Matthew Trueblood

The Red Sox saw something in Brusdar Graterol's medical information that made them balk. But is there any real value in the kinds of assessments that lead to such reversals?The way the Boston Red Sox interpreted and evaluated medical information about Brusdar Graterol cost the Minnesota Twins something tangible. Now that the terms of the Mookie Betts megadeal are more or less set, we can assess exactly what that cost was. Instead of getting Kenta Maeda in exchange for Graterol in a straight-up exchange, the Twins are now getting Maeda and $10 million from the Los Angeles Dodgers, but giving up Graterol, outfielder Luke Raley, and the 67th pick in the 2020 MLB Draft. The change in marginal value for Minnesota is small, but it’s real, and it’s not really fair. The Red Sox shouldn’t have had the right to hold up the deal on this basis, and MLB should modify its rules to avoid similar situations in the future. At first, this might seem an extreme position. No team should be expected to take on damaged goods, and any rule that reduces the discretion a team can exercise when reviewing otherwise privileged information before giving a trade final approval would be met with dismay. There are relevant, recent precedents for teams withholding key information about a player when trading them to another club, and that can’t be allowed to happen. However, there’s a marked difference between truly damaged, injured baseball players—especially pitchers—and merely risky ones. I would argue the difference is one of kind, not of degree, and that the ability of one team to apply their own prognoses to subjective medical data after a trade has been agreed upon is unfair to the other party in said trade and to the player himself. We’re very bad at predicting injuries in baseball, but that should come as no surprise. We’re pretty bad at predicting, and even diagnosing, much more simple, straightforward medical conditions, across much more robust and similar populations than big-league pitchers. In numerous studies, when shown them far enough apart to minimize awareness of the subject at issue, radiologists have been shown to draw almost diametrically opposite conclusions and make dramatically different diagnostic proclamations of two scans, only to be told afterward that the two scans were actually identical. Representativeness, available mental energy, halo effects, and a half-dozen other external factors and cognitive biases affect the way medical professionals assess patients, even in much higher stakes situations and with more time available for the review. It’s easy to imagine that the Red Sox drew different conclusions from Graterol’s medical history and private health information than did the Twins, or even the Dodgers. That doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, they’re probably wrong. Graterol is most likely to be a reliever, in both the short- and the long-term future. His build, his delivery, his repertoire, and his movement profile all point in that direction. So does his health history, though the tea leaves are much less clear there, because it’s not at all clear that pitching in relief poses less risk to a pitcher’s arm or allows him to stay healthier than he would as a starter. However, he’s healthy right now. He’s pitched at a very high level as recently as the MLB postseason, and his offseason workouts have been uninterrupted. By declaring his medicals unsatisfactory, the Red Sox were able to renegotiate their deal with the Dodgers, and they got better talent in the process. The Twins, however, had to decide whether to go forward with a deal that lost some of its original simplicity and desirability. The Dodgers, though willing to take on Graterol, were in a position to apply leverage to the Twins, because of the public reports about the newly questionable health of their flamethrowing pitcher. If the Twins had elected to back out of the deal, they’d have had an even more damaged asset on their hands, because (unfairly) the outside view would have been that Graterol was also rejected, to one extent or another, by the Dodgers. For Graterol, this is all patently unfair. It will, if only tacitly, affect his future earnings. It will color the global perception of him. Again, the risky elements of his body, background, and skill set were already public knowledge, but this assigns a false sense of objective reality to one of those elements. If a player can be shown to be injured (in a way that prevents him from taking the field) at the time of a trade, and if that injury was not known to the acquiring team when the trade was agreed upon, the league should step in, certify as much, and nullify the deal. In all other cases, once an agreement has been reached, it should be final. If teams want to run risk analyses around injury precursors on a given player, they should have to do it using publicly available information, and they should have to do it before agreeing to acquire that player. A smart front office employee can map out the injury risk of a given pitcher using that pitcher’s age, workload, documented injury history, and average velocity, with purely statistical data, repertoire, and qualitative information about their delivery baked into the assessment. They can do so just about as reliably as a doctor, a biomechanics expert, and another front office employee can by viewing old scans of a shoulder strain or measurements of the length of the player’s ulnar collateral ligament, and the simpler method also avoids trafficking in divination. It wards off overconfident assessments that also hurt the reputation and earning power of players, and it provides a fairer foundation for trade negotiations. 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

