Matthew Trueblood

As great as the Twins’ offense was in 2019, the team got as far as they did just as much because of a number of surprisingly successful pitchers. One natural conclusion to draw might be that regression will be coming in 2020. For the Twins and their new pitching infrastructure, however, there’s another explanation: the team’s position at the cutting edge of the art of pitch acquisition.There is no greater example of that phenomenon than the two-headed set-up monster that developed in the bullpen during the second half: Trevor May and Tyler Duffey. Those two benefited tremendously from tinkering with their stuff on their own, readily accepting the feedback they got from coaches and front-office personnel, and steadily increasing their commitment to their adjustments over time. For most of his career, May has used a changeup and a curveball, in addition to his four-seam fastball. The curve was the pitch that came naturally to him, based on his arm slot and mechanical signature. He also tried a cutter-style slider at various points during his career, but struggled to make it an effective offering. Then, while playing catch with Ryne Harper one day, he tried something new: he started gripping his slider virtually the same way he grips his curve, with his index finger curled and flexed into a spike and the middle finger extended along the seam of the ball. He still used slider-like wrist action at release and threw the pitch harder than he throws his curve, but what he essentially found that day was a new slider, a pitch with the vertical depth and bat-missing potential his previous sliders had lacked. It took quite a while, though, for the pitch to really become a weapon for him. In an interview just after Memorial Day, May said he had discovered the new grip and its potential while the team was in Houston in late April. In the five weeks since, though, he’d only taken his new toy out for a spin in games some 32 times, and there was a three-week stretch immediately after the grip change during which he didn’t throw the slider at all. That changed. From mid-July through the end of August, May threw the slider 35 times and threw zero curveballs. As he said in an interview in May, it was not a matter of finding the new grip and receiving the Twins’ enthusiastic reports on it (it had a considerably higher spin rate, and moved from a pitch that stayed almost on plane with his fastball to one that dived more than 90 percent of the other sliders throughout the game), but of mastering it. He talked about feeling his way from being able to throw the pitch for a strike or for a ball, and to throw it as a ball that would start out looking like a strike, but end up being a ball. By the end of the season, May’s breaking balls had melded into one pitch, probably more properly called a curve, but with much more power than the curve he was throwing early in the season. He became more fastball-heavy, setting hitters up with high-spin heaters at the top of the zone, and caught opponents badly off balance when he then threw his changeup or breaking balls. Duffey’s breaking ball underwent a similar transformation, though no technical name change. At the start of the season, his average curveball came in at 81.1 miles per hour, with about 8.5 inches more vertical drop than would be expected, without the spin he imparted. Each month, those numbers moved slightly, and always in the same direction. By September, his average curve sat at 83.9 miles per hour, and it was dropping just 6.3 inches. The pitch also had less horizontal movement, although by a very slim margin, by the end of the season. He’d graduated from having a loopy hook, flush with movement but light on deception, to firing in a power hook that fooled hitters more by mimicking his fastball better. Like May, Duffey was working constantly to improve the pitch on which Wes Johnson had given him feedback and information. It wasn’t just about acknowledging the opportunity to make a change, or about actually making it, but about feeling confident in it. May and Duffey each became more mechanically consistent, found more consistent power and command, and were able to engineer more effective breaking balls. It just took time. Early on, their reputations and apparent unreliability had fans of the otherwise exceptional Twins wringing their hands. By the final two months, they were (arguably) the most effective set-up tandem in the majors, papering over other cracks that appeared in the pitching staff. Every pitcher is different. That’s a key fact in understanding and implementing important changes for pitchers as an organization. May’s experience demonstrates that there’s a slider in almost every arm, and Duffey’s maturation shows how even a pitcher with a relatively long, spotty track record and an obvious deficiency can easily overcome that in this age of information and technology. What both also show, however, is that even moments of epiphany don’t lend themselves to instant turnarounds. Finding a new grip and unlocking better spin characteristics are important breakthroughs, but shouldn’t be expected to produce immediate changes in results, or even approaches within games. It’s important to listen to what the Twins’ coaching staff and pitchers say about what’s going on behind the scenes, because an adjustment already made (in one sense) might still be in its incubation period, waiting to pay dividends if the player keeps buying in and the team keeps showing faith throughout the process. 