Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images No team in baseball got fewer called strikes on pitches outside the strike zone in 2025 than the Minnesota Twins' 295, according to Statcast. The cocktail of a pitching staff that throws lots of non-fastballs (seeking chases outside the zone, rather than calls on the edges of it) and poor pitch framing by catcher Ryan Jeffers led to very few marginal strikes for the team. They were middle-of-the-pack, meanwhile, with 513 called balls on pitches technically within the strike zone. Twins batters were similarly maltreated by the umpires, but again, it had something to do with the way they played. Minnesota hitters had 411 strikes called on pitches outside the zone (third-most), and 528 balls called on pitches within the zone (10th-most). These numbers don't even out, not just because the Twins had the wrong side of umpiring over the course of the season, but because of the well-documented change in the size of the strike zone resulting from a shift in the way the league evaluates arbiters that was rolled out over the winter. The patient approach taken by Twins hitters leads, unavoidably, to lots of balls called on pitches that are "too close to take," by the standards of previous eras in the game. It also results in some called strikes, though, that might technically be outside the zone, but are still the responsibility of the hitter. They really were too close to take; you have to find ways to cover the zone better. Next season, though, there will be a greater recourse than nodding and adjusting. Jeffers, any of the pitchers he works with, and all Twins batters will have the right to challenge ball-strike calls they deem to have been wrong. Each team will get two challenges to start each game, and they only lose them if they challenge a call and the system confirms it. In other words, if an umpire is consistently wrong and a team gets the hang of challenging calls when they are, they might flip a dozen calls within a single game. The net of -101 calls on umpire errors in 2025 placed the Twins ahead of only the White Sox (-143) and Astros (-126) among the 30 teams. Five clubs (the Tigers, Diamondbacks, Blue Jays, Yankees and Giants) netted at least 100 calls in the opposite direction, so the magnitude of this effect could be significant. Imagine if Byron Buxton had the right to tap his helmet and overturn this crummy call. MnIyR3hfWGw0TUFRPT1fVkZkV1ZWQUhCMUFBQVZNRVVBQUhDRkpmQUZsV1ZGVUFCRllDQWxCVVZRSldBUUFF.mp4 That would have flipped a strikeout to a walk; it's a big deal. At other times, though, the effects can be almost as large even when they're much more subtle. Consider this call, also against Buxton. ZFhWNndfWGw0TUFRPT1fVndSVlVBQldVd1VBRFZKVFVBQUhBUTllQUZsWFZ3QUFCVkFIVkZJR1ZGZFNWZ0ZR.mp4 The difference between 0-1 and 1-0 is huge. When a righty batter started a count ahead of a lefty pitcher 1-0, in 2025, they batted .260/.377/.437. When the hurler got ahead 0-1, they held those hitters to .224/.269/.352. Every missed call on a first pitch is worth roughly 6.7% of a run; that kind of difference can add up fast. Next year, the challenge for all 30 teams will be to make good use of the new system. The Twins have more space to use it than most teams do, because if they simply challenged every pitch, they would have had a higher success rate this year than almost anyone else. Of course, it's not that simple. The two Twins hitters who saw the most out-of-zone pitches called strikes were Carlos Correa (already gone) and Trevor Larnach (a non-tender candidate). They took lots of pitches, and they figure to do so again in 2026, but they do need to moderate and modify their approach. If they make good individual and collective adjustments, they might have more overall success, but it might not come in the form of more favorable calls at the edges of the zone. There's also the question of how competent each player in a lineup (and especially each catcher who takes their place behind the dish when a team is pitching) can get at challenging pitches. That will be a point of emphasis for smart teams in the spring, because ideally, players will feel empowered to make as many challenges as possible—without getting two wrong and leaving themselves without the right to appeal during the late innings of a game. Teamwork will matter, but if the Twins default to having hitters be extremely conservative with their challenges, they might only realize the benefits of the system on one side of the runs ledger. With new personnel entering the picture late in the 2025 season and more changes coming, the Twins should be one of the teams best positioned to get better by being good at using the challenge system in 2026. It's not as simple as operating the same way and tapping one's head more often, though. Their efforts to get the better side of calls whenever possible have to be mitigated by a broader focus on playing winning baseball, overall. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images He'll be out of options next spring, and the 40-man roster carousel might toss Jose Miranda off and into the waiver-wire Tilt-o-Whirl soon, anyway. However, one common mechanism of offseason roster churn won't affect the Twins infielder: arbitration eligibility, and the mid-November non-tender deadline. Miranda, 27, finished the 2025 campaign with 2 years and 135 days of official big-league service time, according to Cot's Contracts. That's almost exactly the likely cutoff for Super Two eligibility this winter, based on a Twins Daily review of eligible players. However, Miranda himself can't benefit, even if he noses over the line. No matter where the cutoff line falls, Miranda won't have been part of the calculation thereof, and he won't be eligible for arbitration this winter. As a quick refresher, all players with between three and six years of MLB service time (who haven't already signed multi-year contracts) are eligible for salary arbitration each offseason. In addition to that group, 22 percent of the players with at least two but less than three full years of service (a full year, for the purposes of this question, constitutes 172 days on a big-league roster) also qualify, under what's called Super Two status. Those players get a fourth year of arbitration eligibility, should they stay under team control throughout that entire span. However, there's an important second qualifying factor to become Super Two-eligible, or even to be considered in the class of players from which the Super Two players are drawn. It's not all players between two and three years of service who qualify, but all those who also got at least 86 days of service during the previous season. That turns out to be an important caveat. There are roughly 180 players who sit between two and three years of service heading into this offseason, but only about 160 of them meet the second criterion. The Super Two cutoff will be determined by looking only at that group of 160—and anyone who didn't get at least those 86 days (half a year) of service in 2025 will neither be eligible for arbitration nor part of the denominator that decides who is. Thus, Miranda is on the outside looking in, even if the cutoff line falls below 2.135 years of service. He only got 17 days of his total service time this year, in that calamitous start to this season. After that, the Twins optioned him to Triple-A St. Paul, where he subsequently got hurt and played so badly that he never made it back to the big-league team. The Twins will have the option of renewing his contract for 2026. On balance, this isn't likely to keep Miranda with Minnesota. He still used up his final year of optionability in 2025, so to keep him into next season, the team would have to carry him on the big-league roster. That decision could theoretically be delayed until next Opening Day, but the