Introduction

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of articles focusing on the Twins early season success, and asking one, simple question: can the Twins keep on winning? These articles have focused on two main points: the Twins potent offense (they rank 9th in MLB) despite a mediocre OPS (18th in MLB) and their stellar record (4th best win percentage in MLB) despite a much less impressive run differential (8th best in MLB). Their conclusion has tended to be that the Twins performance is unsustainable.

Other articles have told you the Twins offense has been lucky because we are scoring more runs than we should have based on our current OPS. But this good luck good be balanced out by an unluckily low OPS. So my goal is to determine if our OPS is artificially high or low. If it is artificially low, then we shouldn’t have to worry too much about our inflated run-scoring ability: while we might start scoring fewer runs per point of OPS, our OPS should improve, meaning our run production shouldn’t drop too much. But if our OPS is artificially high…Well that would be bad news.

Analysis

My process will be as follows: OPS = OBP + SLG. OBP is composed of getting hits (AVG) and drawing walks (BB%). SLG is a result of total bases, which is determined by how many hits you get (AVG) and how many extra bases you get (ISO). So in short, we’ve now broken OPS down into three component parts: AVG, BB%, and ISO. One further step: your batting average is determined by how many balls you put in play (K%) and how frequently those balls in play drop for hits (BABIP and, to a lesser extent, HR%). So we now have broken OPS down into four parts: K%, BABIP, BB%, and ISO. Let’s see how the Twins perform in these four statistics, and we’ll have a better idea of what our OPS should be, given how we’ve played so far.

K%: 21.0% (22nd in MLB)

BB%: 6.7% (25th)

Let’s combine these two statistics together into BB/K ratio: BB/K: .32 (25).

BABIP: .309 (8)

ISO: .132 (24)

OPS: .700 (18)

As you can see, the Twins strike out at one of the highest rates in baseball. They also draw walks at one of the lowest rates in baseball. The result, should be one of the worst OBP in baseball. Turns out, it is: the Twins OBP of .311 ranks 21st in MLB. This is in spite of one of the highest BABIP in all of baseball. The Twins also lack power, evidenced by their ISO of .132 (24th in baseball). As a result, our low slugging percentage (.389, 18th in baseball), shouldn’t come as a surprise.

When you put together an inability to get on base with a lack of power, you should get a low OPS. Which is exactly what the Twins have: their OPS of .700 ranks 18th in baseball. In case you’re wondering, this is their triple-slash line, and how it ranks in baseball: .257(11)/.311(21)/.389(18).

So our OPS doesn’t seem to be unnaturally low. After all, the Twins rank 22nd or lower in 3 of the 4 components I identified. The only area where the Twins are performing well is in terms of BABIP, which is why our team batting average ranks 11th in baseball: the Twins currently sport a BABIP of .309, the 8th highest in baseball.

BABIP is somewhat of an infamous statistic. It has a wide variance that leads to dramatic differences in the AVG (and thus OBP, SLG, and OPS) for a given player or team). But let’s take a closer look at the Twins batted ball profile and determine if our BABIP is artificially low (which would be good) or artificially high (which would be bad).

Here is a rundown of how the Twins perform in a number of batted ball statistics:

LD%: 21.7% (12th highest)

GB/FB: 1.36 (14th highest)

Hard hit: 25.6% (27th highest)

IFFB%: 11.3% (6th highest)

Because line drives lead to more hits than grounders and fly balls, the higher your LD% the higher the expected BABIP should be. Same goes for GB/FB ratio (ground balls yield a higher BABIP than fly balls) and hard hit percentage. Conversely, infield fly balls are automatic outs, so a low IFFB% should yield a higher BABIP.

Look at the rankings: the Twins fail to rank in the top 8 in any category where more is better nor in the bottom 8 of IFFB% (where less is better). In fact, the Twins don’t rank in the top/bottom 11 of any of these categories. This isn’t the most scientific approach, but to me this indicates that the Twins should not, at this point, have the 8th highest BABIP in MLB.

High K-rate, low BB-rate, little power, and an unnaturally high BABIP means our play as hitters deserves a low OPS.

Conclusion

The Twins don’t have good underlying statistics as hitters: the Twins rank 22nd or lower in 3 of the 4 components I identified. The only area where we are performing well is BABIP which is the 8th highest in baseball. Unfortunately, this mark seems to be unnaturally high. As a result, I feel confident in saying that the Twins current OPS is not a result of bad luck. In fact, it might even be a result of good luck.

Quick caveat: all I did was look and see if, based on underlying numbers, what our OPS should be. What I didn’t look at was if those underlying numbers are artificially good/bad: Are our players striking out more than in past years? Are they hitting fewer line drives? I don’t know. So I don’t know if our performance in these underlying metrics will get better as the season goes on.

Any number of articles can tell you that the Twins offense has scored more runs than they should have so far (based on OPS). What I’m telling you is that our OPS should be low (maybe even lower). This is further confirmation that our offense has scored more runs than it should have so far. In other words, if our ability to score runs at a high rate given our OPS slows down (and we should expect it too), we should not expect our OPS to increase to balance this out…Unless we start performing better across these underlying statistics. Will we? I don’t know. But let’s hope so.