Kenta Maeda doesn't have a reputation to compare to the top free-agent pitchers of this offseason, but he might be better than several of them, and the best pitcher on the Twins' entire staff.José Berríos is a more traditional workhorse. Jake Odorizzi has a deeper repertoire. Taylor Rogers is a relief ace. In the right mix, however, new acquisition Kenta Maeda can be better than any of them, and the erstwhile Los Angeles Dodgers swingman has landed on a Minnesota Twins team that suits him just as well as his old one did. While other pitchers might be more valuable in a vacuum, the specific context of the Twins pitching staff makes Maeda the most valuable hurler they have. That’s a bold claim, and the advisability of trading Brusdar Graterol for Maeda partially hinges on its viability, so here are five numbers to support it. Of the 104 pitchers who threw at least 2,000 pitches in 2019, Maeda induced the sixth-highest whiff rate on swings. Opponents made contact on a lower percentage of their swings against Maeda than against Lucas Giolito, Chris Sale, or Jacob deGrom. Despite a fastball that averages 92.3 miles per hour, Maeda misses bats at an extremely impressive clip. When he threw a slider to right-handers in 2019, they whiffed 25.2 percent of the time—not on swings, but on all sliders. Left-handed hitters whiffed at his changeup 21.5 percent of the time. Those numbers are eye-popping. Maeda has five pitches, but really, he throws just two against each type of batter. Righties see his slider 53.4 percent of the time and his fastball 33.2 percent of the time. To lefties, he throws 41.2 percent changeups and 34.6 percent fastballs. Because of that, of hurlers who threw at least 2,000 pitches, Maeda induced the seventh-highest swing rate on pitches outside the zone. Against batters of each handedness, Maeda is more likely to throw his primary non-fastball pitch than his heater. His fastball only remains his most-used pitch because he throws it as a secondary offering against all batters. He’s highly unpredictable, and that draws hitters into chasing bad pitches. That unpredictability makes him hard to square up, too. His fastball has above-average spin, adjusted for its velocity, and while his spin doesn’t generate extraordinary movement, it does seem to help him limit hard contact. Of 152 pitchers who allowed at least 250 batted balls in 2019, Maeda yielded the fourth-lowest average exit velocity. It’s not a coincidence that opponents have a .280 batting average on balls in play against Maeda over his 589 big-league innings, which is well below the typical .300. Nor has Maeda simply gotten lucky. He gets tangibly worse contact even when batters aren’t swinging and missing. He’s a fly-ball pitcher, but is one of the best pitchers in baseball at limiting exit velocity on those flies, which only makes him an even better fit for the Twins: their outfield defense is far better than the gloves on the infield. Finding pitchers with both strikeout rates and contact management skills this far above average, while throwing more than one inning at a time, is virtually impossible. Yet, Maeda manages it, partially because he’s been used very strategically. In all situations other than facing batters a third time in games as a starter, Maeda held opponents to a batting line of .199/.264/.343. The Dodgers’ plan with Maeda, for reasons both performance-centered and financial, was to minimize his exposure to opponents for the third time in any game. That prevented Maeda from running into trouble as batters grew accustomed to his two-pitch combinations. He only faced batters on a third trip through the order 104 times in 2019, less than half as many such plate appearances as he had facing them a second time. When restricted to that role, Maeda was dominant. The Twins, with such great bullpen depth in place, can afford to carry forward that strategy, which gives Maeda a chance to remain nearly unhittable. The way Maeda slides between roles (however unhappy he might be about it), and the way he both punches batters out and makes things easy on his defense when they do put the ball in play, makes him a darling of the most advanced pitching metrics. Baseball Prospectus uses Deserved Run Average (DRA) to holistically capture a pitcher’s contribution to run prevention, and DRA- puts that contribution on a simple scale, where 100 is average and (for example) 80 is 20 percent better than average. Maeda’s 68 career DRA- is better than the same number for the best seasons of Berríos, Odorizzi, or Pineda. Among possible Twins starters, only Rich Hill has ever been better than Maeda, and Hill is unlikely to reach that level again at this late stage of his career. It’s unlikely that Maeda will be as inexpensive as his contract first appears, because he’ll probably start for much of the season, and that will trigger a number of significant incentives. However, even at triple his base salary, Maeda is a bargain. He could be the Twins’ ace, especially because of the deep and highly modular group around him. His pitch mix is a perfect fit for the Twins’ evolving pitching philosophy, and his strengths match up with those of the team in ideal fashion. Click here to view the article

The best reason to believe in and take note of the Twins' latest pitching addition is the trait he shares with their first one of the winter: a heavy (and potentially damaging) reliance on sliders.For the second time in three winters, the Twins have signed a Venezuelan right-hander in his early 30s, with an impressive MLB track record but nightmarish recent results, to a late-winter minor-league deal. I don’t expect Jhoulys Chacín to be with the organization much longer in 2020 than Aníbal Sánchez was in 2018, because the Twins already have a number of potentially solid starting pitching options. However, one thing about Chacín should stand out for Twins fans: his slider usage. Like the first pitching acquisition of Minnesota’s offseason (Matt Wisler), this final one seems to reflect the Twins’ confidence that a good, heavily-used slider is a solid foundation on which to build success. Chacín came up with the Rockies in 2009, and had impressive seasons with them. From 2014-16, however, he ran into a lot of trouble, especially with injuries. In that three-year span, he had a 4.81 ERA, in just 234 total innings. He