Matthew Trueblood

As a new book illustrates, the Twins' failure to get anything out of Chris Colabello had much to do with the organization's broader shortcomings. Josh Donaldson's arrival speaks to their evolution since.Josh Donaldson has a lot in common with the Twins. He’s as dedicated to hitting the ball hard in the air to his pull field as they are, and thus, he’s a perfect philosophical fit for the team. Several years ago, however, the team muffed its chance to get the best out of Chris Colabello, the first player ever to thrive under the tutelage of the hitting coach who would similarly help Donaldson. A new book on the baseball industry’s changing understanding of the swing makes clear that, while Colabello could never have become the player Donaldson is, it’s not a coincidence that he broke out only in the season after he departed Minnesota and joined Donaldson on the Blue Jays. Out Tuesday, “Swing Kings” is a book by Jared Diamond, the Wall Street Journal baseball writer. It chronicles the influential roles of several independent hitting coaches who, from outside the structure of organized baseball, changed the way the game is played at the MLB level by bringing a new offensive philosophy to the fore. Among those coaches is Bobby Tewksbary, a former player who topped out in the independent Canadian-American Association. He was a teammate of Colabello, there, and the two are the same age. They became friends, and when (after giving up on playing himself) Tewksbary discovered some counterintuitive and highly valuable things about the nature of the swing, he made Colabello his first guinea pig. Colabello began smashing the Can-Am Association to bits, finally drawing the Twins’ interest. As the book explains, however, neither Colabello nor Tewksbary considered the team a perfect fit for Colabello’s newfound, power-centric swing and approach. Tewksbary called the team, then run by the old guard that surrounded Terry Ryan and the rest of his front office, “anti-progressive.” No sooner was Colabello brought into the ranks of affiliated ball, than the Twins’ minor-league coaches were trying to change him. One number helps tell the story of Colabello’s frustrating failure with the Twins, and his subsequent success in Toronto. With Minnesota in 2013 and 2014, Colabello swung at the first pitch just 28.6 percent of the time. With his overall contact rate (just over 65 percent of his swings resulted in contact during his Twins tenure), being that selective early in the count spelled disaster. He struck out 30.9 percent of the time while he was a Twin, which torpedoed his overall performance. In 2015, when Colabello hit .321/.367/.520 for the Blue Jays, he swung at the first pitch in 43.5 percent of his plate appearances. That early aggressiveness not only allowed him to avoid strikeouts better, but removed the danger that he might let the most hittable pitch he would see go by. He pushed his ground-ball rate down and consistently drove the ball for the first (and last) time during his big-league career, because the Blue Jays allowed him to take the aggressive approach that suited his swing. At the time, the Twins were not only behind the analytical curve, but strikingly rigid in their approach to advising players and building in-game strategies. They were wrong about how to best approach big-league pitching, but more damningly, they were highly confident that they were right, and they allowed no quarter to players who wanted to do things a different way. All of that has changed. Tellingly, the Twins not only sit on the cutting edge of the industry’s advancements in understanding all phases and facets of the game, but treat every player as a unique case. They permit, and even encourage, different approaches from different players, rather than applying any single principle with a broad brush. Donaldson’s arrival is the payoff for that evolution. Another, unheralded Tewksbary client (who initially heard about him because of Colabello) introduced Donaldson to Tewksbary prior to 2013, and Tewksbary so helped Donaldson emerge as an MVP-caliber slugger that, in 2015, Donaldson brought Tewksbary along as his pitcher when he competed in the Home Run Derby. A player of Donaldson’s personality, with his drive and his confidence in the way he does things, would not have signed with the Ryan-era Twins, even if they had made him the most substantial offer. He’d have seen their unreceptive attitude toward unusual approaches, their inflexibility, and their lack of imagination as disqualifying. Diamond’s book stands as a reminder that the Twins have moved from the back of the pack to the front, or very nearly so, where analytical savvy is concerned, but also that they paid a price for taking so long to get here. 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

This week, with the help of Out of the Park, we’ve simulated the 91/19 World Series, a seven-game battle between the 1991 Twins and the 2019 Twins. __________________ Tom Kelly’s strategy in this World Series is becoming clear: he intends to zig wherever Rocco Baldelli’s club expects a zag. In a 7-3 Game 3 victory that puts Kelly’s 1991 team ahead 2-1 in the best-of-seven, every unexpected maneuver paid off—especially the controversial choice to tab rookie Denny Neagle as the starting pitcher.Neagle worked into the seventh inning, holding the hosts scoreless. He demonstrated extraordinary pitch efficiency, and fearlessly faced down the gauntlet of right-handed sluggers slotted into the middle of Baldelli’s batting order. Whether 20-game winner Scott Erickson will recover smoothly from the affront of having a pitcher without a big-league win slotted into the rotation ahead of him remains to be seen, but for one night, Kelly’s decision to avoid Erickson’s contact-heavy profile against the record-setting 2019 offense worked. In the first game of the set played at chilly Target Field, Baldelli called upon Michael Pineda, looking to sustain the momentum the team won when José Berríos led them to a Game 2 victory. No sooner had Pineda taken the mound, though, than Kelly’s ambush lineup went to its work. Leading off again, Chuck Knoblauch caught the 2019 Twins napping with a drag bunt toward third base, taking advantage of Miguel Sanó playing too deep and of Pineda’s tendency to fall off the mound toward first base at the end of his delivery. Pineda got to the ball, but had no chance to throw out Knoblauch at first base. It’s hard to blame Sanó or Pineda for being ill-prepared; Knoblauch didn’t manage a single bunt hit during the 1991 regular season. Still, the tactic seemed to fluster Pineda, and because of Kelly’s new lineup construction, he had no time to recover. On a 1-0 pitch, Kent Hrbek blasted his third home run of the series, into the planters just above the right-field wall. A batter later, Shane Mack fell behind 0-2 to Pineda, but spoiled a pitch, worked his way back to a full count, and then launched a home run into the bullpen beyond left-center field. In a blink, it was 3-0 in favor of Kelly’s agents of chaos, and those who had raised an eyebrow at Kelly’s unusual sequence of pregame decisions were left to semantic arguments. Mack is just maturing into a full-time player, rather than the potent but platoon-protected bench bat he’d been in the past, and in the vast majority of his starts in 1991, he batted either sixth or seventh. He only started twice in the cleanup slot during the regular campaign. Kelly has already written Mack into that spot three times in this series, all against right-handed starters, and it’s paid off, thanks in large part to the trickle-up effects of moving Knoblauch and Hrbek to the top of the order. Mack’s thump has rendered Dan Gladden’s absence almost an afterthought, and as the series shifted to the smaller left field of Target Field, it became a less nervous swap for Kelly and his staff. Pineda’s slider was erratic, and his fastball command was loose. As tends to happen on his bad nights, he was largely in the zone with his heat, but unable to locate to the quadrants for which he was aiming. The 1991 Twins ignored the slider, teed off on fastballs, and squared him up repeatedly. In the second, only a pair of stellar plays by Byron Buxton in center field—cutting off a Mike Pagliarulo line drive toward the gap in right-center field to hold him to a two-out single, then making a diving play on a similar liner from Knoblauch to retire the side—kept the visitors from extending their 3-0 lead even further. In the fourth, right fielder Gene Larkin led off with a double, and two batters later, Knoblauch brought him home with a single up the middle, a sharp grounder that squeezed between the shifted Jorge Polanco and Luis Arráez. Meanwhile, Neagle cruised. The rookie defused the vaunted Bomba Squad like a seasoned special agent, a dour expression masking any jitters about pitching on such a grand stage in the same city