team has to add several players to their 40-man roster next month to protect them from the Rule 5 Draft in December, and Miranda could easily lose his spot during that churn. What it does mean, though, is that the team will have no financial incentive to jettison Miranda, and that keeping him is one extremely low-cost, relatively low-friction way to go into spring training with one more option to evaluate at first base. Two other members of the 2025 Twins (although not ones who overlapped with Miranda on the major-league roster) are affected, in some way, by the same rule, and by Miranda's exclusion from the sample of players who could be Super Two-eligible. Thomas Hatch, who spent the final two months with the team and has 2 years, 98 days of service to his name, didn't get over the 86-day threshold, either. He wasn't all that closer to qualifying for Super Two status, but the fact that he only got 66 days of service in 2025 means he won't be one of the players in the pool from which Super Twos are culled. Kody Clemens, by contrast, got a full year of service in 2025 and enters the offseason with 2 years, 134 days in total. That will likely flirt with the line, but fall just short of it, according to the same review of eligible players. Miranda missing out helps the cause of the man who replaced him, but there are more guys like Hatch (with relatively low numbers of days beyond the two-year threshold) than like Miranda in the pool of players who are eliminated by not having gotten enough experience in 2025. Three players (Lucas Erceg of the Royals, and Patrick Bailey and Ryan Walker of the Giants) have 2 years, 136 days of service; the line is likely to fall right below them and cut Clemens out of the money. That would be a nice (if small) break for the Twins, who would save just under $1 million on Clemens's salary if he doesn't qualify for Super Two status. It doesn't change the fact that Clemens is also out of options, and the team could still elect to part ways with him this winter, but it would make it much easier for the team to keep him, even under extremely tight payroll constraints from ownership. Right now, though, it's just a projection. If the line does fall at 2.135 years of service, it would hold with a trend from last year, when the cutoff came in at an unusually high 2.132—but it would also be the highest the line has been since 2012, when the rules made fewer players eligible. One way or another, it's likely that Miranda ends up on some other team (or playing in Asia or Mexico) next spring. When looking ahead at the team's offseason, though, it's helpful to know that the Twins won't have to weigh the question of whether to tender him a deal for the purposes of arbitration. If he does return to Fort Myers in February, it will be on a contract worth something very close to the league-minimum salary. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images In ways familiar and excruciatingly new, Zebby Matthews keeps underachieving. He throws 96 miles per hour, and can reach 99 semi-regularly. He has six pitches, including a couple of bat-missing breaking balls. He fills up the strike zone. He even has a great, folksy baseball name—the kind of name baseball needs a really good player or two to have, in every generation. Alas: he's not that really good player, so far. In 25 starts and 117 innings over parts of the last two seasons, Matthews has a 5.92 ERA. In theory, he should be much better than that. The stuff is certainly better, and so are his peripheral numbers. Matthews has fanned 24.7% of the batters he's faced in the majors, and walked just 6.6%. He had a major home-run problem in his rookie stint last season, but brought that under control in 2025. Though his FIP is a still-underwhelming 4.41, all the building blocks of a pitcher with a sub-4.00 ERA are here. He just hasn't been that guy—or anything close to it. The problem—the reason why Matthews has been so unsuccessful—is simple: hitters just keep finding singles against him. He's allowed a .361 batting average on balls in play so far in his career, which is too high to permit any pitcher to function well. Whenever a hurler is running that high a BABIP, the temptation is to declare them unlucky. In Matthews's case, though, that's only half-true, and the half of it that's true is a more lasting and existential kind of bad luck, rather than the fluky kind that time and nature take care of. First of all, Matthews gives up too many batted balls that have a very good chance to be hits. Of the 192 pitchers who allowed at least 200 batted balls in the majors this season, only two had a higher percentage of those batted balls fall into the bucket Statcast labels "Flares and Burners". That category is made up, basically, of three kinds of hits, though they scatter along a spectrum (rather than neatly subdividing themselves): Low line drives Extremely hard ground balls Softly-hit fly balls at launch angles too low to be pop-ups; the kind that fall between infielders and outfielders On "Flares and Burners," the global batting average is right around .660. Thus, the fact that Matthews gives up so many of those batted balls is a problem. Here's the other problem: when Matthews allowed those batted balls, opponents batted .789. In that same sample of 192 hurlers, the only one who gave up a higher batting average on flares and burners was Austin Gomber. We have to engage with both of these facts, but let's start with the second one. That's where a kind of bad luck is infecting Matthews—only, it's not the bad luck of a ball just being hit to the wrong spot four or five times, where nothing could be done. Rather, it's the bad luck of having pitched in front of the Twins' defense. Unfortunately for Matthews, that group is unlikely to be stronger next year than it was in 2025. For all pitchers, the Twins allowed a .699 batting average on flares and burners this season. Only the Angels were worse. Batted balls like those test a defense as much as any others, and the Twins failed that test more often than almost any other team. They simply don't have the personnel to convert those plays into outs at even an average level. Unless the team rededicates itself to defense this winter, the likely starters at third base, shortstop and second base will be Royce Lewis, Brooks Lee and Luke Keaschall, respectively. Those three are all average-minus defenders. There's a slightly better chance that Minnesota will have above-average fielders in the outfield, but Byron Buxton is aging and might not be long for center. It won't turn out any better if Matthews shows up in 2026 and continues giving up batted balls like these. They're hits most of the time, and the poor defense behind Twins hurlers will exacerbate that. Let's talk, then, about the fact that Matthews gives up so many of those batted balls in the first place. Is that something he can fix? Or is it an intrinsic aspect of his game? Alas, it's closer to the latter. Unless Matthews makes some changes to the way he pitches, he's likely to keep giving up a lot of those batted balls. He limits very hard-hit fly balls (the Barrels you've probably heard much more about, relative to the flares and burners) reasonably well, and his stuff profile can induce whiffs, but he's not good at manipulating batters' launch angles. That begets a lot of near-automatic singles. Matthews fills up the zone, even though he's walked more batters since reaching the big leagues than he did in the minors. Among the 260 pitchers who threw at least 1,000 pitches this year, he was in the 78th percentile for Called Strike Probability, according to Baseball Prospectus. That reflects not just the frequency with which a ball is technically in the zone, but the average likelihood of a pitch they throw being called a strike if not swung at. As such, his standing within the league