Matthew Trueblood

One adjustment that helped lead to Sanó's great 2019 could be a red flag for the balance of his career.Miguel Sanó will always strike out a lot. In fact, he’ll probably always strike out at a higher rate than that at which any player in baseball history has sustained his caliber of production at the plate. His power is extraordinary, but in order to make up for all his strikeouts, Sanó has to have success even when he isn’t hitting the ball over the walls. That poses an interesting dilemma: can Sanó thrive as a dead-pull hitter who relies on running a high BABIP? First of all, let’s establish a couple of facts about Sanó’s approach, and about the shape of offensive production. Last year, for the first time, Sanó became an extreme pull hitter. In fact, according to FanGraphs, Sanó’s pull rate on batted balls last year was the second highest in MLB among players with at least 300 plate appearances. In the last decade, out of over 2,700 player-seasons, only 14 saw a higher pull rate than Sanó had. Meanwhile, despite his overall improvement (some might even call it a breakout) during the second half of 2019, Sanó kept striking out at an exceptional rate. He fanned in 36.2 percent of his plate appearances, almost exactly matching his career rate of 36.3. In baseball history, no player with at least 2,000 career trips to the plate has struck out as often as has Sanó. Despite that, according to FanGraphs, he’s been 21 percent better than an average hitter (as signified by his 121 wRC+). There are four core skills involved in hitting. They overlap, and each contains several smaller skills that also belong in some measure to other core skills, but these four are the most concise way to capture a hitter in profile. Strikeout rate is one of them, and in that regard, Sanó is certainly well below-average, even by modern standards. In the other three, though, to this point in his career, he’s been quite good. He maintains a high walk rate, has tremendous isolated power, and owns a career .342 BABIP—a 98th-percentile figure in baseball history. Most hitters who whiff as much as Sanó does flame out of the league fairly quickly. Those who survive long enough to play even as much as he already has necessarily possess at least some of the other skills, as Sanó does, so it’s not wholly unusual for a batter to be average or better while running a high strikeout rate. Of the 50 most strikeout-prone hitters ever, however, 22 were below-average, and 19 had a wRC+ between 100 and 115. To run a great wRC+ while striking out more than a third of the time, as Sanó will need to do if he’s going to be an impact player now that he’s moved to first base, requires one to excel in the other three core skills. Considering his newfound pull-happiness, however, that might be a challenge for Sanó. Pulling the ball frequently only helps him tap into his power, and waiting for pitches he can yank in that direction can help brace his solid (if unspectacular) walk rate. Running a high BABIP while pulling the ball so often, however, is rare and difficult. For the 100 player-seasons since 2010 with the highest pull rates, the average BABIP was just .275. Sanó’s BABIP last season was .319, down considerably from his career rate, but still almost 1.5 standard deviations above the average for dead-pull hitters. Between that gap and his unprecedented rate of 0.37 home runs per fly ball, there’s plenty of cause to wonder whether Sanó’s apparent breakout represented a level he can carry forward. Advocates for Sanó could point out, correctly, that the very extremes we’re examining here make comparing him to other hitters unfair. Almost no one in baseball hits the ball harder than Sanó. Unlike many dead-pull hitters, Sanó is right-handed, making him (if only slightly) harder to defend with defensive shifts. Unlike many right-handed mashers, Sanó runs fairly well, which might help him collect an infield hit or force teams to defend him differently on occasion. Still, as has been the case in each of his big-league seasons to date, 2019 gave us insufficient data to determine what we can expect from Sanó in the future. We know he’ll strike out a ton, hit a handsome number of homers, and draw his walks. We don’t yet know what adjustments he can make, around and within those parameters, to weather the process of aging, to respond to the league’s adjustments to him, and to bring his extreme skill set in line with what we know about paths to success and failure in MLB. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

Why the Twins' relief ace's famous new pitch was a natural addition for him, and why he's likely both to stay great for a while—but not to get better.Taylor Rogers has a unique pitching motion. Former Twins catcher Bobby Wilson once called it “his little rushed delivery,” a compliment that only sounds backhanded. Interestingly, when one delves into the details of that delivery, the dominance of Rogers’s newest pitch comes into focus, but so do his vulnerabilities. By now, the story of Rogers’s transformation from fringy lefty specialist to formidable relief ace is familiar to nearly all Twins fans. During the first third of the 2018 season, Rogers tinkered with a new offering, a slider, which he then incorporated as an extra look for hitters hoping to lock in on his sinker and curveball. Since he became comfortable using that slider, he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball. Despite Wilson’s characterization, there’s certainly nothing rushed about the initial phase of Rogers’s delivery. On the contrary, the first notable thing about Rogers’s mechanics is the long path his arm traces while it’s working behind his body. When he first brings his throwing hand out of his glove, he stabs it down and backward, behind his back, toward the shortstop. Then, as he drives forward and his hips rotate, his arm rapidly comes up and through, but flexes only very briefly. Rogers naturally stays extended for much of his delivery, right through release point. That has big implications when we begin to consider the addition of the slider to his repertoire, at first as a third pitch, then as his primary breaking ball. “On the curveball, you’re actually trying to tuck the arm and decrease the radius of the arc, which increases the spin—whereas on the slider, you maintain a full arm length and full follow-through,” then-Red Sox pitching analyst Brian Bannister told Tyler Kepner, for Kepner’s 2019 book on pitching. “All the spin [on the slider] is created by the wrist and fingertips.” That’s the key to understanding Rogers’s slider, and the ease with which he was able to incorporate it. Rogers told Dan Hayes of The Athletic that he grips the slider the same way he grips his curve, which eliminated any discomfort or confusion during that step of the process. The only real difference in the way he throws the pitch, then, is in the arm action itself. For a hurler with a relatively low natural arm slot and such natural extension in his motion, that makes the slider a more natural pitch, for reasons summed up by Bannister: that extension suits the pitch better than a true curve. By no means, however, has Rogers stopped throwing the curve, and in fact, his curve has been as effective as ever since he added the slider. For that, Bannister (at least in his interview with Kepner) can’t offer us an explanation. “Two totally different approaches, which is why some guys throw sliders well and some guys throw curveballs well and why most guys struggle to throw both,” Bannister said. “Somebody like Clayton Kershaw is very rare, to throw elite versions of both.” Is Kershaw a fair comparison point for Rogers? Not really. It’s not fair to compare much of anyone to Kershaw. However, Rogers had a 69 cFIP and a 57 DRA- last season, according to Baseball Prospectus, suggesting he was somewhere between 30 and 40 percent better than an average pitcher, on a rate basis. Those are very close to the aggregate figures Kershaw posted from 2011 through 2013—not quite at his true peak, but when he was already winning Cy Young Awards, and even an MVP. Rogers gets near Kershaw’s level of batter-for-batter effectiveness partially by not having to face batters multiple times in one game, but also by having one breaking ball (the slider) which is essentially just a combination of his other breaking ball (the curve) and his fastball: he grips the