where he pitched collegiate ball. Even when C.J. Cron dented the chain link of the fence in left-center with a leadoff double in the third inning, Neagle kept his jaw set and took care of business. He got a lazy fly ball from Eddie Rosario, a breaking ball worming its way to the end of his bat, and then struck out Buxton after a tough at-bat. A fastball on the hands of Polanco induced a pop-up to Knoblauch, and the 2019 club’s rally died without so much as advancing Cron. Baldelli hasn’t managed with tremendous urgency to this point in the series, and that became particularly pronounced in the middle innings of Game 3. He lifted Pineda in favor of Ryne Harper, who delivered a clean inning as a good matchup for the right-handed Kirby Puckett and Mack. The next pitcher out of the bullpen, however, was Matt Magill, and Baldelli would leave his fringy pensman in to throw 47 pitches over 2 ⅔ innings. Baldelli also slotted Arráez into the second place in the order against the left-handed Neagle, a gamble that briefly seemed poised to pay big dividends. In the bottom of the sixth, after Neagle had retired 11 in a row, he came back to the top of the order for a third trip through. Polanco drew a two-out walk, and then Arráez doubled over the shallowly-positioned Mack and Puckett, to the gap in left-center field. Polanco held at third on the play, and Neagle then walked Nelson Cruz. Brian Harper and pitching coach Dick Such visited the mound, but Kelly elected to give his young starter a chance to work out of the jam again. That brought up Mitch Garver, who worked a 2-2 count, then crushed a ball on a high arc toward the left-field bleachers. Lady Luck didn’t attend the poke in its flight, however, as Mack hauled the ball in with his back to the wall in straight-away left field. A would-be game-tying grand slam became the final out of the inning, and the game seemed to slip out of the 2019 club’s reach for good. It took just two batters for Kelly’s band of assassins to stomp on the throats of their wounded opponents. Magill’s second inning of work began with a Hrbek single past Arráez, despite the shift that had Arráez positioned about 210 feet from home plate in straight-away right field. Then, Puckett swatted a fly ball to the same spot as Garver, with an identical exit velocity of 99.4 miles per hour off the bat, but landed it in the second row of the bleachers, just beyond Rosario’s best Spider-Man impression at the left-field wall. Each side kept their best bullpen powder dry, thanks to Kelly’s profound faith in Neagle, and thanks to the hole in which Pineda put the 2019 team early. Baldelli seems unable to keep up with Kelly’ uncharacteristic, counterintuitive, highly modern tactics, and the power of the 1991 team has caught its more famous slugging counterpart off-guard. It will be interesting to see whether Baldelli turns back to Jake Odorizzi, on short rest, in order to avoid falling behind 3-1 in Game 4. In the meantime, fans of the 1991 Twins will savor the feeling of having dodged a bullet on Garver’s drive, and of having outsmarted the notorious innovators of the 2019 team in order to put two quick runs on the board in a key game. You can find the boxscore and pitch-by-pitch results for Game One attached below. If you would like to learn more about Out of the Park 21, please click on this link. If you would like to try it, you can also download it for 10% off the regular price using the code TWINSDAILY. Finally, be sure to go back and see the recaps for: Game 1 Game 2 Download attachment: Mnnesota 2019 Twins @ Minnesota 1991 Twins Game Log Game 3.pdf Download attachment: MLB Box Score, Minnesota 2019 Twins at Minnesota 1991 Twins Game 3.pdf Click here to view the article

Homer Bailey made huge strides after a mid-July trade in 2019. To be as good in 2020, he needs to lock in a few adjustments, and make one or two more.The additions of Josh Donaldson and Kenta Maeda defined the Twins’ offseason, but if the season eventually goes forward, they might benefit as much from the earlier work they did to bolster their rotation. Homer Bailey is an under-the-radar addition to the pitching staff, but not an unimportant one. Under the tutelage of Wes Johnson, he could build upon his 2019 success in ways that go far beyond his increasingly famous splitter. Read about Bailey’s bounceback campaign last year, and you’ll be inundated with talk of his splitter. It was the pitch that saved his career, and using it more often—including finding the courage to do so even against right-handed batters—certainly put him on the path toward the success that earned him a guaranteed deal this winter. However, in paying close attention to the remarks made by Twins brass when they signed Bailey, it becomes clear that it’s not just the splitter that intrigues them. They specifically took interest in Bailey’s adjustments in the second half, and his increased splitter usage began long before he was traded from the Royals to the Athletics, in mid-July. One obvious adjustment Bailey made, beyond any tinkering with his pitch mix, was to slide over on the rubber. He went from being a slightly crossfire righty setting up on the third-base edge of the pitching rubber to using the middle of that rubber, changing the angles his pitches created for hitters and allowing him to take a more direct mechanical line to home plate. In so doing, he added heat to his fastball. His average velocity on the heater ticked up by about 0.3 miles per hour after the trade, according to Statcast, and so did his average perceived velocity—he lost no extension at release by making the mechanical tweak. His average spin rate rose, too, from 2,071 revolutions per minute (RPM) to 2,117. None of those changes are large, but they matter. The biggest (apparent) change the A’s asked of him wasn’t to move over on the rubber, but to take that more direct line to the plate, and to raise his arm slot to match. Bailey did it, and the result was that everything he threw achieved more vertical plane. His curveball lost about an inch of lateral sweep, but no vertical depth, and since his fastball rose slightly more, the curve came to tunnel better off of the heater than it previously had. More importantly, as he leaned ever more heavily on the four-seamer and splitter, those two pitches could stay on the same plane for longer, with the fastball nipping the bottom of the strike zone, and the splitter diving out of it. Download attachment: Brooksbaseball-Chart (5).jpeg By starting that splitter at a higher point, Bailey allowed it to tumble freely, but end up slightly less far below the zone, tempting more hitters. He induced swings on 52 percent of his splitters before the trade to Oakland, and on 58.6 percent of them afterward. He was both throwing more strikes and getting hitters to chase more when he threw non-strikes. He also stayed out of danger zones more consistently. His fastball spin is below-average, so when he elevates the pitch, it tends to flatten out—and get hammered. In Kansas City, 25.7 percent of his heaters sailed to or above the top of the zone. In Oakland, that figure dropped to 20.6 percent. The slide on the rubber and the change of arm angle are good signs that what Bailey did for the A’s down the stretch is partially sustainable. However, after running a very slight reverse platoon split in Kansas City, Bailey fell victim to a severe and scary one in Oakland: With Oakland, v. LHB: 156 PA, 37 K, 7 BB, 4 HR, .197/.237/.327 opponent batting lineWith Oakland, v. RHB: 151 PA, 31 K, 8 BB, 5 HR, .314/.353/.471 opponent batting lineWe mustn’t draw overly confident conclusions from such small samples, but those results point to a fact of Bailey’s new fastball-splitter approach: that pitch pairing works best against opposite-handed batters. Bailey’s fastball has above-average armside run, which is why it mirrors the spin of the splitter and creates such a neat vertical tunnel with it, but as he raised his arm angle and changed the alignment of his delivery, he lost the ability to consistently move the ball horizontally, away from same-handed batters. There’s good news here, too, though: the Twins have the personnel to help Bailey adjust again. One way in which the Twins (who are otherwise in lockstep with the industry leaders in advancing and modernizing pitching) still seem to hew toward the old school is their use of the sinker. Rather than cratering last year, as Johnson replaced Garvin Alston, the team’s sinker usage merely dipped, and they still threw them more often than all but six other teams. Bailey junked his sinker in 2019, but after moving over on the rubber and changing his mechanics, he’s now a good candidate to add the pitch back into his arsenal. A good sinker, running in on the hands of right-handed batters, could help him manage contact better, and he has more room to create that running action, thanks to the realignment. The other thing