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When baseball people break down pitch types into categories, they tend to use three: fastballs, breaking balls, and offspeed pitches. This distinction is decades old, long predating modern, data-centric pitching analysis. It’s a natural one, because it centers on the thing that makes each type of pitch effective: speed, movement, and deception, respectively.
There’s another natural way to subdivide pitch types, though. It’s rarely used, but equally valid, and perhaps more in line with the way we think about the craft in the age of biomechanics and high-speed video. You can separate pitches into three broad, slightly messy, but telling categories:
Those that move to the “arm side”, or in on a same-handed batter: Sinkers and Changeups Those that move to the “glove side”, away from a same-handed batter: Sliders and Cutters Those that move mostly in the vertical plane, with lateral movement mostly incidental: Four-seam Fastballs, Curveballs, and Splitters There are multiple reasons why the taxonomy of pitching has historically favored the first model. For one thing, it’s neater. There are individual examples of pitches within the familiar categories that actually depend on a characteristic other than the one implied by the name of their category for their effectiveness, but they’re rare. The membranes which divide armside, gloveside, and vertical offerings are much more porous. For another thing, pitching (and pitch types, and especially the tendency to classify pitches that walk near a borderline between two possible ones in certain ways) is always evolving, and until relatively recently, breaking things up according to the direction of movement didn’t fit the way most pitching coaches or public commentators thought about things.
Consider the advantages, though. So much about a pitch can be explained by whether it primarily moves to the arm side, the glove side, or vertically. Glove-side movement tends to be hard on same-handed batters, but not opposite-handed ones. Vertical movement creates swings and misses, but isn’t good for managing contact quality or inducing ground balls. Arm-side run is the surest way to generate weak contact, but only misses bats if it comes with some other extraordinary characteristic, and can have wide platoon splits.
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One of the greatest Minnesota-born pitchers, Dave Goltz could not have chosen a more inconspicuous start to his life. Born in Pelican Rapids on June 23rd, 1949, Goltz entered the world as the child of a produce marketer (his father) and a produce-business bookkeeper (his mother) (Temanson). He moved to Rothsay as a young boy.
A multi-sport athlete in high school, Goltz’s 6’4” frame stood out among the regulars. His dominant performance in football, basketball, track, and baseball—the only four sports offered by Rothsay High School—spread his name across the state as a high school legend, perhaps a new athlete capable of great things (Temanson). Goltz eventually narrowed his focus to baseball, fueled by the interest sparked in him by his former teacher, Ken Reitan, who started a little league team when Goltz was young (Sorum).
A fresh-faced 5th-round pick in the newly-minted June MLB draft (the first was in 1965; Goltz was drafted in 1967), Goltz headed to the GCL to start his professional career. His first two seasons were great successes. He led the GCL in ERA in 1967, then led the Northern League in strikeouts in 1968 (B/R bullpen).
Set to lead a league in another pitching stat in 1969, conflict in Vietnam intruded on Goltz’s budding pitching career. Despite new President Richard Nixon beginning the slow, messy process of withdrawal, Uncle Sam called Goltz to service. He worked as a helicopter mechanic in the Army Reserve and missed the 1969 baseball season (Temanson). One of 54 former ballplayers who served in the Vietnam War, Goltz never left the states during his active duty (Baseball Almanac) (twinstrivia).
Returning to baseball, Goltz spent two more seasons in the minors—one in Tacoma, Washington as roommates with Tom Kelly—before finally joining the Twins in 1972 (twinstrivia). In the middle of the season, Jim Kaat broke a bone in his wrist sliding into second base, and Minnesota “needed to fill the roster with pitchers,” necessitating a promotion for Goltz (Sorum). 
 Two years removed from an ALCS appearance, this was not a legendary period for Twins baseball. A few remnants of the 1960s glory days remained—names like Kaat, Rod Carew, Cesar Tovar, Tony Oliva, and Harmon Killebrew—but this was a roster in turmoil. Bert Blyleven, 21 and one year away from a legendary pitching season, led a group of players whose ceiling was an 85-win season in 1976.

Always one to pitch deep into ballgames, Goltz collected 83 complete games in his MLB career (image courtesy of twinstrivia.com)
But this was still 1972 and there was baseball to be played. Goltz debuted against the Yankees on July 18th, pitching 3 2/3  scoreless frames in relief of starter Ray Corbin in a 6-0 loss. Thurman Munson—who should be in the Hall of Fame—homered and doubled. Goltz’s first win came in his first start—a six-inning, two-earned-run performance in the opening game of a doubleheader against the Milwaukee Brewers. The Twins used Goltz mainly as a starter the rest of the season, allowing him to soak up innings as the team struggled to stay afloat. 
As fun as 1972 was, 1973 proved disappointing, a lesson for Goltz to learn as he grew as a player. The 5.25 ERA, 106 1/3  inning slog cursed him to the minors to start 1974, but Minnesota quickly recalled the starter, and he tossed 174 1/3  frames with a finer 3.25 ERA in 1974.
Thus began Goltz’s odd streak of consistency. The good: he gobbled nearly 700 innings between 1974 and 1976 with ERAs of 3.25, 3.67, and 3.36, respectively. The bad: Goltz could not escape his record—a stat as crucial to a starter as any—which somehow tagged him as a .500 pitcher each year. He went 10-10, 14-14, and 14-14, respectively, over the same period. Minnesota’s offense remained well over the league average each season; Goltz simply felt the run-support curse that occasionally dogs even the best pitchers in baseball.
Goltz’s 1977 was legendary. In an unparalleled 39 start, 303-inning performance, Goltz accrued 19 complete games, won 20 games, and finished sixth in the AL Cy Young voting. He only finished third in MLB in innings pitched—this was the 70s, after all—but he led the AL in both starts and wins, something that a Twin didn’t do again until Johan Santana in 2006. No Twin has touched 300 innings since. Parsing through the best Twins pitching seasons by fWAR, you’ll find a few Hall of Famers—Bert Blyleven and Jim Kaat—a few Cy Young Winners—Johan Santana, Jim Perry, Frank Viola, and Dean Chance—Camilo Pascual’s excellent 1962 and Phil Hughes’ historic 2014, and sitting as the 16th best individual pitching season in Twins history is Goltz’s 1977 effort. In other words, he was pretty good that year. He was so good that he nearly tossed a no-hitter on August 23rd against Boston, only allowing a bloop hit to Jim Rice that barely sailed over a leaping Roy Smalley.
Goltz’s 1978 season was even better by ERA. His 2.49 mark served as his career low, but a few ailments, including a burned hand suffered while grilling and a rib fracture earned during a scuffle against the Angels on April 22nd, cut his innings; he totaled “just” 220 1/3  of them that year (Temanson) (Gleeman, 175).
The Twins gave Goltz the opening day nod in 1979, marking the third season in which he pitched the first game. Baseball forces worked against him that year; after five straight seasons with an ERA under 4.00, Goltz’s earned runs shot up, and he ended the year with a 4.16 ERA, the worst since his sophomore slump in 1973. His league-leading 282 hits allowed appear to be the culprit.
But times were changing. The landmark 1972 Supreme Court decision Flood v. Kuhn effectively killed the reserve clause, allowing players to sign with whatever team they chose. Catfish Hunter's five-year, $3.35 contract before the 1975 season set the standard. Free agency started to develop even more following the 1976 Collective Bargaining Agreement. With years under his belt, Goltz earned the chance to capitalize on his worth. 
After his disappointing 1979 season, Goltz filed for free agency. The Twins in this era were stingy, to be kind. Owner Calvin Griffith ran potential stars Lyman Bostick and Larry Hisle out of town with his tight pockets and traded 1977 AL MVP Rod Carew for similar reasons. Although, Griffith’s infamous racist comments in Waseca in 1978 also fueled that move. Goltz claims Howard Fox, Minnesota’s Vice President, was the man he had financial issues with, but he nonetheless chose to dabble in the open waters (Temanson).

Perhaps not the proudest accomplishment, Goltz owns the record for most runs allowed in a saved game after allowing eight runs against the Cleveland Guardians on June 6, 1973.
Four teams, led by the trio of Southern California franchises and Milwaukee, vied for Goltz. The starter preferred the Brewers with their energetic hitters and gritty style of play, but kept his heart open to the Dodgers, Angels, and Padres (twinstrivia). When the Dodgers offered an eye-popping six-year $3 million contract, Goltz's agent sealed the deal, and the Minnesota boy officially headed west to join a growing powerhouse.
The 1980s Dodgers, under manager Tommy Lasorda, were a legendary bunch. Fresh off NL pennant victories in 1977 and 1978, the team enjoyed a host of elite players: hitters like Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero, Steve Garvey, and Dusty Baker supplied the pop while veteran Don Sutton handed the torch off to youngsters Bob Welch, Fernando Valenzuela, and Orel Hershiser. L.A.  won two titles in the 1980s while finishing above .500 in six seasons. 
Goltz’s time as a Dodger was not happy. He started his career in L.A. with back-to-back shutouts but fell out of the rotation in 1981, and the team cut him just a few months into the 1982 season. Still, after tossing 3 1/3  innings in the 1981 World Series, Goltz aided in a championship victory, earning a ring in the process. 
Goltz remained in California, joining the Angels in 1982. Back under the watch of manager Gene Mauch, Goltz joined an eventual playoff team led by Carew, Reggie Jackson, the eternally-underrated Bobby Grich, Fred Lynn, and Don Baylor. Luis Tiant and Tommy John served as the (very) veteran depth arms. Goltz earned one more chance at postseason success, a relief appearance in Game 4 of the ALCS against the Milwaukee Brewers. However, Harvey’s Wall-Bangers didn’t spare Goltz as, after jumping on Tommy John, Milwaukee pegged Goltz for three runs on their way to a World Series appearance. 
Goltz tossed a few innings for the Angels in 1983, but his playing career ended quickly and quietly.
Never a strikeout artist—he “relied more on ground balls” than strikeouts—Goltz could be easy to miss and simple to paint broadly (Gleeman, 175). Sometimes mentioned as one of the original free agent “busts,” Goltz was not merely a decent pitcher on an elite Dodger team, but instead, a starter who endured massive workloads in his prime, only finally wobbling once he reached the wrong side of 30. Of all the pitchers Gene Mauch oversaw—an impressive list that includes Nolan Ryan, Frank Tanana, and Jim Bunning, among others—he claims Goltz to be the best he ever managed (Temanson). 
A master of the sinker—one that would “rise” and another that would “sink” into a right-hander—Goltz earned his outs with movement (Sorum). When paired with a knuckle curve that he could throw three different ways, Goltz could gobble innings with the best of them (twinstrivia). His 1,248 innings thrown between 1975 and 1979 are the 11th-highest of all pitchers. Stars like Nolan Ryan, Luis Tiant, Don Sutton, and Jerry Koosman (another Minnesota-born Vietnam veteran) rank below Goltz’s total in that streak. 
Minnesota’s leaderboards bear Goltz’s greatness. He accrued the fifth-most fWAR of all Twins starters, the sixth-most innings, and has the 11th-lowest ERA of all qualified starters. His numbers compare favorably to Frank Viola—a Twin legend cherished and remembered by fans into the present.
Goltz left baseball to join Midwest Insurance in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where, as of 2010, he still entered the office consistently (Sorum). Occasionally making his way to various Twins events, Goltz prefers to avoid the city and its traffic, instead choosing to live in sparse parts of the state.
Aaron Gleeman placed Goltz 30 in his Big 50 book, an appreciation of the men and moments that define the Minnesota Twins.
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Twinsdaily's formatting doesn't allow for footnotes, my preferred style of citation, so I used the Author/Date system in the text with my bibliography here. Sources are listed alphabetically, not necessarily by use.
Temanson, Lee, "https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Dave-Goltz/," SABR, 2009.
Sorum, Scott, "Dave Goltz: Former Minnesota Twins pitcher calls this area ‘Home’," https://www.wahpetondailynews.com/, 2010.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Dave_Goltz
https://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=goltzda01
twinstrivia.com, "Dave Goltz interview," 2011.
Gleeman, Aaron, "The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Minnesota Twins," Triumph Books, 2018
https://www.fangraphs.com/
 