pitch like his curve but throws it like his fastball. In so doing, he works around the problem Bannister articulated: he can have two different approaches and two different breaking pitches, without either compromising the other. That’s not to say Rogers is a perfect pitcher. There is, after all, a reason why he’s not a dominant starter, like Kershaw. The aforementioned “rushed” element of his delivery can create deception for hitters, especially now that he has multiple breaking pitches, and especially because both pitches have wider-than-average velocity separation from his fastball. However, it also makes him vulnerable to missing high and to his arm side, because his arm sometimes isn’t on time at release. Nearly every pitcher experiences that mistiming of release on occasion, and many hurlers have bigger problems than Rogers does because of it. In many cases, that mistiming (which creates misses within a predictable band; imagine a scatter plot of locations mapped across the strike zone, shaped like the pitcher’s arm slot) is compounded by instability or misalignment in other elements of the delivery. That can lead to more and bigger misses. Very few pitchers in baseball can match Rogers, though, for consistent alignment and stability. As he drives down the mound, he drags his back foot longer than most pitchers, then turns the heel of that foot toward first base, keeping the back leg on line even a split-second longer. It’s an unusual motion, but it gives him tremendous balance and stability as he releases the pitch and follows through. Because of that foot drag, and because he’s increased his core strength to generate more stability in his upper half, he’s as reliably on target in everything but release point as any pitcher in the game. Even that superlative comes with a catch. Rogers’s extraordinarily low walk rate last year bespeaks his excellent control, and that’s likely to be a sticky skill for him—especially now that he’s found a second breaking pitch that he can throw for strikes or get hitters to fish for. However, pitchers who miss only because of those minute mistimings can sometimes be more hittable, and given the nastiness of Rogers’s stuff, that tendency to miss in hitter-friendly spots is the only good explanation for the above-average rate at which hitters barreled him up last year. On the whole, Rogers has plenty of tools to avoid being hit hard. His sinker has great run to the arm side, and usually induces ground balls. The twin breaking balls keep hitters off-balance and will help him miss bats when he needs to do so. He might always give up more home runs than is ideal, especially for a relief ace (with that role’s inherently minuscule margin for error), but making the adjustments necessary to reduce that vulnerability almost certainly wouldn’t be worth the lost ability to manipulate a pair of breaking balls and pound the zone as no one else in baseball can. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The Twins' ace has a unique style and repertoire, and the two might not be a perfect fit for one another in the long run.Watch José Berríos pitch, and the first thing that grabs you is his delivery. As good as Berríos’s stuff is, his high leg kick, crossfire stride pattern, and hyperkinetic finish make him especially compelling. All of that is also what makes Berríos’s future murky. Over the last three seasons, Berríos has blossomed into a solid frontline starting pitcher. He’ll turn 26 next week, before any MLB games are played in 2020, but before the onrush of the coronavirus, he looked like a strong candidate to break out this year, becoming a genuine Cy Young contender. He spent the winter training in a new, less intense way, the better to stand up to the rigors of a long season. He spent the spring tweaking the shape of his curveball, trying to get less horizontal sweep, more deception, and more whiffs from the pitch. Those attempted adjustments form an interesting juxtaposition, though, with Berríos’s delivery. In all of baseball, there are only two right-handed starters who consistently release the ball from as extreme a horizontal angle as Berríos: Jake Arrieta and Max Scherzer. Ranking every player-season with at least 2,500 pitches since 2015 (when Statcast began tracking this data) according to horizontal release point, Arrieta and Scherzer take up nine of the top 13 slots, and Berríos’s 2018 and 2019 are two of the remaining four in that group. Both Arrieta and Scherzer are famously intense in their workouts, as Berríos has been ever since he was drafted. They’re extraordinary physical specimens, with high-energy, high-intensity deliveries. Crucially, they’re also each a few inches taller than Berríos. That underscores what sets him apart from each of them: his funk and his crisscrossing limbwork are doubly unusual for a pitcher on the small side. To create the sharp angles he achieves, he has to not only stride somewhat toward the third-base dugout and throw across his body, but start on the third-base edge of the rubber, as well. It made some sense to do so, as long as Berríos was relying heavily on his four-seamer and his unique, two-plane curve. Scherzer thrives using that approach: 85 percent of his pitches are four-seamers or breaking pitches that move to the glove side. From that arm angle, the four-seamer and a good breaking ball can work optimally off of one another, even if that breaking ball ends up varying widely from the heater in both dimensions by the time it reaches home plate. However, Berríos used his sinker and changeup a combined 38.7 percent of the time last year, a career-high mark. If that’s his plan going forward (and I believe it should be), then a slightly less extreme horizontal angle from release to the strike zone could be called for. That goes double if he has, indeed, reshaped the curve into something that won’t sweep naturally off the plate horizontally. Arrieta is the more compelling comparison for Berríos, anyway. Their frames and their deliveries are more similar: compact, extremely athletic, obviously powerful, yet also, clearly vulnerable to occasional loss of command and repeatability. As one might guess, Arrieta’s repertoire (especially at his peak) is also a better fit to that of Berríos. Arrieta has long relied on his power sinker, and on a tight, two-plane curve. Because of misguided instruction in the Orioles system, Arrieta didn’t become the ace-caliber pitcher Berríos is poised to become until well after age 26; he wasn’t even established as a big-league starter until 28. Now, a mere half-decade after his peak, he’s on the brink of being pushed back out of the majors. His peak only lasted about three seasons. Obviously, Berríos has youth on his side in this comparison, but it’s worth wondering: can a pitcher remain both highly effective and healthy for a prolonged period using the delivery Berríos and Arrieta employ? The fact that Berríos goes through periods within seasons during which his velocity sags is a small red flag. The lack of a durable pitcher with whom he can be easily compared is, perhaps, a larger one. Yet, that might also be the strongest argument in favor of leaving Berríos alone: he’s a unique pitcher. Good decisions, in the age of biomechanics and pitch design, can and should be made without resorting solely to reasoning and evaluating via analogy. Arrieta didn’t realize his potential until the Cubs allowed him to go back to his natural delivery, after the Orioles tried to straighten him out. Perhaps Berríos (whose rookie season was marred by a severe alignment problem in his own delivery) would be similarly damaged by trying to do things more conventionally. Still, as he develops more trust in the pitches that move toward the arm side after release, and as he changes the shape of his curve, he might be wise to make adjustments to his mechanics (or his placement on the rubber) that match those tweaks in objective. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