a sinker might help do, against right-handers, is to set up a breaking ball. Neither of Bailey’s are especially good at this point in time, but his whiff rate on the slider spiked impressively in September. Here’s where, inevitably, we enter into something of a guessing game. In watching video of Bailey’s slider, from early in the season and from September, the only especially obvious changes are to his arm angle and delivery, about which we already know. He used the same grip early on as he did later, slightly flexing the index finger, laying the middle finger more flatly across the seams, and extending his thumb underneath the ball. Using the publicly available video, I can’t say for sure, but there appears to be one small (but potentially important) change, despite the apparent sameness. In September, it appears that Bailey had altered the way the pitch comes out of his hand, very slightly. Instead of coming off the middle finger and index finger simultaneously, he seems to hold contact with the tip of his index finger for a millisecond longer, helping create more consistent action, down and away from a right-handed batter. The numbers show he achieved slightly more average movement in both dimensions in September, but the adjustment (if it exists) wasn’t Earth-shattering. Nonetheless, something he did with his slider near the end of the season worked, and worked well. The Twins have access to better information than we do. There’s high-speed video of Bailey’s slider somewhere in their database, and if he did change the way he released the pitch, they know it. That could be the final thing the Twins believe they know about Bailey, and which we don’t know, and can’t know, except by asking. For what it’s worth, it’s also true that the Royals lag behind the industry in embracing the value of high-speed video, whereas the A’s use it more expansively, so they might well have helped Bailey in a way Kansas City could not. If that change is real, then it’s likely that Johnson will find a way to bring it along even further. Bailey closely mirrors another right-handed starter the Twins acquired two years ago, who had a good four-seam fastball and a nasty splitter, but struggled with every other pitch in his arsenal. Jake Odorizzi became more mechanically efficient prior to his 2019 breakout, which improved both his velocity and his command. Johnson helped him along from there, tinkering with the action of his cutter and slider, and aiding him in developing the sinker into a weapon against fellow righties. While Odorizzi’s seemingly intrinsic feel for spin is far superior to Bailey’s, there’s no reason to doubt that Bailey can be similarly effective given his track record, his veteran mindset, his demonstrated willingness to tinker, and the team’s proficiency in the skills on which he still needs to improve. If he can stay healthy, and if the season even takes place, Bailey could be a much better hurler than most Twins fans are expecting. 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 of the hallmarks of the Twins' record-setting offense in 2019 was the way they pounced on pitchers early. Doing that consistently in 2020, without getting swing-happy, will be a new challenge.Last season, big-league teams had the highest aggregate OPS on record, in plate appearances in which they swung at the first pitch. The league also swung at the first pitch more often, on average, than it had in any season since 2001. The Twins rode that rising tide, and even helped steer it: no American League club swung as often on the first pitch as did Minnesota. They also had an impressive .520 collective slugging percentage in those plate appearances, because the team’s excellent power paired perfectly with the aeroball. Now, they face the challenge of remaining on the attack in 2020, without becoming overly anxious. It hasn’t been the Twins’ custom to swing at the first pitch at anything like their 2019 rate. Until the end of 2018, of course, the team’s offensive identity could best be embodied by Joe Mauer, whose patience (and especially, whose reluctance to ambush the first pitch) was his defining characteristic. That didn’t always mean that the rest of the team took Mauer’s mentality into the box with them, but he was the heartbeat of the offense for well over a decade, and thus, the team came to resemble him in certain key tendencies. It wasn’t until 2013 that the Twins, having experienced two nightmarish seasons at the tail end of their run of AL Central success in the 2000s, started to hold hitter back from hacking at the first pitch, but once they did so, they did it firmly. I wrote about their apparently hard take signals on first pitches for Baseball Prospectus in 2015. They were embracing the OBP-focused mindset of the Moneyball Athletics, but they were a decade too late to the party. Because it would take them another several years to modernize their front office, however, and because they similarly lagged in progressive thinking in the dugout, and because of Mauer’s veteran influence, the team remained one of the least aggressive on the first pitch even after the rest of the league started to attack more often. Sometimes, taking too long to make one change means having to pivot more quickly than others when the trend lines reverse themselves, and it creates a snowball effect. With Rocco Baldelli on the top step and Mauer in retirement, the 2019 Twins became a team past whom you couldn’t hope to sneak an early strike. While hitters have been slow in making the adjustment to swing more early in counts, pitchers have been even slower to stop throwing predictable fastballs on the first pitch, and that means it’s still a good idea to be more aggressive on the first pitch than most hitters are. Even hitters who are otherwise disciplined are learning to hunt hittable strikes where they’re most abundant, at the front ends of plate appearances. Max Kepler swung at 40.5 percent of first pitches last year, against a league average still hovering just south of 29 percent. Still, much of the Twins’ first-pitch damage came from hitters who will be either wearing other uniforms or playing reduced roles whenever the 2020 season begins. Jonathan Schoop and Eddie Rosario paced the team. Mitch Garver and Luis Arráez each took the first pitch over 80 percent of the time, making them two of the most selective early-count hitters in the league. Every hitter’s approach needs to be neatly tailored to their skill set, and Kepler, Arráez, and Garver nicely demonstrate the flexibility of the Twins’ individual plans for their hitters these days. They don’t need to make major adjustments in the way they approach the first pitch. At a team level, though, as they get more disciplined and patient hitters, the Twins will need to remain opportunistic, forcing pitchers to handle them carefully from the moment they enter the batter’s box. That responsibility falls mostly to Baldelli, along with Edgar Varela and Rudy Hernández. It’s not an easy balance to strike, but the team demonstrated its ability to find it last year. 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' second baseman is profoundly difficult to gameplan against. Then again, we've got some unexpected free time in which to try it. It’s nice to have a knack for making contact, and especially nice to be elite in that regard. Twins second baseman Luis Arráez isn’t the projected American League batting champion, though, simply because he projects to strike out less than 10 percent of the time, in a league that could whiff in 24 percent of all plate appearances.Plenty of batters who make frequent contact do so on the ground, or towards predictable and easily defended areas of the diamond. In his stellar rookie season, Arráez avoided those traps. He showed an almost Joe Mauer-like ability to smack medium-strength line drives into the areas just beyond infielders and in front of outfielders, especially on the left side of the diamond. He’s excruciatingly hard to defend. Even Mauer, however, eventually saw opponents begin to realign their defense, swinging their outfielders well toward left field in an effort to foil his opposite-field approach. Let’s ask ourselves, then, how teams might adjust to Arráez, too. Since he’s both slow-footed and lacking in power, there are certain ways they can do so, but it will take something we’d normally regard as radical and irrational, and it might well be that Arráez could counteradjust and foil those defensive strategies. Above is Arráez’s spray chart, color-coded by batted-ball trajectory, for 2019. It is extraordinary. The sheer number of line drives, which are hard to defend even for a well-positioned team, is impressive, and the way he both peppered the shallow outfield area with liners and drove the ball to the alleys with relative consistency makes for headaches for any outfield coordinator. Arráez even sprays his grounders a bit more