López, who will turn 27 in March, has five pitches, and he’s tinkered with his arsenal several times in the past few years, as he and the Marlins have tried to accomplish the ascension from mid-rotation starter with upside to ace. The Twins will try to further refine that mix. It all starts, though, with the two pitches that require little in the way of further polish: his fastball and his changeup.
When it comes to heaters, the Twins have a type, in more ways than one. Firstly, they like four-seamers, not sinkers. Only the Dodgers threw more four-seamers than did the Twins in 2022, and only the Dodgers threw fewer sinkers. 
Fastball Usage, MLB Teams, 2022
Highest Four-Seam %
Lowest Sinker %
Team
%
Team
%
Dodgers
43.9
Dodgers
6.1
Twins
42.3
Twins
6.9
Reds
41.7
Guardians
8.3
Astros
41.1
Reds
9.5
White Sox
40.1
Mariners
10.0
Source: Pitch Info, via FanGraphs
López has both pitches, and the Twins aren’t dogmatic about this, so it’s possible they’ll allow him to keep using each. (Sonny Gray, who came over from a team with similar fastball tendencies in the Reds, threw his sinker more than a quarter of the time last year–though he did throw the four-seamer more, for the first time since 2019.) On balance, though, they’re much more likely to have him eliminate the sinker, because (like Gray) he has a four-seamer with the other characteristic they love: a very flat Vertical Approach Angle (VAA).
In the world of pitching nerds, VAA is all the rage. It’s a statistic which requires multiple measurements of the position and velocity of the ball, plus a bit of physics knowledge, and it’s not as publicly available as velocities or spin rates, but it’s a very important piece of information about any pitch. 
It’s a product, mostly, of three things: velocity, release point, and the location of the pitch when it enters the hitting zone. López throws hard, and despite his 6-foot-4 frame, he has a low release point. His arm angle isn’t sidearm, exactly, but it’s certainly a low three-quarters delivery, and he sinks into his legs well. Of the 169 pitchers who threw at least 500 four-seam fastballs last year, Joe Ryan had the sixth-lowest vertical release point. Gray had the 28th-lowest. Nestled between them at 21st-lowest was López, despite the fact that he stands two and six inches taller than those two hurlers, respectively. 
Though his height doesn’t factor into the equation in the usual way, López does make use of his size. He gets down the mound and achieves near-elite extension through release, and in combination with his raw velocity, that means that López’s four-seamer has an average perceived velocity of 94.5 miles per hour, according to Statcast. That was good for 44th out of 143 qualifying pitchers last year. 
The velocity is a welcome addition to the Minnesota rotation, because they ranked 29th in average perceived velocity from starters in 2022, the lowest they’ve landed during the PITCHf/x Era. Given how long it took the team to prioritize velocity at all, that’s jarring.
All of this means that almost wherever he throws it within the zone, López has his fastball riding a bit more than does a typical pitcher. He doesn’t generate impressive spin rates or raw movement numbers, but because of the way he throws, those same quirks give him a flat VAA that makes his four-seamer highly effective. 
Fastballs with a flat VAA generally enjoy higher-than-average rates of both whiffs and called strikes, and they have a wider margin for error. López fills up the strike zone with his heat and still has an above-average whiff rate with it, and he gets an elite number of called strikes on the pitch. 
The Twins’ tweaks to the fastball, then, will be minimal. They’ll have him largely junk the sinker, but he already used that less often in 2022 than in the past, even with the sinker-happy Marlins. 
They’ll also try to help López attack the areas of the zone where he has more success with the four-seamer, and focus less on spots where his command gets a bit loose. He excels when he keeps the ball up and to the arm side (in on righties, away from lefties), regardless of which handedness of batter he’s facing. He also does well when working down and to the glove side (in on lefties, away from righties). Those are the locations where we would expect him to be most effective, too, based on his arm action. Consistently hitting those spots will allow him, eventually, to better set up the rest of his arsenal.
Speaking of which, we should talk briefly about López’s changeup, about which the Twins will have no notes. Hardly anyone could. Growing up in Venezuela, López got many chances to watch and admire both Johan Santana and Félix Hernández, aces who relied on changeups they could throw in any count, to same- or opposite-handed batters. He’s developed a similar weapon. No one threw more right-on-right or left-on-left changeups than did López in 2022, and it wasn’t especially close.
Most Changeups Thrown to Same-Handed Batters, 2022
Player
Number
Pablo López
481
Zach Davies
442
Logan Webb
344
Lucas Giolito
327
Ian Anderson
322
Source: Baseball Savant
Coming from that low arm slot, and with López’s impressive ability to manipulate his hand position, his changeup takes off to the arm side and has heavy sinking action. Of 140 pitchers who threw at least 200 changeups last year, López had more horizontal movement than all but seven, and more sink than all but 31. 
It gets above-average whiff rates and above-average ground ball rates, despite being compared to pitches used much more carefully and much less frequently. He can make it even more devastating, too, if he can turn the corner with the other two offerings in his repertoire.
Let’s remember that, as I wrote a few weeks ago in a discussion of Gray, pitching is really two different tasks in one. Pitching to same-handed batters requires different skills and a different mindset than pitching to opposite-handed ones. One reason for that is that relatively few pitches work well against both types of hitter. 
López has a leg up in that regard, since (as we’ve already said) his fastball and his change can both neutralize batters from either side. To be a front-of-the-rotation starter, though, one usually needs a third pitch for all opponents. For López, those complementary pieces are already in place, but there’s plenty of room to make them better.
Against lefties, López prefers to work high in the zone with his fastball, which is sound thinking. As we’ve already noted, his heat has characteristics that allow him to have success throughout the zone, but his best command spots are up and away and down and in against lefties. Even for such a good pitch, consistently going down and in on lefties is dangerous work. Climbing the ladder also has the salutary effect of setting up his changeup, allowing him to change eye levels. 
However, he can augment that approach by increasing and altering the usage of his curveball as a third thing for which hitters have to account. He started to do that a bit more in 2022.

The curve also took on more of a vertical shape last season, until it was more or less an 11-to-5 breaker. That’s pretty remarkable, considering the way he throws, even if it’s not the 12-to-6 that profiles best against opposite-handed hitters.
 The arm angle has been one limiting factor in the development of López’s curve. His inability to generate elite spin has been another. Even so, he’s had some success with the pitch. Last year, he only allowed four hits on the pitch–all singles. No other pitcher who threw at least 200 curves allowed as low a batting average as the .095 hitters managed against López’s, let alone doing so without giving up any power, and he did get 18 strikeouts with it. 
Unfortunately, he did so by throwing the pitch too selectively, and with too little conviction. Despite not getting hurt on it even once, he threw it for a strike less than any other pitcher in baseball, and he hardly ever threw it except when ahead in the count. In the past, he used the pitch to steal strikes on the first pitch of at-bats, but this year, that tendency disappeared.
Pablo López, Pitch Usage v. LHH, 2022

Partially as a result of that change in tack, López also stopped throwing the curve for a strike. No pitcher in baseball threw their curve in the zone less often than he did. Given López’s control, it’s inconceivable that he simply lost the ability to hit the zone with that offering. They say if you’re never racing to the gate ahead of the final boarding call, you’re getting to the airport too early. López needs to live a little more dangerously with his curve to neutralize lefties better, and the Twins will help him do so.
Against righties, the combination of his fastball and his unique confidence in the changeup make López tough, but his cutter is where his breakout potential lies. Last year, he began a transformation of that pitch, from a hard, short counterbalance to his sinker into something closer to a slider, with bigger break and a velocity differential of 5-7 miles per hour from his fastball. He also started throwing it more, particularly against righties.

As they get López targeting his most effective quadrants with the fastball, the Twins can help his cutter play up by having him play the pitch directly off of the heater. A heater up and in on a righty can set up a cutter running from the middle of the plate out to the edge. One located down and away can set up a strike-to-ball cutter off the plate for a chase and a whiff. The latter sequence could be especially effective, because hitters have to keep that filthy changeup in mind. 
Knowing that, they’re not likely to see the cutter well when it starts on the outer edge. They’ll identify that it isn’t the change and start their swing, but be fooled by the spin axis, which is nearly identical to that of López’s four-seamer. The movement difference comes mostly from seam-shifted wake, which hitters struggle to read. López only used the pitch to try to get ahead early in counts, but in the right sequences, he could turn it into a putaway pitch at times.
There are weaknesses in López’s game that cap his upside somewhere south of elite status. He’s an intelligent, multitalented hurler, though, and while he’s already shown the ability to be an above-average workhorse at the big-league level, the Twins gave up an All-Star and fan favorite for him because they have designs on making him even better than that.

