Ranking What Went Wrong with the 2021 Twins

1.  Medical staff?

2. Waiting too long to bring players up.  Seems at least with pitchers they have already or now have injuries?  I don't know if it would help without a good medical staff.  

3.  Berrios leaving is going to have a long term effect.

I would say very poor bullpen early played a huge role.  So many games were lost early in the season with late inning blow ups.  I put little stock in complaining about injuries, every team deals with them.  Yes, going through like 10 OF options is not common so the fact so many injuries happened in one position does tax the depth a ton.  The pitching injuries you always expect and need to have the depth, we did not have that depth. 

It is hard to point to any one or even three things that blew up the season because it was different things at different times. 

I think our batting order let us down and in some real key situations and while they're not the biggest problem the first half of the season we constantly wrote about leaving runners in scoring position and the lack of hitting in key situations.

Sano looks good right now but half the season he was absent, Larnach looked great but once he was challenged by Major League pitching he didn't know what to do and obviously our coaches didn't know how to help him. Simmons is not as good as his Fielding rating and his hitting is horrible. Arraez it's supposed to challenge for the batting title. He hasn't and he has had some prolonged hitless periods. 

Kepler should not have batted lead off for second for all the games that the manager wanted him on top of the lineup.

I am finding myself less and less enamored with the manager and the lead coaches. Too many things happened that I expected them to begin to fix, but it never happened. I certainly don't like pulling the pitchers as early as they have the starting pitchers going deeper helps a bullpen that is struggling. 

Poor fundamentals was a big part of this season’s downfall. 
 

They played like poop in the preseason and it continued right on into the regular season. 
 

Regardless if everything else goes right  re injuries, decent starts, etc., it’s hard to win consistently if the team plays poor fundamentals baseball. 
 

IMO, that’s on Rocco and the staff. And, as the team probably will be getting younger going forward, I’m questioning if Rocco is the right manager to lead this team in 2022 and beyond. 

Injuries didn't hurt the Twins nearly as much as other teams. There were 2 keys.

1. The front office not addressing the loss of what Odorizzi was expected to be in 2020 and relying upon Maeda to be an Ace. This led to the front office adding back end "depth" free agent starters instead of #1-2 starters to the top of the rotation.
2. The front office thinking you can just plug-n-play relief staff. The front office basically blew up the bullpen and it didn't work. I've seen this happen before with the Twins.

The first seems like a more glaring issue. Relief arms are pretty ethereal, but losing May was a big deal IMHO.

#1 is the rotation. Combination of injuries and ineffectiveness was brutal here, because not only did you have that hammer on Happ & Shoemaker (ineffective), Pineda & Maeda (injured), but it also hit the depth: Dobnak & Thorpe (injured & ineffective), Duran & Winder (injured), etc. While some of it was predictable (Pineda should never be predicted to get through a full season healthy, and Shoemaker had enough issues coming in to not be counted upon) having so many hit in sequence was crushing.

#2 was the early implosion of the bullpen. Cost a bunch of wins and really changed the perception of the team and what it was capable of. Took way too long to find some reasonably reliable options (note: the bullpen has been fine recently, but it hasn't been consistent), but unfortunately the small sample sizes on bullpen innings and the fungibility of relief arms makes this one of those things that happens. Taylor Rogers injury was bad timing, but didn't meaningfully impact the season. One of the biggest issues with this bullpen is the walk rate; too many guys with BB/9 rates over 3 and 4, something that was not a problem in 2019 (or even really in 2020). The bullpen WHIP doesn't have a lot of guys who are down around 1.0-1.1 this season.

#3 is the injuries in the lineup. yes, every team should expect to have some, but the Twins injuries were definitely concentrated in the OF and it really hurt their depth. The infield has been pretty healthy except at catcher; Donaldson, Simmons, Polanco, and Sano are all going to finish above 125 games played and could easily clear 130 (if Donaldson and Simmons don't it'll be because the team gave meaningless games for them to younger players), which isn't bad. But the OF isn't going to have a single player make 125 games, and only 1 guy clear 100. Look at the standings: most of the winning teams had 1-2 OF playing 130-140 and 2-3 playing 100+.

The wait and see with rest will probably mean, I am betting, that Rogers, Duran, Dobnak and others will be out for all of next year or much of it when the fingers and arms finally get the repair surgeries that were delayed and took them out for much of this year. I hope not, but I fear that will be the case. 

Fundamentals? This is a horrible team fundamentally. Fundamentals won’t overcome poor talent, but they will help make a average team very difficult to beat. 
 

Talent? Is it possible that fans, and media overestimated this group. My thought on this is somewhat driven by constant references to 2019, a year of career years for some on this roster. Also, a year where the roster and the baseball in use made a perfect match. This allowed a very productive offense to cover up some inherent flaws in the roster, such as the aforementioned fundamentals, defense, and an overall lack of pitching talent. 

6 hours ago, bean5302 said:

The front office not addressing the loss of what Odorizzi was expected to be in 2020 and relying upon Maeda to be an Ace. This led to the front office adding back end "depth" free agent starters instead of #1-2 starters to the top of the rotation.

The same could be said for the loss of Trevor May.

Excessive shifting creates the need for versatile players. Putting guys out of their strength positions. 

I want specialists playing in their best positions. Versatility is over rated, IMHO.