Star power isn't everything in baseball. Still, do the Twins need a bit more of it?This month, a group of 30 Baseball Prospectus writers has wheeled through four rounds, drafting “franchise players” with whom to begin an imaginary organization. Contributor Kazuto Yamazaki proposed the exercise, an unusually expansive spin on a familiar idea. It’s still not complete, but the draft has been illuminating, not least in the way it’s helped me conceptualize the Twins’ current standing among MLB teams. For the purposes of this draft, we imagined that all contracts were thrown out. Participants were instructed not to ponder a player’s current salary or service time; the only criteria were present and future performance. As one would imagine, there remained a strong bias in favor of younger players (who wants to start their franchise with a 35-year-old, even if they’re a surefire Hall of Famer?), but without the universe of current contracts as an overriding consideration, we were free to weigh players’ strengths and weaknesses with unusual clarity. At present, BP has no plan to present this draft as a full-fledged public project, as other outlets have done with similar prompts in the past. However, the participants have taken it admirably seriously, and by going four rounds, we’ve pushed the concept further than most of those past efforts. It’s been eye-opening, because it’s forced us all to spend some time mulling the merits of a wide swath of candidates, and we’ve continued past the point at which obvious names ran out. Here are the Twins who have been taken so far, with less than half of one round remaining in the draft: José Berríos, 41stJorge Polanco, 79thMitch Garver, 96thRoyce Lewis, 100thByron Buxton, 104thObviously, in addition to those five players, the team has a handful of clear candidates to go in the 15 picks which remain as of this writing: Max Kepler, Luis Arráez, Miguel Sanó, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, and Jordan Balazovic. Even if none of them are selected, though, the Twins will have been more than proportionally represented in the draft, overall, at least from a quantity perspective. Still, it’s interesting to note that no Twin cracked the top 30 (the threshold above which, ostensibly, a player is necessarily the envy of every team in the league to whom they don’t belong), and that only Berríos even fit into the top two rounds. Nor is that an especially controversial way for things to break down. A big believer in Lewis could have pushed him up the draft board. He certainly has a chance, in a few years, to make the group’s collective valuation of him look too conservative. For now, however, his star is a bit dimmed by the struggles he experienced at the plate in 2019, and by scouting reports that suggest there are tangible, persistent reasons for those problems. I’m particularly bullish on Kepler, and would have taken him before Buxton, let alone prospects Cristian Pache and Dylan Carlson, all of whom have been selected in the fourth round. Given his years of experience and demonstrated limitations in terms of hitting for average, though, it’s easy to see why he’s slipped down the board. Could Berríos have been taken higher? There’s a strong case to be made that he’s better (and of a sufficiently similar age and ceiling) to have gone above both Mike Soroka and Frankie Montas, the two hurlers taken just ahead of him in the second round. On the other hand, the two starters taken just after him (Shane Bieber and Jacob deGrom) are both much more accomplished than Berríos at this point, and seem to have plenty of miles left in their arms. One theme that pervaded the draft was that, without existing contracts as anchors and tiebreakers, large differences emerged between participants in terms of valuing pitchers. That was true not only with regard to weighing hitters against pitchers, but with regard to what drafters were looking for in the pitchers they did take. In general, the exercise made clear the extent to which the Twins’ chances in the foreseeable future hinge on depth, rather than star power. The Indians had two players drafted ahead of Berríos, and one (Bieber) immediately after him. The White Sox also clustered three draftees into the top 46 picks, and after them, had two additional players plucked before Polanco got the Twins back onto the board. It was clear, even as last season unfolded, that the Twins’ success was designed to be considerably less sexy than that of their divisional rivals. Their model centers on a unified offensive approach, an overhauled player development system, and betting wisely on veterans, rather than on finding and building around individual superstars. That’s wise; baseball generally rewards that approach. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy way to do things. The Dodgers had five players taken within the top 32 picks in this draft. The defending champion Nationals had four of the top 50, not counting Anthony Rendon, who just departed after the championship, nor Bryce Harper, who departed one year earlier. Superstars give teams with great processes and protocols in place a greater margin for error, and margin for error matters a great deal in baseball. That’s why the Twins were smart to pony up for the star power of Josh Donaldson this winter. They exposed themselves to some risk—even without his fresh contract to consider, Donaldson hasn’t been taken in the franchise player draft, because of his age and injury history—but made themselves less reliant on continued good luck in developing homegrown players into stars. Now, as this draft underscores, they need to keep trusting those processes, and hope that one of those players (Lewis, of course, being the obvious candidate) can become the centerpiece they currently lack. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The Twins' left fielder might not be around much longer, unless he can adjust his mechanics to suit his approach—and go back to a plan of attack that suits his skills.In each of the last three seasons, Eddie Rosario has hit like a star for about half a year, then been average (or considerably worse) for about as long. That, more than his somewhat old-fashioned approach or his lack of fielding or baserunning value, is why he’s broadly seen more as a trade candidate than as a likely mainstay for the Twins. Yet, the dichotomy in his half-season splits speaks to the impact potential he still has. One key question underpins any effort to tell whether he can sustain more consistent success in the future: Can Rosario go the other way? Everywhere one turns (including here at Twins Daily!), there’s a simulation of the 2020 season happening, in one form or another and through one vendor or another. Visit Rosario’s Baseball Reference page, and the news is grim: his (real) brutal spring training has carried over into his (non-real) regular season, and he’s no longer a Twins regular. This imagined Rosario has a .404 OPS in 41 plate appearances. That feels dauntingly plausible, because when one watches Rosario at the plate during one of his slumps, it’s little stretch to say that he appears to have forgotten how to hit. An exceptionally aggressive hitter at the best of times, he seems to swipe hopelessly at the ball when going badly, missing some pitches badly and weakly mis-hitting others. Still, the primary problem isn’t how Rosario looks when going badly, just as evaluating him can’t be boiled down to how he looks (usually, great) when going well. The main issue, in forecasting Rosario’s near and medium-term future, is whether he can get himself going well more frequently, and going badly less often. To do so, he’s going to have to solve the shift. Last year, only seven batters saw more shifts than did Rosario, according to Baseball Info Solutions. Freddie Freeman, Anthony Rizzo, Cody Bellinger, Kyle Schwarber, Brandon Belt, Kole Calhoun, and Charlie Blackmon were those seven hitters, and the two immediately behind Rosario were Carlos Santana and Bryce Harper. It’s no surprise that all of those are left-handed batters (save Santana, who is a slow-footed switch hitter), but interestingly, most of the group is similar in other ways, especially in terms of approach. These are, by and large, patient hitters. Certainly, their patience correlates strongly with their success. It’s very hard to be a shift-prone (pull-happy) left-handed hitter and succeed, without being patient at the plate. That’s been true since long before the shift became widely used, though. It’s part of the design of baseball. Thus, the real question isn’t whether Rosario can conquer the shift (he actually hit better against it than against non-shifted defenses last year), but whether he can change the thing that led to all those shifts in the first place: his pull rate. Rosario hasn’t always