Earlier this month, the Twins shocked the baseball world by signing Carlos Correa to a $200 million contract. The move would've seemed inconceivable for this franchise as recently as five years ago, but in recent offseasons, Minnesota has signaled its willingness to start wading into the deeper end of the spending pool.
After all, they first signed Correa just a year ago, albeit to a short interstitial deal that paved way for this one. Months earlier, the Twins had extended Byron Buxton with a $100 million contract, two years after handing free agent Josh Donaldson a then-record $92 million.
Compared to the previous regime, Derek Falvey and Thad Levine have shown a drastically greater willingness to profer these kinds of large-scale contracts, which are somewhat rare for teams in their class. (For context, Chicago's $75 million deal for Andrew Benintendi last month was the largest free agent commitment in White Sox history.)
Notably, however, this appetite has been limited entirely to the position player side. Minnesota's current front office has been comparatively averse to investing dollars on the pitching side. Pablo López falls in line with a distinct pattern when it comes to acquiring rotation help: they trade talent (in this case Luis Arraez) for a cost-controlled starter who fits snugly into the budgeting forecast for multiple seasons.
Minnesota did the same thing with Tyler Mahle at the deadline last year, and with Sonny Gray the prior offseason. They did it with Chris Paddack, and Kenta Maeda, and Jake Odorizzi. They traded away José Berríos, in part, because he was reaching the end of that cost-controlled window.
Only in one case have these situations ever led to the Twins paying a remotely market-rate salary for one of these frontline starters: in 2020, when Odorizzi accepted the qualifying offer to earn around $18 million. Of course, the club ended up paying out less than half that amount due to the truncated COVID season.
Outside of that instance, Gray's $12.5 million salary this year will supplant Lance Lynn in 2018 ($12 million) as the highest salary paid to any pitcher acquired by this front office in seven years. Michael Pineda's two-year, $20 million contract signed in December of 2019 – also prorated down, because of his carryover suspension – remains the largest Falvey has given a pitcher. It's 10% of the amount they just guaranteed Correa.
So like I said, the pattern is pretty stark. The question is, what's driving it? Why are the Twins comfortable allocating such an outsized proportion of their available budget to position players while persistently minimizing money tied up in arms?
I think it comes down to volatility and risk.
Back in November, I wrote an article on the troubling realities of buying high on free agent pitching. I was citing a dynamic that I believe prevents the Twins – and really, the vast majority of mid-market teams – from winning bids for top free agent pitchers available at their peak.
Namely: you are paying the utmost long-term premium for pitchers in their late 20s or early 30s who are hitting the sharp downward slope of the aging curve. Look back no further than last year's free-agent class to see the pitfalls of this buy-high philosophy: Robbie Ray, for example, got a $115 million deal from the Mariners coming off a breakout Cy Young year and then reverted right back to his previous ordinary form. The contract already looks like a hindrance for them.
There are worse outcomes. Signing up commit pay big bucks to starting pitchers, who've already often logged 1,000+ innings, through their mid-30s is flat-out hazardous. The Yankees bought high on Carlos Rodón and earmarked $162 million to lock him up through age 35. The upside he brings as a true ace exceeds almost any bat you can buy on the market, but it's counterbalanced by the tremendous risk of his shoulder issues flaring up and making him a non-factor.
With their financial inhibitions, New York can afford to assume that risk without catastrophic collateral downside. Most teams operating in lesser markets can't or won't. 
Of course, there's even more risk in simply not acquiring pitching talent. It's not an option if you want to compete, and you lack the elite development machines of a Tampa or Cleveland.
For Minnesota, the preferred course has been to trade for second-tier starters in their prime. This prevents risky long-term commitments and keeps the rotation's budget share in check, enabling the Twins to invest in building around the likes of Correa and Buxton, who now occupy a third of the payroll with almost 300 million in combined dollars owed.
I'm not going to say staking the franchise's future on Correa and Buxton is WITHOUT RISK, of course, but star position players tend to age a bit more reliably than standout starting pitchers, in part because they have more "outs."
If injuries continue to impact Buxton, he can still make a real difference while spending time at DH, as we saw last year. If Correa's ankle forces him off shortstop, he can move to third, as he planned to with the Mets.
When you're paying top dollar for a starting pitcher and they get struck by injuries that keep them off the mound or diminish their performance, it's harder to maintain that value equation. For teams with finite spending capabilities (self-imposed as they may be), that matters.
Continually trading quality prospects to replenish their rotation will not necessarily be a viable strategy for the Twins going forward, so the success of this approach really comes down to how well their efforts with the pitching pipeline come together. 
The front office has put in place a potential lineage to support sustained rotation success – with Louie Varland and Simeon Woods Richardson followed by the likes of Marco Raya, Connor Prieilipp, and more – but pressure is rising to see it pay off and embed some legitimate fixtures so they don't have to keep trading their way to patchwork solutions.
In theory, allocating your funds to superstar everyday players and relying on a sustained and regenerative pipeline of younger, fresher, lower-cost pitchers is a savvy strategy. In theory.

Ask any Twins fan what area of the current roster scares them the most, and the answer will surely be either the top of the starting rotation or in the bullpen. Despite a stronger group of starter candidates and some rosy projections for the relief staff, the fanbase isn’t going to believe it until they see it. 
A similar mindset was apparent heading into the 2020 season, and the Twins ended up having one of the best relief corps in the game. They ranked third in baseball with a combined 3.6 fWAR, sixth with a 3.62 ERA, and second with a stellar 77% strand rate. 
A surprising leader in this group was off-season waiver claim Matt Wisler, who finished the year with a glowing 1.07 ERA and 32.7% strikeout rate. 
He was seen as a relative project coming into camp that year, but the Twins’ decision makers saw something in him that gave them hope that he could turn into a weapon out of the bullpen, or someone that could at the very least provide value given their minimum salary. They didn’t know that their project would transform into a buzz saw by drastically changing his pitch repertoire. He completely ditched his seldom-used curveball and changeup  and started throwing his slider over 80% of the time and mixed in a very occasional fastball. 
Flash forward to present day, and fans will probably want absolutely nothing to do with a project. As good as Wisler was, the results of the projects that followed were either disastrous or disappointing, to say the least.
But could any of the current members in the Twins’ bullpen benefit from a change similar to Wisler’s in 2020?
Danny Coulombe 
A minor-league deal signee, Coulombe represents an ideal candidate to tweak and tinker with if the Twins are looking for another project. Since coming to Minnesota in 2020, he’s actually been quite effective when healthy, based on his combined 2.92 ERA, 8.2 K/9 and 3.5 BB/9 across 49 innings pitched. For a low-leverage option out of the bullpen, you could certainly do much worse. 
But what happens if his strikeout rate improves with a change in pitch repertoire? That’s when things get interesting, as they did for Wisler. 
Coulombe has experimented with a slew of different pitches over his career, with his fastball, slider and curveball being constant throughout. His sinker and cutter, however, have seen mixed results. 
Notably, his fastball velocity went up last year (averaged 91.8 MPH compared to 90.6 MPH in 2021), and he used his curveball and slider significantly less (66.6% in 2022, 43.5% in 2021). He did this in an effort to reintroduce his changeup, which he used 19.6% of the time. He saw great surface results when healthy, with a sterling 1.46 ERA and an 81.3% strand rate in his 12 innings pitched. His slider, while used less-often in 2022, was still an above-average offering, and was his best pitch in 2021 (1.6 runs above average). It should remain in his mix, and he should eliminate his curveball. 
If Coulombe can stay healthy in 2023, continue to add/maintain good velocity on his fastball and up his usage of his slider, he could open some eyes. Maybe his rediscovered changeup can still play a factor against right-handed hitters and his slider is his weapon of choice against lefties. Either way, a more-refined balance in his repertoire could keep him effective as long as he remains healthy. 
Trevor Megill
The tall right-hander debuted with the Twins in May and impressed with his blazing fastball right away. By the end of the season, Megill found himself in the 97th percentile for fastball velocity, 92nd percentile in fastball spin rate and the 85th percentile for curveball spin rate. These are enticing numbers under the hood, but he seemed to get a bad reputation after losing some gas starting in August. 
At one point, he gave up at least one earned run in seven of eight appearances, and lost the trust of frustrated Twins fans. While many were ready to see him removed from the roster, it would be foolish to give up on such an electric arm after struggling in their sophomore season. 
His fastball plays at the big league level. That much is certain. Can he get one of his breaking balls to be a true complementary offering?
His curveball has the aforementioned spin rate that surely encouraged him to throw it 30.9% of the time in 2022. He only allowed two extra base hits on the yacker, but the average exit velocity on it was 94.1 MPH. Can Megill find a way to get better results on this pitch, or should he start to emphasize his slider more? 
The slide piece got knocked around a lot more in 2022 (.536 slugging percentage against), but it is by far his best offering in terms of getting swinging strikes (36.5% in 2022). If he can continue to get whiffs on this pitch while upping its usage, it could lead to more strikeouts at the risk of harder contact. For a project-type pitcher in lower-leverage (or even minor league) opportunities, this is a risk worth taking.   
Kenta Maeda   
It appears that the 2020 American League  Cy Young  award runner-up will get every opportunity to stick in the starting rotation after missing all of last season. That’s fine for the time being, but it would not be surprising to see him in the bullpen at some point in 2023.  Tommy John  surgery recovery can be unpredictable, especially for pitchers on the wrong side of 30. 
When push comes to shove, Maeda didn’t pitch any MLB innings last year, and only had 106 under his belt before succumbing to surgery in 2021. There’s no way to reasonably expect him to be a reliable starting pitcher for 30 starts this year. 
If he approaches an innings limit and the team decides to try him in the bullpen, it will be a facet of the game that Maeda is familiar with. Even if it isn’t his preference, he could be a welcome addition among the relief corps if he optimizes his repertoire like he has done in the past. 
In 2019, King Kenta pitched 17 innings out of the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen down the stretch and had terrific results. He had a 3.24 ERA in relief, with a 11.9 K/9 and just 2.2 BB/9, and he left about 80% of baserunners stranded. So what happened when he made that move?
In the month of September, his slider usage rose to 43.9% and he essentially dropped his curveball and sinker. He mainly used that slider, his 4-seam fastball and his splitter. Opponents hit a meager .164/.220/.382 against him that month. His simplified game plan paid off immensely, even if it was just temporary.
If Maeda can rediscover that balance in his repertoire, and adjust it even further in the likelihood that his fastball loses velocity post-surgery, those results would play in a major way.
 
But what do you think? Should the club try tinkering with these pitchers? Are there any other arms that come to mind?
 