than most left-handed hitters do, deterring would-be defensive shifts. One strategy teams frequently used against Mauer, however, could also allow them to pose problems for Arráez. Because Mauer didn’t run well, aggressive teams would move their second basemen a handful of steps out into right field, despite keeping both their third basemen and shortstops in standard positioning on the left side. Since Arráez doesn’t hit many balls hard, a second baseman could play him quite deep, widening his lateral range, and still have plenty of time to both reach the ball and throw out the plodding youngster. Meanwhile, whereas Mauer was capable of pulling the ball hard down the first-base line at times, Arráez did little of that last season. Thus, the first baseman could plausibly play well off the line, further cutting down the space into which Arráez might fit a hit on the right side. On the other side, teams have a chance to get even more radical. Again, Arráez doesn’t exactly scorch the ball most of the time, especially when going the other way with a pitch on the outer part of the plate. That could allow the third baseman to play drastically shallow, cutting off many grounders that would otherwise become hits. In turn, that would permit the shortstop to play much deeper than normal, handling hot shots to the left side of the infield and in position to go back on and snag some of the lofted line drives Arráez turned into singles last year. Both middle infielders, in fact, would essentially be playing rover roles, taking hits that fell between the infield and outfield last year and turning them into outs. That leaves the outfielders. The right fielder would, in all likelihood, do well to play Arráez more or less straight-away. Like Mauer, Arráez tends to drill the ball when he does turn on it and elevate, so the only high-percentage play to that field is to play it straight and be ready to catch those line drives when they’re close enough. The center fielder’s job is harder. Arráez puts pressure on them by hitting to both gaps, and by occasionally lofting a ball to dead center field that requires them to go back to the wall. So many more of his batting balls are lower-trajectory hits to the middle of the diamond, though, that center fielders should still play quite shallowly against him. Given his lack of top-end speed, a good center fielder should be able to hold him to a double even if he gets the ball over his head, and those types of hits off Arráez’s bat are much less common than ones that drop in front of a center fielder in standard position. In left field, Arráez varies from Mauer. He doesn’t hit the ball hard down the line often. He’s more prone to drive it toward the gap. As a result, the left fielder needs to stay off the line, resulting in a pinched alignment, but he can’t play too shallowly. In this scenario, he’d be able to afford to play at average depth, ready to go back and collect well-struck would-be doubles to the gap, because the shortstop would help cover shallow flies and liners. Download attachment: InkedJake Odorizzi_LI.jpg It’s interesting to imagine how Tony Gwynn would have handled defensive shifts. He had an extraordinary ability to punch the ball through the gap on the left side of the infield; he surpassed 3,000 hits by honing that skill. Had teams positioned themselves as flexibly and proactively during his playing days as they do now, however, Gwynn would have had to come up with a new way to find hits, retaining that touch when the hole was left open but able to scorch the ball through the right side when teams overcompensated. Of course, were he playing now, he’d also have to contend with much more strikeout-focused, high-velocity pitching than he saw in the 1980s and 1990s. Arráez shares a number of key traits with Gwynn, even if the comparison seems unfair. It’s fun to imagine how a team might try to torture and negate his skill set, but it’s also important to remembr that Arráez has shown a balanced skill set at the plate. If forced to, he might well make a major adjustment and become an equally dangerous (though fundamentally different) hitter. 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

Here are five players for whom certain aspects of the advanced system's projection could be wildly wrong, and for which the system doesn't allow flexibility.Yesterday, I broke down the way projection systems can fail to capture the real variance of a forthcoming baseball season, using the Twins’ PECOTA projections as an example. Here, now, are five key projections that, while fixed in all PECOTA simulations, seem highly uncertain, and which would have a huge impact on the Twins if they swung widely in either direction: Byron Buxton’s Playing Time We already discussed this one, but it’s worth touching on again. If Buxton gets just half the number of plate appearances for which he’s projected, he not only forces the team to cover his absence and install a (likely) lesser hitter into the lineup, but also loses the chance to have the overwhelming defensive impact he has when he’s positioned in center field. Josh Donaldson’s Defense PECOTA pegs Donaldson for -3 Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA). That seems crazy, and it’s probably flat-out wrong. In the past, other defensive metrics have consistently rated Donaldson much more highly than FRAA, and the eye test says those metrics are right. However, defensive statistics remain muddier and harder to assess than offensive ones. If it were to turn out that Donaldson has little defensive impact on the Minnesota infield, the team would have a weakness the public has generally overlooked. If he does save them a bunch of runs with his glove, despite his age and FRAA’s pessimism, then you can mentally tack an extra win or two onto each of the decile projections for the team above. Mitch Garver’s Defense Before he transformed himself under the guidance of catching coordinator Tanner Swanson prior to 2019, Garver had a poor reputation as a pitch framer, and BP’s stats on that skill matches the scouting report. As a result, and even after the stats reflected his growth into an average-plus framer in 2019, PECOTA forecasts -8 FRAA from the Twins’ catcher for 2020. It’s worth noting that other catchers have had good seasons of framing after years of struggle, only to go backward. However, PECOTA is probably wrong again, here, because we know that Garver has made substantial and (presumably) sustainable changes to both the physical and the mental way he receives the ball. This speaks to something else that is worth noting, because Garver also isn’t a darling of PECOTA on the offensive side. Player development has become a much more real, tangible, and replicable practice over the last several years. Projection systems, as currently constructed, have very limited ability to bake that in. Even a perfectly tuned system will miss on players who have undergone a large, fundamental transformation over a short period of time, because one of the primary responsibilities of a projection system is to avoid being fooled by small samples and random fluctuation. Eventually, and particularly in light of the availability of such granular data (exit velocities, launch angles and directions, pitch velocity and movement, spin rate, sprint speed, defensive positioning, and so on), the industry could and should look to move to a first-principles projection system—one founded on everything a player does, from their tendency to chase pitches outside the zone to their hard-hit rate and clustering of launch angles, rather than on every outcome a player produces. In the meantime, however, systems have to contend with the risk that a player who appears to have undergone a legitimate breakout could have done so with smoke and mirrors. As humans who know the humans who build these systems, we can sometimes allow ourselves to acknowledge that the system’s limitations are greater than our own. Jake Odorizzi’s Innings Total In the past, Odorizzi has often had trouble pitching deep into games, and he’s sometimes had trouble staying healthy. For a mixture of the two reasons, the architects of BP’s depth charts have him listed for just 149 innings in 2020. Because the depth charts fix innings pitched, and not batters faced, Odorizzi remains a low-mileage starter even when checking his higher-percentile outcomes. That’s a fair way for the system to solve the complex problem of projecting both performance and health risks, but in practice, Odorizzi has pitched at least 159 innings in five of the last six seasons. That 159 was his total last year, and was held down, in part, by the team’s careful usage of him in September, to ensure he was ready to pitch in the postseason. Given the changes Odorizzi has made to his approach, pitch mix, and mechanics, and given that he’s starting the season with a clean slate, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which