means that Matthews is throwing pretty hittable stuff; he leaves a lot of white on either side of the ball. He doesn't perfectly target the edges, laterally or at the top and bottom of the zone. Location is an issue, then. Unfortunately, so is raw stuff. Only Matthews's slider reliably avoids being hittable; hitters square him up a lot. A change of pitch mix (ratcheting up the frequency with which he throws his sinker to righties, for instance) could help, but it's not obvious that he can either shape or locate that pitch (or any other, save his very good slider) well enough to prevent an abundance of this kind of hit. Even if there's no major roster overhaul, the Twins could use their very best defensive lineups behind Matthews in 2026 and achieve a modest improvement in outcomes. Even if Matthews can't avoid giving up this kind of contact when hitters do touch him, he might be able to miss more bats by using strike-to-ball breaking or offspeed stuff more often, or by better elevating his fastball. There are plenty of ways he can take a big step forward next season, but doing so will require at least some mitigation of the tendency to give up lots and lots of singles by letting opponents hit lots and lots of balls with high expected batting averages—even if the high expected slugging average that plagues some similar hurlers isn't among his problems. View full article

Thanks to all of you for being here with us! Brock, as always, nice job finding fun stuff to send to the winners. 😀

Image courtesy of © Eric Canha-Imagn Images Though highly visible and familiar names—mostly ex-players and those with direct ties to Minnesota who have lots of media savvy or easy name recognition—tend to pop up each time a managerial job opens up, the hottest candidates in baseball tend to be people you've barely heard of. When the Twins hired Rocco Baldelli after the 2018 season, he was not widely known in Twins Territory. Already, we at Twins Daily have confirmed that the team has interest in Cleveland bench coach Craig Albernaz. Now, we have even more concrete evidence of an even more obscure (but very intriguing) candidate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, MLB scoopster Jon Heyman reported that the Twins had asked the Red Sox for permission to talk to their bench coach, ex-infielder Ramón Vázquez, about taking the job at the top step of the first-base dugout at Target Field. Vázquez, 49, would certainly be a less sexy signing than Baldelli was seven years ago. Whereas Baldelli had transitioned from a playing career as a budding star-turned-injury case to working in the Tampa Bay Rays front office and was known first for his familiarity with the behind-the-scenes things of the modern game, Vázquez is an in-uniform lifer. When his playing career ended, he moved into coaching, then managing in the minor leagues. He got back to the big leagues as a coach with the Padres in 2017, but joined Alex Cora when the latter took over as manager of the Red Sox in 2018. He's worked in roles ranging from infield instruction to coordinating gameplans and advance scouting information, and thus, he's had ample exposure to the analytical side of the game, as well. He coached the bases for Boston for three years, then stepped up to become Cora's lieutenant as bench coach. A Puerto Rico native who went to college in Iowa before being drafted in the 7th round, Vázquez rode buses in the minor leagues for a long time; played almost 700 games in parts of nine big-league seasons; and then went back to the minors to earn his way to the majors as a coach. He has every kind of experience as a coach and manager, and a strong reputation within the game for his breadth of knowledge and ability to develop rapport with young players. If hired, he would be the first person of color ever to manage the Twins. We're a long way from that happening, of course. Vázquez might not even end up actually interviewing; this is just a confirmation of the team's interest. However, it's nice to see signs of real movement in the search for the new skipper. The Twins need to get this hire right, and Vázquez is an interesting name to watch. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images Don't lose sight of this: Being a good relief pitcher in the major leagues is hard. That said, it's not as hard as being a good starting pitcher, or a good shortstop or a good cleanup hitter. Relievers are role players. They enjoy the advantages of playing at a higher baseline level of effort, relative to the absolute maximum they can do, and of being sheltered (most of the time) from the worst matchups they might face if their manager weren't carefully selecting the situations in which they're used. You really just need one good thing, to be a good reliever. You have to have a calling card. That's not to say that overspecialization is advisable. In the age of the short start and the three-batter minimum rule, it pays to be versatile and durable. Still, because relievers play in such short bursts and under such favorable conditions, having one really good trait can be enough to keep you around. It might even be enough to make you a positive contributor on a winning club. Kody Funderburk entered 2025, though, without that one thing. He was an up-and-down relief arm in 2024, used more or less as cannon fodder. The Twins didn't view him as a well-built weapon against lefties, but nor has he ever been a reverse-splits guy. He does get lots of ground balls, but because he's generally struggled with walks and doesn't miss bats, he was always a bit too much of a risk to bring into a high-leverage situation, even to get a lefty batter out or to induce a double play. He was missing the kind of ingredient that cements a player in the majors, and keeps them off the shuttle to Triple A. Over the summer, though, he found it. Funderburk slightly lowered his arm angle and his release point this season. As a result of the mechanical tweak, he achieved more extension at release, which added a half-tick to his fastball. The change in angles also made it easier for him to keep his primarily east-west arsenal on the plate. Fully 53% of his pitches this year were in the strike zone, according to Statcast; that's up from just over 50% in 2024. He still walked batters at about the same rate, and there's work left to do with his sequencing to better convert the increase in strikes thrown to a decrease in free passes, but Funderburk no longer found himself working from behind in so many counts. He kept the ball in the park much better, because hitters couldn't sit on his cutter, and indeed, the lower angle opened up much greater usage of his sinker and changeup, each of which helped him seek grounders. Were Funderburk pitching in front of a better defense, he'd probably have put up even better numbers this season. As it was, he finished the campaign with a 3.51 ERA in 41 innings for the major-league team, most of them pitched after the trade deadline fire sale. That's sustainable. In fact, he can improve upon it next year. The Twins should pencil him into their relief mix heading into the offseason, which is a concrete improvement from where he slotted into their depth chart as recently as three months ago. It would be good, I think, to visualize this arm angle change in a couple of ways more concrete than that numerical chart. First, let's compare the arsenal Funderburk threw to lefties in 2024 with that for 2024, by looking at an animation of his pitch mix coming toward a lefty from an imagined lefty's vantage point. Slightly reducing the arm angle actually makes the cutter separate from his other offerings more than it did last year, for Funderburk, but that only sounds like a bad thing. It's actually exactly what he needed. Getting around the cutter a bit more allows him to drive it to the outside edge against lefties, while