The Giants and Taylor Rogers reportedly agreed last Friday to a three-year deal worth $33 million. This kind of contract wouldn't have been to surprising had it been signed, say, mid-way through the 2021 season, during which Rogers was an All-Star for the Twins. 
But he missed the last two months of that season with a finger injury, and then struggled his way through 2022 for two different teams, posting a 4.35 ERA for the Padres and then 5.48 down the stretch in Milwaukee.
His underlying metrics were not bad – we'll get to that shortly – and Rogers had a very strong prior track record. Also, we know the Giants had money to burn after whiffing on both Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa.
Still... Thirty-three million dollars?! For a guy who had all the looks of a buy-low candidate fishing for a make-good deal? In this economy?!?
Even in a clearly inflated free agent market, I find this deal stunning and fascinating. Even if Rogers wasn't a top target for the Twins – sure seems that way – there are some implications worth exploring in terms of what this means for a potential pursuit of remaining free agent relievers.
First: 
The cost for free agent relief pitching is astronomical.
We already knew this long before Rogers signed. Edwin Diaz struck the biggest payday for a relief pitcher in history. Roberto Suarez ($46M) and Rafael Montero ($34.5M) received contracts that are pretty much unprecedented for non-closers. 
This contract for Rogers is merely another piece of supporting evidence to confirm what we already knew: in order to acquire impact relief pitching in free agency, the Twins will need to move well past their comfort zone.
To contextualize, the $33 million deal Rogers got coming off a bad year is twice the size of the largest contract the Twins have ever given a free agent reliever (2 years, $16.75 million for Addison Reed). At the time, Reed was an elite late-inning arm, coming off a great season and three years younger than Rogers is now.
Further context: if the Twins signed Rogers to the same deal he got from San Francisco, it would rank as the third-largest sum handed to a free agent in seven years under this front office (sixth-largest in franchise history). That distinction currently belongs to Christian Vazquez and his $30 million contract signed earlier this offseason.
And to reiterate, Rogers was NOT GOOD this past season. At no point was he a reliable late-inning fixture resembling his prime years in Minnesota. The lefty was bad enough in San Diego that the championship-obsessed Padres traded for an upgrade in Josh Hader at the deadline (didn't quite work out). After getting traded to Milwaukee, Rogers posted a negative-1.02 Win Probability Added for a Brewers team that missed the postseason by ... one game. 
Rogers was not only bad, but very consequentially bad, which is the same statement you can make about the guy Minnesota traded him for: Emilio Pagan. Would anyone have been excited about the Twins signing Rogers on these terms, even though it ostensibly meets the need to spend money and show initiative?
Actually, invoking Pagan brings me to the other big revelation from examining Rogers' new deal with the Giants:
Teams are paying for indicators over results.
I should clarify that when I say Rogers was bad last year, I mean his results were bad, not necessarily his underlying indicators of performance. Some would say that's a distinction without a difference, but to the Giants and whoever helped run up the bidding on Rogers, clearly it's not.
On the surface, the narrative seems clear: 
Rogers was plagued by a serious finger issue in 2021. The Twins traded him just ahead of the 2022 season, at least in part because they were concerned about lingering effects from that injury on an extremely slider-reliant pitcher. They were right. Rogers scuffled through the worst season of his career. And now the Giants, who just backed out of a mega-deal with Correa because of an eight-year-old ankle injury, are paying $33 million to inherit all of this risk and apparent decline. But when you take a deeper look, this version of events doesn't quite hold up. If Rogers' finger was truly affecting him, you'd expect to see tangible signs of it: diminishing velocity, reduced spin rate, wayward control. None of that was really the case. 
Rogers' 2.7 BB/9 rate was a bit high by his standards, but hardly terrible. His K/9 rate (11.8) and K% (30.7%) were both above his career benchmarks. His home run rate was typical (about one per nine innings). 
There were no signs of trouble gripping and executing a featured slider that produced a .191 batting average and 38% whiff rate, while leaned on to a higher degree than ever before. 
The Giants paid Rogers based on these qualities, not the ugly ERA or the season-altering breakdowns on the mound. Which is an interesting dynamic when you think about Pagan and the Twins.
Many of the same things we're saying here about Rogers can be applied to Pagan, whose contract tender from Minnesota in November raised a lot of ire from the fan base. The case for Pagan outperforming his peripherals isn't quite as compelling – he had a 4.21 FIP compared to 3.31 for Rogers – but in both cases, the stuff is undeniable and there's big upside beyond what we see on the stats page. 
After seeing Rogers get $33 million from San Francisco, it becomes a bit easier to grasp the idea that Minnesota had several trade suitors lining up for Pagan, and that his projected $3.7 million contract could be viewed as somewhat of a bargain.
Of course, it's unlikely this will change anyone's opinion on Pagan. And bringing him back will certainly not stand on its own as a satisfactory approach to reinforcing the Twins bullpen, in anyone's eyes.
Luckily, there are still quite a few interesting arms out there on the free agent relief market, which has developed more slowly than starters and hitters. Assuming the Twins miss out on Correa again, and don't sign Nathan Eovaldi, there are few other obvious places to focus their remaining budget and make an impact. 
Building a bullpen that is ultra-deep on quality options, to offset question marks in the rotation and protect against key reliever injuries or setbacks, would seem to be one of the few remaining paths for an offseason that legitimately positions the Twins as assertive contenders.
Read More: Looking Toward the Bullpen Market by Cody Pirkl
There's already a very solid foundation in place, so the addition of an arm or two like – say – Matt Moore or Andrew Chafin or even our old friend Michael Fulmer could have outsized benefit. But as the Rogers contract illustrates, none of these guys will be coming at a bargain and whichever route they go, the Twins will likely have to overpay on faith. Something this front office doesn't tend to do.
Yet, something's gotta give if the Twins want to demonstrate to their fans that they give a dang about making a push in 2023. Thus far their moves have felt more obligatory (Vazquez, Kyle Farmer) or confusing and lateral (Pagan, Joey Gallo) than strategic. The relief market offers opportunities for more purposeful, decisive upgrades ... if Minnesota's willing to meet the price.

The Twins’ ace not only had reverse splits, but was a true ace against lefties, and more of a fourth starter against righties. Since he saw more righties than ever before, the latter was a real problem. 
This is an underrated aspect of the massive challenge that is succeeding as a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Years ago, I wrote about the fact that a switch-hitter is a strange creature, because they must maintain competence at two distinct tasks throughout the season: hitting left-handed, and hitting right-handed. For hitters who don’t thus burden themselves, though, hitting is really just one job. Hitting opposite-handed pitchers is easier than hitting same-handed ones, but the essential movements and cues aren’t so different that it qualifies as two different things.
The more we learn about the craft and the science of pitching, however, the more clear it becomes that even for a pitcher who only throws with one hand, what we think of as pitching really is two distinct and disparate tasks: pitching to lefties, and pitching to righties.
Gray came to Minnesota with all the tools to dominate in both of those tasks. He throws both a four-seam fastball, and a sinker. He has an excellent, high-spin curveball, and he has a slider that helped him take his career to a new level upon his arrival in Cincinnati in 2019. Talking about it that way, though, might be treating Gray too much as one pitcher. Let’s consider him as two, instead.
Sonny Blue only faces left-handed batters. He’s the one who continued ace-caliber work in 2022. He doesn’t really have that slider, or at least, he rarely deploys it. That’s ok, though, because he has excellent command of his cutting, riding fastball. Of the 169 pitchers who threw at least 500 four-seamers last year, his had the 12th-most movement to the glove side–that is, in his case, toward the first-base side of home plate. 
Sonny Blue, Pitch Usage

With that pitch, Blue can hammer the inside corner, because that’s where the pitch wants to move anyway. He can stop lefties from extending their arms against him, and limit the authority of their contact. His big-breaking curve is the second weapon in his arsenal, and the pairing is all Blue really needs. No right-handed pitcher who threw at least 750 pitches against lefties in 2022 got called strikes at as high a rate as Sonny Blue did. Hitters just couldn’t cope with his unusual movement and good control, given the angles from which he was working.
Cloudy Gray, on the other hand, only faces right-handers. He struggled, because Cloudy doesn’t usually make all that much use of his four-seamer or his curve. Rather, he’s a sinker-slider guy. When Gray was dealt to the Reds after 2018, he was reunited with his collegiate pitching coach, Derek Johnson, and the two of them went to work. Sonny Gray griped about the way the Yankees forced him to throw a slider in which he had no conviction, but with better communication and a source he trusted, he reinvented the pitch, and turned it into one of the league’s best. 
Cloudy Gray, Pitch Usage

While everything was sunshine for Sonny Blue in 2022, Cloudy Gray ran into two different problems. Firstly, his slider lost some of its sweep. 
 
Cloudy Gray, Horizontal Slider Movement, 2019-2022
Season
HMov (in.)
2019
8.9
2020
9.8
2021
10.1
2022
7.5
That compromised Gray badly. Even at his worst, with the Yankees, hitters chased his slider outside the zone roughly 35 percent of the time. In his best years, it was closer to 40 percent. As he struggled to sweep the pitch out of the zone at all, and as he began to exaggerate those efforts and miss the zone by wider margins in the process, righties only chased the pitch 25 percent of the time in 2022. When they did decide to swing, it was usually because the ball hadn’t moved as much as Gray wanted it to move, and they made better and more frequent contact than in the past.
All of those issues were only exacerbated by the fact that Cloudy couldn’t control his sinker. He couldn’t steer it in on righties’ hands, the way Sonny Blue could with the cutting four-seamer to lefties. Like all his offerings, the sinker lost a tick of velocity in 2022, as he moved toward his mid-30s, but unlike the others, it was neutered by that diminution. It too often found the heart of the zone, wouldn’t stay down for him, and got hit harder and higher than in previous campaigns. 
One problem is that whereas Sonny Blue fit perfectly into what the Twins like their pitchers to do, Cloudy Gray was a bit off script. The Twins threw four-seam fastballs at the second-highest rate in MLB last year, and sinkers at the second-lowest. They prefer higher-riding heat to facilitate greater perceived depth on breaking stuff, rather than the tilted, east-west contrast of Gray’s best and most natural sinker-slider combination. They got Cloudy to throw the four-seamer more against righties, but the pitch didn’t effectively set up the slider, and trying it interfered with the command of his sinker.
Let’s reunite the split personalities, now, because it’s important to understand how these half-problems have trickle-up effects on the holistic effort to win ball games. Sonny Gray–the indivisible, corporeal man–has been known to attempt a reset during tough starts by walking back into the clubhouse and stripping down to his, er, indivisible corporeality. “Starting over,” he calls it. But how do you reset just half of yourself? When the twin tasks of getting out righties and lefties are considered as individual ones, it becomes an important question. 
His overall numbers suggest that Gray had a good season, splits be damned. His 3.08 ERA and 1.9 WARP in 120 innings would tell you that his only deficiency was in durability. That’s not quite true, though. Because he couldn’t get righties as well as a pitcher of his talent usually can, Gray had too many short starts. The inability to put a hitter away because the slider isn’t sliding enough costs extra pitches. Furthermore, a vulnerability to same-handed batters can leave you just as open to things snowballing or opponents outmaneuvering you as can a weakness against opposite-handed ones.
An ideal starter has two pitches they can command to each side of home plate. There can be overlap between the two (a fastball you can dot on either corner, for instance), but that’s increasingly rare. 
You also want two pitches for each type of hitter. Opposite-handed guys will struggle more with vertical movement and changes of speeds, whereas same-handed ones are weak against good lateral movement and pure velocity. Only a few starters have that whole suite of weapons for each of their tasks, though. 
The rest have to grapple with their own incompleteness, and try to thrive anyway. In 2022, Gray only averaged five innings per start. He only meaningfully improved the Twins’ chances of winning (with a 0.10 or greater Win Probability Added) in 11 of 24 outings, because he wasn’t able to manage or correct that compartmental failure.
This isn’t primarily a Sonny Gray problem. The Twins have to be better at making the platoon advantage an actual advantage. They had reverse splits as a team last year, for both left- and right-handed pitchers. The same was true in 2020, and in 2019 for righties. Dylan Bundy, Chris Archer, Joe Ryan, Josh Winder, and Emilio Pagan all ran reverse splits last season, just like Gray. 
That’s not always a bad thing, but it’s not as though these teams have been loaded with stellar changeup artists. On the contrary, they look for breaking stuff, and shape it as discussed above, on the theory that vertical disparities between the fastball and breakers will generate whiffs against batters from either side.
That’s not universally true, though, and the team mismanaged its idiosyncratic cases for the second straight season in 2022. When you ask some pitchers to streamline their repertoire, you get monsters capable of mowing down opponents. When you ask others to do it, though, or when you try to conform their style to your organizational one, you hamstring guys. 
This is why modern big-league teams carry multiple pitching coaches, and it certainly underscores the way Wes Johnson’s departure in the middle of 2022 hurt. In 2023, the Twins could benefit by starting to think of their pitchers as containing multitudes, and by finding creative solutions to problems for each of their hurlers’ halves.
 