been such a pull-conscious hitter. According to Baseball Savant, he pulled just 32.1 percent of his batted balls in 2017, but that number rose to 40.6 percent in 2018, and in 2019, it soared all the way to 44.4 percent. He’s becoming more one-dimensional, and given his ability to consistently make contact on such a wide array of pitches, that seems like the kind of concession he could avoid making if he rearranged his approach. Worse news: on pitches on the inner part of the plate (and just off it), Rosario has gotten steadily less productive over the last three years. In 2017, his wOBA on such pitches was .447. In 2018, it rose to .477. In 2019, though, it plunged to .391. A would-be left-handed slugger, especially one without the discipline to draw walks consistently, needs to do more damage than that on the inside pitch. Rosario hit those pitches harder than ever, on average, in 2019, but elevated it less, and the result was considerably less production—and more groundouts into the shift. Rosario hasn’t been hit by a pitch since July 29, 2016. That’s a little surprising, initially, because he has that familiar, closed stance, with his front foot near the inner line of the batter's box. To begin his swing, though, Rosario uses a toe tap, then strides forward and opens his front hip. In watching video of him, it sure looks like he’s become increasingly prone to letting the transition from his toe tap to his real stride carry him away from home plate, opening him up too much. As a result, he’s not hammering pitches on the inner half of the plate, and he’s not reaching pitches on the outer portion as cleanly. Opening up this way occasionally allows Rosario to yank a pitch on the outer part of the plate out of the park, but for that rare gain, he’s given away his ability to drive the ball to the opposite field. The effects on his handling of inside pitches help illustrate the problem, but it’s pitches down the middle and away from him that he could handle much better, and to do so, he’s going to need to clean up his stride pattern. If he does so, he can get a better look at the ball, keep opposing defenses honest, and give himself more chances to reach base. If he doesn’t, he’s going to end up on some other team soon after baseball resumes. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

One accounting shows that the Twins shifted inefficiently in 2019. They might need to tweak their shifting paradigm in order to thrive defensively in the future.Only two teams used more total defensive shifts than the Minnesota Twins in 2019, but the team was barely above-average in terms of net outs created by the shift, according to Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). That might mean that the team needs to be more careful and precise in their deployment of shifts going forward—or it might not. Based on video analysis and batted-ball data, BIS estimated the Twins lost 162 outs on balls that would not have been hits had they not been in the shift, the second-highest total in MLB. That kind of miss rate, even given the 185 outs the company estimated the team gained through shifting, is frustrating and counterproductive. Among Twins pitchers, as individuals, José Berríos lost 21 outs because of the shift (though he gained 29). Jake Odorizzi and Taylor Rogers each lost 13 outs that way, and together, they only gained 26 outs through shifts, breaking even. Nor, surely, did it even feel like breaking even, for any of them. Our brains operate in fairly predictable, imperfect ways, and the principles of loss aversion and negativity dominance tell us those three hurlers experienced the frustration and disappointment of losing would-be outs because of the shift much more saliently than they felt the relief and affirmation of hits turned into outs by shifting. Other aspects of behavioral psychology come into play here, too. When an individual pitcher retroactively assesses their performance on a given day, they will do so with a biased internal eye. They’ll mentally treat the outs generated by shifts as having been a given, or as the product of their own successful pitching to the defense behind them. However, they’ll attribute the balls hit through empty infield halves to poor positional decision-making by the team. Because shifts are still counted as a separate strategy from the traditional defensive alignment, players, fans, and even members of the coaching staff and front office will tend to treat traditional alignments as the default. That leads to the false notion that deploying a shift is a more proactive decision than not doing so, and by extension, that hits created by the shift are errors of commission by the coaching staff, whereas hits through traditionally aligned defenses are errors of omission. Our minds forgive the latter much more readily than the former. As I chronicled for the Twins Daily Offseason Handbook back in the fall, the Twins were one of baseball’s most aggressive shifting teams early in the season, but that became less true during the middle and latter portions of the campaign. In particular, the team cut down its shift rate behind its starting pitchers. In light of the data above, that shouldn’t be terribly surprising. It’s likely that several influential members of the pitching staff grew frustrated and pessimistic about shifts, because the team’s shifts seemed to be relatively inefficient. It’s not clear that that’s true. The numbers from BIS say so, but those numbers are imperfect, themselves. The company uses video analysis and batted-ball data, and compares batted balls against shifts to similar ones without a shift in place, in order to estimate when a hit has been gained or lost due to the shift. However, the applied definition of shifts for this data set isn’t granular enough for us to be sure that apples are really being compared to apples, and oranges to oranges. More importantly, perhaps, the Twins had a porous defensive infield in 2019, with arguably the worst left side in baseball when Miguel Sanó and Jorge Polanco played side-by-side. Luis Arráez was a valuable addition to the regular lineup, thanks to his bat, but is not a strong defender at second base. It’s perfectly possible that the system, because of the way BIS designed and deploys it, counted as lost a healthy number of outs that the team would not have been able to convert even if they weren’t shifted—that is, that the system blames strategic choices for what were really the shortcomings of the personnel on hand. Josh Donaldson’s arrival pushes Sanó to first base, a dramatic upgrade when it comes to glovework at third base. In all likelihood, it will also permit the team to position Polanco a bit differently, and there could be cascading effects that make the Twins’ infield defense more effective, whether they’re in the shift or not. In the meantime, though, the overhauled coaching staff (absent Derek Shelton, Jeremy Hefner, and others) will need to communicate openly and consistently with the players, to assure full faith in shifts as a viable defensive strategy. Broadly, MLB teams need to continue to erode the idea (especially in the minds of players and coaches) that a shift is an active choice, while a traditional alignment is not one. If they can do so, they won’t need to wonder as much about what BIS (or any other data source) says about the efficacy of their shifts, and will be better able to position defenders optimally, according to the tendencies of the pitcher and opposing batter. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

