American League Wild Card Preview: Minnesota Twins vs. Toronto Blue Jays

The Minnesota Twins and a short first round playoff series: Name a more iconic duo. The Twins have been quietly excellent this year, compiling the seventh-best run differential in baseball. To be sure, some of that is because they have the good fortune of facing fellow AL Central clubs, but a lot of it is because their team is full of good pitchers. They’ll meet the Toronto Blue Jays in a Wild Card clash. You’ve probably watched and heard a lot about the Blue Jays this year, and I’ll get to them, but let’s start with the thing you probably most need to hear: The Twins are good, not just the token AL Central representative, and they got a lot better when you probably weren’t paying attention.

The Minnesota rotation might be short on name recognition relative to some other playoff squads, but Pablo López and Sonny Gray are each top 10 pitchers by WAR this year. Joe Ryan, Kenta Maeda, and Bailey Ober are both above average as well – Ryan will likely draw the third start, but the other two will surely be available to relieve him if necessary. They’re one of those classic playoff tropes, the team you hate to face because so much of their value is concentrated in good pitching. López has gone six or more innings while allowing one or fewer runs 11 times this year; Gray has done it nine times himself. It’s easy to imagine the Jays coming into Minneapolis and leaving with very few runs to show for their trip.

On the other hand, the Twins are more directly another playoff trope: Those bumbling Twins who can’t get out of their own way. The last time they won a playoff game was 2004; they’ve been swept in five series (plus lost a Wild Card game) in the interim. It’s a good thing that playoff mojo isn’t a predictive metric, because the Twins are pushing all-time levels of bad mojo. At least they aren’t playing the Yankees, I guess.

If you’re looking for ways this Twins team could unravel, well, it’s baseball. You never have to look very hard to find things that could go wrong. López and Gray have all those great starts, sure. They’ve also allowed four or more runs a combined 12 times, and gone five or fewer innings 17 times. The difference between great pitching and mediocre pitching can come down to something as simple as which side of the bed your starter wakes up on that day; the margins are vanishingly thin against good major league opposition, a category the Blue Jays certainly fit into.

That might bring Minnesota’s bullpen into play early, which sounds scary. They put up one of the worst WAR totals among playoff-bound bullpens. But despite that ominous note, I don’t think the bullpen is a problem. In fact, it might be an asset. A lot of their reliever woes came from players who aren’t on the team anymore. Jorge López was awful before getting traded to Miami. Josh Winder pitched 34.2 ineffective innings. Brent Headrick, Cole Sands, Jordan Balazovic, José De León, Jorge Alcala, Oliver Ortega – the Twins gave a ton of bullpen innings to guys who are a) bad and b) no longer part of the bullpen.

The top five members of that unit now are all solidly above-average relievers. Jhoan Duran runs the ship with his 100 mph weirdo splitter/sinker hybrid. Caleb Thielbar missed a big chunk of time with injury, but he’s been more than capable in the middle innings since returning. Louie Varland has been dominant since moving into relief, to the tune of 17 strikeouts against one walk over 12 innings. Emilio Pagán is a perfectly reasonable setup man. Even Griffin Jax, squeezed on the depth chart thanks to all of those guys I named up above getting pushed off it, has been on fire of late. When the Twins can shorten their ‘pen, it ceases to be a weakness and might even be a strength.

Ah, then, their greatest weakness must be their offense? Again, not exactly. The Twins started out the season quite slowly on the offensive side of the ball. At the All-Star break, they had the 20th-best wRC+ in the majors. Among playoff teams, only the Brewers were worse. But in the second half, the Twins have been the third-best hitting team in the game, led by a mixture of unheralded veterans and exciting rookies.

Remember Max Kepler? He’s finally producing the way everyone expected him to for years, with a 124 wRC+ driven by his usual power and the best BABIP season of his career (.289 — the guy just cannot buy a hit). Ryan Jeffers is in the midst of his best season in the majors. Jorge Polanco is good (the same as every year) and underappreciated (the same as every year). He’s even moving around defensively, another one of his specialties, and is now playing third base to squeeze more offense into the lineup. Alex Kirilloff is delivering the power he’s always promised in a platoon role. Even Donovan Solano, miscast at first base (he’s 5-foot-8!), wore his hitting shoes this year.

The young guns have been even better. Royce Lewis, who came into the season with only 41 career major league plate appearances thanks to a laundry list of injuries, has torn the cover off the ball all year, though he of course missed the end of the season with a hamstring injury and will return to the playoff roster with his health in question. Edouard Julien burst onto the scene at the World Baseball Classic and hasn’t stopped hitting since; his gaudy minor league batting lines translated perfectly to the bigs, and he’s even played passable second base defense, something few evaluators expected coming into the year. Matt Wallner has a 146 wRC+ and the underlying statistics to match; if he’d spent more time in the majors this year, you’d be hearing about him as a potential Rookie of the Year candidate.

Strangely, the two most famous Twins hitters haven’t been part of this offensive resurgence. Byron Buxton hasn’t played the field this year and is also in the midst of his worst offensive campaign. As is all too common for him, he’s also been on the IL since the start of August and likely figures into their postseason plans only as a bench bat. Meanwhile, Carlos Correa is having the worst season of his career and is also injured, though he’s on track to play in this series.

The Twins have gotten excellent production out of Solano (or Kirilloff, depending on who you think they’d bench) and Kyle Farmer to replace Buxton and Correa’s playing time. Michael A. Taylor went from speculative fourth outfielder to key defensive cog in short order. This does not look like it’s a great offensive unit, because all the guys you think are the key hitters have been bad, but they’ve performed like it for months at this point. Their worst everyday hitter in the second half has been Correa, and even he’s over a 100 wRC+.

