Twins Improve, Reds Take a Step Back as Sonny Gray Heads to Minnesota

The Cincinnati Reds have been rumored to be interested in trading at least one of their top starters for over a year, with bits of buzz centered around Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray. Castillo remains in Cincinnati — at least for the moment — but Saturday, Gray was traded to the Minnesota Twins, one of a few weekend moves the Twins made. Heading to Cincy is Minnesota’s first round pick from last year, right-handed pitcher Chase Petty. A third player, A-ball reliever Francis Peguero also joins the Twins, but landing Gray was the fundamental purpose of this trade.
The reasons for the Twins’ sudden collapse in 2021 are varied, but the most pressing among them is obvious: the rotation. Minnesota’s starting pitchers combined to finish 25th in the league in WAR last season, with a 5.18 ERA and a 4.87 FIP. Even those marks kind of overstate the strength of the rotation given that the team no longer enjoys the services of José Berríos, who they traded to the Blue Jays last summer. Michael Pineda (and his 3.62 ERA over 21 starts) is a free agent, and Kenta Maeda’s September Tommy John surgery means that he won’t be pitching for most, if not all, of the 2022 season. Minnesota’s de facto ace, Dylan Bundy, is a pitcher coming off an ERA north of six; he significant missed time due to shoulder injuries and is taking a pay cut of more than half.
Suffice it to say, Minnesota’s lack of pitching, combined with a rapidly dwindling number of fixes in free agency, left them in a rather unenviable position even in one of baseball’s weakest divisions. Gray isn’t a true ace in the Gerrit Cole/Jacob deGrom vein, but he’s still a well-above-average starting pitcher who gave the Reds three seasons strong enough to largely erase the memory of his stint in New York. His 4.19 ERA and a 3.99 FIP in 2021 were a bit below the previous couple of seasons, but both ZiPS and Statcast’s x-stats think he was unlucky here. zHR is designed to be predictive and saw Gray as allowing three more homers last season than he actually earned from his velocity, angle, and direction data. Subtract those round-trippers out, and Gray’s 2021 looked a lot like his ’19 and ’20, though he did miss time due to injury. A sore back cost him a month of spring training and April games, and he lost another month due to a groin injury. Those maladies combined to limit him to 26 starts, most of the Five-Inning Special variety. Still, I’d take those injuries over a janky elbow or some nasty tear in the shoulder. Read the rest of this entry »