was worth -0.4 WARP, according to Baseball Prospectus. Between March 2015 and the end of 2016, he belonged to five different teams. His career on life support, Chacín signed with the pitching-starved Padres for $1.75 million for 2017—but found something there that (briefly, anyway) changed the course of his career again. After never having thrown his slider even a quarter of the time, he threw it 34 percent of the time that season, stayed healthy, topped 180 innings, had a 3.89 ERA, and racked up 2.2 WARP. That earned him his two-year deal with the Brewers prior to 2018. Here’s where his slider usage has gone since. Download attachment: Brooksbaseball-Chart.jpeg In 2018, Chacín had a season fully in line with his early brilliance in Colorado. Using his slider as his primary pitch, he befuddled and frustrated opposing batters. They couldn’t get him to throw anything straight, and that left them hacking away at stuff they had no chance to drive. He made 35 starts during the season and another three in October, as the Brewers pitched him virtually every time he could be said to be on full rest. Their strategy was to get him out of the game before opponents could see him a third time, thereby giving them a chance to find the range on his slider and square it up. Then, in 2019: disaster. As Chacín leaned more and more heavily on the slider, batters started taking its measure. His whiff rate (as a percentage of all sliders thrown) tumbled to a career-low 11.5 percent, not because it flattened out or he stopped commanding it, but because batters started sitting on it. They still didn’t exactly obliterate the pitch; they did most of their damage when he gave in and threw a sinker. However, the attempt to push his slider usage up to 50 percent while still starting was a failure. He found the point of diminishing returns for that pitch, in his particular repertoire, in the role he was asked to fill. That point is higher, of course, if you’re a short-burst reliever. Opponents have far fewer chances to see and adjust to the pitch, and they can’t make you the focal point of their preparation for any particular game. Matt Wisler threw his slider 45 percent of the time even in 2018, but that wasn’t anywhere near the red line for slider use, because (although he began his big-league career in the Braves’ rotation) he’s a pure reliever. In 2019, though, he really pushed the envelope. Download attachment: Brooksbaseball-Chart (1).jpeg It backfired, though in a different way than Chacín’s strategy did. (That shouldn’t shock us; they’re very different pitchers and pitches.) Wisler still induced whiffs on a very impressive 20.9 percent of all his sliders, which is why the Twins liked him enough to claim him on waivers and slot him into the bullpen plans. By Baseball Prospectus’s advanced metrics (where 100 is league-average and lower is better), he had an 85 DRA-, a 93 cFIP, and was worth an impressive 0.7 WARP in just 51 innings last year. His ERA, however, was 5.61, because batters cracked 10 home runs against him in that relatively small body of work. The problem wasn’t that Wisler’s slider lacked bite, or that batters began gearing up and swinging out of their shoes against him. Nor was it (solely) the aeroball that victimized him. The problem was simple: most pitchers’ sliders are prone to occasional slips, and some of those slips lead to balls in dirt, and some lead to balls left fat in the center of the zone. By throwing so many sliders, Wisler opened himself up to a few too many of those slips, and too many of them landed in hittable areas. Pitch mix is always a delicate balance. Every pitcher must calibrate and tinker with their pitch interactions in their own, unique way. However, there are certain thresholds that should raise one’s eyebrows, and they can make for easy adjustments, especially for teams with ample confidence in their pitching infrastructure. That last modifier definitely describes the Twins, which is probably why they were happy to take their chances with Wisler and Chacín. If Wes Johnson can help them each hone their pitch balance the way he did with multiple Twins last season, these small investments could pay big dividends. 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

Michael Pineda is a big guy with a power pitcher's reputation, but quietly, he's become much more dependent on command and control. Luckily, there's evidence that he has some of the best of each in all of baseball.The Twins re-signed Michael Pineda to a two-year deal worth $20 million back in December, on the premise that he had regained his pre-Tommy John form down the stretch and proved himself as a viable mid-rotation starter. Despite the suspension that will steal a quarter of his 2020, Minnesota’s front office believes he can provide stability and upside for the balance of the season, based on last year’s progression. Pineda is a very tough pitcher to figure out, though, and whether or not the team made a good bet depends heavily on whether his good command can continue to outweigh his pedestrian stuff. By most of the currently popular pitching metrics, Pineda is somewhat unimpressive. His cFIP (a Baseball Prospectus metric that isolates factors over which a pitcher has the most control, but which does not fall victim to some of the oversmoothing tendencies of other fielder-independent statistics) was 105 in 2019, marking him as worse than an average hurler. Statcast has six buckets into which it sorts tracked batted balls. Pineda gave up the two most damaging types—Barrels and Solid Contact—in a higher percentage of opponent plate appearances than all but 14 other pitchers. His average fastball velocity has dipped over the years, and is now lower than the average for a right-handed starter without exceptional durability. His spin rate on the fastball is in the fifth percentile among all qualifying pitchers, which leads to heavy movement on the pitch—but because it’s still relatively straight, batters are able to lift it consistently. His slider once had considerable movement