Perhaps no Twins player draws more ire than Max Kepler; the long-time right-fielder has disappointed over his eight-season MLB career as—with the exception of 2019—his offensive numbers fall below his potential. Season after season, the German product produces a .225/.317/.422 line, flashes an offensive profile with upside and fails to fulfill that promise in the following season. It’s madness.
Naturally, the restless fans remain exhausted. They don’t boo—this isn’t New York, after all—but if there were some sort of passive-aggressive method to indicate disapproval, Minnesota fans would embrace it. Instead, we read yearly articles detailing all the teams interested in Kepler, watch him enter the season as a Twin, and endure the same style of season he has played since 2016. It’s madness.
But maybe the Twins should hold onto Kepler for one more year. It’s crazy—madness, even—but it could make sense.
One of the strongest arguments for Kepler’s exit rests on the internal options. The Twins possess about 20,000 left-handed hitting outfielders capable of catching a flyball at an adequate level, rendering Kepler’s skillset redundant in a sea of similarity.
Those options may be weaker than we believe; neither Alex Kirilloff nor Trevor Larnach has played more than 80 games in an MLB season, so far always succumbing to an injury that cuts their year short. Matt Wallner may have the bat, but his outfield flopping netted him -4 DRS over just 138 2/3 MLB innings, 14th worst 91 players with 130 innings in right field. DRS is a cumulative stat. That’s bad. Nick Gordon may be best suited for the role, but he is more valuable as a jack-of-all-trades positionless weapon, not a locked-in everyday player. 
Kepler, on the other hand, is an elite defender in right field and can cover center at an above-average level, perhaps not an easy skill to find with Target Field’s unusual characteristics in that section of the field. Maybe he’ll never break through the 100 wRC+ glass ceiling, but he’ll also never outright bust with the bat. And, sigh, there might be optimism for Kepler’s bat.
WARNING. DISCUSSION OF MAX KEPLER’S BATTED BALL DATA BELOW
It’s folly to analyze Kepler’s hitting; his BABIP baffles the wisest of sabermetricians, and this author swore an oath years ago never to attempt to understand it. More innovative writers have tried and failed, and there’s a good chance the answer to his mysterious hit tool lies wherever Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
But let’s go.
Kepler’s under-the-hood numbers improved drastically in 2022; his max exit velocity reached 113.8 MPH, his xwOBA stood in the 74th percentile of all batters, and he cut his already-low strikeout rate while holding steady with his walks. His Baseball Savant page has enough red to drive Joseph McCarthy crazy. Even in his weirdest batting seasons, Kepler’s batted-ball data never looked this pristine; there’s a chance he truly experienced bad luck in 2022. 
If those improvements are here to stay—it would be weird if he suddenly fell off at 30 years old—the new limits to shifting combined with his changes in 2022 may finally unluck his offensive profile. Remember all those times he hit a sharp groundball directly into short right field for an out? Those days are gone; instead, he’ll earn a well-fought single for his efforts, not an out. 
It makes sense to deal Kepler; the team has plenty of backup options, and if the team is pinching its pennies to sign Carlos Correa and a top-tier starter, Kepler is the obvious candidate for heaving. The logic is there. But there are worse things than having a guaranteed solid player on your roster, and Kepler’s defensive acumen will be difficult to replace. Maybe this sounds like Stockholm Syndrome, but Kepler should stay.
 

Joe Pohlad has been involved with the Twins since 2007, working in areas of the organization that were preparing him for this leadership role. Most recently, as Executive Vice President, he was involved in the rollout of the new Twins branding, logo, and uniforms, including introducing the changes to the media and fans at the Mall of America earlier this month. He has also been involved in marketing and ticket sales areas within the Twins, and oversaw the Pohlads' media company Go Media. He's also been on the Pohlad Foundation's Board of Directors.
Joe Pohlad has been more visible as a fan of the team than Jim Pohlad, who was viewed as generally hands-off. Joe Pohlad even attended Twins Daily's Winter Meltdown several years ago, and has confessed to being a Gleeman and the Geek podcast listener. He has discussed Twins Daily with me as well, admiring the passion and detail that is contributed by our writers and community.
Joe Pohlad has often been involved in several of the Pohlads' and Twins' more aggressive initiatives, such as Go Media, which included acquiring two radio stations and BringMeTheNews.com. He served as the Executive VP of Brand Strategy and Growth for the Twins, which explains the involvement with the recent rebranding. In that role, he also oversaw the launch of the Minnesota Twins Accelerator by Techstars, an effort to develop startups in technology, sports, and entertainment. 
What this means for the direction of the team is anybody's guess. In his letter, Jim Pohlad said he will remain involved as the Control Owner, which suggests at a high-level (including budget, cough, cough), he'll still be involved. However, Joe Pohlad's track record with the Twins suggests he is more likely to be focused on growth than status quo, perhaps aggressively. 

Farmer will cost the team between $5 million and $6 million via the arbitration process, and they had to give up pitching prospect Casey Legumina to get him. No front office–least of all the one run by Derek Falvey and Thad Levine–acquires a player at that price without a good reason. Here, in a nutshell, is that reason.
Batted Balls 88+ MPH, Pulled, Launch Angle 10-40 Degrees, as a Percentage of All Plate Appearances, 2022
Player
%
Rank (of 357)
Carlos Correa
7.3
134
Dansby Swanson
7.6
119
Kyle Farmer
7.9
106
Admittedly, that’s not the world’s most elucidating nutshell. Let’s crack the nut open and take a closer look, though. This statistic (let’s call it the Bomba Rate, for reasons we’ll get into shortly) tells us at what rate a hitter hits the ball somewhat hard in the air toward their pull field. (Why 88 miles per hour? You can read this blog post from sabermetrician Tom Tango for more detail, but in short, that exit velocity best reflects the point at which batted balls begin to rise in average value.)
That’s nice, you might say, (1) but surely Correa and Swanson hit their pulled flies harder than does Farmer, and anyway, (2) the differences in their rates are vanishingly small, and (3) it’s just one very small part of a hitter’s game. The first thing is true, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter that much. It’s nice to hit the ball much harder than 88 miles per hour, or to get the launch angles exactly right when pulling it, but meeting the criteria matters much more than excelling within them when you do.
The second thing is also true, to some extent, but it turns out that an individual’s Bomba Rate is very sticky from year to year. We’re taking outcomes out of the equation here. It’s all about how often you generate a certain kind of contact, and the denominator is all plate appearances, so the samples are of a good size, the number captures a skill and an approach pretty cleanly, and the leaderboards tend to look quite similar from one year to the next. 
In fact, Correa’s Bomba Rate actually rose considerably in 2022, from a below-average 6.0 in 2021. Swanson’s was exactly 7.6 in 2021, too. Farmer, meanwhile, had an even more impressive 8.7-percent Bomba Rate in 2021. (Remember that number. We’re going to revisit it.)
The third thing is superficially true, but as the rates we’ve already seen imply, it’s no smaller a share of a player’s game than walks. The league leaders hit Bombas over 10 percent of the time. The trailers do it barely 2 percent of the time. That gap matters, because Bombas have very high expected run values. In other words, while they might not be frequent, Bombas aren’t really a small part of offense. Their payoffs make them worth chasing.
This is all especially important when evaluating the Farmer addition, because if I had to sum up the Twins’ offensive philosophy in a single sentence, it would go like this: Hit the ball in the air, to your pull field. No viable approach could ever be quite that simple, of course, but theirs comes close. 
No other team in MLB emphasizes this quite as clearly. Knowing that this is what they’re always doing explains almost every individual move they make. Here’s the list of all 2022 Twins who came to the plate at least 200 times, with the same information given for the three shortstops above.
Bomba Rates, Minnesota Twins, 2022
Player
%
Rank (of 357)
Byron Buxton
11.0
7
Jorge Polanco
9.7
30
Jose Miranda
9.7
33
Nick Gordon
9.5
36
Luis Arraez
9.2
42
Gary Sanchez
7.9
103
Carlos Correa
7.3
134
Ryan Jeffers
7.2
139
Max Kepler
6.7
179
Gio Urshela
6.2
205
Gilberto Celestino
2.9
347
I won’t further inundate you with numbers, but name a homegrown Twins hitter from the last several seasons–Mitch Garver, Miguel Sano, Eddie Rosario–and they rank highly in Bomba Rate. Guys like Correa come through and see their Bomba Rates rise. The few free-agent hitters in whom the team invests (Marwin Gonzalez, Josh Donaldson) run high Bomba Rates. 
There’s more. Jake Cave had a Celestinish 4.0-percent Bomba Rate in 2022, and was waived immediately after the season. Kyle Garlick had a Buxtonian 10.5-percent rate, and the team re-signed him. The Twins kept both of their hitting coaches and promoted a third to their big-league team from within the organization this fall. Why did they do so, even after a frustrating finish to the season? Because those coaches got their guys to keep on Bomba-ing.
Highest Team Bomba Rates, MLB, 2022
Team
Bomba Rate
Dodgers
8.6 %
Braves
7.8
Twins
7.7
Cardinals
7;7
Mariners
7.6
Astros
7.5
Bombas are distinct from Barrels, the Statcast statistic pushed out by the league with which you might be familiar. Bombas are more specific, and they’re about process, not reverse-engineering from results. This is a distillation of what the Twins are encouraging hitters to do at almost all times. 
I dubbed it the Bomba Rate because, when Minnesota had an 8.3-percent rate in 2019, that figure not only led the league by a full percentage point, but was eight tenths of a point higher than any other team had managed in any of the previous four years of the Statcast Era. The Twins led the league in this statistic again in 2021, and as you can see, even a barrage of injuries only dragged them down to third in 2022.
You couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, build your entire offensive identity around this skill, but focusing on this type of batted ball as the optimal outcome of every trip to the plate has positive knock-on effects, too. For instance, pulling your fly balls puts batted-ball spin on your side, instead of having it work against you. 
Also, an approach geared toward this kind of contact requires one to wait for a pitch on which this kind of contact is possible, or to find a different way to force pitchers to throw such a pitch. In addition, whiffing all the time dents your Bomba Rate just the way it dents other numbers, because you can’t hit the ball in the air to the pull field if you don’t hit it at all. Bomba Rate is a sound primary criterion around which to build an offense, and the Twins seem to use it as a firmer guide for their choices than any other team in the majors.
That doesn’t mean that they won’t bring back Correa, whose Bomba Rate is still strong for a shortstop, or that Farmer’s Bomba Rate was the only reason they targeted him. This could turn out to be a placeholder move, and Farmer could end up a mere role player. Unlike the moves that brought in Correa and Urshela last winter, though, the Twins proactively sought this one out. 
They might also think their organizational plan can help Farmer build upon what he did in Cincinnati. For one thing, he played in pain for part of the second half last season, after a Spencer Strider fastball traveling at 100 miles per hour hit him in the hand. He was lucky to avoid fractures, but before that moment, he was batting .280/.345/.411 for the season, with an 8.7-percent Bomba Rate–identical to the one he’d posted in 2021. 
After missing a few days, he returned to the lineup, but he batted just .235/.290/.366 the rest of the way, and his Bomba Rate fell to 7.3 percent. Even the latter figure isn’t bad, but given better health, he’s shown that he can exceed it, and the Twins would drool over the number he posted for a season and a half before the plunking.
Speaking of that plunking, there’s a little more to Farmer’s profile, too. One way that he generates so many authoritatively pulled fly balls is by crowding home plate and asserting control of the outer edge of the zone. 
It’s really one way for him to overcome profound struggles against right-handed pitchers, whom he’s never hit as hard as he hits lefties. Since the start of 2021, he’s batted .286/.350/.528 against southpaws, but just .250/.304/.358 against righties. His average exit velocity against lefties is 88.4 miles per hour, but against righties, it’s just 85.6. His average launch angle is 4.8 degrees higher against lefties, too. 
That might read like a platoon player, and it’s possible that’s exactly the role he will fill. However, Farmer’s proximity to the plate has led to 27 times being hit by pitches by righties over the last two years, which (in combination with his good contact rate) sets a higher floor for him than many marginal right-handed hitters have against same-handed hurlers. 
Those numbers also came while facing lefties just 25 percent of the time for the Reds. Urshela, Jeffers, and Buxton all saw lefties between 29 and 30 percent of the time in 2022, so that’s a fairer forecast of how often Farmer will have the platoon advantage within the Minnesota offense. 
There’s an entirely different article to be written about the various defensive and off-field considerations that went into the Twins’ pursuit of Farmer. In his offensive profile alone, though, there are several things that made him a good candidate to land with Minnesota, and seeing what they saw in him can help fans better understand what the team looks for and tries to instill in all hitters.