he throws 25 more innings than he’s projected for in 2020. It’s also possible he could pitch 50 fewer, and while the Twins have above-average pitching depth, that would be a major blow. Neither risk is captured by the decile projections. Trevor Larnach’s and Alex Kirilloff’s Playing Time While PECOTA produces projections for thousands of players, only the ones who are listed on Baseball Prospectus’s depth charts go into team record projections. That means that Kirilloff and Larnach, both of whom are off those depth charts entirely, are ignored by the system. From a downside perspective, that doesn’t matter much, because the system also doesn’t reflect the risk of a more serious Buxton injury, or that of a prolonged absence for Eddie Rosario or Nelson Cruz. However, it misses some upside, because both Larnach and Kirilloff are high-level hitters who have succeeded at the upper levels of the minors and have impressed observers this spring. The system likes both hitters, too. Their median projections are for a 102 (Kirilloff) and 103 (Larnach) DRC+, making them above-average hitters. If either were to reach the big leagues and perform at their 80th-percentile level (a 116 and 117 DRC+, respectively), they’d be solid contributors, providing more value even than Marwin González or Rosario are likely to. Projection systems are still more accurate and more interesting than pundits and opinion polls. However, if you really want to see a full picture of the season ahead, you have to look hard at them, and ask yourself what those systems are missing. When you do so, you realize that baseball is even less predictable than we tend to believe. Click here to view the article

Projection systems are more robust than ever... but there are still whole swaths of baseball's unpredictability for which they cannot account.According to Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA system, the Twins have a 76.6-percent chance of winning the AL Central in 2020. FanGraphs pegs them just a bit lower, at 55.0 percent to win the division. FanGraphs gives them a 68.3-percent chance to make the playoffs in any form; BP has them at a gaudy 87.5 percent. Both systems project them for over 90 wins, though fewer than 95. However, as I was preparing the Twins’ team preview for Prospectus last week, I found myself noting ways in which PECOTA (and all projection systems, in fact) is unable to properly capture the risk and the upside of a team like Minnesota. First, consider injury risk. At Baseball Prospectus, the only way in which those risks are accounted for is through the manual process of building team depth charts. Because Byron Buxton strongly tends to get hurt and miss portions of each season, he’s not projected for as full a share of the playing time in center field as he’ll enjoy whenever he’s healthy. However, the playing time he is projected to receive (75 percent of center field innings, and 490 total plate appearances) isn’t treated as a variable by the system. The format for team previews at Prospectus this spring involves building out and breaking down the decile projections for each team—that is, the record each club would have given a 90th-percentile outcome, an 80th-percentile outcome, and so on, down to 10th. The idea is to sketch out how PECOTA captures the variance possible at a team level, based on the vagaries of individual performances. The decile projections are created using the individual decile projections PECOTA generates, with each team projection representing the outcome of 500 simulations wherein each team’s players all perform at that decile and the rest of the league is kept at their median projection. Here are the Twins’ decile projections for 2020, as of last week: 90th percentile: 109-5380th percentile: 104-5870th percentile: 100-6260th percentile: 98-6450th percentile: 94-6840th percentile: 90-7230th percentile: 86-7620th percentile: 81-8110th percentile: 74-88That seems, at first blush, like a fair depiction of the real possibility spectrum for this team. The Twins are likely to be very good, and the only way they won’t at least be a respectable Wild Card contender is if the wheels truly come off. However, in all nine of those amalgamated projections, and in all 4,500 simulations that underpin them, Byron Buxton goes to the plate 490 times, and is the Twins’ center fielder for 75 percent of their defensive innings. In all of the simulations, José Berríos pitches 184 innings, Michael Pineda pitches 100, and Rich Hill pitches 52. The system is only capturing variance created by players performing in unexpected ways; it doesn’t see injury risk. For that matter, the system also only reflects variance in offensive performance. In all those simulations, Buxton (with his fixed playing time) is worth 20 runs as a defender in center field. In all of them, Miguel Sanó (whom BP has pegged for 65 percent of the playing time at first base, five percent at third base, and five percent at DH, reflecting some of his own injury history) is worth eight runs as a defender at first base, because typically, third baseman who make the transition to first base while still in their prime tend to be good fielders there. PECOTA has no engine for systematically scaling defensive production upward or downward, and even if it had one, it would be hard to decide how to use it. Would a player having a bad season at the plate be expected to struggle to the same extent in the field? Would a guy who turned out to be a better-than-expected defender lose something at bat because of his focus on defense and the wear and tear of playing harder in the field? PECOTA isn’t alone in not being able to answer these questions, and BP isn’t alone in being unwilling to attempt to calibrate all of that manually. Playoff odds and other team-level projections, like the atomic player projections of which they consist, are fraught with oversimplifications and unexamined axes of upside and downside. This is part one of a two-part exploration of the ways projection systems miss certain elements of the Twins' risk and upside. Check back tomorrow for five specific examples drawn from the Twins' individual projections. Click here to view the article

Byron Buxton will always have swing-and-miss in his game, but he's shored up his vulnerability to whiffs over the last two years, especially in one key respect.Though Byron Buxton has had a long, uneven, complex development curve, it’s clear that he turned a new corner in 2019. After going back to the setup and swing mechanics he had trusted in high school late in the 2018 season, Buxton blossomed into the kind of multi-dimensional, dangerous hitter on which Twins fans had dreamed for years. He not only set a new career high in average exit velocity and hard-hit rate, but did so by wide margins, while slashing his strikeout rate. There were many adjustments and improvements involved, but the one that might have been most important seems trivial at first: he whiffed on many fewer fastballs. Over the last five years, there have been 1,666 player-seasons in which a batter swung at least 250 times at fastballs. That’s an average of about 350 per season, and equates to a threshold of coming to bat about 200 times. Buxton has only surpassed that threshold three times, because of his prolonged slumps and (more importantly) many injuries. Here are his whiff rates when swinging at fastballs in those three campaigns, along with their rankings on the list of 1,666. Download attachment: tempsnip.png This could seem like a small change, especially if one studies the list of all those player-seasons. Ronald Acuña, Jr., who was a contender for the NL MVP last season, whiffed as much during that season as Buxton did in 2017. Giancarlo Stanton’s 2017 MVP season saw a similar whiff rate on heat as Buxton had in those two troubled seasons. Meanwhile, the names and seasons around Buxton’s 2019 entry on the list are less inspiring. Buxton, however, isn’t a normal hitter, and he can’t be defined, nor his performance predicted, by analogy. He’s a unique athlete. Though he had a career-low ground-ball rate last season, he posted a .314 BABIP and a .348 batting average on contact (BACON). He did even better than that on contact in 2016 and 2017, but of course, he struck out so much in each season that his production was hampered. Buxton shouldn’t be focused on hitting ground balls, but to the extent that he can get on plane with an incoming pitch and increase his contact rate, he should always do so. His speed and his strength make him a potentially lethal hitter, if he does so. The change itself might feel small, too, but in the context of pitchers and teams trying to gameplan against Buxton, it’s not. Going from the 12th to the 28th percentile in vulnerability to whiffing on fastballs, while continuing to hit the ball hard when one makes contact, represents the elimination of a catastrophic weakness. Buxton might never have an average contact rate on fastballs, but if he’s merely below-average, rather than dwelling near the very bottom of the league, then he’s a tough at-bat and a tough out. It shouldn’t be controversial to say this: Buxton is the most important player on the 2020 Twins. When he’s healthy and functioning at full capacity, he turns the Twins into a juggernaut, closing the only prospective hole in their lineup and fundamentally transforming them from a subpar defensive team to one that catches almost everything in the air. When he’s absent or compromised, the team is still good, but their flaws become much more apparent. If Buxton can continue to hammer fastballs while minimizing his empty swings against them, he adds a dynamism to their lineup that is somewhat wanting otherwise. 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