separation from the heater, but that’s become muted over the last two seasons in which he’s pitched, leading to fewer grounders on the slider, too. Indeed, Pineda was once a reliable ground-ball guy, but last year, 114 of the 130 pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched had higher ground-ball rates than he had. Pineda’s always been vulnerable to hard contact, and even during his strong finish to 2020, he gave up a fair amount of that, with opponents’ average exit velocity against him in the upper quartile of the league. Even worse, now that he’s not getting grounders, Pineda also allows a lot of that contact within the launch-angle band in which batters have the most success. Of the 129 pitchers who allowed at least 300 batted balls in 2019, Pineda allowed the 24th-highest Sweet Spot percentage. His changeup isn’t great, either, which makes containing left-handed batters and getting through opposing lineups for a third time a constant struggle for Pineda. However, he did throw his fastball and changeup more (and his slider less) against lefties in 2019 than ever before, and that led to more success than usual in those situations. When it comes to sheer whiffs per pitch or swing, Pineda is impressive, fitting into the top quartile of the league. However, he’s not even in the top tertile of the majors in actual strikeout rate. It seems as though, because Pineda’s repertoire remains limited, batters are able to guess along with him in certain counts and situations, minimizing the value of his granular, pitch-for-pitch numbers. Despite all that, however, Pineda had a 4.01 ERA, in a league that averaged 4.60. The only AL hurlers who topped 100 innings and allowed a lower walk rate were Mike Leake and Ryan Yarbrough. Without sexy stuff or a deep arsenal, Pineda was very good for most of 2019, and projects relatively well for 2020, because he does a simple and vital thing very well: he fills the zone with fastballs, and expands it with breaking stuff. Over 400 pitchers threw at least 200 four-seam fastballs in 2019. Among them, Pineda ranked in the 97th percentile for Called Strike Probability—in essence, the average likelihood that fastballs he threw would have been called strikes, if batters didn’t swing. Some 245 pitchers, meanwhile, threw at least 200 sliders. Pineda’s Called Strike Probability for that pitch ranked in the seventh percentile. An average fastball from Pineda had a 59-percent chance of being called a strike, and given the lack of either extreme velocity or rising action on the pitch, that made hitters very eager to attack. However, if they saw fastball but got a slider, they were likely to find themselves waving at a pitch that otherwise had a 36-percent chance of being called a strike. Unlike more straightforward, quantitative stats, Called Strike Probability is an extremely nuanced characteristic. It’s captured in a single number, but it’s hard to say what the optimal number is for any individual pitcher or pitch, except by understanding the pitch’s place in the pitcher’s repertoire and the constellation of characteristics that make up that hurler. For Pineda, however, it’s pretty easy to see how this works. Fastballs have to be strikes consistently, or else a pitcher starts racking up far too many walks. Breaking balls, and especially sliders, need to end up consistently outside the zone. Pineda did that better than ever in 2019, burying the slider not only more consistently, but further below the zone, reducing the chance that a hitter would even happen to reach down and golf a shin-high pitch somewhere. His lack of power or strikeout skill gives Pineda a thin margin for error. He has to repeat the command gains he made in 2019, especially since he’s unlikely to get back the velocity he once had. However, the Twins made multiple bets on command over stuff this winter, suggesting that they trust Wes Johnson and their support staff to help pitchers maintain that trait. That makes the deal to which they signed Pineda a reasonable risk, even if it seems a bit old-fashioned. Click here to view the article

With the Astros, stolen signs helped González fake improved plate discipline. He wasn't purely a creation of Houston's systematic cheating, however, and the Twins taught him some new tricks of their own in 2019.Marwin González probably profited from the Houston Astros’ systematic sign-stealing efforts in 2017 and 2018, in ways we can clearly identify using advanced data. After he signed with the Twins last winter, however, González also profited from Minnesota’s hitting philosophy and instruction. Thus, while you shouldn’t expect him to repeat or approximate his gaudy 2017 numbers in 2020, there are reasons to believe he can be a similarly valuable (though different) super-utility slugger. Early in his career, González battled persistent problems recognizing and laying off non-fastballs outside the strike zone. He did good work against heaters, but was too easily exploited by pitchers who could command secondary stuff. In 2017, however, his chase rate on junk outside the zone dropped sharply, and González’s production surged accordingly. Download attachment: Chase Rate MG.jpeg In hindsight, thanks to the information that has come to light since, it seems safe to assume González was getting help from Houston’s banging scheme. Since that year, and particularly after leaving Houston for Minnesota, he’s been unable to replicate that improved plate discipline. His walk rate in the two seasons prior to 2017 was just north of 4 percent. His walk rates in 2017 and 2018 were just south of 10 percent. In 2019, he walked just 6.7 percent of the time. However, it’s not fully clear that González solely shored up his plate discipline in those seasons as a result of sign stealing. He was at an age and in a situation that encouraged a maturing, increasingly selective approach, and might have simply made that conscious decision. Then, in coming to the Twins, he both faced pressure to live up to a multi-year deal and was immersed in a team whose baseline