More great lessons, and some modern Twins implications, from Rod Carew's handbook to hitting.Last week, I wrote about some of the mechanical concepts that jumped out to me while I was reading “Hit to Win,” Twins legend Rod Carew’s book on the craft at which he became such a master. Carew is no modern swing guru, but while his style was distinct from those of most modern hitters, many nuggets of his wisdom can be applied to current Twins. Today, let’s look at a few such items. The sharp differences between Carew and Ted Williams were a theme last week, but we must return there to begin this conversation, too. Williams and Carew didn’t only differ on how to swing, but at which pitches. Famously, Williams credited much of his success in baseball to his successful adoption of Rogers Hornsby’s first principle of hitting: get a good pitch to hit. Williams believed he could thrive only by having the discipline to lay off pitches low and away from him, and especially, to lay off anything outside the strike zone. Carew mentions Williams by name in refuting that notion. He writes in the book about his firm belief that a batter should be able to make good contact on as varied a selection of pitches as possible, and that if a hitter believed they could hit a ball squarely, they shouldn’t waste any time considering whether or not it was a strike. To modern hitters, that in itself is antithetical. Consider the 2020 Twins. Last year, Mitch Garver swung at just 17.9 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, one of the lowest rates in baseball. Josh Donaldson chased 24.9 percent of non-strikes, but that was compared to a 67.5-percent swing rate within the zone. Garver and Donaldson are exemplars of the pervasive modern philosophy of hitting. Swings are, increasingly, grooved to maximize contact on a certain launch trajectory, within the strike zone, and batters are willingly trading looking bad when they do expand the zone for increased damage when they stay within it. In that regard, the Williams School has won the old debate. In the book, however, Carew provides a road map for hitters to take a different tack, and some of what he teaches can even be put into action by those who eschew his broader outlook. Whereas Williams (whose vision was famously preternatural) emphasized pitch selection, Carew focuses more on pitch recognition, believing that doing that well can allow a hitter to hit a wider array of pitches. Methodologically, what Carew proposes makes sense, and can be done even by those without a fighter pilot’s eyes. He details, in the book, the visual path he would create, in order to pick the ball up right out of the pitcher’s hand. He discusses simple cues for reading spin, but for batters who can’t manage that, he also provides some secondary cues. Pitch by pitch, Carew talks about where to look for the pitcher’s fingertips, in relation to the ball at release, and he frames the idea of pitch selection by encouraging batters to establish a visual tunnel from the pitcher’s hand outward. If the ball leaves that tunnel, it can be a cue not to swing. Otherwise, the tunnel should help the batter read the pitch well enough to put a good swing on it. Unlike some hitters (even modern ones) who emphasize hitting to the opposite field, Carew is adamant that good contact happens out in front of home plate. In that sense, he’s in step with the science of hitting in 2020, even if his objectives and technique are less so. He talks about aiming to hit the top and inner halves of the baseball, but whereas some hitters repeat those old saws as paths to hitting hard ground balls and maximizing contact, Carew makes the concepts fit with what we now know about hitting. In his passage about aiming for the top half of the ball, what Carew emphasizes is the apparent rising action created by the backspin on big-league pitches. He doesn’t actually advocate hitting the top of the ball; he just wants hitters to aim there, in order to hit the center of it and maximize the quality of contact. Something similar underpins his advice to hit the inside half of the ball. It’s not about actually hitting that inner half, but about being sure not to cast one’s hands too soon. Time is not on a hitter’s side, as Carew (and every other hitter) well knows. If a hitter wants to get around the ball all the time, they’re likely to try to rush their hands through the hitting zone, sapping the natural power flowing from their hip and shoulder rotation, and from the forward shift of their weight. A properly executed swing, as described by Carew, will get the barrel of the bat into the hitting zone on time, going at the highest possible speed. To do so, however, the hitter has to be loose, and they have to trust they can do that. If they’re worried about being beaten by speed, they’re likely to use counterproductive movements that will only guarantee that outcome. Nelson Cruz is, then, an almost perfect adherent of Carew’s essential teachings. He has the power to chase homers in a way Carew would never teach most hitters to do, but he, too, contents himself with aiming to hit line drives and stay inside the ball. That approach still begets plenty of quickness and power to the pull field, but Cruz doesn’t have to wait out pitchers as excruciatingly as do Donaldson or Garver. Obviously, the hitter in the Twins’ prospective lineup most reminiscent of Carew is Luis Arráez. It’s not even close. Arráez lives Carew’s most important principles, especially when it comes to picking up the pitch as early as possible and being ready to swing until it becomes wholly clear he shouldn’t. Arráez’s weight transfer and hands also look more like those of Carew than like those of his current teammates. Because he was never a true slugger, it’s easy to remember Carew as a pure singles hitter, reliant on exceptional contact skills and irreproducible in the modern game. In reality, though, Carew had the same relative strikeout rate, given his league and era, as Jorge Polanco has thus far in his career. Polanco is a fine contact hitter, but what made Carew special wasn’t avoiding strikeouts like Polanco; it was that he had the highest era-adjusted BABIP in baseball history. Polanco is unlikely to replicate that, but as we’ve noted in the past, it’s possible that Arráez could be that kind of high-BABIP guy. Moreover, to this point, he’s been a much better pure contact hitter than Carew was. He won’t match the modest power or the impressive walk rates Carew had, but if there’s a hitter in the modern game ideally suited to the things Carew wrote about in “Hit to Win,” it’s Arráez, and if there’s a person in baseball ideally suited to give Arráez guidance in developing his unique skill set, it’s Carew. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

When one of the best hitters in baseball history writes about their craft, it's worth revisiting every so often to mine for wisdom.As has virtually every baseball fan, I’ve spent much of the last six weeks reading. Unlike Rogers Hornsby’s, my eyes were ruined before I ever picked up a book, so I stopped playing the game at age nine and started reading voraciously about it during the offseason. This year, the offseason just keeps going, so there’s been extra time for that treasured work. Let’s dig in, then, to a decade-old tome on the art and science of hitting by Twins legend Rod Carew. Firstly, of course, one must know what not to expect from the book. It’s not a perfectly modern perspective. It’s not on the cutting edge of the home-run revolution. There is an entire chapter devoted to what Carew calls “situational hitting,” focused wholly on directional batting aimed at making productive outs to move runners along. Another whole chapter details, in minute detail, the mentality and techniques required to bunt successfully. The cover shows Carew near the point of contact with a pitch, and diagrams his swing in a parabolic arc that should be familiar to modern fans, with his imaginary bat working uphill through the latter portion of the swing. Within, however, Carew largely espouses keeping the swing flat, and emphasizes both using the opposite field and keeping the ball on the ground. The seven-time batting champion exhorts readers to stay within themselves, usually in the context of resisting the temptation to try for more power than that of which they’re capable. Mechanically, Carew’s most urgent teaching point is a principle he calls ‘flat hands’, a concept echoed in the Charley Lau school of hitting. The idea is simple and (to a reader in 2020) highly intuitive, almost obvious one: keep the bottom hand above the bat and facing down, and the top hand below the bat and facing upward, for as long as possible. Carew is insistent that the top hand act as a guide, but not the power source of the swing, and that, too, is a principle shared with Lau’s system. Carew and Lau share a common foil: Ted Williams. While Carew reiterates his respect and admiration for Williams, and mentions having talked hitting with him at length, he underscores two key aspects of hitting about which he and Williams disagree. For one thing, Williams famously believed in the primacy of the top hand—believing that the power in a swing came from that arm. Carew contends that all