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Five and a half years ago, in previewing the 2014 MLB season, ESPN: The Magazine tried to do the impossible. Leaning on a formula cooked up in conjunction with a couple of university professors, they proposed to quantify and assign value to clubhouse chemistry.It was a good time for that particular project. The quirky and uniquely assembled Boston Red Sox had won the World Series the previous fall, and they weren’t the only notable team in that regard in 2013. The Dodgers were the most expensive team in baseball history, but were rife with cliques and egos. The Athletics repeated as AL West champions, thanks to a bunch of players of similar ages and skill sets, with similarly non-elite pre-Majors pedigrees. Notions that teams were inevitably either more or less than the sums of their parts were thick in the air. While underpinned by ostensibly sound science, the formula didn’t perform especially well in predicting the effects of clubhouse dynamics, and neither the magazine nor any other entity within ESPN publicly revisited the project for 2015. It’s likely that any such systematic effort to pin down interaction effects on player performance will fail, because there’s so much danger of overfitting and generalizations that don’t actually apply. However, the fundamentals of the concept are appealing to anyone who has experienced a long MLB season. There are so many important relationships within every clubhouse, so many ways in which the vagaries of the eight-month campaign can throw things out of balance, that the value of good chemistry is undeniable. The problem is that good chemistry is very hard to reliably reproduce. Nonetheless, it’s worth walking back through the principles of that years-old formula, because as the Twins embark on a tight-rope walk of an offseason, one challenge they face is to retain the propitious balance they crafted off the field. The 2019 Twins, irrefutably, were one of those teams that were better than the sum of their parts. To repeat as AL Central champions in 2020, they’ll need to stay that way. There were three pillars to the system devised by those professors and number-crunchers in 2014: clubhouse demographics, trait isolation, and stratification of performance to pay. The first metric focused on diversity of nationality, race, age, tenure with team, and position (this last, since clubhouses famously divide a bit between pitchers and position players). By and large, more of this kind of diversity was considered better, as long as the groups formed by dissecting the room that way overlapped in sufficient measure. The second was an expression of whether, perhaps because of too much of that diversity, there were players within the room who were left isolated. Were they either shut out of subgroups or unable to identify closely enough with those subgroups to which they did belong? The final factor was about ego. Teams scored best if they fit into the middle range: enough star power to provide clear leadership, but not so much as to have everyone big-timing one another. The 2019 Twins, seen through this prism, were nearly perfect. We can’t replicate the scores the magazine assigned to teams, because the formulas themselves were not published, but we can sketch out a number of ways in which the team was perfectly constructed. Ehire Adrianza, Luis Arráez, Willians Astudillo, and Marwin González are a good place to start. All four of them are Venezuelan. All four bloomed relatively late, though they aren’t close in actual age. All four play multiple positions. They quickly formed a loose but easy and valuable bond. Their lockers, in the Target Field clubhouse, were all in a row, save Arráez’s. On their own, the four formed a valuable subgroup in support of one another, but they’re all personable people, and they each fit smoothly into other groups, as well. González, like Nelson Cruz, Jonathan Schoop, and C.J. Cron, came to the Twins in 2019, and brought with him experience in playoff races and competitive clubhouses. Those four formed their own group. Schoop, who is from Curacao, speaks multiple languages, and has always been known as a good team guy. The second baseman formed easy connections with Jorge Polanco and Miguel Sanó, the Dominican left side of the infield. Fellow Dominican Cruz was a good fit alongside them, thanks to his own love of talking hitting. González was a former teammate of Jason Castro in Houston. Polanco, Sanó, Eddie Rosario, Byron Buxton, and Max Kepler formed a natural subgroup, because of their similar arcs through the Twins system and shared maturation with the parent club. Mitch Garver came along later than any of them, but is a similar age, and has been with the Twins ever since being drafted in 2013. Cron is even closer in age to Garver than is most of the tenured Twins core, is a fellow right-handed