hitting mentality is more aggressive. He might have swung more often in 2019, not because he forgot how to be patient or lost his secret edge, but because he simply felt more pressure and was trying to tailor his approach to that of his new club. In any case, González also got something valuable in return for his increased aggressiveness: more pop. Despite leaving Minute Maid Park and coming to Target Field, which is a tough park on his power tendencies, González nearly matched his extra-base hit rate from 2018, and his underlying batted-ball data support that. In fact, those numbers suggest that he could have seen even better results. Download attachment: unnamed.jpg That forward leap, in both average exit velocity and hard-hit rate, is very significant. A player in his 30s adding three miles per hour to that average exit velocity figure within a single season is nearly unprecedented. By tapping into his aggressiveness again, González found a lot more hard contact. He saw particular improvement in his ability to drive the outside pitch, as a left-handed batter, and in staying on top of pitches up in the zone, as a right-handed one. Twins fans shouldn’t expect González to rebound to the kind of numbers he put up in 2017. That was probably a career year, sweetened by his team’s systematic sign-stealing. Still, there were drawbacks to hitting the way the Astros trained González to hit, including drawbacks to the banging scheme itself. The Twins have helped González realize his potential for avoiding the weakest and least valuable forms of contact, and for thumping the ball more consistently, even when an opposing pitcher executes well. On balance, he’s still a good player, likely to produce better in 2020 than he did in 2019, and having signs relayed to him did not turn him from some fringe big-leaguer into the fine utility player he is now. 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

Love this list but propose this amendment to the first entry (sacrilege, I know): https://youtu.be/1P2HSPaF3cI Also, what about Clapton’s “Let It Rain”?

It's easy to guess that Jorge Polanco's erratic arm would force him to position himself differently at shortstop, but with modern databases, we don't have to guess. It's true, and it's crucial to understanding how Polanco can be a better shortstop.In the latest Gleeman and the Geek, John posited that Jorge Polanco’s arm might be a compound problem for him as a defender if his lack of confidence in making long throws led him to play a step shallower than stronger-armed shortstops. Despite his good sprint speed, and despite hands deft enough to generate one of the highest contact rates in the majors when at bat, Polanco is a poor defensive shortstop. His range is deficient, but in particular, he has a weak and erratic arm. Thirteen of Polanco’s 22 errors in 2019 came on throws. Since the start of 2018, Baseball Info Solutions counts Polanco as four plays to the good when it comes to positioning-adjusted range and playing balls in the air, but 13 plays to the bad on throws alone. However, we have tools that can tell us for certain whether Polanco is also giving away range because of that arm. According to Baseball Savant, 25 shortstops played in a shifted infield with a right-handed batter at the plate at least 200 times in 2019. (That makes for convoluted reading, but those qualifiers help ensure that we’re comparing apples to apples.) Of them, Polanco played the second-shallowest, an average of just 142 feet from home plate. Perhaps, however, that had something to do with the dramatic way the Twins deployed shifts against right-handers last year, with Polanco so far into the hole that it only made sense for him to pinch down, toward a traditional third baseman’s starting spot. The same database showed 28 shortstops as playing at least 100 times in what it coded as “Strategic” alignments against righties—what previous generations would have called shaded, but not shifted. Among those 28, Polanco played fourth-shallowest. Finally, among 31 shortstops who played at least 1,000 plate appearances against right-handed batters in “Standard” alignments, Polanco played seventh-shallowest. The last list provides the cleanest data. The guys who play deepest, on average, are ones like Nick Ahmed, Javier Báez, Francisco Lindor, and Fernando Tatis, Jr. — the shortstops renowned throughout the league for their cannon-strength arms. Polanco isn’t hedging as much as some of the game’s most inexperienced and undertooled shortstops, but he’s definitely striving to cut batted balls off a half-step sooner, when he’s able, in order to shorten the throw across the diamond. Yes, his arm is costing the Twins outs, not only when he’s unable to turn a double play or throws away a routine groundout, but by making it harder for him to create angles and give ground in order to make tough, ranging plays. As has been enthusiastically and repeatedly mentioned since the signing of Josh Donaldson, the Twins are aware of this problem. Their frequent and drastic shifting in 2019 was, in part, an attempt to hide Polanco. Donaldson makes that easier, because he can cover dramatically more ground (including and especially in the hole between third base and shortstop) than could any of the team’s previous options. In the long run, the solution to this problem is to successfully develop Royce Lewis or Keoni Cavaco as a shortstop. Given Lewis’s documented struggles with mechanics both at the plate and at shortstop, however, and given that Cavaco played more third base than short in high school, neither fix is a sure bet. In the meantime, then, the Twins need to keep Polanco plugging on some of the small ways he can shore up his fielding, and (especially) improve the utility of his arm. Recall that he just revamped his throwing motion last year, but that was done on the fly, in-season. The dropdown in throwing motion implemented by third-base coach Tony Díaz did seem to help Polanco’s accuracy, but it cost him in terms of both timing and getting zip on his throws. Polanco needs to work this spring to develop a throwing motion that allows him to transition more fluidly from fielding the ball to throwing it, and that gives him a chance to fire the ball across with more urgency. That should be more easily done under the more flexible practice conditions of spring training. His footwork is another potential path to improvement: Too often, he receives relatively routine grounders in positions that force unnecessary stutter-steps, or doesn’t reach a ball because his first step is too hesitant. If Polanco can make any of these small adjustments, the effect will compound in a positive direction. He’ll be able to play deeper and open up more options for the team’s defense against ground balls. If he can’t, the Twins will have to hope they can continue to outhit and mitigate the damage done by having him at short on an everyday basis. 