Liam Hendriks and Ryan Pressly spent one season pitching together on the Twins staff. It was 2013, when Pressly had just joined the club as a Rule 5 pick, and Hendriks was playing out the string with the organization that first signed him. 
At the time there was no indication we were looking at two of the future biggest relief stars in baseball. Hendriks posted a 6.85 ERA in 47 ⅓ innings and was waived in December, owner of a 5.31 FIP and 5.8 K/9 rate through 156 big-league frames. Pressly was moderately effective as a rookie long reliever, tossing 76 ⅔ innings at a 3.87 ERA but with an underwhelming 49-to-27 K/BB ratio. He might not have hung around the majors all season if the team were not compelled to do so by his Rule 5 status.
I don't really blame the Twins for moving on from Hendriks, though it would've been nice to see him at least audition in a short-burst relief role first. When they waived him, he was claimed by the Cubs, who themselves waived him 10 days later. The Orioles, who claimed him from Chicago, followed suit by waiving Hendriks in February. 
Hendriks landed with the Blue Jays, who traded him to Kansas City in July. The Royals then traded him back to Toronto in October. Three weeks later, the Jays turned around and traded him to Oakland. You still keeping track? Me neither.
Needless to say, it took a lot of scenery changes for Hendriks, and a lot of teams had him in their grasp (however briefly) before he finally settled in for the A's and began reaching his full form as the best reliever in baseball. 
Pressly, on the other hand, was already reaching his full form when the Twins decided to trade him to Houston at the 2018 deadline. This was a very different situation and one much more worthy of dissection.
There seems to be a misperception that Pressly was a poor performer in Minnesota who instantly flipped a switch to become elite with the Astros, but that's not really the truth. 
Pressly's development with the Twins was a slow and gradual process. With each passing season, his velocity would nudge upward a bit, along with his strikeout rate. Under two different managers and three different pitching coaches, Minnesota stuck with Pressly through some fairly uninspiring seasons, all in the hope he'd eventually reach the dominant peak they long envisioned.
In 2018, he did it. All that time and work finally paid off. By now Pressly was averaging 96 MPH with his fastball and decimating opposing hitters. 
In 47 ⅔ innings with the Twins he had a 13.0 K.9 rate and a 17.9% swinging strike rate. Those numbers ranked ninth and fifth in all of baseball, respectively. He had a 2.95 FIP at the time they traded him. His spin rates were off the charts. It's easy to see why the Astros came calling.
 

Unlike the rest of their deadline sell-offs in 2018 – including the Eduardo Escobar trade that brought in Jhoan Durán – the Twins were not motivated to move Pressly, who still had another year of team control remaining. But they liked Houston's offer of Jorge Alcalá and Gilberto Celestino enough to pull the trigger. 
A reasonable decision at the time, especially considering the general volatility of relief pitchers. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that this trade has been an abject disaster for the Twins thus far. 
Alcalá and Celestino, to their credit, have both reached the majors, and the book is far from written on them. But neither has proven to be a major impact player yet, while Pressly has gone on to become one of the most impactful relievers in the league – and one the Twins could've desperately used over these past four years. 
Late-inning relief has been perpetual thorn in the organization's side. Thrust back into championship contention sooner than expected in 2019, the Twins found themselves short-handed in the bullpen, and traded for Sergio Romo and Sam Dyson at the deadline. Minnesota still got swept out of the postseason, with relievers taking the brunt of the negative WPA.
In 2020, the bullpen was actually a big asset through the 60-game regular season, but again it was the relief corps (namely Romo) lapsing severely in the playoffs. I'll never waver that Minnesota's offense bears most responsibility for that miserable 0-5 stretch in October of 2019-20 (and the team's long-running playoff woes at large) but the fact remains: they ran out of guns in crunch time. 
Meanwhile Pressly was emerging as an All-Star annihilator for the Astros – not to mention a big-time postseason performer.
The 2021 and 2022 Twins seasons were tanked largely by dreadful bullpens, with the main culprits being veteran pitchers targeted as late-inning replacements to fill Pressly's void. 
By now it seemed no matter which route the front office went in seeking bullpen help – signing a steady established name (Alex Colomé), trading for a buy-low candidate (Emilio Pagán), trading for a buy-high candidate (Jorge López), sticking with their staples (Tyler Duffey), moving on from their staples (Taylor Rogers) – they could do no right. Their lack of late-inning dependability became a major hindrance, a chronic momentum-killer and source of angst for fans.
Through it all, Pressly just kept on dominating for the Astros, like almost no other reliever in baseball. With his help, Houston went to the World Series three times in four years, and just won it.
Now, there are a number of counterarguments people could make (and have made) to refute the idea that Minnesota blundered with this move. To me, they all ring a bit hollow:
They didn't have the coaching staff to unlock Pressly at the time. It's not exactly a big secret that manager Paul Molitor and bullpen coach Eddie Guardado were widely viewed as ineffective at translating and embedding analytics principles for players. I would respond that while these coaches might have been inherited by the current regime, baseball ops still controls who is on the staff. And, four months after Pressly was traded, Falvey would install his own new group led by the analytically-inclined Rocco Baldelli and Wes Johnson. If the Twins recognized what they had in Pressly, they could've held him and brought in the right people to bring it out.
He wouldn't have thrived here like he did in Houston. One might argue that, even with new coaches, Pressly would've never reached the heights he did in Houston, where his ERA dropped from 3.40 in the first half with the Twins to 0.77 post-trade. Astros pitching coach Brent Strom is regarded as one of the best in the biz. Fair point. But in reality, Pressly only needed to stay the course to be a massive asset in the Twins bullpen. As mentioned, he was statistically one of the most dominant relievers in the league BEFORE they dealt him.
They weren't going to sign him to the contract extension Houston did. The reason Pressly is still on the Astros is because they quickly signed him to a two-year extension, buying out his first two years of free agency with a two-year, $17.5 million option. (They recently re-upped with another two-year deal.) This Twins front office hasn't shown any willingness to extend relievers, or really even to shell out multi-year contracts to them. But ... there's no reason they COULDN'T have extended Pressly, other than their own volition. I think we're past the point of deferring to this front office's stubborn adherence to a status quo that hasn't gotten the job done. 
Ultimately, any counterargument that tries to absolve the Twins of blame in ends up directing it back to them in some different way. The bottom line is that they took a measured risk in trading Pressly and, like many they've taken, this one blew up in their faces. 
I'm not saying it's some unforgivable offense. One thing I like about this front office is their threshold for risk in the name of upside. It's possible we'll rue this particular decision less one day, because Alcalá and Celestino have years of control remaining and potential left to tap. 
Also, while the overall tone of this column may be critical, it should be emphasized that the Twins deserve credit for identifying and acquiring these talents to begin with: 
They found Hendriks as an unknown teenager in the barely-scouted continent of Australia. They developed him into a legitimate prospect, who appeared in back-to-back Futures Games, and a big-leaguer. The Twins set Hendriks on the path to stardom.
They identified Pressly as a seemingly unremarkable arm in the Red Sox system, one who'd barely pitched above Single-A at age 24. They developed him from solid MLB long reliever to effective middle reliever to outstanding setup man before flipping him to Houston where Pressly completed his evolution.
The Twins have shown an eye for the right relief talent, but they've usually been unable to properly actualize it while in Minnesota. In order to escape their cycle of bullpen torment, they need to break the spell.
Twins Daily Caretakers can now download the new chapter of the Offseason Handbook, "Scouring Free Agency for Relief Help," and learn about the options available to them as they look to break the spell. If you haven't yet, sign up as a Caretaker to access all of the Handbook content as it drops! 
 
 

When the Twins acquired a relief pitcher by the name of Juan Morillo in 2009, it was considered a big deal. "New Minnesota Twins relief pitcher Juan Morillo can throw 96 mph" remarked the headline for a Phil Miller story in the Pioneer Press at the time. Quaint as that number seems by today's standards, it turns out the headline was underselling the newcomer's velocity.
Although Morillo ended up throwing only two innings for the Twins, and was done as a big-leaguer after that, his name hung around as a quirky bit of trivia – he became the first Twins pitcher to ever touch 100 MPH, a distinction he held up until Brusdar Graterol came through more than a decade later.
Minnesota infamously lagged way behind in Major League Baseball's pitching velocity movement, which makes it all the more noteworthy they now have three relievers in their bullpen who have touched triple-digits this year. The leader of that pack is a rookie who has quickly emerged as one of the best relief pitchers in baseball – a consistently reliable performer in a bullpen that's been volatile and erratic around him. 
This certainly hasn't been true of all flame-throwing pitchers – with Morillo being a great example – but Jhoan Durán has translated his premium velocity into true dominance on the field. Through 53 ⅔ innings, he has a 2.01 ERA, 2.86 FIP, and 0.99 WHIP. His 70 strikeouts and 12 walks are good for a 5.83 K/BB ratio, putting him in the range of a prime Joe Nathan. 
He's been an essential outlier in a bullpen that has rarely risen to the occasion, ranking third among MLB relievers in Win Probability Added behind only David Robertson and Emmanuel Clase. If you take away Durán's contribution, the Twins bullpen as a whole drops from ranking 17th in the majors in WPA to ranking 27th. 
According to the statistic Championship Win Probability Added (cWPA), which is designed to measure "how a player impacts their team's chances of winning the World Series," Durán ranks #1 in all of baseball.
This astounding level of success is made all the more impressive by these three facts:
He's pitching in relief for the first time. 
Usually, even the eventual success stories for starters-turned-relievers take a little time to reach fruition. Durán's transition was sharp and seamless. When he got the ball in the fifth inning of a close game on Opening Day, he looked like he'd been doing it for years, notching four strikeouts over two scoreless frames. It was very much a sign of things to come.
Not only has Durán acclimated instantly to the change of routine and altered dynamics of pumping it up for one-inning stints, he's also handled the rigors of regularly pitching in extreme high-leverage spots with aplomb. Recognizing his greatness, Rocco Baldelli quickly placed Durán atop his bullpen hierarchy – the go-to option when games are truly on the line. That'd be a tall order for most rookies but Durán has thrived under pressure, as evidenced by his nearly unrivaled impact among relievers on winning games.
 