If there’s anything holding the Twins back, it’s their lack of true stars. That’s a nebulous term, obviously, but let me put it this way. The best offenses, the ones that put up huge numbers all season long and score silly piles of runs, do it because they have a bunch of solid hitters and also an MVP candidate or two. The Braves and Dodgers look similar to the Twins in the back half of their lineups, but the top end is just bigger when you can throw in an Acuña and an Olson here, or a Betts and a Freeman there. In an AL mood? Try a Semien/Seager combination. In short series, that doesn’t always matter, but the Twins are just operating at a run-scoring disadvantage because they don’t have any players that feel like cheat codes.

Speaking of stars, let’s talk about the Blue Jays. Despite being the road team in this series, they won two more games in the regular season, and they did it despite facing a brutal AL East slate. Like the Twins, you probably think you know the deal with the Jays: They have a great offense built on the sons of former major league greats. But like the Twins, you probably have the wrong idea. Among playoff teams, only the famously offensively challenged Milwaukee Brewers and Miami Marlins have scored fewer runs.

A lot of that comes down to poor performance with runners in scoring position, but even if you’d prefer to ignore context and focus on wRC+, this was a disappointing Toronto offense. The legacy kids weren’t at their best this year; Vladimir Guerrero Jr. scalded the ball but got little to show for it (118 wRC+), Bo Bichette started the year on fire but cooled off while dealing with injury issues down the stretch, and supporting second-generation acts Daulton Varsho and Cavan Biggio had forgettable seasons.

Even the Jays’ auxiliary stars were off their game. George Springer struggled to a 104 wRC+, Matt Chapman ended with a 110 mark after starting the year off on fire, and Alejandro Kirk turned in a clunker of a season, though he improved as the season wore on. If it weren’t for unexpected contributions from Brandon Belt (138 wRC+) and Davis Schneider (176 wRC+, though he’s been ice cold of late), the Jays likely would have missed the postseason.

In fact, Belt’s presence might be the best thing the Jays have going for them offensively in this series. The Twins are heavily right-handed, but the best Toronto hitters are righties. The team specifically tried to address that by bringing in Belt, Varsho, and Kevin Kiermaier this year, but only Belt has truly clicked offensively. Toronto is ready to wail away against lefties, but there just won’t be many of them in this matchup, and I expect them to largely be deployed against Belt in high-leverage situations.

Luckily for Canadians everywhere, the Jays secretly turned into a pitching-and-defense operation. They’ve been heading this way for a while, in fact; they consistently employ excellent receivers behind the plate, their offensive acquisitions are generally good and versatile defenders, and they’ve dedicated both prospects and money to improving the pitching staff.

When you add Chapman, Varsho, and Kiermaier to your defense, as Toronto has done in the past two seasons, it stands to reason that it would get better. Per Statcast, it was the 10th-best unit in the game this year, and the catchers were top 10 in both framing and blocking. DRS, which wraps this all into one number and also measures defense differently, had them as the best overall defense in baseball. The eye test agrees; the only clear weak link in their default defensive alignment is Bichette, and even he is much improved this year.

Those defenders make things easier for a group of starters that will give the Twins’ group a run for their money. Kevin Gausman is the headliner here, and he’s a perennial Cy Young candidate at this point, a true ace capable of stringing together zeroes with great regularity. Chris Bassitt and José Berríos will follow him up in some order, and they’ve been very similar pitchers this year: decent strikeout rate, above-average command, always seemingly three pitches away from imploding.

Berríos has given up four or more runs in five of his last nine starts, but he’s also capable of brilliance. I’d normally say that Bassitt is more of a steady middle ground type, but he just twirled a 12-strikeout gem his last time out, so it would be a mistake to dismiss him as just another innings eater. They both rely heavily on sinkers and mix in a heaping helping of secondary variety, and they’re both right-handed, so I don’t see much difference between them when it comes to who should go first. They’re solidly in that Joe Ryan tier that Minnesota will bring to the third game, which means I’d give Toronto an edge in one pitching matchup, Minnesota the edge in the second, and call it a dead heat in the last one.

Toronto’s bullpen is a roller coaster ride for both the team and the opposition. Jordans Romano and Hicks headline the unit, and they’re both masters of the uncomfortable save — baserunners left and right but enough strikeouts or grounders to make the whole package work anyway. Erik Swanson, another 2023 acquisition in Toronto’s continued shift towards run prevention, is a great third option. Things get pretty mix-and-match after that. Tim Mayza has looked shaky recently but was great earlier in the year. Chad Green returned from injury in September and looks like basically the same excellent reliever he’s always been. Génesis Cabrera and Yimi García throw hard, and García even has command. Yusei Kikuchi will be lurking, perhaps sleepily, as a long reliever. It’s a solid unit, even if it’s built on nerve-wracking relievers.

If you’ve been keeping track throughout this preview, you’ll notice that these teams feel extremely evenly matched. They both have excellent starting rotations, so good that they’ll both leave above-average starters in the bullpen for this three-game series. They both have good bullpens – Minnesota’s has been better of late, but Toronto’s might have the higher-octane arms. They’re both top 10 offensive units, though they got there in different ways. This doesn’t feel like the worst division winner against the worst Wild Card team, because the American League was stacked at the top this year. It feels like two deserving playoff clubs duking it out. I predict a three-game series – and why not, a long-awaited Minnesota victory in the final accounting. But most of all, I think that this is a better series than people are giving it credit for, and I’ll be excited to watch the young Twins and namesake Jays battle it out.