hitter, and is also from the Southwest. In fact, most of the roster fell between the ages of 25 and 29, which both limited age-related performance downside and made it easier for the majority of the team to gel. Rosario is from Puerto Rico, as is José Berríos, and the two lockered next to one another. Berríos was chosen in the same draft as Buxton, and has been slotted into the same hierarchy of the organization’s young prizes as the five hitters in the team’s core ever since. Kyle Gibson, though older and on the verge of free agency, has a long-standing connection with Berríos and the rest of that crew. He, Jake Odorizzi, Martín Pérez, and Michael Pineda are all of similar ages, and are at similar stages in their careers—having established themselves, but not cemented their long-term places anywhere. Trevor May fits in with that group to some extent, though he fully immersed himself in relief work in 2019, and he also fit like a glove into the quartet of the team’s most important relievers during the first half. Taylor Rogers, Tyler Duffey, and Ryne Harper are all within two years of each other in age, and all were college draftees who took a long time to find their way to the big leagues. The overlapping groups formed by this assemblage kept anyone from being truly left out. Nor were there any superstars making huge money, or guys who felt they should have been but had been denied that kind of payday. Leaders emerged, but there wasn’t inordinate competition for those roles. The coaching staff, itself a conscientious concoction, fostered all the most advantageous relationships possible within the group, and made their own connections directly to key individuals. Now, Odorizzi, Pineda, Pérez, Gibson, Sergio Romo, Schoop, and Castro are free agents. A few more players are likely to depart via trade or non-tender of arbitration, and the team will try to shore up certain aspects of on-field performance via both trade and free agency. Rearranging those pieces and improving the roster, from a sheer talent perspective, is tantalizingly possible, and even exciting. However, the team will have to undertake it all cautiously, because there’s a real risk that they’ll lose something along the way that made this year’s team great. Click here to view the article

On Monday, we found that the Twins’ best relievers struggled on back-to-back days and wondered if scheduling the best relievers might not be beneficial like it is for starting pitchers. Yesterday we examined how that might work and the most obvious objection. Today we’ll look at other concerns.Another easily imagined objection is that, pitching just 54 times all year, the Relief Aces might not deliver the value they could by being used more traditionally and pushed up to 60 or 65 appearances. Getting fewer innings out of one’s best relievers, in addition to putting them in less important situations on average, would indeed be a deal-breaker. With MLB considering a hard cap on the number of pitchers a team can carry for 2020, putting that kind of added volume pressure on the rest of the pitching staff would be a disaster. The reality, however, is that it’s a red herring. In 2019, even counting Duffey’s innings in Rochester, the trio of Rogers, Duffey, and Romo pitched 190 times, and amassed a total of 201 innings pitched. Working with two or three guaranteed days of rest, they could all stretch their average outing to about an inning and a half. On any given day, Rogers might come in with the bases loaded in the sixth, or Romo might serve as an opener. If they pitch well, they could give the team eight or nine outs. Then, on another occasion, the team might be trailing by three runs in the eighth, and they might be asked for just two quick, low-stakes outs. By the end of the season, however, a healthy pitcher working in such a role (and this role only increases their likelihood of staying healthy) should be able to throw 75 or 80 innings. From the set, you could certainly project an extra 20 total innings, relative to what they can provide in the current system. That volume helps make up for the loss in average leverage, even without baking in the superior expected performance in those innings. It also makes the prospect of signing an innings-eating mid-rotation starter, rather than an exorbitantly expensive longshot ace, more palatable, because it starts to fill in any gaps where the team might otherwise not project to have average-plus pitchers to take the mound. The concept of this change, in addition to keeping the club’s best relievers healthier and pitching at the peak of their ability, is to be unmatched in consistent competence on the mound. This allows the the offense to regress from its all-world 2019 showing and still score enough to win nearly every day. The final major objection to this idea, however, is a tougher one to answer: the pitchers might just hate it. Eventually, they wouldn’t. In some far-future version of baseball, barring other fundamental changes, there will be Relief Ace rotations, and they’ll be more efficient than the way teams operate bullpens now, and no one will question them, because they will be as familiar and feel as natural as starting