He threw only 16 innings over the past two seasons.
It's easy to forget now, but Durán's health was a huge concern coming into this season. After getting no official game action in 2020, with the minor-league season canceled, he made only five appearances last year and didn't pitch after June 15th due to an elbow strain that the team trusted to heal up without surgery.
That approach hasn't always worked, as we are all painfully aware, but so far it's paying dividends with Durán. While reaching new heights with his velocity and accruing more relief innings than any Twin, sans Griffin Jax, Durán has remained healthy and strong all year long, with not a whisper of any physical issues.  
He was acquired for two months of Eduardo Escobar.
Back in 2018, the Twins were going nowhere at the deadline so they dealt a few veterans, including Escobar who was an impending free agent. In that deal they got back three prospects: outfielders Ernie De La Trinidad and Gabriel Maciel, and Durán. 
La Trinidad and Maciel never did much of note, and are now gone from the organization. But Durán alone is enough to make that trade a slam-dunk. Between this and last year's acquisition of Joe Ryan for Nelson Cruz, the front office has certainly made the most of its opportunities to add young impact pitching when in a seller position in its two non-competitive seasons.
Both pitchers have played integral roles in keeping this one from turning into a non-competitive season, and in Durán's case it's especially impressive once you zoom out and look at the state of his position across the league. We've been reminded this year of just how quickly things can turn for top relievers and closers across the league.
Guys like Taylor Rogers, Josh Hader, and Clay Holmes were amazing until they very quickly weren't. These are established, respected names and All-Stars. The rarity of Durán's unyielding steadiness becomes all the more distinct against this backdrop.
Even with the likes of Jorge López and Michael Fulmer aboard, Durán remains the heart and soul of this bullpen, enjoying one of the better seasons we've seen from a Twins reliever and doing it in a way that leaves little room for doubt or skepticism. This team has had some great relief pitchers over the years, but never someone so visibly, obviously, undeniably dominant as the imposing 6'5" hardest thrower in franchise history.
If the Twins going to find a way to pull it together and win this division, they're going to need their miraculous rookie sensation to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Carlos Correa has had a weird 2022 season with the Minnesota Twins, who brought him in as a second superstar to hopefully pair with Byron Buxton at the top of the lineup. His wRC+ of 122 indicating he’s been 22% above league average is perfectly acceptable, but in a down offensive year league wide, that number stems from his first sub .800 OPS since the shortened 2020 season.
The way the rest of the season plays out may play a big part in whether Correa opts into his $35m option for 2023. Thus far, the Twins haven’t really gotten the Carlos Correa they expected when they handed out so much money to him this spring.
Lacking in the Clutch
Correa has become a legend because of his incredible clutch play in the postseason year after year. He owns a career .849 OPS in the playoffs with 18 homers and 59 RBI. Historically there are few players in baseball history you’d want up in a big spot when a game is on the line. Unfortunately for the Twins, that hasn’t played out at all this season.
Look no further than Correa’s 37 RBI to see that he simply hasn’t cashed in when given the opportunity. With runners in scoring position, Correa has posted a triple slash of .231/.316/.292. An OPS of .608 which is good for 33 percent below the league average hitter in those situations. With two outs and runners in scoring position, Correa has been a complete non-factor, slashing .097/.200/.129, a .329 OPS. If you feel like Correa hasn’t really had many big moments in a Twins uniform at the plate, it’s hard to blame you.
Clutch stats can only be looked at so closely as they’re typically pretty random. That being said, Correa’s severe failures in big situations has undoubtedly cost him some counting stats. While teams don’t value things like RBI like they used to, Correa is on pace for some of the worst marks of his career in several areas. Not a great time for it considering he’s seeking a massive long-term contract this winter.
Defensive Disappointment
Personally, it’s felt like Correa hasn’t been the gold glove caliber defender we expected at shortstop, and upon further investigation, this turns up true in just about every defensive measure you can find. Fangraphs defensive value measurement pegs Correa at a perfectly neutral 0.0 value added on defense this season. He’s been well above average in this statistic in every season of his career since 2016. In addition, Correa scores a -3 Outs Above Average on Statcast, tied with Tim Anderson, Alcides Escobar, and Isaiah Kiner-Falefa for 26th among shortstops league-wide. He’s also on pace for his worst mark in Defensive Runs saved since his rookie season.
The newer defensive metrics are tricky and many don’t trust them for good reason. Looking at base defensive measures, however, tells the same story. Correa’s fielding percentage of .975 is his worst since his rookie year and he’s on a full-season pace for a career-high in errors.
It goes without saying that in search of a long-term deal at 27 years old, Correa can expect significantly less from teams if they suspect his defensive future at the premium shortstop position is going to be short-lived. At 6 foot 4, Correa had questions dating back to draft day about his ability to stick at shortstop. As he gets into his late 20s, a down season defensively would surely be cited in free agency to try to drive down his price by teams trying to lock him up for the next 8-10 years.
Carlos Correa has been far from a bad player in 2022, but for the price tag he has and the number of holes the Twins roster has had for much of the season, it’s fair to be disappointed with the level of output he’s provided. He’s on a 162-game pace of 3.2 Wins Above Replacement on Fangraphs, and trails Buxton, Kepler, Polanco and Arraez. He’s only half a win ahead of Trevor Larnach, who hasn’t played since the end of June. He’s tied with Sonny Gray who’s thrown all of 79 innings so far this year. Since July 1, crunch time for the Twins who hold a one-game lead in the division, Correa is hitting .183/.287/.333. Yet another measure of the Twins' $35m man failing to meet expectations when they’ve needed him most.
And so in consideration of Correa’s future with the Twins, it’s fair to say it’s still very possible he opts out. Hitting free agency at the age of 28, it’s possible a team completely disregards 2022 and signs the Twins' current shortstop away long-term in pursuit of a superstar. That being said, you can expect Scott Boras to put out some feelers, and if he gets the sense teams are going to try to cite Correa’s disappointing 2022 season to nickel and dime them on a long-term deal, another one year, $35m deal to recoup some value certainly won’t be out of the cards.
Do you think it’s possible Carlos Correa could opt back into the Twins contract in 2023? Do you agree that this has become more likely as the season has gone on? Let us know below!

Industry buzz had the Twins interested in Connor Prielipp at number eight overall in the draft. Instead, they were able to nab him with their second pick at #48 overall. The slot value for the #48 pick is $1.62 million. Jeremy Nygaard drafted Prielipp at #8 overall for the Twins in the Prospects Live Mock Draft.
Prielipp already has two plus pitches. The first is a 60 grade fastball that sits 93-95 mph. His slider is his best secondary pitch and one of the better offerings in the entire draft. It generated 50% whiffs when he threw it in college. Finally, he has a serviceable changeup that is already above average, and can be developed further. Prielipp had good command pre-surgery, but this may take some time to return.
Prielipp didn't allow a run in 21 innings pitched in the 2021 season before COVID halted play in the SEC. He struck out 35 hitters. Prielipp is 6'2, 205 pounds and still has a ton of projectability to add velocity, an endeavor the Twins have shown proficiency with. When he is fully recovered, I'd expect them to be able to add a tick or two to his fastball as he fills out more.
Prielipp missed the entire 2022 season due to Tommy John surgery. The Tomah, Wisconsin native was in line to be a top ten overall talent in the draft has he remained healthy. With his surgery and rehab behind him, Prielipp was able to throw multiple times in front of talent evaluators in late spring, including at the MLB Combine. Expect the Twins to bring Prielipp along slowly, but the upside here is a front of the rotation arm. Prielipp fell due to such a limited track record. If he can remain healthy, the Twins may have a steal at 48 overall. Prielipp was recommended by Twins scout Matt Williams.
What do you think of the Twins taking Connor Prielipp at #48 overall?
 

As we get closer to the first round of the MLB Draft on Sunday, Twins Daily is wrapping up its individual player draft profiles. Today, we look at a consensus top five prospect who could slip to the Twins at eight, Brooks Lee.
Who is He?
Brooks Lee is a 6’2, 205-pound shortstop who plays for Cal Poly under the tutelage of his father (and prestigious hitting coach), Larry Lee. Lee places as high as second overall and as low as fifth overall on industry big boards. He is fourth overall in our consensus big board There have been sources linking him with the Twins in recent weeks. He will be 21 on draft day.
Why the Twins Will Draft Him
Lee is one of the few prospects who has been at the top of big boards since the beginning of the pre-draft process. This spring for the Mustangs, he put together a 1.125 OPS and hit 15 home runs. Not to be stifled by wonderings about the strength of his conference, this outstanding performance was on the back of a .677 SLG in the Cape Cod League during the summer prior to the 2022 season.
Lee is a switch hitter with a 65-70 grade hit tool and above-average power. Throughout his career, he has been able to generate more consistent power from the left side. Lee has incredible bat-to-ball skills and almost never strikes out. In 2022, he put together a 20 BB% and a measly 11 K%, making him one of the safest hitters in the class with an incredibly high floor.
Lee has a good arm and is solid defensively but has limited speed that impedes his range. It’s likely that he eventually moved to third base at the major league level. While Twins fans may not have considered him as a possibility at number eight overall, he has a skill set that will appeal to the Twins model-based approach and should hit for average and good power at the major league level.
Why the Twins Won't Draft Him
While it’s been an assumption that Lee would be gone by the time the Twins pick at eight, the early stages of the first round always produce curveballs. It will take one team ahead of the Twins to be enamored with a prospect who is not considered ‘consensus top seven’ to upset draft boards and make a mockery of three months of mock drafts.
That said, Lee is a relatively safe choice who should move quickly through the minors with an incredibly well-developed approach and skill set. I’d put the chances of him being around at eight overall at about ten percent. If he is, the Twins should be sprinting to the podium.
What are your thoughts on the Twins drafting Brooks Lee? Do you think he’s a good fit for Minnesota? Share your thoughts in the comments.
 