the power in a swing comes from bat speed (with which Williams would agree), and argues that becoming overly dependent upon the top hand puts a hitter at risk of rolling over and grounding the ball to the pull side too often. Lau disciples, even more insistent on the bottom hand as the key to the swing, would agree there. Yet, Carew departs from Lau on the other key tenet of that school, the one that most sharply divided Lau from Williams. Whereas Williams was a firm believer in back-foot hitting, believing keeping his weight back was vital to generating power and maintaining stability, Lau’s school took the side of many other hitters who came up later in Williams’s career, and who shifted their weight aggressively to the front foot when hitting—hitters like Henry Aaron and Willie Mays. Lau’s school decried the old-school mantra of pivoting on the back foot, but keeping the balls of the feet down, encouraging hitters instead to get up onto the toes of their cleats or come off the ground entirely with that foot. Carew, however, traces a middle road between Williams and Lau: he supports the concept of a weight shift, but wants batters to keep their stride controlled and keep their back foot under them. Interestingly, he denies the popular conception that he was prone to moving around the batter’s box frequently, insisting that he would set up with his back foot in the same place (near the plate, at the back of the box) almost every time he stepped in, and merely moved his front foot around to modulate his stance based on situations he was facing. There’s plenty more that makes Carew’s book interesting, and that might be applicable to current Twins, even if many of them seem to ascribe to very different philosophies than those Carew outlines. We’ll discuss more takeaways from the volume next week. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

To watch a Jake Odorizzi start in 2019 was to see a talented hurler finally learn to pitch. One newfangled number helps tell the story.For appreciators of the pure craft of pitching, there must be few pitchers whose 2019 seasons were more enjoyable than that of Jake Odorizzi. He did so many new and nuanced things on the mound, forcing batters into tougher guessing games and dominating with the very command that had been absent for so much of his career to that point. One way to summarize that brilliance in a single number, without attempting to confine it to that number, is to look at the improvement in the spin efficiency on Odorizzi’s fastballs. Spin efficiency is a decidedly unbeautiful term, more technical than aesthetic, but it’s a vital statistic. Baseball Savant reports the Statcast-estimated efficiency of the spin on every pitcher’s pitches, breaking it out by pitch type. Here, one can see that Rich Hill has the most spin-efficient curveball in the game—that is, the one that most closely approximates perfect topspin, meaning that all of the spin he generates with the pitch creates what the batter perceives as movement. While complicated on the surface, it’s very much a measure of style, and by extension, we can use it to appreciate Odorizzi. As an over-the-top thrower who has always relied on elevating his fastball, Odorizzi already rated well in spin efficiency, before his mechanical and approach adjustments last year. In 2018, he had a spin efficiency of 89.2 percent on his heater, putting him in the 75th percentile among pitchers with at least 1,000 pitches thrown on the year. However, there was more in his tank. Odorizzi’s more aggressive, cleaner mechanics, which he honed at the Florida Baseball Ranch prior to 2019, led to increased velocity. However, they also allowed him to demonstrate better command, and part of that was improved spin efficiency. In 2019, Odorizzi had a fastball spin efficiency of 91.4 percent, putting him in the league’s 86th percentile. Baked into that number is Odorizzi’s increased use of his sinker, a pitch that rarely rates well in terms of spin efficiency. Sinkers, because of the seam position and the way the pitcher releases them, usually have an element of sidespin, which can become “wasted” spin. It’s not unfair, in the modern game, to think of many sinkers as flat fastballs—ones that lack the apparent rising action of four-seamers, and don’t make up for it with enough lateral movement to wiggle off the barrel of opponents’ bats. That’s why, league-wide, sinker usage has been in freefall for half a decade. As anyone who watched Odorizzi last year surely noticed, though, his sinker was no mere flat heater. If thrown properly and with intention, a sinker can maintain plenty of active spin, with the changed alignment of the seams creating ample movement to the arm side. That’s what Odorizzi’s did, as he subtly lowered his release point. Paired with his four-seamer, splitter, cutter, curve, and slider, the sinker became a weapon, because Odorizzi was able to command it better. On each of his pitches, Odorizzi had better command, which grew out of the entire mechanical process of his delivery, but also out of the relationship between his hand and the baseball. The improved spin efficiency was just an effect of that, but it was an important one. Small manipulations, ones for which Odorizzi lacked the requisite feel the previous season, allowed him to move the ball around the strike zone, and even lead hitters out of it. His movement pattern, prior to 2019, was problematically two-dimensional: he could move the ball up and down, but struggled to throw to both sides of the plate and to surprise batters with varied pairs of pitches and locations, laterally. It’s a tired line, but Odorizzi truly matured into a pitcher in 2019, as he learned to induce weak contact even when he wasn’t missing bats, and to stay around the strike zone even when he didn’t want to fill it up. Fastball spin can help us understand the way that paid off for him, because it was an outgrowth of his improvements in other areas, and because without the command that comes with improved spin efficiency, those other improvements might not have played out as nicely. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

Just work with me here. If this happened, how different would it make things? And who'd benefit?This is an article breaking down the four players I view as legitimate candidates to be the Twins’ best player if the bases were 81 feet apart. If the bases were 10 percent closer to one another, and their distance thus better fit baseball’s fervent devotion to multiples of three (three strikes, three outs, nine innings, and now, 81-foot basepaths), which Twin would best help the team hang on to its primacy in the AL Central? A former editor of mine, Sam Miller, was a genius. When he wrote an article at Baseball Prospectus about where to put a pit on a baseball field, if there was to be a pit, he knew better than to engage on the question of whether there should be a pit. Too messy. Right up front, he made it clear: the article was about where to put a pit, if there was a pit, operating under the assumption that that was just the way it was going to be. Same here: we’re not debating whether the distance between all bases should be shortened to 81 feet. That’s a given, until you depart this page. The question is: Which Twin would be the most valuable, if the bases were 81 feet apart? Obviously, it wouldn’t be a pitcher. There might be pitchers who would be the most valuable player on their team if the bases were 81 feet apart, like Max Scherzer or Jacob deGrom, but no Twins hurler combines strikeouts, a low walk rate, and the ability to induce weak contact well enough to be a candidate. A game with 81-foot basepaths is a game focused on speed, contact, and defense, not on that weird little bump in the back half of the infield. Among the position players, there are four guys with legitimate cases: Byron Buxton, Luis Arráez, Max Kepler, and Josh Donaldson. Back in the old days, when the basepaths were long and the game was slower, there were cases to be made that Miguel Sanó, Nelson Cruz, Mitch Garver, and Jorge Polanco were as valuable as this quartet, but now, forget about it. Sanó’s trouble making contact is a more costly disadvantage than ever, and he has no positional or defensive value. Cruz is just a hitter, and his power is a smaller relative edge now, thanks to all the hits and extra bases to be found all over the diamond even