rotations do now. For now, however, there’s a certain identity that goes with being a reliever. There’s a culture, out there beyond the outfield walls, in the ballpark’s nooks and crannies. There’s a hunger for the big moment, the adrenaline rush, and the respect that comes with answering the call when the team’s need is greatest, even (perhaps especially) when one is not at full strength. Relievers want to feel a little slighted and a little overworked. They want some fuel for the fire. Brushing that mentality aside would be unduly snide and inadvisable. There are real and valid psychological underpinnings to it. That said, some of the best relievers in baseball rely on excellent command, on cerebral gameplanning, and on perfect repetition and execution, just like the best starters do. Over time, that population will grow, and the culture will gradually change. If the Twins want to jump the market and gain an edge on the competition by changing their bullpen structure, however, they will have to deal with the consequences of demanding an almost immediate change in culture. They might not have the stomach for that, and they might be right not to. Still, the idea merits real consideration, because if done right, it could be the next in the lineage of great pitching staff manipulations that shakes the game to its core. Tony La Russa had Dennis Eckersley. Joe Torre had Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, and Mariano Rivera. Terry Francona had Andrew Miller and Cody Allen. Kevin Cash had Ryne Stanek. Rocco Baldelli has Rogers, Duffey, and a bunch of other interesting pieces that need to be fitted together perfectly next season in order for Minnesota to repeat their 2019 success. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Click here to view the article

Yesterday, we looked at some of the Twins’ best relievers’ struggles with zero days rest. Is it time to consider scheduling the Twins' ace relievers into a rotation? Before going forward, let me clearly lay out the system I’m envisioning. It’s a simple one. Just as five starting pitchers take turns doing the bulk duty from one game to the next, three top relievers should do the same.The Twins ought to prioritize re-signing Romo no matter what, but he’s an especially good fit for this kind of gig, so if they were to pursue it he’d become an even better target. They would pitch every third game. Almost every appearance for Rogers, Duffey, and Romo would thus come on either two or three days of rest. Depending on the opposing lineup and the starter scheduled for that day, the day’s relief ace might serve as an opener, be called in immediately when the starter needs to be lifted, or saved for anywhere from three to eight outs at the end of the game. The point is that they would be given a firm schedule, with designated time for rest and recovery, a throw day to work on a given pitch or make mechanical tweaks, and the ability to game-plan for opposing teams and individual hitters in a more focused way. Rogers showed the ability to work all the way through an opposing lineup within a game at times last year. He could do it semi-regularly under this system. Romo could be reserved for a segment of the opposing lineup loaded with right-handed batters, perhaps as an alternative to the starter facing that group a third time. As starters sometimes must, a relief ace might be asked to prepare differently from outing to outing, according to the path the team sees through the 27-out gauntlet of the contest. However, as a starter does, they would benefit from at least knowing in advance on which day they’d be asked to do so. The loop would need to be three pitchers deep, because while one day of rest makes a huge difference relative to zero days under current usage patterns, a pitcher asked to throw roughly every other day would be on fumes by August. Three is the magic number here. It avoids both overrest and overwork, both in short windows and over the long season. Involve more pitchers, by making a middle relief rotation for instance, and the staff might become too rigid. Unpredictable situations could demand that a team be ready to stretch a given pitcher out, or throw them on back-to-back days, and while a relief ace rotation can decrease the frequency of such incidents, a manager still needs flexibility further down the depth chart. Besides, there will always be some pitchers—Trevor May is an example, though far from the only one—who thrive on a less consistent usage pattern, finding rhythm and averting fatigue when working back-to-back games, and fluid roles should be held open for such players. Let’s tackle the obvious objections here. First of all, yes: making this change would decrease the average leverage index of these pitchers’ appearances. Inevitably, it would mean that some percentage of Rogers', Duffey’s and Romo’s innings would end up being virtually meaningless. As currently constructed, bullpens concentrate the most important innings in the hands of the best few pitchers within them. This system would more evenly distribute those opportunities, and it could lead to more narrow leads being blown by the fourth or fifth arm in the bullpen. It would