There's one organizational preference with regard to which Josh Donaldson isn't a perfect fit for the Minnesota Twins. Can he change it? Should he?When a team signs a former MVP and eight-year veteran to a deal that could reach nine figures in total salary, they rarely ask that player to make big changes. The Twins will be no exception to that rule when it comes to Josh Donaldson. One reason why Donaldson was an excellent fit for the team, in the first place, was the way his approach matched the mentality the team was already preaching to so many of its hitters. However, there is one thing the Twins ask of their hitters that Donaldson didn’t do in 2019, and it could be the one adjustment they try to make to his approach for the coming season. Consider the relationship between contact rate on pitches inside the strike zone, and contact rate on pitches outside of it. They each signify something different. To make consistent contact within the zone, a batter has to have a good understanding of that zone, and to engineer a swing that gets them on plane with the flight of the incoming pitch for as long as possible. Making a lot of contact on swings within the zone makes a batter a tough out for opposing pitchers. To make contact on pitches outside the zone frequently, a hitter generally has to have exceptional hand-eye coordination (even for a baseball player, a pool within which virtually everyone has what would be extraordinary hand-eye coordination by the standards of the general population). They also, usually, have to take a more aggressive mindset, and to trust themselves to find the barrel even on pitches that aren’t in the hitting zone on which they were most focused. Both of these skills can be valuable, depending on the overall skill set and objectives of the batter in question. Obviously, despite being representative of different things, they’re also correlated skills: the better you make contact within the zone, the better you’re likely to make contact beyond it. The correlation is far from perfect (r-squared, for the statistically savvy, is 0.41), but it’s meaningful. The fact that there’s a positive correlation between swing-and-miss within the zone and outside it means that no team has to choose between making contact in the zone and on chase pitches. However, the Twins have an organizational preference between the two. They would rather see their hitters have that grooved swing, ready to punish mistakes and defend the zone, than see their guys hitting pitches opposing hurlers want them to chase. Download attachment: chart.png Among hitters who played a meaningful role for Minnesota in 2019, only four had in-zone whiff rates that would have suggested a higher out-of-zone one than they actually had: Eddie Rosario, Jason Castro, C.J. Cron, and Jonathan Schoop. Of those four, only Rosario returns to the roster, and Castro (the one whose in-zone contact rate spiked highest, relative to his out-of-zone rate) was replaced by Alex Avila, who fits beneath the line. Donaldson, then, is an outlier in one way, even if he’s otherwise perfect for this Twins team. Famously, he prioritizes launching into the ball with as much energy as possible, and he did hit 37 home runs last season by virtue of posting his highest average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and Sweet Spot percentage (the share of his batted balls hit in the most valuable band of launch angles) during the five-season Statcast Era. One could certainly argue that, rather than his in-zone whiff rate being too high for his profile, his out-of-zone whiff rate is merely held very low by way of his elite plate discipline. However, there are real holes in Donaldson’s zone, and the Twins might seek to help him cover them, even if it means doing a bit less damage on fringy pitches. Here’s the rate at which Donaldson swung at pitches last season, by where they were in (or outside of) the strike zone. Download attachment: chart (1).png Now, here’s his whiff rate when he swung, again mapped by pitch location. Download attachment: chart (2).png The hole in the upper, inside corner of the zone is not just about whiffs. Donaldson had just two hits on pitches in that corner of the zone all season last year, so even when he made contact, it tended not to be of a very high quality. It might well be that Donaldson’s overall approach works best when he organizes his zone this way—that whatever tradeoffs he might have to make in the plane or speed of his swing in order to cover that hole up in the zone, or whatever aggressiveness he might have to sacrifice on pitches similarly elevated but out over the plate, would offset any gains he’d make by swinging and missing less at the top of the strike zone. If so, the team will probably ascertain as much, and tell Donaldson to keep doing what has made him a superstar. However, the Twins are always looking for a way to take a player to the next level, so don’t be surprised if they at least try to help Donaldson cover that hole. Stylistically, they want their hitters to battle for control of the strike zone so fiercely that pitchers become afraid to attack them. Donaldson’s vulnerability to whiffs within the zone hurts him much less than it would hurt a hitter without such great patience, and it hurts less in a lineup full of hitters who don’t share that characteristic. Still, it sets him apart from his new teammates, and could be a point of emphasis as he tries to stay at the top of his game. 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

Devin Smeltzer spins the ball better than almost any other pitcher in baseball, but his delivery doesn't allow him to reap the full benefits of that talent. Can he adjust and thrive?On Monday afternoon, Devin Smeltzer pitched for the Twins in a Grapefruit League contest with the Cardinals. Thanks to several different forms of defensive deficiency, St. Louis scored four times in Smeltzer’s two frames, but he had two strikeouts and no walks. Lewis Thorpe’s brief personal absence has opened a narrow window of opportunity for Smeltzer to start the season as the Twins’ fifth starter. That could turn out to be enough, if Smeltzer can make a few adjustments to make his similarities to one new teammate play up. With an average fastball velocity of just 89.1 miles per hour, Smeltzer starts at a certain disadvantage, even as a lefty. However, his average fastball spin rate in 2019 was 2,433 revolutions per minute, a number as far above the league average as his velocity is below it. A budding modern heuristic for capturing the value of fastball spin rate is the Bauer Unit, named after Reds right-hander Trevor Bauer. Divide a hurler’s average spin by their average velocity, and you get their Bauer Units for a given pitch. The league average for Bauer Units on the fastball hovers around 24. Smeltzer sits at a very impressive 28.3. One of the few pitchers who topped that figure last year: Rich Hill, at 28.4. Smeltzer shares more in common with Hill than handedness and those fastball spin characteristics. Though Hill came up as a heralded prospect and was a solid big-leaguer for a couple of years, this version of him emerged only after a long sojourn in the minors and independent leagues, and after a stint as a matchup reliever. Smeltzer was similarly shoved into a relief role before he attained the majors, but being traded to the Twins gave him a fresh start. Both have overcome significant adversity, on and off the field, to get as far as they have. Both have extremely impressive spin not only on their heaters, but on their curveballs. Thus far, however, Smeltzer hasn’t missed bats and shown the ability to dominate the way Hill has, and it’s not hard to see why. Whereas Hill famously launches himself down the mound and comes right over the top with his high-energy delivery, Smeltzer’s deceptive, short-stride windup gives way to a three-quarter arm action. It helps keep batters off-balance, and it has been Smeltzer’s preferred arm slot since he was an amateur. However, that arm angle creates some wasted spin, and some