his sinker runs nicely back to the inside corner. He emphasized his slider more this year, at the expense of his sweeper. That sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it's not. Firstly, as he lowered his arm angle and brought his sinker forward as his primary fastball, Funderburk naturally went to the breaking ball that better tunnels with the sinker. His sweeper, as you can see in the upper half of the image above, tunnels better with the cutter; he's more deceptive with the slider taking over. Secondly, though, making the slider a primary weapon to lefties also made it easier to maintain that pitch and execute it consistently to righties. One challenge for a reliever is that their arsenal needs to overlap, from a matchup perspective, more than a starter's does. A starter who has three pitches that work against lefties and three that work against righties will get enough reps and enough time between starts to hone all of those offerings. A reliever has to be ready at all times, which usually means keeping the repertoire streamlined and sharp for whoever digs into the box. Here, you can really see why the sinker and cutter disguised one another better in 2025 than in 2024. The sweeper is turning into more of a curve, a pitch thrown ball-to-strike to catch the batter off-guard and steal a call. The slider and changeup stay on plane with the sinker and cutter longer, from a righty's perspective, despite the lower slot. Here's a glimpse of the change in video form. First, watch Funderburk throw a sinker to a lefty in 2024. NjQxdllfWGw0TUFRPT1fQjFWWEFRWU5VQW9BWFZBQ1ZBQUFBUVZlQUFBQ0JWTUFBbFlDVWxBSEJsSmRWUU5R.mp4 That's not a bad way to shoot for that corner, but Funderburk decidedly missed. Now, consider the way he went after another lefty, in August. UUEyclZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQndOU1ZsUUdWUVVBRHdkV1h3QUhVd1ZUQUZrRlZBVUFCbFJYQkFWVUIxVlRBVmRX.mp4 Though neither the velocity nor the simple movement metrics on that sinker changed much this year, it's easy to see why Funderburk now likes it enough to be throwing it more often. It's livelier. It's also more likely to find the zone. Let's freeze on the release point of each of those pitches. You can see the difference, in the angle of the arm relative to the shoulder. It's much harder to see from this angle, but Funderburk is also getting a bit deeper into his legs as he flies down the mound. Thence comes his better extension and the added deception of a change in release angle. Funderburk is not a future closer. His upside looks something like what Caleb Thielbar gave the Twins for a few years. Until this season, though, Funderburk looked like he might never get off the roster bubble. Changing his mechanics (and letting that inform changes in approach) got him off that bubble. It was a small thing, but it became a bigger one for both the player and the team after the July shakeup. In 2026, it might feel like a fairly big thing to have done. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images Rocco Baldelli couldn't pick up a bat and take the place of any of the hitters who lost touch with their talent in the second half of 2024, and he couldn't toe the rubber in the places of injured hurlers Pablo López, Zebby Matthews or Bailey Ober as the season fell apart in 2025. However, after failures of several different forms over the last half-decade, the team finally decided that a new voice was needed to lead the club out of the rut into which they've fallen. The Twins dismissed Baldelli Monday, the team announced, despite having picked up the 2026 option on his contract in June. Back then, it felt like they had little choice. Baldelli had just overseen a 13-game winning streak, and the team appeared to have turned around its season after a brutal sub-.500 start. Alas, that magic didn't last. Though they didn't immediately spiral out of contention after the end of that streak, they could only hover around .500. The loss of López to injury at the beginning of June and the persistent underachievement of several young hitters on whom the team had relied coming into the season conspired to slowly drag Minnesota down in the standings. For all involved, this year's failure felt uncomfortably like an extension of last year's, when the team was riding high in mid-August and then cratered, missing the playoffs because of a 12-27 plane crash of a finish. Baldelli held onto his job after that calamity, but couldn't survive the slow death of the 2025 team, accelerated by the trade deadline fire sale undertaken by the front office in July. The roster Baldelli was given was far from ideal. The fault for that lies (in large part) with the Pohlad family, who constricted spending, and with a front office who was too slow to change direction when their player development faltered. With no significant new spending on the horizon, though—and with the longer-tenured, equally unsuccessful Derek Falvey locked into his role via contract extension and promotion to president of both baseball and business operations—the franchise apparently felt that some visible, tangible change was needed. Baldelli's legacy achievements will be the 100-win record to which the team romped in his first year, 2019, hitting a record 307 home runs; and the snapping of the team's long drought between playoff victories, when the 2023 division-winning Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the Wild Card Series at Target Field. He has been a fine steward of the organization's reputation and a liked and respected figure among players and media members. His approach—very much manager-as-delegator, allowing his assistant coaches to make significant contributions and rarely seizing the initiative by demanding a particular style of play or mode of preparation—sometimes frustrated fans, but he was good at the vital functions of the job: communicating with players, the media, and his bosses in the front office. Minnesota might now look to hire a skipper who takes a more proactive or specific tack in their coaching and direction-setting, but the front office loved Baldelli partially for the very pliability and openness to input he brought to the job. The team had too little success to justify keeping the manager around for an eighth season, but whether this change will prove to have been sufficient (or even necessary, as an alternative to overhauling the front office or the ownership suite) is a much murkier question. View full article

No offense to Funderburk at all, but there were two very interesting storylines of that game and neither had anything to do with him. :D

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images Box Score Starting Pitcher: Bailey Ober - 6 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 5 SO (78 pitches, 52 strikes) Home Runs: Byron Buxton 2 (34) Top 3 WPA: Ober (.387), Buxton (.182), Kody Funderburk (.106) Win Probability Chart (per FanGraphs) We always list the top three win probability players for Twins wins, but this is what you call a classic two-man win. Byron Buxton hit two long home runs, and we're going to talk a lot about them. Bailey Ober worked six stellar innings to put a positive punctuation mark on a largely negative season. The bullpen did its job, too, but this win was all about two Twins veterans whose fortunes were among the biggest stories of the season, and who each did something remarkable as they close out the campaign. Let's start with the starter. Ober was great Thursday, teasing and frustrating the Rangers lineup (admittedly, a decimated one, at the end of a lost season and in a pitcher-friendly park) with a marvelous display of touch and feel. His fastball sat around 89, and dipped below 87 a time or two, but still, he was great. Back on August 20, Ober's velocity went over a cliff. It never came back. He's been down a full