fall to May, Zack Littell, Cody Stashak, and another two hurlers of even less distinction to build bridges from the starter to the designated relief ace of the day, or to close things down if the day’s ace pitched early. Like the Boston Red Sox’s closer-by-committee experiment of 2003, the plan would risk ridicule and a certain degree of clubhouse turmoil should it not go well right out of the chute. However, there’s a case to be made that the existing system- especially the one that came into vogue early in the 21st century, wherein a good bullpen would have a formulaic hierarchy of three hurlers lined up behind a starter the team hoped would go six innings: set-up, set-up, closer- creates its own set of problems. A winning streak becomes oddly taxing, when a team has to call on its trio of dominant relievers five times each in seven days. If a manager elects to be cautious with those arms, that streak might never even materialize. Pitchers further down the ladder get fewer chances to demonstrate their own value, and just as importantly can suffer either rust or overuse when the team gets very hot or very cold. With the depth the Twins will hope they still have come Opening Day, rotating relief aces to get the best possible performance from them doesn’t even cost that much. May, Littell, and Stashak, among others, can provide adequate work in medium-leverage middle relief. There are other concerns and challenges, too, should the Twins proceed down this road. We’ll cover those in Part 3 tomorrow. Here is Part 1 of this series. Click here to view the article

We live in the age of Bullpenning, The Opener, and a never-ending quest for The Next Andrew Miller. Some 20 years ago, trying to limit the risk of injuries and loss of effectiveness, teams began closely, consciously counting the pitches thrown by their starting pitchers. Ever since, reliever usage has become more creative, more important, and sexier.Roles that had fallen out of vogue in the early 1980s have come back, to some extent. With glaring exceptions at the absolute top of the market, teams have been willing to pay quickly and handsomely for free-agent relievers over the last two winters, while many starters have had to wait out the sluggish markets alongside the position players. Yet, for the first time in modern history, starting pitchers had a better collective ERA than relievers did in 2019. There are many reasons for that, and even after accounting for them, it might not be correct to suggest that those starters really outperformed their bullpen counterparts, on an inning-for-inning basis. The fact remains, though, that working in short bursts is becoming less of an advantage than it used to be, and that even the teams who made it to October this season seemed forced to cobble together and restructure their bullpens on the fly. Being a reliever allows pitcher to pare down their repertoire to their most effective two or three offerings. It often leads them to throw harder, and their stuff plays up thanks to that extra zip. They can also be shielded from platoon vulnerabilities, though less so in 2020 than in past seasons (thanks to the incoming three-batter minimum for relief appearances). However, they also have to be ready at all times, bounce back quickly after unsuccessful or tiring appearances, and stay mentally locked in even if they’re asked to warm up, sit down, and warm up again to go into the game an inning later. Starters must deal with pacing themselves and strategizing more deeply against opposing hitters. Relievers must deal with unpredictability. What if that unpredictability could be eliminated? What if, in fact, a Relief Ace rotation could work, the same way the starting rotation does? Starters have not always enjoyed this degree of rhythm and routine. When he managed the Yankees, Casey Stengel famously signaled to a given pitcher that he would start that day by placing a baseball in one of his cleats before the players arrived in the clubhouse. That worked for Stengel’s crew, but over time, pitchers articulated a preference for a more consistent routine to optimize rest and preparation. Experience taught teams to listen to their charges in that regard. Rotations are de rigueur now because they’ve proved to be the best way to manage the most important group of pitchers a team has. Perhaps it’s time to implement the same thing among a unit that has nearly achieved parity with those five hurlers on every team in the league: the top three arms in the bullpen. In 2019, when working on zero days’ rest, Taylor Rogers struck out 27.3 percent of opponents, walked or plunked 14.3 percent of them, and allowed home runs to 6.5 percent of them. On one or more days of rest, he fanned 34.3 percent of all hitters, walked just 3.0 percent of them, and allowed just three home runs in 201 plate appearances. Here are batters’ stats against him, on zero days, on more, and overall. Download attachment: 2019-10-20 Trueblood 1.JPG Those numbers are jarring, but Rogers isn’t unique in that regard. Download attachment: 2019-10-20 Trueblood 2.JPG Unlike Rogers and Duffey, Sergio Romo will become a free agent after the end of the World Series. Like them, however, he’s