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Last season Bailey Ober made his Major League debut starting 20 games for a bad Twins team. A 12th-round pick in 2017 and never a top prospect, Ober performed well above his expected water level. The 4.19 ERA wasn’t earth-shattering, but it came with over a strikeout per inning, and if he was able to be just a bit more stingy with the longball, another step forward could be taken.
Despite a brief stint on the injured list this season, Ober has now made five starts and owns a 2.55 ERA. His 3.26 FIP suggests he’s not pitching much over his head, and while the strikeouts have tailed off a bit, he’s allowing just 0.7 HR/9 and has cut the H/9 down by one to 8.0.
In an age where velocity reigns supreme, Ober is doing it with a fastball that averages just 92 mph. Of course, the fact that he’s 6’9” and basically putting the ball across the plate out of his hand doesn’t help opposing hitters to sit on his pitches. The step forward is also evident in the peripherals. Ober is allowing 5% less hard contact this season, dropping the hard-hit rate against him down to 32%. Both his xFIP and xERA are hovering in the 4’s, but his whiff and chase rates are both slightly up from where they were last season.
It’s a small sample size thus far in 2022, but the body of work is starting to become substantial. The thought on Ober was that he’d provide Minnesota great depth if pushed to Triple-A. Instead, he was tabbed as a rotation mainstay from the get-go and has continued to look the part of found money when it comes to projecting prospects.
On the flip side, Joe Ryan has been a top-100 prospect after being drafted in the 7th round of the 2018 Major League Baseball draft. It will forever be mind-boggling that Minnesota wrangled him from the Rays in exchange for a few months of an aging Nelson Cruz, but here we are.
Ryan’s debut was extremely limited last season. He made five starts down the stretch and posted a 4.05 ERA. The 3.43 FIP suggested more was there and the 10.1 K/9 was hard not to get excited about. If Ober’s numbers were small and tough to get behind, however, then Ryan’s were minuscule.
Instead of hedging their bets, Minnesota named Ryan their Opening Day starter even after acquiring potential ace Sonny Gray. Now eight starts into his 2022 campaign, Ryan may be the frontrunner for the 2022 American League Rookie of the Year award. He has a dazzling 2.28 ERA and is still sitting strong with an 8.7 K/9. Maybe being helped by the deadened baseball, his 0.6 HR/9 is more than halved from what it was a season ago, but the 3.24 FIP suggests his stuff is as good as advertised.
Like Ober, Ryan doesn’t pump velocity on his fastball. Averaging just 92.4 mph on the pitch, which is a one mph jump from 2022, his ability to spin the pitch and get movement is where the success comes from. Minnesota has gotten Ryan into a more slider-focused repertoire this season, pushing roughly 10% of the fastball usage to his newly featured offering. The results haven’t produced a shift in chase rate or whiff rate, but they’ve helped to hold the status quo on what were already impressive results.
Admittedly we’re still early in the 2022 season. The combined total here is just 13 starts. Knowing the rotation needed to be reconfigured though, both Ober and Ryan were immediately penciled in as key pieces and that may have seemed like a leap. The Twins' front office seemingly knew what they had, however, and the developmental path for both arms continues to remain strong.
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