mile-per-hour, relative to his previous level, for the last five weeks. In that very game, though, Ober pitched 5 2/3 innings of three-hit, two-run ball against a tough Athletics lineup, striking out seven. After the game that night, two reporters asked Ober how concerned he was about the dip in his velocity, and he was clear: he wasn't, at all. In fact, he emphasized repeatedly that he had feel for moving the ball in both directions and landing his secondary offerings where he wanted to, so in his own opinion, he had above-average stuff that day. It just didn't come in the form of his best possible velocity. That's a legitimate stance. As much as the modern game has fallen in love with velocity, if a pitcher like Ober has the capacity to throw their fastball with good carry, one or more breaking balls, and a changeup with good depth, they don't need to throw very hard to have success. The rub, of course, lies in the fact that it's very hard to maintain the feel and the command to do all of that—a difficulty Ober ran into even during an improved stretch to finish his season. On Thursday, though, he had the good stuff—not heat, but the rest of it. To visualize that, we can set his pitch movement plot from his previous start (a rough, six-run effort against Cleveland in which he couldn't miss bats and had just one strikeout) side-by-side with the same chart for this one. He changed speeds on his slider throughout the game, manipulating it into what sometimes looked like a true slider and other times played more like a cutter. He also had great depth on his changeup. Despite topping out at 90.1 miles per hour, Ober had good stuff Thursday. In all, he had four starts like this one in his final seven for 2025. This is the roadmap for a successful 2026 for Ober, which the Twins need badly. Meanwhile, Buxton gave him all the support he needed—and more. He didn't just hit two home runs (one leading off the game and one with two men on in the top of the eighth, putting the contest on ice). He hit two carbon copies, of each other and of his homer the previous night. Three times in two days, he hit a ball 110 miles per hour—not 109, not 111—at a launch angle between 22 and 24 degrees, out of the spacious park in Arlington to something very like dead center field. It felt like watching a different sport, because in baseball, you hardly ever see a hitter do the same big thing so many times in such a short span. Even when a guy has a two-homer game, one will go to the opposite field, or he'll hit one no-doubter and one wall-scraper. A three-single day will probably include one grounder and one line drive, rather than the same hit on a loop. Buxton got so locked in during this set that it felt akin to watching Steph Curry come up the floor and hit a logo three—and then another, and another, all within a few minutes of one another, all because he could feel that he was dialed in and the other team had no way to stop him. Buxton now has 34 home runs this year, to go with his 24 stolen bases. Even as it takes its final, gasping breaths, his season gets more impressive. Only six players have hit more home runs in a season in a Twins uniform than Buxton has this year. Those of you with a keen eye for a Twins history nugget know that Bob Allison and Josh Willingham each topped out at 35, exactly, so a homer this weekend would draw Buxton level with them. It's a remarkable story, not only because it's such a relief that he's been able to stay on the field this year, but because he's dominated so thoroughly during the time he's had. Even in this relatively healthy season, he's made two trips to the injured list and can only top out at 127 games played. Yet, he's slugged a total of 62 extra-base hits. Watching him get hot one last time, as he occupies the leadoff spot on a daily basis and shows passion for the endeavor even with the team long eliminated, has been a delight. Buxton is also up to 61 Barrels this season, according to Statcast. Those are batted balls that turn into extra-base hits more often than not, and very often, they're homers. In the 11-season Statcast Era, only Nelson Cruz (who had 65 in 2019) has produced more of those high-quality batted balls than Buxton, who drew level with Josh Donaldson's 2021 with his two Barrels Thursday. Add in his early defensive heroics and his 24 steals without being caught, and it's fair to say that Buxton is having one of the best seasons in Twins history. Where, exactly, he ranks is an argument for another day, but Thursday was a reminder of just how explosive he's been. What's Next Joe Ryan (13-9, 3.47 ERA) will try to arrest the tailspin his season has gone into since the trade deadline and reclaim the exciting tenor of his first half Friday night. He'll toe the rubber for the Twins in Philadelphia, where they'll take on the NL East champion Phillies and Aaron Nola (4-10, 6.46 ERA). First pitch is scheduled for 5:45 PM CT. Postgame Interviews Rocco Baldelli - Postgame Conference 9/25/2025"> Bullpen Usage Chart SUN MON TUE WED THU TOT Hatch 0 0 0 0 0 0 Adams 14 0 0 16 0 30 Sands 20 0 6 0 12 38 Funderburk 14 0 11 0 14 39 Laweryson 0 0 0 12 0 12 Cabrera 0 0 0 11 0 11 Ohl 9 0 0 0 20 29 Tonkin 0 0 0 0 0 0 View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images Say this for Luke Keaschall: the man knows how to set a high floor for his hitting profile. He has hits in 13 of his 14 games in September, even as the league adapts and adjusts to him. He's batting over .300 for the month. However, he's also only walked three times and hit two doubles this month; his slugging average is south of .350. Is Keaschall proving himself slump-proof, or is this just what a slump looks like for him? That question isn't answerable in the sample of playing time he's accrued this year, or that he will accrue before the season is over. It'll have to wait until next year, and perhaps well into that campaign, at that. There's little doubt that Keaschall has an elite raw hit tool, at this point. The league is forcing him to adjust and cover a bigger strike zone, though, and whether he can counteradjust will determine just how valuable he is going forward. As we've discussed before, Keaschall loves to hit the high pitch, despite the steep plane of his swing. He almost cuts off the lower rail of the zone, preferring to gamble on not having strikes called down there than to risk chasing a pitch he can't handle with his extremely compact stroke. As a result of this, Keaschall does nearly all his damage in the upper, inner quadrant of the strike zone. His most famous hit to date, the walkoff home run he drove to right-center against the Royals in mid-August, was on a pitch up and away, but most of the time, he's only going to really hurt you if the ball is near the middle of the zone, and a bit in from there. Even most of his well-struck singles come in that part of the zone. Because he takes a bunch of called strikes along the bottom edge and doesn't get the barrel to the ball if it's down and away, that lower, outer quadrant is where you're most likely to get him out. This chart shows his run value per 100 pitches by location. The league has this data, too. Heck, they had it while Keaschall was still in the minors. Thus, pitchers started hammering him away, away, away, practically the moment he came up. If we come as close as we can to splitting his rookie season exactly in half, to date, the dividing line comes August 22. Here's where Keaschall saw the most pitches through that date. Away, away, away. Preferably, down and away. Pitchers had the book and they tried to make him prove he could hit that pitch. He still can't, really. However, during that span, Keaschall had a .400 weighted on-base average (wOBA, a holistic offensive stat that scales neatly to on-base percentage; .400 is excellent). His average exit velocity was 87.9 miles per hour, and