a candidate for a Relief Ace rotation, should he return. Download attachment: 2019-10-20 Trueblood 3.JPG Throughout the majors, 2019 saw a higher percentage of all batters faced by pitchers pitching on zero days rest than either 2017 or 2018. More importantly, pitchers in those situations allowed a higher adjusted OPS, relative to the league average, than they had in any season since 1994, and they had the highest ERA (4.52) in that circumstance since 1950, when pitching on no rest was about 75 percent less common than it is now. There’s an important innovation waiting to be made here. Some team is going to exploit a market inefficiency in 2020 by using their best relievers in a more regimented, less emergent way, thereby getting more and better work out of them. There’s no reason that that team ought not be the Twins. But what would that look like? Is it possible practically? Is it wise? We’ll unpack those questions tomorrow in Part 2. Click here to view the article

Watching the Twins fail to cobble together runs against even a very good Yankees pitching staff was painful and surprising. They continued to grind, to wait for their pitch and try to do damage, and they might have had much more success if their key cogs had been healthier, but the overall feeling of the Twins’ offensive half-innings throughout the series was valiant helplessness. Three games should hardly form the basis of a team’s offseason mentality, but this five-part series will explore five takeaways from the ALDS series that seem both clearer and more important now than they did a week ago. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. I talked to Andy Barkett, who spent the last two years as the Red Sox’s assistant hitting coach and got ample looks at the Yankees, about the experience not only of trying to hit that group, but of trying to instruct hitters in an age of overwhelmingly useful information. “There’s a huge part of hitting that has to be just, ‘You know what, screw that guy, he’s trying to take food off my table,’” Barkett said. “Just because, you’re fighting this fear of 100 miles per hour [at your head] and you’re having to find your aggressiveness despite that.” Barkett said the unique challenge in today’s environment is that hitters have to incorporate information that is essentially cerebral, objective, and somewhat complex into a process that is necessarily reactive, emotional, and subliminal. “I can tell a guy, ‘Ok, go up there and look for this pitch in this quadrant and try to hit it to right-center with [an optimal] launch angle,’ but he also has to be loose and just seeing the ball, and the two aren’t always compatible,” Barkett said. “You can’t be overanxious. I think guys go up there with their mechanics and the pitcher’s repertoire in their heads and they get in trouble, but it’s not as simple as just programming that in before they go up there, because they’re not computers. They’re human beings.” That was the most painfully evident truth about the Twins during the Division Series. They were human beings, and they seemed to be facing perfect baseball robots. Going forward, their challenge in maintaining the excellent offensive production they enjoyed for most of the season will lie in identifying what got out of whack during these three contests. All season, they were a highly organized, engineered offense, churning out hard-hit balls in the Statcast launch-angle sweet spot at the highest rate in baseball, but the structures and systems that allowed them to accomplish that weren’t flexible enough to permit them to convert long at-bats into hard-hit balls, or even walks, at the rate they needed. The book is out on a lot of the Twins’ best hitters, now. Cruz is relatively impervious to the march of time, let alone to the progress of pitching evolution, but as Garver, Kepler, Polanco, Sanó, and even Arraez established themselves this year, teams got smarter about how to position their defenses and where and how to pitch them. Without losing their natural, primal aggressiveness or their sterling feel for the barrel, those hitters will have to add layers of mental preparation and physical adaptability to their games in order to carry their success forward, and certainly to have more of it if and when they return to the playoff stage. Widen the lens, and that’s the whole story of the winter, spring, and summer ahead for the Twins. They’ve demonstrated tremendous competence. They’ve jumped the league, asserted their ability to dominate, and pushed their way to the cutting edge of the game’s analytical advancement in certain arenas. Now, the organization—from Derek Falvey down to the 26th man on the Opening Day roster—will have to prove that it can adjust to the league’s adjustments, re-innovate to counter opponents’ innovations, and build upon success without becoming its victim. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4 of this series. Or comment below after you register. Click here to view the article