without elite pop. Garver’s framing is great, but he runs poorly, and his below-average throwing arm is a bigger deal. Great throwing catchers will take advantage of a throw 13 feet shorter than their former one, despite their fielders needing to range further to cover the bag on steal attempts, but Garver isn’t going to be able to do it. Besides, robot umpires can’t be far off, and then framing becomes a dead issue. Polanco simply doesn’t play the kind of defense now required of a shortstop, even as the league takes shifting to a new level. He doesn’t have the range or the arm to get batters out when they have just 81 feet to cover between home plate and first base. On, then, to the real contenders: Buxton Strengths: Absolutely every ground ball he hits is now a likely hit. It takes a perfect play on a ball hit right at a shallowly-positioned infielder to get him, and even then, it has to be a strong-armed infielder. Remember, each base is 81 feet from the next, so he’s also going to start racking up hustle doubles, line-drive triples, and more inside-the-park home runs than a Dead Ball shortstop facing Little Leaguers. In addition to all of that, it’s never been more important to have a defensive whiz in center field, and Buxton’s strong arm will come into play often, too. Weaknesses: Strikeouts still hurt, and through every iteration of Buxton’s maturation, he’s been vulnerable to them. Pitchers are going to be pitching for the strikeout in practically every plate appearance, especially with Buxton up there, and he’s exploitable. Arráez Strengths: Even using the old-fashioned dimensions, Arráez was a tough hitter to defend. Now, he’s virtually unstoppable. The reliable outs are harmless fly balls, ground outs hit to predictable places, and strikeouts, and hardly any of Arráez’s plate appearances end with any of those outcomes. He’ll frustrate strikeout-hungry opponents to no end with his ability to spoil pitches. He’s also on the right side of the infield, where the impact of weak defense is slightly lower. Weaknesses: He still isn’t a great fielder, and it’s still a problem to have anything short of a brilliant infield defense with these dimensions in place. Arráez also doesn’t run well, making him a dreaded baseclogger atop the lineup. Kepler Strengths: Kepler is such a good right fielder that, as five-man infields become more common, he and Buxton allow the Twins to feel comfortable going with two-man outfields from time to time. He’s not just fast on the bases, but quick in his changes of direction, allowing him to take the extra base, and that’s a bigger part of the game than ever. More than that, though, Kepler’s balanced offensive skill set is so appealing. He’s a left-handed batter with speed, so putting the ball in play is a good mathematical move in itself, and he’s sustained a well below-average strikeout rate for the last two years, while also demonstrating above-average power and plate discipline. Weaknesses: Kepler did show some vulnerability, some new holes in his swing, during the season half of last season. He’s also become a dead pull hitter, and teams will force him to change that habit by populating as much of the right side as possible until he starts consistently driving the ball to left field again. Donaldson Strengths: A great athlete with a rocket arm, Donaldson is the kind of third baseman who can still turn batted balls to the left side into outs. He’s always shown a special penchant for charging bunts and throwing with oomph on the run, which should help the Twins control the opponents’ bunting game. He also has the plate discipline to get on base very consistently, and under these new dimensions, having a runner on base puts more pressure on the defense than it did before. Of course, he’s also an excellent power hitter, and pitchers don’t figure to suddenly find a way to shut down that aspect of his game. Weaknesses: Slow-footed and aging, Donaldson can’t take advantage of the basepaths. He’s also swung and missed within the zone at a fairly high rate in recent years, and as pitchers hunt for strikeouts, he might see his own whiff rate rise to a troubling extent. The Verdict The pitchers are still 60 feet, six inches away. They still have nasty sliders, and changeups, and fastballs with such extraordinary spin that they hop over bats. Buxton will still strike out too much, and though he’ll take extra bases on hits and outs with awesome, hilarious frequency, he won’t be able to steal more, because the catchers will get bigger advantages in those isolated cases than runners will. Arráez won’t help the team prevent runs, and won’t develop power any time soon. That leaves the two more balanced options, and of them, Kepler seems to have the edge. His impact will be more two-sided; the outfield is really the place where teams’ fates will be decided. His ability to make contact so often without sacrificing power is also more valuable than ever, now that the bases are only 81 feet apart. This change should bring balance and action back to baseball, and it should make Max Kepler a superstar. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

The question hits like a line drive to the shin, but if baseball won't be back this year, it's an important and legitimate one.The persistent uncertainty over when (or if) MLB will have a season in 2020 continues to invite questions about the futures of almost every player, in various ways. One of the most serious and potentially painful forms these questions take pertains to longtime veterans in their late 30s. In the case of Twins reliever Sergio Romo, it’s a reasonable (though cruel) question: will he ever pitch in the big leagues again? At first blush, that might seem a foolish question. Romo had a terrific second half with the Twins last year, and signed a contract for 2020 that includes a team option for 2021, at an affordable $5 million. Under the surface, though, there are signs that Romo, one of the best relievers of his generation, is headed for troubled water, even if and when baseball resumes. Among hurlers with at least 500 innings pitched since 1950, Romo has the 20th-best career DRA-, according to Baseball Prospectus. He’s in virtual lockstep with Max Scherzer. Obviously, Scherzer’s role as a workhorse starter makes him much, much more valuable than Romo, a one-inning reliever, but the fact remains that Romo has been a dominant pitcher (perhaps more so than most people even realized) for over a decade. He does it in a few ways, and the details shift with each passing year, reflecting the right-hander’s savvy and willingness to evolve as he ages. For one thing, while his four-seam fastball sat at just 86.5 miles per hour in 2019, he spun it at over 2,300 revolutions per minute. His low arm slot and the way he releases the pitch preclude him from getting the rising action pitchers look for when spinning their fastball so efficiently, but the spin isn’t wasted: both his four-seamer and his sinker have exceptional run to the arm side. Romo threw his changeup more often last season than ever, helping him extend a trend of neutralizing left-handed batters better late in his career. He hardly ever throws the pitch against righties, but to lefties, it’s become a steady part of the diet, a pitch he throws fully 30 percent of the time. It has enough velocity separation from his sinker to fool batters, despite strikingly similar movement, and crucially, he adjusted his targets after joining the Twins. He began hitting the bottom of the zone with his sinker, and absolutely burying his changeup, as never before. Batters were slow to adjust, and he got plentiful whiffs from the pitch down the stretch. Then, of course, there’s that slider. Romo unabashedly drops down and gets around the pitch, which drops less than his sinker and only slightly more than his four-seamer on the way to the plate. Its spin effectively mirrors that of his sinker, though, and the 20-inch difference in their horizontal movement makes misreads by opposing hitters costly mistakes. Great lateral movement, but minimal vertical separation, tends to beget weak contact rather than swings and misses, and while Romo’s strikeout rate has sagged recently, he was one of the best hurlers in baseball at avoiding hard contact in 2019. Why, then, do we say there are signs of trouble? For one thing, Romo’s become an extreme flyball pitcher. For another, he’s avoiding