he only struck out 11.1% of the time. As it turns out, if you spend all your time trying to attack one side of the plate—especially to a hitter who, while he might not have a swing versatile enough to produce hard contact foul line-to-foul line or throughout the zone, does have a strong ability to spoil pitches and the speed to turn a squibber into an infield hit—you're going to end up making mistakes. The ball will wander into the middle of the plate too much, where it gets hit hard. The hitter, even if he's a rookie with a fairly stubborn philosophy, can start to cheat toward that pitch and cover it better than he ordinarily would. Keaschall foiled the basic plan of going after the so-called hole in his swing right away. Here's how pitchers have responded, since August 23. Wait! Don't do it! You're in danger! Except, no, they largely haven't been. Keaschall's wOBA is down to .338 during this stretch. His strikeout rate is 15.2%, and even when he puts it in play, his average exit velocity is down to a very unthreatening 84.3 miles per hour. Teasing that outside edge has worked, to some extent, because Keaschall's chase rate is up from 20% in the first half of his young career to 25% in this second half of it. Mostly, though, the league is making him cover the whole plate, and he's having a very hard time with that. More pitches on the inner third means being ready to pull the hands in or tilt downhill even more than usual, but to do that, Keaschall has to give up more capacity for covering the outer third. For many pitchers, feeling emboldened to go after him inside also means fewer mistakes over the middle. Again, so far, Keaschall has only consistently proved that he can punish meatballs in the middle of the zone—and, specifically, hanging stuff in the upper 80s. He doesn't hit even average fastballs for power, and if a pitch finds its target, he usually fights it off, rather than truly attacking it. That's not an indictment, per se. There are 'mistake' hitters in the Hall of Fame, and Keaschall's great blend of contact skill and speed allows him some margin for error. If he wants to be a truly productive hitter, though—a legitimate top-third hitter in a winning lineup, rather than a nice but empty batting average—it's time to see what Keaschall's next phase looks like. How he tweaks his swing and/or his approach to put the barrel on the ball more often or produce more bat speed while covering the whole zone will shape his career, and the final 10 games of 2025 will give us a glimpse of that. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images There have been several theories advanced to explain the unhappy denouement of Taj Bradley's tenure with the Rays. A promising prospect, Bradley did establish himself in the majors with Tampa, but he never got over the hump and made it even as a mid-rotation starter. After stalling out so profoundly that he was optioned to Triple A in July, he was dealt to the Twins in the Griffin Jax deal. For Minnesota, it made sense to roll the dice on Bradley, and Jax wanted out anyway, but it wasn't exactly an exciting time to get into the Taj Bradley business. So far, results have been mixed, but Bradley has shown some irrefutably intriguing things during his first handful of appearances with the Twins. As hideous as his ERA is, it's important to notice that his strikeout rate is slightly up; his walk rate is down; and he's allowing less hard contact. With better defensive support, he'd be looking like a perfectly viable starter. Besides, the under-the-hood stuff is much more encouraging. Bradley's fastball velocity is significantly higher since joining Minnesota. His 96.9-mph average on the heater in September is the highest he's posted in any month in his major-league career. Opponents are whiffing on 26.1% of swings against his four-seamer this month, the highest rate he's ever induced. To get from where he was to where he is now, the Twins had to clean up a delivery that had gotten downright hideous. Here's a fastball he threw on the mound at Target Field, but as a visitor, back in early July. ZzY4a1dfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdkWlVWMENVbGNBREFaUlV3QUhCQVpUQUZoWFdsWUFBbEFGQkZaUlZRRUVCZ3BY.mp4 Obviously, this pitch is a mess on multiple levels. It's poorly located, in a way that doesn't even tempt Matt Wallner. It's also only 94.8 miles per hour, slower than his average even for that month. But a lot of his pitches looked like this during the last few months of his time with Tampa. Now, compare the above to a pitch he threw against another Twins familiar, but this time for the home side after the trade. ZzY4dmJfVjBZQUhRPT1fQmdKUVZGQUZWQVlBQ1FFQ0FBQUhWUWNIQUZnRlVBUUFDbDBBQVZFRkIxQUFWbE5S.mp4 This baby hums in at a robust 98.4 miles per hour, and it has some serious carry. It earns a whiff from a guy whose whole thing is not whiffing. Bradley has made some important strides. Let's talk about how. Some of his added carry comes from throwing from a slightly higher arm angle. The Twins have him getting down the mound slightly better and throwing with more extension, but his arm slot is higher even though his release point (relative to the ground or the batter's eye level) hasn't changed. That's a small help. There's a more important change to spot, though, because it informs that angle but also drives the uptick in velocity—and gives him a better chance to command the ball, to boot. Take a look at where he is when his left foot lands in the clip from July. This is what pitching people refer to as 'foot strike', and it's a crucial moment in the delivery. To understand what's going on with a pitcher mechanically, you have to know where they are and what they're doing at foot strike. Bradley had something really strange (and bad) going on in the back side of his delivery, back in July. After reaching back with the ball upon breaking his hands, he was bending his elbow to bring the ball back toward his head and start moving forward quite early, and quite flat. There's a movement the pitcher's arm has to go through to wind the ball up behind their head, to build tension and torque through the shoulders and upper arm muscles. In this clip, though, Bradley isn't getting the ball up high enough, early enough. Nor is he creating flexion in his spine, to store energy that gets released when he launches into spine extension by getting over that landing leg. Compare that image to where he was at foot strike on the pitch to Arraez. He's driven off the back leg better. That creates initial force. The ball is up higher, and will be on time, so less of that initial force will be wasted. And his spine is flexed, which will create more snap into extension in the next moment. This is the difference between 94.8 and 98.4, in a nutshell. Obviously, if you take any two given heaters, the differences won't always show up as this extreme, but there's a meaningful difference almost every time he fires. Bradley's stuff gets intense in a hurry, working with this improved mechanical profile. He can give hitters trouble in a lot more ways, even without an elite out pitch. His cutter, curveball and splitter probably need further refinement, but he's already killing spin better on the latter and throwing them all harder, too. Again, he's far from an ace, but the upside is apparent again. Bradley's heat plays very differently at 97 than it does at 95, and so does the rest of his arsenal when those extra ticks are there. As he takes the ball a couple more times to close out 2025, the Twins remain in evaluation mode, but Bradley increasingly looks like a good investment. They bought low, and the stock is already rising. View full article