Baseball writer Joe Sheehan has been onto the importance of what he calls “short-sequence offense” in the postseason for much longer than most of the baseball world. Years ago, he coined a phrase that sounds troglodytic but holds up pretty well, for the best way to reliably score runs in October: “Ball go far, team go far.” Slugging wins in October, because even great pitchers make mistakes a bopper can hit over the fence, but it’s very rare that great pitchers make enough mistakes for a lineup to (say) string together four straight hits and score twice. Three games should hardly form the basis of a team’s offseason mentality, but this five-part series will explore five takeaways from the ALDS series that seem both clearer and more important now than they did a week ago. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. That was certainly on display during this series. The Twins may have hit more homers than the Yankees did during the regular season, but by the time the curtain came up for the ALDS, New York had a more powerful lineup, and they got lucky a few times, too, knocking homers on balls hit no better than ones that went for doubles or outs off the bats of the Twins. No one can fix bad luck, or reverse whatever wind patterns make the ball carry so much better to left field than to right at Target Field, but consider the Twins’ failed rally in the bottom of the second inning in Game 3. Eddie Rosario slammed a leadoff double, and Mitch Garver walked, and Luis Arraez singled. Rosario couldn’t score on that hit, though, and the bottom third of the Minnesota order then squandered the scoring chance. Luis Severino made just a couple of small mistakes in that sequence, and while the Twins took full advantage of them, they weren’t enough to facilitate even one tally. For most of the season, Baldelli and the Twins steadfastly lined up their batting order to resist platoon manipulation. After switch-hitting second hitter Jorge Polanco, the team would alternate lefties and righties almost perfectly down the rest of the lineup card. As a result, however, the team’s three dominant right-handed sluggers (and probably the three best hitters on the team, overall: Nelson Cruz, Garver, and Sanó) nearly always were separated from one another by two lefty bats, including low-OBP Rosario and low-SLG Arraez. For 2020, that’s probably a fine formulation to repeat, although some of the particulars will undoubtedly change. If and when the team gets back to October, however, maybe they need to do away with that mentality, and stack their power at the top of the order, the better to get the guys who can exploit mistakes extra chances to hit. Given the diminished forms of Garver and Kepler who played this entire series, it might not have mattered, but next year, they should at least consider batting Sanó, Cruz, and Garver (or the equivalent best trio of power hitters on the roster) second, third, and fourth. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 of this series. Or comment below after you register. Click here to view the article

The two key hits of the series, for my money, each came when a Yankee batter spanked a ground ball between Miguel Sanó and the foul line to drive in a run. In Game 1, Gleyber Torres’s go-ahead double really began the landslide, and in Game 3, Brett Gardner took calculated advantage of Sanó repositioning himself to cash in a key run from third base, changing the atmosphere of the ballpark from hopeful and noisy to frustrated and confused in two seconds flat. Three games should hardly form the basis of a team’s offseason mentality, but this five-part series will explore five takeaways from the ALDS series that seem both clearer and more important now than they did a week ago. Here is the link to Part 1. Neither hit was Sanó’s fault, exactly. The smart money says he was instructed to move off the line before the Gardner single by the Twins dugout, to better align him with the rest of the shifted infield. The Torres ball was hit hard, and the team hadn’t had a shift on against Torres, so Sanó was a step further from the line than he might have been otherwise. (It’s a story for another time, but the Twins were on track to shift more often against right-handed batters than any other team in baseball until about mid-August, and then they plunged into the middle of the pack. That paradigm shift is somewhat inscrutable, at least for the moment.) Still, they each demonstrated something true about Sanó, something the Twins will have to reckon with this winter on a large scale: he’s a below-average third baseman, especially when a particular play puts a premium on quick reaction and a good first step. At Baseball Prospectus Night at Target Field in August, GM Thad Levine said the team tried to keep Sanó at third whenever they could in 2019, believing he remained more engaged with the game both day-to-day and plate appearance-to-plate appearance when manning the hot corner. That might be so, and it might have been sufficient justification for lining things up that way throughout this season, but in 2020, they need to find a way to keep him engaged and his production maximized while slotting him in at first base every day. As a team, and especially as an infield, they suffered from a fatal dearth of athleticism and defensive prowess in the ALDS. That was thrown into particularly sharp relief by the dazzling play of