answer, as Betteridge’s law of headlines would suggest, is a simple one: no. Some sequence of major changes to the game could result in that record becoming vulnerable, but based on the current composition of the game and its players, it’s well out of reach. More interesting than the simple answer, though, is a more nuanced one. Let’s take the time to offer that answer—to wrestle not just with whether a player is likely to drive in 140 or more in some season to come, but with the questions of what changes have made that so unlikely, and of what would have to happen in order for that condition to change. Since 2000, there have only been three seasons in which any player in MLB drove in 150 or more runs. Sammy Sosa drove in 160 in 2001, in his best season. Miguel Tejada pushed across 150 in 2006, and Alex Rodríguez pummeled his way to 156 RBI in 2007, when he won the MVP with the Yankees and opted out of his famous 10-year deal, eventually winning an even more lucrative one from the team. Eighteen player-seasons have eclipsed 140 RBI over the same span, but every one of those came before the 2010 campaign. In the decade that just ended, Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown-winning 2012 total of 139 RBI was the top number. Since offense bottomed out, and then began to rebound, the highest individual total in any season was the 133 runs driven home by Rockies slugger Nolan Arenado, in 2016. In the first four seasons after the last expansion, beginning in 1998, there were 70 individual seasons of 120 or more RBI, and 34 of at least 130. Over the last four seasons, there have been just 13 and four such seasons, respectively. There are two key reasons for this: the changing structure of the modern lineup, and the changing offensive profile of non-elite big-leaguers. As stat-savvy fans are well aware, sabermetric explorations have found that the ideal place for a lineup’s best hitter is not third or fourth, but second. Since about 2015, teams have embraced that fact, and the nature of the top segments of the batting order have transformed. Teams put their best hitters at the top of the order, even if those hitters have ample power—and they usually do. Rank every season since 1904 by the league’s aggregate slugging average from the top two places in the order, and the leaderboard begins: 2019, 2017, 2018, 2016. The .460 slugging average from the top two slots in 2019, easily the highest ever, tells the story in concise fashion. Where tablesetters once batted, there are now big eaters. More to the point, though, every hitter in baseball is becoming more run producer than table setter. As teams have become more sophisticated in their evaluations of hitters, they’ve stopped giving any real time to players without power—and in some cases, have even helped players who would never previously have been trained to slug to do just that. The player with a .360 or better on-base percentage, but little power, is nearly extinct, for a number of complementary reasons. For the first time since the first expansion of the league in 1961, we’ve now gone more than two decades without any expansion at all. That’s eliminated a key driver of gaudy offensive numbers of all kinds: there just aren’t enough bad pitchers in baseball to facilitate them. That, far more than performance-enhancing drugs or even the fluctuating liveliness of the baseball, accounts for the fact that no one has seriously threatened a home-run record in over a decade. There aren’t easy marks against whom great hitters can rack up huge home-run totals, and there aren’t wild hurlers against whom non-dangerous hitters can rack up walks. Nor, with the ever-increasing average athleticism of players and the even more rapidly evolving intelligence of defensive alignments, are there places for such hitters to deposit singles. Teams select for power, because a hitter bereft of power has never had less chance to be successful in the majors. As they cull the talent pool that way, and retrain certain players to hit more long balls, they reduce the number of baserunners any player is likely to have on when they bat, because their lesser teammates are more likely to have driven themselves or others in. As the league drags its feet on potential expansion (navigating their way toward the best balance of demand in a new market and the ability to manipulate current cities when existing teams need new ballparks or tax breaks), great pitching also makes it harder for batters to run up huge individual numbers. It doesn’t help that these trends have also pushed strikeout rates higher, depressing batting average potential; great RBI seasons almost always involve a player batting at least .300, a wildly rare occurrence in the modern game. All of that could change, someday. The ball could stay as lively as we saw it be in 2019, and two new teams could be added, and rule changes could force teams to reconceptualize their offenses and make it a plan, once again, to maximize OBP at the top of the order and save their sluggers for its heart. If that all happens while Luis Arráez is batting atop the Twins order, some Minnesota slugger could eclipse Killebrew. For now, however, his record seems very safe. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article