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images The nominees for the 2025 Roberto Clemente Award were announced Monday, as each of the 30 MLB teams selected the player they believe best embodies the league's values of character, community involvement, philanthropy and positive contributions on and off the field. The award is, in effect, the league's Man of the Year trophy, named after a player who had an enormous, transformative impact on the game—one very much akin to Robinson's. Though not the first Black player from Latin America to play in the majors, Clemente was very much the first star from that demographic, and like Robinson, he was unafraid to speak his mind or to back his thoughts and words with action. He endured slightly less focused racial animus than did Robinson, coming along more than half a decade into the integration of the National and American Leagues, but he had to deal with different prejudices, too—of culture and language, as well as skin color. Clemente was mercurial, but deeply dedicated to that which he believed in. He died in a plane crash, after he was so irrepressible in collecting and delivering relief supplies to an earthquake-stricken Nicaragua that he chartered a plane that wasn't airworthy and couldn't handle the load he'd amassed. That made Clemente baseball's closest facsimile of a saint, and has made it easy for the league to deify him as a symbol of charity and nobility ever since. That's not an inaccurate image of the man, but nor is it complete. The institution of baseball has always been comfortable with that. For that very reason, they're not sweating as much at the league's central office in New York today. Robinson, who died the same year as Clemente but had spent 15 years in post-playing career public life by then, left a legacy that could never be untangled from the racism and inequality that made up so much of the game's history. Clemente, however, had never been heralded as the same sort of trailblazer as Robinson; his story was mixed in with others somewhat like it. He was a phenomenal player with such a leonine off-field reputation that he could be upheld as the perfect confluence of baseball and personal virtue, in an uncomplicated narrative. Just as three rivers (not two) flow into one another in the city where Clemente became a baseball legend, though, there's a third element that needs to be part of a serious conversation about his impact. Clemente was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, a majority-Black city that lies cheek-by-jowl alongside the larger, better-resourced, majority-White capital of San Juan. From a young age, he was aware of the tension of his own existence, and when he journeyed to the States and became a professional ballplayer, he never ceased to be. Clemente was born into a Puerto Rico whose future was still very much undecided, as the post-Spanish Caribbean basin took shape under the heavy influence of the United States. Throughout his childhood, though, the U.S. firmed up its control of the archipelago. Clemente was 16 years old when the U.S. military violently quashed a revolution by Puerto Rican nationalists, including by bombing the town of Jayuya and killing civilians who were American citizens. Clemente himself never took up the cause of Puerto Rican independence, but nor did he denounce it. He signed up to serve as an American military reservist, but as he experienced more of the country and its contradictions, he would go on to consider himself a "double outsider," which itself seemed to be a double-entendre. Both his Blackness and his Latino heritage alienated him from neighbors and fans in the States, while his life as a rich and famous boricua made him occasionally feel less welcome on his own home soil—though, of course, he's now virtually venerated there, as some idealized (and partially silenced) version of him is here. Though they have always wanted to trade on his exemplary attitude of service and his extraordinary, stylish play, the league has never wanted much to do with the third current of Clemente's story. Even in times when the political and cultural climate invited more attention to the history and the modern reality of racism and xenophobia, the league never used Roberto Clemente Day to talk much about it. In this climate—one that actively discourages such conversation and whitewashes history to serve the maintenance of an inequitable social order—they've been especially quiet on that front. In fact, in each of the past three years, the league announced the Clemente Award nominees earlier in September, leaving at least a bit more space to (specifically) honor Clemente and (generally) celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. This year, they've held back those nominations until the day designated for Clemente, crowding the schedule. As for the nominees themselves, whereas 14 players of color were nominated in 2022 and 2023 and 12 in 2024, only seven of this year's 30 are people of color. It's a real shame that the league finds the waters of that third river too swift and too dangerous, because there's great power to be drawn from that current. At a moment when the world seems increasingly obsessed with mutual protection between self-selected tribes, it might be wonderful to make a bigger deal of the fact that Clemente wasn't rushing to his own home with the relief shipment that never made it. Nor was he seeking to serve his adopted hometown, or home nation. He'd only visited Nicaragua a few months earlier, while coaching Team Puerto Rico in the Amateur World Series, but that was enough to make him feel an obligation to his fellow humans. Clemente, who got used to being slapped with labels throughout his life and who came from a place that has lived in a colonialized limbo for over a century now, didn't pause a moment to consider whether the people affected by a disaster thousands of miles away were within his required circle of empathy or help. He took action, with conviction, because those people were worth as much to him as he himself was. We haven't resolved the colonial status of Puerto Rico in any satisfactory way, and life there gets more precarious by the year, as economic forces and climate change conspire against it. We also haven't resolved the sense of twice-baked alienation Clemente so often felt early in his baseball career. Preferring to read the direction of the wind and blow with it, the Commissioner's Office has abdicated any responsibility to address either issue. It can't be that way, for those of us who care a bit more about the game and the world it's played in than do Rob Manfred and his cohort. The history of American influence (sometimes imperialist, sometimes colonialist, sometimes covert, sometimes salutary, sometimes calamitous) in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela and other places is inextricably connected to the growth and development of baseball. In a sport awash in Spanish speakers and immigrants and supported by no small number of people who sound and look like those players, baseball has a huge, urgent duty to speak up each September—not just about the virtue of a great throwing arm and mission work, but about the relationship between the U.S. and many of its neighbors, and about how wide our circles of empathy ought to sweep. The league doesn't want that conversation right now, so please, start it yourselves. Otherwise, we'll be paying just two-thirds tribute to the legacy of Clemente—and letting too much water flow under the bridge. View full article

I think the SIS Video Scouts would resent your characterization of them, and it's worth noting that Defensive Runs Saved uses data *in combination* with the insights of those scouts—but the most important thing to say here is that you've got the wrong stat there! Deserved Runs Prevented (DRP) is the one Cody cited here, and it doesn't make *any* use of human video review and judgment. It's built by starting with Statcast data and making important refinements via modeling.