the Yankees’ very strong defensive infield. Sliding Sanó over to first base diminishes the value of his strong arm, but his range and hands would be fine there with a solid winter of work. The team ought to encourage him to play in the Dominican Winter League (but to stay far away from podiums, of course, should he win another championship there), and to work to become the best defensive first baseman he can be. As demonstrated by everyone from Albert Pujols to Mitch Moreland, it can be better to be an overqualified first baseman than to be an under-qualified defender elsewhere on the diamond, and there are more ways to stay intimately connected to the action at first base than it might seem. Of course, that move would squeeze C.J. Cron out of the picture. That’s somewhat regrettable, because he put together some brilliant at-bats for the team and (when healthy) added tremendous power for a bottom-of-the-order hitter. However, on balance, it’s the right choice. Cron’s thumb injury hampered him so much throughout the second half that he’s no sure bet to bounce back in 2020, and his arbitration salary will be inflated by his strong power numbers. Swapping Cron for Sanó and finding a replacement at third base who brings more athleticism is necessary, but not sufficient. The team needs better athletes in the outfield, too, unless Byron Buxton has a fully healthy season next year—and at this point, betting on that outcome would constitute malpractice. Trading Eddie Rosario, while a painful proposition, certainly has to be a consideration, but his likely replacements in left field are Alex Kirilloff and Trevor Larnach, and neither of them is an above-average defensive outfielder, either. This is where Royce Lewis might soon enter the frame. His encouraging offensive showing in the Arizona Fall League and dubious recent scouting reports on his future at shortstop allow one to envision him reaching the parent club as a third baseman (he’s played there most of the time in the AFL) who moonlights as a speedy outfielder, by the middle of next season. One way or another, though, the team has to upgrade its defense, and that starts with Sanó changing mitts. For Part 1 of this series, click here. Click here to view the article

It’s important to not sugarcoat what just happened, even if there seems little danger of it. While the Twins’ brilliant season was unexpected and thrilling, and while they certainly seem more on the upswing than on the down slope, the decisive and deflating way the season just ended represents a real setback. Not only do they have to start all over next spring without even a moral October victory to balance out the added pressure they’ll face, but the team faces real challenges in reconstituting a roster that will regress substantially in 2020 if left to its own devices.Three games should hardly form the basis of a team’s offseason mentality, but the particular way these three games unfolded should crystallize a few things as the Twins look toward 2020. Specifically, this five-part series will explore things that seem both clearer and more important now than they did a week ago, and which should inform the Twins’ plans for getting back to the Division Series, at least, next fall. Jake Odorizzi Should Be a Priority For most of baseball history, a pitcher with Odorizzi’s vulnerabilities the third time through an opposing batting order would be significantly less valuable than even a slightly worse pitcher with better durability. In this era, though, Odorizzi is almost the quintessential mid-rotation guy. He might only go five or six innings (as in Game 3, when he allowed two runs to the formidable Yankees lineup in five frames), but he’ll usually leave his bullpen a lead to protect for the balance of the contest. His performance in Game 3 was typical in every way: he got some swings and misses, stayed mostly off the barrels of opponents’ bats, and forced them to defend the entire strike zone. His adjustments this season deepened his repertoire and made him more well-rounded, even if they didn’t eliminate his fundamental shortcomings. As he carried the pitching staff during September and turned in the best performance of any Twins hurler against New York, he asserted himself as the first internal decision the club needs to make. The club should extend a qualifying offer to Odorizzi. Too often, teams get cute with those decisions, and treat it like a game of chicken. They only extend the offer if they feel sure the player will reject it, thereby assuring them of the right to collect draft compensation for him. In this case, Odorizzi might well accept the offer, but that shouldn’t scare Minnesota away from making it. He’ll only be 30 in 2020. He’s a good fit in the clubhouse and for the needs of the team. He’s already proven he can work within the support framework of coaches and analytical staff to maximize his talent. A one-year deal, even for $18 million or so isn’t a bad proposition at all, especially given the Twins’ payroll situation for the coming year. Such a short-term solution would allow them to evaluate their internal options for a more homegrown rotation in 2021 and beyond. Click here to view the article