spin that flattens out his fastball into a pitch with more lateral run than vertical hop. It also turns his big, slow curve into a two-plane breaker, rather than a 12-to-6 offering. Raising his arm angle could transform Smeltzer from a decent pitch-to-contact, control-oriented swingman into a higher-upside guy with the ability to rack up strikeouts. It would unlock the maximum value of his excellent ability to impart spin. Alas, it’s not nearly that simple. For one thing, Smeltzer has gotten to this point despite his lack of pure stuff, and it might be difficult for him to clear the mental hurdle of giving up his unique delivery for a more trendy one, thereby risking the deception he creates by pitching the way he does. For another, it might turn out that his ability to generate that spin is dependent upon his pitching from the angle he uses now—that his current mechanics fit his natural biomechanical signature, in a way throwing from a higher angle never could. If he runs into further adversity and ends up back in Triple-A for an extended period, Smeltzer might experiment with a change in mechanics. If the Twins end up needing him as a starter or a high-leverage reliever, they might approach him and suggest such tweaks. In the meantime, despite the potential benefits of such a change, it’s hard to see it actually happening. The fear of the unknown, and the possibility that making a change before it’s absolutely necessary could ruin a good thing, will give both parties pause. 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 broad assumption, since MLB's newest rule on in-game strategy was announced, has been that specialists will go extinct because of it. That might not be true; they might just have to live closer to the edge.The 2020 Minnesota Twins are unlikely to carry a true matchup reliever, of either handedness. The pitchers closest to that profile, among those likely to make the roster, are veterans Sergio Romo (a righty who's tougher on righties) and Tyler Clippard (a righty who's famously tougher on lefties), but even they aren't extreme in this regard. However, despite a new rule that makes such hurlers harder to use, Rocco Baldelli might find he can occasionally escape a sticky situation by embracing platoon matchups in key moments, if he's willing to stomach a bit more risk. With the advent of the three-batter minimum rule in 2020, the role of matchup relief arms will, inevitably, diminish. The rule requires any pitcher who enters a game to face at least three batters, or to reach the end of an inning. It's been called the death of the LOOGY (lefty one-out guy), among other things, since it was first floated last spring. Paired with a rule that will firmly cap the number of pitchers on a roster at a given time at 13, and with longer option periods when pitchers are farmed out to bring up someone fresh, the three-batter minimum does incentivize a greater emphasis on durability and versatility among relievers. However, the rule changes have been slightly oversold as a death knell for the matchup guy. The second clause of the rule — "or to reach the end of an inning" — has been underrated as a carrot for the aggressive manager to chase. Last season, Baldelli showed that he belongs to the small class of new-age managers who are willing to take tactical risks, when the odds favor it. He could put that mentality to use to get the most out of his bullpen under new constraints in 2020. Say there are two outs, and an exceptionally tough left-handed hitter is due for the opposing team. It's the seventh inning of a one-run game, and there are two runners on base. Behind that slugging left-handed stick (perhaps Chicago's Yasmani Grandal) lurk a pair of right-handers with similar thunder (José Abreu and Edwin Encarnación, maybe). The White Sox's bullpen is pretty sturdy, these days, so it's important to hold on to the slim lead. In such a situation, Baldelli might be tempted to call on Taylor Rogers, as he sometimes did in 2019, and to then stretch Rogers through at least the eighth frame. That creates a long path to the end of the game, though. If he's feeling a bit more risk-averse, in light of the new rule, he might turn to Tyler Duffey or Trevor May, who are each split-neutral. Let's imagine, though, that only one of the two is available that night. That would leave someone further down the depth chart to pitch the eighth, or that same setup man to come back out, and maybe even Rogers to stretch out across multiple innings, too. If he were willing to roll the dice a bit, though, Baldelli could try something else: inserting Clippard. It's not ideal, in the sense that if Clippard should fail to get Grandal, he'd then be stuck in the game to face two tough right-handed batters. Clippard isn't as strong against righties; that would lead to a bit of a spiral. On the other hand, outside of Rogers, there's no single reliever in the Twins bullpen more likely to get Grandal out — and, thereby, to end the threat and become eligible to leave the game before the Sox come up to bat in the eighth — than Clippard. Managers will have to accept some risk of a snowball effect, whenever they try this kind of matchup management, from now on. However, that doesn't mean they shouldn't sometimes try it. In pivotal moments, if there's an optimal matchup against one or two particular batters, Baldelli should accept the downside in order to raise the likelihood of what is, already, the technically more likely event: getting out of the jam unscathed and regaining full flexibility for the following inning. Ron Gardenhire won't deploy this strategy. Nor will Mike Matheny, or even Terry Francona or Rick Renteria. In the AL Central, there will suddenly be a massive extinction event for matchup baseball in the middle and late innings, at least outside Minnesota. If Baldelli can sometimes accept the risk involved — if he's willing to raise the chances of a catastrophic unwinding by one percent in order to raise the chances of the best possible outcome by three or four percent, when that was already perhaps 65-percent likely — he'll give the Twins a clear strategic advantage in close contests throughout the campaign. 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 start of spring training doesn't necessarily spell the end of trade season, and the Twins still have the kind of depth that gives them options on the trade market.The Twins don't have many holes, and even their worst-case scenarios look relatively rosy. However, spring training is the time of year during which smart contenders consider ways in which they might shore up their minor weaknesses and raise their floor ever further. To that end, Minnesota should explore the possibility of a trade for Cubs outfielder Albert Almora, Jr. Before you ask, no, Almora isn't someone the Cubs are desperately trying to move, and no, he wouldn't be a notable improvement over Jake Cave or LaMont Wade as a regular fourth outfielder. However, the Cubs are infamously weak in an area (young pitching) in which the Twins are famously strong, and Almora would provide something the Twins do still need: a reliable, viable backup to Byron Buxton, capable of stepping in as an everyday center fielder if Buxton gets hurt and keeping the outfield defense intact. He has three years of team control remaining, including 2020. Almora, who will turn 26 in April, went to the Cubs just four picks after the Twins took Buxton in the 2012 draft. If Buxton's path to establishing himself in the majors felt circuitous and frustrating, though, it was nothing to that of Almora, who battled hand and wrist injuries, was blocked for most of a season during which he seemed ready for the majors, and has been given only inconsistent opportunities over the last three seasons. That said, he's not wholly a victim of circumstance: He's yet to post a season in which he was even a league-average hitter, according to Baseball Prospectus's DRC+, and he's failed to rein in his plate discipline as the Cubs hoped he would. Buxton and Almora are very different, in terms of style and profile, but similar in the shape of their overall value. Almora lacks Buxton's power potential and game-breaking speed, but has far superior feel for contact, and makes up for his lack of wheels in center field with terrific instincts. When right, he's well above-average defensively, and a line-drive hitter who can be a headache for left-handed pitchers. Alas, for much of 2019, Almora wasn't right. He had a career-worst 72 DRC+, as he continued to hack away too often at pitches outside the zone. He put the ball on the ground far too often. Last spring, he benefited when the Cubs sent Ian Happ to Triple-A Iowa to open the season. By mid-summer, however, Almora had lost his starting job in center to Jason Heyward, and Happ came back up to push him into a true platoon role. For the Twins to take interest in this particular target, they