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images This isn't some gobsmacking revelation about baseball, but when you throw a fastball right down the middle, bad things tend to happen. Unless you throw 100 miles per hour and have electric movement, those pitches tend to get crushed—and even then, batters will sometimes sit on that offering and hit it hard somewhere. Matthews has allowed a .612 slugging average on heaters this year, despite a fairly lively pitch with two-plane movement and an average velocity north of 96 miles per hour. The problem is location. Matthews has great control, but he hasn't always had good command of his four-seamer within the strike zone. When you look at where he locates that pitch, it's not as much of a mystery that it tends to get hammered. Let's look at where he throws his heaters and where he has the most success with them, side-by-side, to illustrate the point. First, for righty batters: Whenever he can put the fastball on the top rail or along the outer edge of the plate, he does well with it. The pitch has more ride than the hitter would expect, based on Matthews's arm angle, and it also runs more to his arm side than his delivery suggests. That leads to righties sometimes giving up on a fastball away and taking a called strike, and to guys swinging under those balls at the top of the zone. Matthews gets into trouble, by contrast, when he ends up throwing the heater right down the middle, or in but belt-high. Those aren't unusual places for a pitcher to get hurt. What's unusual is that Matthews leaves such a glaring percentage of his heaters in the heart of the zone. You can see that he's trying to go up and away from righties, but he's ending up throwing far too many pipeshots. Part of the problem is that that natural arm-side movement works against his efforts to attack that upper and outer quadrant, rather than for them. Pitchers who can drill the upper, glove-side portion of the zone with their fastball drive hitters crazy (Chris Paddack talked to us about why it's such a staple of his arsenal back in April), but most of them can do that because they throw from a fairly high arm slot and/or have a fastball that cuts more than most four-seamers. Matthews's, by contrast, runs more than most similar pitches, so the tendency is for that ball he's aiming at the outer edge to wander over the meaty part of the dish—like this: WU9reTdfVjBZQUhRPT1fVUZSVUFRVUdWUVVBQ2dBQkJBQUhBbE1GQUFBTlVsZ0FDMWNBQ1FKVUJsZFhCVk5l.mp4 The story is slightly different against lefties, but the broad strokes are similar. Matthews still has success at the top of the zone and on the glove side, but he still throws too many of the things right down the middle, where success is almost impossible. As you can see, Matthews fares well almost everywhere but the center of the zone when throwing his fastball to lefties. This is where the deceptive run on that pitch comes into play for him. That the offering has horizontal movement a bit like a sinker but rides like a four-seamer gets a lot of lefties reacting oddly to it. He seems to be throwing it right at them, and they can read and adjust to the vertical movement, but they pull their hands in too far and hit lazy flies on balls down and in (which is usually a lefty's wheelhouse), not expecting it to tail back onto the plate instead of getting in on their hands. That only works, though, when he executes and gets that pitch down and in, or keeps it up on the top line of the zone. Just as he has against righties, Matthews has too often ended up leaving the pitch out over the middle of the plate to lefties. All of that is changing, though. Two starts ago, between his outing in Chicago and one at home against San Diego, Matthews slid over on the rubber. Instead of starting in the middle of the pitching plate, he now sets up on the first-base side. Here's a game-by-game chart of his average horizontal release point. As you can see, he moved over to that place in the center of the mound after returning from his shoulder injury this summer, but now, he's back where he started the season—and maybe even a hair farther toward first base. That's made a huge difference in Matthews's ability to attack the glove-side edge of the plate. Here's where his fastballs to lefties went over all his starts prior to the last one in August: Here's where those pitches have gone to those batters over his last two outings. Being more aligned with the inside edge to lefties (and the outside one to righties) means Matthews doesn't have to be quite as fine to locate there. Instead of coming back to the heart of the plate, a pitch with the same shape can come back from off the corner to a perfect location for called strikes. ZFh6M2pfWGw0TUFRPT1fQlFCVUJWTldWQVVBQzFRRFVRQUhCUU1DQUFCUlZsSUFWbHdEVmxKV0F3TUhCbFpX.mp4 When he does want to elevate, meanwhile, he can cut it loose and find the upper arm-side quadrant a bit more easily. Like this: ZFh6M2pfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGxkV1hWRU5BZ2NBWEFNR0J3QUhCRkJRQUZoVFVGTUFBMU1OVWdjTVVGSldCd3BV.mp4 Matthews is a better pronator than supinator, meaning that (although he's found a feel for two breaking balls and a cutter) he doesn't get the ball moving much toward the glove side. His breaking stuff all works more vertically than horizontally, and his four-seamer, sinker and changeup have considerable arm-side run. Moving to the side of the mound that gives his stuff more room to work in that direction (and that keeps him out of the middle of the plate better, with all his pitches) just makes good sense. In these two outings, Mstthews has worked 12 total innings, striking out eight, walking two, allowing 10 hits, and yielding just three earned runs in total. He might still run into home-run problems in the future, given the nature of his stuff and the imperfect feel he has for some of it, but this was an important shift for him. It should lead to less hard contact from opponents and, in the long run, a series of other benefits. View full article