barrels by nibbling on the edges of the strike zone. His command and control remain solid; he just doesn’t have the sheer stuff to attack within the zone anymore. When hitters do swing, despite getting less desirable pitches to hit, they are making contact more and more often. Even with good command, the willingness to throw his slider over 60 percent of the time, and improved depth on his change, Romo is becoming a more comfortable at-bat, because he utterly lacks the ability to overpower big-league hitters. Even with his sterling showing for the Twins mixed in, Romo had his worst season in 2019. For the first time ever, he registered a DRA- above 78—and it was 95, meaning he was just five percent better than an average pitcher. His cFIP, a more skill-centric and predictive measurement of a pitcher’s performance, was 101, meaning he was (if anything) worse than average. Meanwhile, as teams develop increasingly advanced player development tools, the importance of lost games for minor leaguers still on the way up the chain is diminishing. Whenever baseball resumes, top prospects with big stuff are going to be much less affected by the layoff than those of old veteran hurlers, even though those hurlers, like Romo, will benefit marginally from not bearing a year of wear and tear. Romo’s competitive advantage over young arms was already shrinking rapidly; it might disappear entirely before 2021 begins. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article

After a promising rookie showing, Stashak looks likely to be part of the Twins' bullpen in the near term. But he could be more than 'likely' with a successful tweak or two.Cody Stashak had an impressive 2019, rising from fringy prospect status as a Double-A reliever to an occasionally high-leverage arm in the bullpen for the Twins. Across three levels, he faced 321 batters (not counting the ALDS against the Yankees), struck out 99 of them, and walked just 10. He’s already proved he can be a good relief pitcher. However, there are mechanical and mental changes he could make to take another step forward, whenever baseball finally resumes. Stashak made five appearances in the Grapefruit League, prior to it being shuttered due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. In them, he pitched seven scoreless innings. He faced 23 batters, struck out nine of them, and issued no walks. Batters managed just three hits against him. Even when the ball was put in play, it tended not to be well-struck. Between that showing and the team’s decision to trade Brusdar Graterol at the beginning of spring training, Stashak had positioned himself well to open the season in the Minnesota bullpen. Obviously, it’s an open (and difficult) question whether baseball will or should be played at all in 2020, and if the season happens, the Twins will have a deep pitching staff. Stashak isn’t guaranteed to be on the roster at all times, let alone to have an important role in the club’s relief corps. Since Stashak is still a young and fresh arm, though, there’s room to dream on him as an important long-term piece of that puzzle, including and especially as a potential replacement for impending free agent Trevor May. First, a quick reintroduction to Stashak’s background and skill set. He’s a former 13th-round pick, though he signed for a bonus that indicated the team believed in him more than that. For the first two and a half seasons of his professional career, he was a starter, and a fairly effective one. The Twins elected to move him to a relief role in 2018, not as a response to failure, but as a proactive effort to get the most possible out of him. Neither a hard thrower nor one with an especially deep repertoire, Stashak immediately benefited from the switch. His high arm slot gives his fastball some natural rising action, and his slider can be a wipeout pitch, as evidenced by batters’ 47.3-percent whiff rate on swings against it when he reached the big leagues last season. He only gets his fastball above 92 miles per hour when really reaching back for something extra, though, and his changeup (right now) lacks sufficient movement or velocity separation. Becoming a reliever also helped paper over one of Stashak’s remaining weaknesses as a pitcher: he doesn’t have great command. Because he has considerable spine tilt during the latter phase of his delivery, he doesn’t show a consistent ability to hit his catcher’s target. His misses tend strongly to be up or down, rather than lateral, which helps him avoid walks exceptionally well. However, missing vertically so often makes him highly vulnerable to hard contact. In 2019, 10 of the 77 batted balls against Stashak were what Statcast classifies as Barrels—the most valuable bucket into which the system places hits. Batters had a .351 BABIP and slugged .475 against him, and the patterns were similar in the minor leagues. That’s why, despite his tremendous strikeout and walk numbers, he had an ERA of 3.22 for the entire season, and 3.24 in the big leagues, marking him as good, but not great at actually preventing runs. Part of the problem might be that Stashak still has certain remnants of his effort to be a starter baked into the way he pitches. For one thing, he sets up on the first-base edge of the rubber. That’s somewhat common for a right-handed starter, because they tend to have pitches that run to their arm side, as well as ones that move to the glove side, and because that can sometimes create tough angles for opposing left-handed batters. Now that he works in relief, though, Stashak should consider sliding over on the rubber. Despite his high slot and largely vertical movement profile, his slider has a natural sweep to the glove side, so moving to the middle or the third-base side of the rubber might allow him to more aggressively use the slider—especially against left-handers. He threw the slider almost exactly half the time against fellow righties in MLB last season, but against lefties, his slider usage was under 23 percent. In the modern game, even a reliever needs the conviction to throw a breaking ball to opposite-handed batters, and to do it relatively often. Stashak, without an overpowering fastball or pinpoint command, needs to do so especially acutely. Moving on the rubber could help with that, and because Stashak’s fastball lacks much run to the arm side anyway, it wouldn’t much harm his ability to attack hitters with that pitch. More importantly, though, Stashak needs to quiet down some of the spine tilt he shows at release, in order to harness his stuff better and avoid hard contact. Some of that tilt comes from his stride pattern, one that keeps him closed and allows him to maximize torque, but some of it is the result of insufficient functional strength. He showed signs of having improved his posture during delivery during the spring, contributing to better command, so he might already be on the way to achieving that. If Stashak does improve his posture and enjoy better command, he might lose some of the rise on his fastball, as his release angle will drop slightly even if his arm slot remains the same. The arm might move more freely, though, in which case he could make up the loss of movement in one dimension with some armside run or even extra spin. He’d be far from the first hurler to see an uptick in spin or velocity after improving the same mechanical flaw. He might also get better movement (and thus, better results) with his changeup from that altered release point, especially because the pitch would be better able to work toward or past the outside corner against left-handed batters. This point of caution always deserves mention: Stashak has had an improbably successful pro career. He might not be inclined to make a significant change, lest he lose whatever magic (deception, perhaps, or effective wildness born of the sheer unpredictability of his misses) has carried him so far. If he embraces data-driven adjustments, though, he could blossom into an even better reliever, and thereby transform from a competent big-leaguer forever on the shuttle to the International League into a borderline relief ace, with a chance to reach free agency and leave the game a decade from now, his family set for life. MORE FROM TWINS DAILY — Latest Twins coverage from our writers — Recent Twins discussion in our forums — Follow Twins Daily via Twitter, Facebook or email Click here to view the article