 

The year is 2006. I'm 20 years old, home from college for the summer, and my family is embarking on a road trip to see the Twins and Brewers in Milwaukee. This was planned partially because my parents enjoy baseball and love a good family vacation, but – in retrospect – maybe more due to their noticing my increasingly rabid interest in the Minnesota Twins. (About one year earlier, I'd started blogging about the team every other day.)
Little could they have known how much this trip would fan the flames.
We grab tickets for the Friday night game. It's my first trip to Miller Park. May 19th. On this date, a rookie named Francisco Liriano is making his first start of the '06 season. 
Given my now-ardent following of the team, I'm well aware of Liriano. He emerged as a top prospect after being scooped from San Francisco in the A.J. Pierzynski deal, and he's been dealing as a reliever for the first five weeks of the season. Much like the staff's current ace Johan Santana once did, Liriano is forcing the issue with his dominant performance in the bullpen.
On this Friday evening in Milwaukee, the Twins finally let him loose as a starter. I'm sitting along the first base line with excellent seats (thanks Mom and Dad!) to take in the show. Not only does Liriano toss five innings of one-run ball, but he also hits a double at the plate – because, you know, those old National League rules. 
Liriano's win over the Brewers would set off an absolutely incredible run: he went 11-2 with a 1.65 ERA over his next 14 starts. His blazing fastball and wipeout slider blew everyone away. And the lefty's breakthrough coincided with one of the most spectacular stretches in Minnesota Twins history – a surge from 12 games out of first place in mid-July to 96 wins and a division title. 
Of course, Liriano's rookie season ended in heartbreak, as did the 2006 team's postseason flop. But I'll never forget being on hand for the game that sparked legendary runs for both. And that game isn't even my fondest Twins memory of that weekend.
On Saturday, my family spends the afternoon in Milwaukee, and later that evening we're hanging out in the hotel. The news is playing on the TV, and my ears are perked by the mention of a Minnesota sports story. State legislature has approved a bill authorizing construction of a new Twins ballpark on the old Rapid Park site in Minneapolis' warehouse district. After years and years of starts, stops, and setbacks, it's finally gonna really happen. We're getting an actual ballpark.
One week later, Governor Pawlenty would sign the official legislation before a big crowd at the Metrodome, ahead of a Twins game. (They won that game, by the way. Liriano threw five shutout innings in his second start.)
Four years later, we were taking in baseball at Target Field, one of the finest baseball stadiums in the nation and a triumph in structural engineering. In the 12 years since, that yard has developed into one of my favorite places on Earth. 
During this time I've also had the privilege of taking part in the launch and growth of Twins Daily, a website dreamed up around the passion of fans and writers who also revel in the kinds of experiences I'm discussing here. 
Which brings us to the present occasion. On Saturday afternoon, in Milwaukee, I am beyond excited to hang and celebrate with a few of the folks who built TD alongside me as we celebrate the building of something new: a neighboring fan-driven community at Brewer Fanatic, following the same model and spirit as Twins Daily.  We'll be tailgating and partying with folks from this community outside of Miller Pa––er, American Family Field and then catching a Brewers/Pirates game the best way: together with other hardcore baseball diehards.
Sites like Twins Geek, Seth Speaks, Over the Baggy, and BYTO – which all essentially merged to become Twins Daily as we currently know it – were as instrumental in growing my fandom as that unforgettable 2006 season. I sincerely hope that Brewer Fanatic can serve a similar purpose for many Wisconsin baseball fans, even though I may dislike Wisconsin as a general concept. If they like ball, they're okay with me.
Maybe my tune will change next week. Because, fittingly, as soon as the Brewers finish up with the Pirates this weekend they'll be heading to Target Field for a two-game series between two first-place teams. I'll likely be in attendance on Tuesday night. And while I might not be getting to witness the arrival party for the rookie sensation known as Francisco Liriano ... Josh Winder ain't a bad substitute. Especially when it's at the best stadium in the Midwest. (Sorry Brewer fanatics. No contest.)

Dick Bremer was born and raised in Minnesota and has been a Twins fan all of his life. There really aren't too many instances where a hometown kid becomes the announcer of his favorite team. 
Born in St. Paul and raised in Dumont, Minnesota, Bremer is the fourth-longest tenured radio or television broadcaster in Major League Baseball. He trails only the Royals' Denny Matthews (1969), the Brewers' Bob Uecker (1971), and Texas' Eric Nadel (1979) and is tied with Seattle's Rick Rizzs (1983) and Boston's Joe Castiglione (1983). 
On that list, only Bremer and Uecker are currently broadcasting games for their hometown teams. 
With such a long tenure comes an intimate knowledge of the team's history. Cory Provus, who I really enjoy quite a bit on the radio broadcasts, can look up stats and stories from the 1984 season when Kirby Puckett made his debut or watch videos of the 1991 parade, but he wasn't there and didn't live it the same way Bremer did. 
Not only does Bremer possess a nearly unprecedented wealth of Twins knowledge, but his personality is also a great fit for baseball fans in the Upper Midwest with a dry sense of humor and a large dose of humility. He seems to understand that viewers tune in to watch the games, not for him. That can be rare in today's world. 
When I was a kid I had two memorable interactions with Bremer. One at Spring Training where I was basically starstruck passing him in the concourse in Ft. Myers.  I managed to sputter out "How will the Twins do this year?" and he gave me a thoughtful, long answer and asked me what I thought. As a kid, I felt so cool having a real conversation with a famous adult. 
Years later in the 2000's, I was settling into my customary Upper General Admission seat in Section 212 for an afternoon game. I looked down the row a bit, and there was Dick Bremer reading a newspaper in the nosebleeds waiting for the game to start. I remember thinking that it was really neat that he would watch a game from up there on a day the game wasn't televised. 
In fact, I was in that very seat for one of my favorite Bremer calls: 
In other words, he strikes me as a real fan of the team. This can be bad (In my opinion Paul Allen takes this a bit too far, nothing against him he's great at what he does) but Bremer seems to know how to toe that line perfectly. 
I still get goosebumps when I watch this highlight from 2009, coincidentally featuring Kubel as well: 
That is not a forced home run call. That's not a planned out, "A-Bomb From A-Rod" corny home run call. That is a man who is genuinely excited about what he just saw. 
I think it is natural to get 'sick of' a broadcaster after this long of a time. If you hear anyone every day for over 30 years, they are probably going to wear on you a bit whether it is a spouse, boss, or sports broadcaster. 
For the folks who wish for a change in the broadcast booth, be careful what you wish for. There can never be another Dick Bremer. The man has seen it all. 

On the surface, Joe Mauer and Buster Posey seem to have similar cases for Cooperstown. Mauer hit .306/.388/.439 (.827) while earning three Gold Gloves, five Silver Sluggers, and six All-Star appearances. Posey hit .302/.372/.460 (.831) while earning a Gold Glove, four Silver Sluggers, and seven All-Star appearances. Both players won an MVP, and Posey won two fewer batting titles than Mauer. 

JAWS is one way to measure a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness as it averages their career WAR with their 7-year peak WAR. Mauer currently has the seventh-best JAWS total among catchers as he trails only Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, Ivan Rodriguez, Carlton Fish, Mike Piazza, and Yogi Berra. Those are the best catchers in baseball history. 

Posey doesn’t rank quite as well, according to JAWS, as he finished his career ranked 14th. This puts him below the average of the Hall of Famers at this position. However, other factors impact Posey’s candidacy. He was a three-time World Series champion, and that certainly plays a role in his Cooperstown case. 

Mauer and Posey both have some unique characteristics for the voters to consider. Mauer is the only catcher to win three batting titles, and he topped the .400 OBP mark in six of his seasons at catcher. Posey finished in the top-20 for MVP voting in six seasons, including three in the top-10. Mauer finished in the top-20 in MVP voting in five different seasons with four seasons in the top-10. 
Posey is in elite company when narrowing down his career to a six-year window. From 2012-2017, only Mike Trout had a higher fWAR total, and the next closest player is Josh Donaldson. Mauer’s best six-year stretch (2005-2010) ranks him as having baseball’s fourth-highest fWAR total behind Albert Pujols, Chase Utley, and Alex Rodriguez. He also played 70 fewer games than any of the players ahead of him on the list. 

Another commonality between Posey and Mauer is that their careers ended earlier than some of the other greats at the position. Posey is walking away at age-34 after one of the best seasons of his career. After concussions, Mauer retired following his age-35 season, which forced him to become a primary first baseman for his final five seasons. 

It seems like both players have a good chance of eventually getting inducted. Mauer becomes eligible for the first time in 2024, while Posey will be eligible in 2027. There will be plenty of talk about Posey being a Hall of Fame player as he rides off into the sunset. If that is the case, Mauer’s credentials should make him a lock for Cooperstown. 

Do you think both Mauer and Posey will be elected to the Hall of Fame? Leave a COMMENT and start the discussion. 

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Over at the Athletic, Eno Sarris wrote about an intriguing pitch being used more regularly across the league. Some people call it the Dodger Slider, while others refer to it as the Sweeper. A sweeper is a breaking pitch that is thrown faster than 77 mph with more than 6.5 inches of glove side movement and -2 inches of depth from 40 feet. Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson is known for his focus on sliders, and this might be one reason the Twins have been so successful with this pitch. 

So how do the Twins compare to the rest of the league? Los Angeles is the clear leader when it comes to using the Sweeper, but the Twins rank as the second-best AL team when it comes to this pitch usage. The Yankees are not far behind the Twins, but the AL Central is much further behind. No other AL Central clubs rank in baseball's top-15.
To rank this highly, Minnesota has seen multiple pitchers evolve their slider over the last handful of seasons. Jorge Alcala ranks as the Twins' best pitcher when it comes to Stuff+, where he ranks higher than Shohei Ohtani, Julio Urias, and Max Scherzer. Also, his slider ranks better than league average when it comes to horizontal movement. He uses his slider more than any of his other pitches, and he held batters to a .181 batting average and .277 slugging percentage on that pitch. His slider will be critical if Alcala is going to be part of the long-term bullpen solution. 
Taylor Rogers is another Twins pitcher that threw his slider more this season. He increased his slider usage from 43.3% to 54%. Both of his primary pitches, his sinker, and slider, rank well above the league average when it comes to horizontal movement. His unique arm action allows for a lot of natural horizontal movement, but what about a more obvious name?

One name fans might expect to use a Dodger Slider is Kenta Maeda since he spent the majority of his career in the Dodgers organization. Three of his primary pitches get more horizontal movement than average, including his sinker, splitter, and four-seamer. However, his slider ranks below average (-2.5 inches) compared to the rest of the league. 

Former Twin Jose Berrios is known for the movement he can generate on his pitches, so he impacted the team's overall numbers this season. Three of his pitches (four-seamer, sinker, and curveball) all get more horizontal movement than the league average, with his curveball getting 5.2 more inches than average. 

Griffin Jax is one name that might surprise fans to appear on the leaderboards. When it comes to Stuff+, they rank ahead of Shane Bieber, Lucas Giolito, and Madison Bumgarner. Jax saw his slider and four-seamer get four more inches of horizontal movement compared to the average. Jax may also have seen some bad luck this year as his xBA and xSLG were both lower than the batting average and slugging percentage he allowed. 

There were plenty of reasons to criticize Minnesota's pitching staff this season, but there may be a silver lining beneath it all. If the Twins focus on developing the Sweeper, the highly anticipated pitching pipeline might finally arrive at Target Field. 

Do you think the Twins can continue to use the Sweeper? Leave a COMMENT and start the discussion. 

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