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 Minnesota Twins will never be the same. This is a transformational signing. This is that first statement signing a team needs, when it matures into the kind of organization that can compete for top talent with those in bigger markets. At the plate, in the field, and on the books, Donaldson is just perfect for this team, at this moment.The Washington Nationals signed Jayson Werth for seven years and $126 million prior to 2011. Unlike these Twins, those Nats weren’t ready to win, but they needed to announce themselves as serious about acquiring stars and about winning games. The Twins, despite their 101-win 2019, needed this signing to do the same. However, the serendipity of this match runs much deeper than that. No contending team needed a defensive upgrade on the left side of its infield more than the Twins did. I wrote about this right after they were eliminated in October. Donaldson is a massive upgrade for them. He was second in Defensive Runs Saved at third base in 2019, and has been great throughout his career, but the particular way in which he saves those runs makes him a particularly perfect fit for Minnesota. Defensive Runs Saved breaks down how players perform on balls they field straight on (including charging weakly-hit balls), to their right, and to their left. Of Donaldson’s 15 runs saved, 10 of them came on balls to his left, toward the hole between third base and shortstop. Donaldson is great ranging to his left, picking the ball smoothly and throwing accurately on the move, across his body. He’ll not only be an upgrade of about 20 runs over Miguel Sanó at his own position, but help minimize the impact of Jorge Polanco’s defensive deficiencies at short. At the plate, the big problems the Twins face in 2020 are the risk of regression from some of their breakout bats and the departure of hitting coach James Rowson. Donaldson’s arrival softens both of those blows. The Twins’ trademark last season was their unrelenting focus on the goal of driving the ball in the air to the pull field. No team did it as often as they did; no team came close. Few hitters agree as readily with that mentality, or execute it as methodically and faithfully, as Donaldson does. Teams and players who make that their objective can set themselves at different points on a spectrum of approaches, however, tinkering with the means they believe can most consistently achieve that end. Some prefer to emphasize plane, launch angle, and timing. Others emphasize maximizing exit velocity, even if it means using the big part of the field at times and having to command the strike zone better. The Twins fall into the latter bucket, and so does Donaldson. Rank the 342 batters who had at least 150 tracked batted balls in 2019 by average exit velocity, and the Twins now have the second-, third-, and sixth-hardest hitters, in Sanó, Nelson Cruz, and Donaldson. Rank the group by average exit velocity solely on fly balls and line drives, and they have the first-, third-, fifth-, and seventh-most powerful sluggers, with those three in the same order and Mitch Garver sliding into the picture. If you were worried about a brain drain, or about the team being (on the whole) pretty aggressive and susceptible to junk, the addition of a guy like Donaldson, who walks about 15 percent of the time and will not shut up about leg kick and launch angle even if you ask him to, should be a source of comfort. Cost certainty can be a hard asset to assess, but it’s clear that the Polanco, Max Kepler, and Sanó extensions have delivered tangible value here. With those three and Donaldson locked in for at least the next four seasons for an average annual total of $45 million and change, the team has a ton of flexibility. They can afford to pay Garver, Byron Buxton and Luis Arráez, even if they have big seasons that put them in position to demand huge paydays. They have time and leverage to seek long-term deals with Royce Lewis, Trevor Larnach, or Alex Kirilloff, should any of them come up and perform in a way that makes that kind of investment seem wise. They’ve replaced Cruz’s massive power and reliability, a year before they even needed to do so. They have a solid offensive core under control for relatively little money, which gives them the season to assess some internal starting pitching candidates they like very, very much, and which will allow them to bid handsomely on starters next winter if those internal candidates don’t assert themselves. Jeff Passan tweeted that the Twins were the sneaky favorites to sign Donaldson from the outset of the offseason. In hindsight, perhaps that should have been obvious. No team and player were better matched, even including the Twins and certain free-agent starters for whom they elected not to pay a premium. This move feels perfect. Click here to view the article