would need to believe they can do with Almora what they've done with so many other young hitters over the last two seasons. That would be a bet against the Cubs' player development, but bets against that particular element of the Chicago operation lately have tended to be wise ones. Almora showed up this spring talking about an overhauled swing, and there is certainly a real change. With his altered mechanics, he's already generated some impressive hard contact this spring, including a double and a home run, and he's more balanced, giving him a longer look at the incoming pitch and a better chance of laying off it if he doesn't like what he sees. If those changes hold, or if the Cubs (or Twins) build upon them, it's easy to see Almora blossoming into a similar hitter to Buxton, albeit with less impactful defense and baserunning. PECOTA projects an unimpressive .249/.287/.384 batting line for Almora this year, which isn't exciting, but the system only forecasts Buxton to hit .230/.288/.437. When (more than if) Buxton goes down with an injury, Almora could provide a facsimile of his value on both offense and defense. At the moment, the plan for any extended Buxton absence would seem to be to slide Max Kepler back to center field, with Marwin González becoming an everyday corner man and the roles of both Cave and Wade expanding considerably. Almora would change that. His presence would allow the team to keep Kepler in right field, where he's a Gold Glove-caliber defender. He'd also be a right-handed bat, helping maintain the balance at the bottom and turn of the batting order. Over the last few years, as teams have reached Peak Bullpen and the squeeze on position players has gotten tighter, the priority for any team in building a bench has been flexibility. Any player slated for a backup role needed to do things someone else on the roster didn't do. Complementary skills were valued much more highly than redundancies. With the addition of a 26th man and rules in place to prevent teams from further expanding their pitching staffs, that can start to change. The Twins could carry Almora as a late-game defensive replacement for Eddie Rosario, allow him to soak up the pinch-hit opportunities against lefties that would otherwise go (as his roster spot would) to Willians Astudillo, and have him handy as a high-upside replacement for Buxton when injury strikes. They'd still have room on the bench for Alex Avila, González, and Ehire Adrianza. Astudillo, Cave, and Wade, who all have minor-league options remaining, would remain available whenever need arose. For that matter, Almora can be optioned, too. The Cubs would want a fairly solid young arm in exchange for Almora. The fifth spot in their rotation is a toss-up between veteran Tyler Chatwood and young hurlers Alec Mills and Adbert Alzolay, but the system is considerably more bullish on Randy Dobnak and Lewis Thorpe than on Alzolay or Chatwood, and even its pessimistic take on Devin Smeltzer puts him on even footing with Chatwood. With Jhoulys Chacín in camp, the Twins could part with one of those three in exchange for Almora, but even if they were unwilling to, they might tempt the Cubs with either Cody Stashak or Zack Littell, because Chicago's bullpen lacks the controllable, flexible arms with which Minnesota's corps is replete. Moves that contain even a kernel of risk, as an Almora trade certainly would, are unappealing to teams in strong positions like the Twins' in February and March. If they're smart, though, Minnesota will keep their ears open and their thumbs limber, listening on offers and texting with executives throughout the spring. The worst-case scenario for this team isn't Buxton getting hurt, but rather, Buxton getting hurt at a time when any other player is also out, leaving them unable to shift their phalanx to cover their holes neatly. It's Buxton getting hurt while they don't have a solid defensive center fielder to keep their team defense together in his absence. It's having to go make a trade like the one outlined above, but in June or July, with the eyes of the baseball world on them and a whole lot less leverage than they have now. Proactive teams can avoid major overpays during the height of trade season, the kind that cost valuable prospects who go on to be stars elsewhere, and still be ready for a long season and deep playoff run. The Twins can enjoy that kind of benefit by acting now to fill what might be their only important hole. 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

José Berríos became a full-fledged four-pitch pitcher in 2019. That makes him more well-rounded, and it might allow him to be better than even advanced models forecast him to be.José Berríos threw more changeups in 2019 than in the previous two seasons, combined. He’d had a good change when he first reached the majors in 2016, but lost confidence in it, and his lack of a second reliable off-speed pitch had been a lingering problem. In 2019, he developed more confidence in using the changeup as a swing-and-miss pitch against right-handers, and used it as a replacement for his sinker against lefties. Despite his struggles late in the season, Berríos made a major breakthrough when he rediscovered the changeup, and that improvement could vault him to ace status in 2020. Adding (or increasing the usage of) a pitch is one of the key ways in which a pitcher can find a new gear. In Berríos’s case, that would be an especially welcome development, because his projections aren’t overly optimistic, and they don’t even come with especially wide error bars. His metronomic consistency over the past three years, in terms of final, full-season numbers, belies both his real development and struggles as a pitcher, and fools projection systems. Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA system generates not just one projection for each player, but a dozen of them. A player’s median projection is the default, but the system spits out projected values for each decile from 10 through 90, plus a couple of even more extreme possibilities. That allows us to look at the range of plausible outcomes for a player, rather than just a single, most likely one. The longer and more consistent a track record a player has, the less those decile projections differ from one another. For young players who have had uneven careers, however, they tend to vary widely. It’s a bit surprising, then, to note just how little the projected outcomes for the 25-year-old Berríos vary. His median projection includes a 4.20 ERA, 98 DRA- (meaning he’d be slightly above-average, relative to all big-league pitchers), and 1.6 wins above replacement player (WARP). In 184 innings, he projects for 190 strikeouts and 63 walks. In his 20th-percentile projection, he’d have a 4.90 ERA, a 105 DRA-, and be worth 0.9 WARP, with 185 strikeouts and 70 walks. His 80th-percentile projection would only nudge him to a 3.58 ERA, a 91 DRA-, 2.3 WARP, 195 strikeouts, and 56 walks. To see a real, significant chance of Berríos becoming the dominant starter for whom Twins fans have so often hoped, then, one has to believe he can do something the system can’t foresee. Because pitch types and pitch usage are two things PECOTA does not include in its modeling, Berríos throwing a changeup more frequently and strategically would be just such a blind spot. He’s now deftly using his four-seamer, curve, sinker, and changeup, blending them relatively evenly against batters who stand on each side of the plate. That keeps batters guessing, in a way PECOTA is only beginning to understand that Berríos can do. More importantly, perhaps, Berríos can command the sinker and the changeup really well when pitching to the third-base side of the plate. He can do the same with his four-seamer and curve to the first-base side of the dish. It’s great when a pitcher can command a given pitch to all quadrants, and to some extent, Berríos can do so with his four-seamer. In a huge majority of cases, though, a given offering is effective mostly when thrown to one side of the plate, because of the way its movement and the pitcher’s mechanics interact. That’s why it’s tremendously valuable for Berríos to have improved his feel for and confidence in the change; it gives him two pitches that are excellent on each side of home plate. Even if a batter decides to cut the plate in half in a given situation and lay off anything else, they have only a 50-percent chance of being right about what they’re swinging at. The Twins and Berríos have worked hard to ensure that he’s prepared for the long haul of baseball’s long season this year. He’s changed the way he recovers and is working to maximize flexibility, the better to promote his chances of staying healthy. If all of that works, he might emerge this year as the best pitcher in the American League Central, thanks to an improvement he’s already made. 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