There’s a “Josh Donaldson or Bust” vibe hanging over the Twins’ offseason. The superstar third baseman would tie this winter together neatly. Missing out would create frustration. Naturally, there have been efforts to cook up alternatives. One of them: free agent Nicholas Castellanos as a first baseman.It’s important, as we gain ever greater insight into the game through statistics and quantitative evaluation, not to get lost in them. In the age of Big Data. It’s more important than ever to sift signal from noise, and to recognize when non-objective, qualitative sources are providing more valuable information than the hard, cold numbers. Baseball is still a game nicely suited to statistical measurements, and anyone who ignores those measurements in the modern environment is lost. On the other hand, one must know when to look around and through the numbers in order not to get tangled up in their traps. Defensive statistics, especially, can be nasty snares. Decades ago, Bill James codified the Defensive Spectrum, using broad-spectrum historical study to identify the hierarchy of positional difficulty for defenders. He made important discoveries that way, and the hierarchy he sketched is still, more or less, the one we use today. From hardest to easiest, the stations go: ShortstopSecond BaseCenter FieldThird BaseRight FieldLeft FieldFirst BaseThat order tends to predict the way players change positions throughout their careers (sliding down the spectrum), and it has become especially relevant as versatility and position changes have become more important elements of defense in the last 15 years. Over the same period, we’ve gone from having almost no credible defensive metrics (that is, ones other than fielding percentage or raw assists and putouts) to having three or four of them. As a result, the modern default in evaluating players as potential additions to a defense is to check their Defensive Runs Saved total, project that figure to hold steady if they remain at their current position, ponder a move down the defensive spectrum where appropriate, and call it close enough. Sometimes, that works. In cases like that of Castellanos, though, we can and should do better. In September 2017 I wrote the following about Castellanos, then playing third base for the Tigers, as part of my ranking of all 30 teams’ starting third basemen in the field. (Castellanos ranked dead last on that list.) [Castellanos] doesn’t use his speed well at the position. His lateral movements are robotic and his hands are stone. There was a reason why Detroit was willing to make this kid wait while Miguel Cabrera manned third base just a few years ago, and now that he’s learned to run and can access his full speed potential, they ought to move him back to the outfield for good. The day after that article ran, Castellanos played his first game of the season in right field. He played two more games at third at the end of the season, but otherwise, has never returned to the dirt. He’s played over 2,500 innings in right field since September 2017. At first, he was a total butcher out there, too. However, his numbers improved considerably from 2018 to 2019: Download attachment: NCChart.png Given that, and given that Castellanos stands 6-foot-4, with improved athleticism, it’s easy to imagine a world in which he slides on a first baseman’s mitt, comes back to the infield at the cold corner, and continues to rake the way he has over the last two seasons. That’s the narrative the numbers want you to believe; it’s the trap his body and the data have conspired to lay. Go back, though, and watch video of Castellanos playing third base. It wasn’t a dearth of athleticism that held him back when he played there. Nor was it an erratic arm. Rather, it was the fundamental skills required of any infielder—nimbleness, smooth motion, soft hands, and an underlying comfort with the ball coming in one’s direction—that were simply missing. Castellanos was drafted as a third baseman. He played there, with only a brief sojourn in the outfield, for seven professional seasons. If he had the instincts or the feel for the infield, it would have shown up by now. Instead, he’s quickly becoming a viable outfielder, because his athleticism plays better there. As he gains experience, he can use his speed to make up for poor jumps and reads. In the infield, there’s no such margin for error, so Castellanos should never return there. The Defensive Spectrum, in this sense, does not apply. Castellanos also isn’t what the Twins need at the plate. Donaldson would bring an approach consistent with everything the Twins already emphasize, and he’d add a dimension (extraordinary plate discipline) that was the only missing ingredient at times in 2019. Castellanos is a fun, enthusiastic, unorthodox hitter, but he’s an inveterate hacker. He swung at 40.2 percent of pitches outside the strike zone last year. He is, in a number of ways, a right-handed Eddie Rosario, and while Rosario is unfairly maligned at times, there are few times when Twins fans find themselves wishing they had two of him. After Castellanos signs, the Twins should call up whoever failed to get him and see whether that team would cough up something useful for the next best thing. Other than that, though, Castellanos’s free agency is irrelevant to the Twins’ winter. 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

Among the group of Twins internal starters without a firm place for 2020, but with a clear chance to assert themselves, one name stands out: Randy Dobnak. No other in-season reinforcement had the kind of impact Dobnak had, and none of them have as much potential to be a valuable starter throughout 2020.Dobnak isn’t just a good story and a quirky look; he’s a legitimate starter. After all, 2019 was just his second full season as a professional, and he scaled four levels to reach the big leagues. He pitched 163 innings, and at all four stops he was above-average according to both of Baseball Prospectus’s key pitching metrics, cFIP and DRA-. Some of what he did in the big leagues in 2019 is undeniably unsustainable. Of the 514 pitchers who threw at least 400 pitches, only one induced a higher percentage of swings on pitches outside the strike zone than did Dobnak—Ryan Pressly. Twins fans know well what Pressly can do with the ball; Dobnak isn’t quite on that level. Inevitably, batters will force Dobnak to throw more strikes going forward, and that means he’s unlikely to keep his walk or home-run rates as low as they’ve been thus far. Even once the league adjusts to him, though, Dobnak will have some things going for him that can’t be ignored. Let’s break down his four-pitch arsenal, piece by piece, to see why the Twins could reasonably project their diamond in the rough to be a solid starter at the back end of their rotation in 2020. Sinker Dobnak comes at hitters from the first-base side of the rubber, with a pretty simple delivery and a pretty low arm slot. His posture is excellent, which has helped him repeat that delivery and demonstrate good command. It’s also the perfect mechanical signature to support his sinker, which is a heavy, low-spin thing batters couldn’t figure out in 2019. Of the 263 pitchers who threw at least 100 sinkers this year, Dobnak had the 12th-most sink, and because he located it so consistently at the bottom of the zone, that heavy action led to a ground-ball rate just under 70 percent on the pitch. Sinkers are going out of vogue, league-wide, as batters find ways to square up and elevate the pitch and pitchers look for offerings with more unconventional movement, chasing swings and misses. As well as Dobnak executes his particular sinker, though, he should stick with it, at least as a complementary offering. Slider In some quarters, it’s controversial even to call Dobnak’s slider a slider. It’s read as a curveball by Statcast, and that’s understandable. The pitch has a very vertical shape, and 90th-percentile vertical depth. It doesn’t sweep like a conventional slider, especially one typically thrown from an arm slot like Dobnak’s. That, in fact, is what makes it so dastardly. When Dobnak served as an opener in Boston just after Labor Day, he got a couple of swings and misses on the slider. The reactions of the Red Sox broadcast team (that night, Dennis Eckersley was in the booth) tells the story of the Dobnak breaking ball succinctly. Eckersley was flabbergasted by the action of the pitch. A replay showed the team how Dobnak releases the ball very much like a slider, getting around the ball as opposed to creating topspin the way a curve does. It also showed the lack of any hump out of the hand, disguising the breaking ball better than curves do. As Eckersley explained, a pitch thrown that way, from that slot, should have more sweep and less plunge to it. Hitters did no better at solving the Dobnak slider than did Eckersley. He induced whiffs on over 46 percent of swings on the pitch. He got swings on over 56 percent of the sliders he threw, despite rarely throwing the pitch for a strike. When he did land it in the zone, he froze opponents and got called strikes with a regularity usually reserved for curveballs. The sample is, admittedly, tiny, but Dobnak’s slider had all the markers of an extremely effective pitch. The list of guys with comparable results on the pitch, based on whiffs, pop-ups, and called strikes, starts with elite relievers Will Smith and Felipe Vázquez. Batters will adjust, but they can’t solve the pitch, because it’s genuinely special. Four-Seamer Though not his least-used offering, the four-seamer is the weakest pitch in Dobnak’s arsenal, and the one he needs to hone if he wants to thrive and push his ceiling higher. He doesn’t spin it especially well, and it’s a low-rise fastball, which is a tough pitch for which to find a role in this day and age. Hitters see it less as heavy than as flat, and therefore hittable. The best comparison point for Dobnak’s fastball might be that of Mike Leake, who is also a sinker-first guy who relies on athleticism and has a relatively low slot, but Leake has a cutter that keeps hitters honest. If Dobnak can just learn to locate the four-seamer up in the zone, he can get away with it as a changer of eye levels. If he can develop a pitch with a bit more armside movement, he can really start to use the four-seamer as a weapon, but for now, it’s a pitch he throws purely to burn hitters sitting on sinker or slider, and he’s not likely to succeed in that endeavor for long. On the other hand, Leake throws in the upper 80s with his heat. Dobnak’s four-seamer can find a gear his sinker can’t, and sometimes touches 95 or 96 miles per hour. Again, then, it comes down to whether he can get comfortable firing that heat toward the top of the zone, despite his mechanical signature, and without radically altering his release point. Changeup Because of the unique movement on his slider and his sinker-first fastball profile, Dobnak doesn’t need his changeup as much as most right-handed starters do. When he brought it out in 2019, however, it seemed a viable offering. He commands it well enough to the first-base side of the rubber to use it against righties, which is relatively rare. He can also fool lefties really effectively with it because of the velocity gap between the change and his fastballs. Movement-wise, however, there’s very little difference between his change and sinker, so once more, some of his effectiveness will be dictated by his ability or inability to start using the four-seamer above the belt. … There’s no chance Dobnak explodes into some new strata from here. He’s not going to give the team the upside it needs in its rotation, which is why they still need to aggressively explore options to add a new ace or co-ace at the front end. However, whereas it would be easy to view him as an extra option or a swingman, the team should view Dobnak as a credible fourth or fifth starter, someone they can count on enough not to spend free-agent dollars on a marginal option like Rick Porcello or Homer Bailey. Dobnak can do anything those guys can do. Derek Falvey and Thad Levine should be out there selling someone who can genuinely change the equation on being a Twin, and spend whatever money they might otherwise throw at a lesser second option at that primary target as a sweetener. Click here to view the article

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