Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about weirdness and whimsy in spring training, the Giants and Cleveland playing an unnecessary bottom of the ninth (without umpires), the 22-pitch plate appearance between Jordan Hicks and Luis Guillorme, Jacob deGrom’s ever-escalating velocity, and two recent research pieces, then preview the 2021 Twins (23:33) with Aaron Gleeman of The Athletic and the 2021 Tigers (59:27) with Evan Woodbery of the MLive Media Group.

Audio intro: Fruit Bats, "The Bottom of It"
Audio interstitial 1: Joel Plaskett, "Catch 22"
Audio interstitial 2: John Frusciante, "Central"
Audio outro: Will Butler, "Finish What I Started"

Link to story about Giants-Cleveland game
Link to Jesse’s Giants-Cleveland Twitter thread
Link to story about 22-pitch PA
Link to RJ McDaniel on the 22-pitch PA
Link to Forman tweet about timing the 22-pitch PA
Link to Russell Carleton on full-count fouls
Link to spring Statcast standouts
Link to story about deGrom’s spring speeds
Link to Matt Kelly on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Travis Sawchik on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Ben on moving the mound back
Link to Rob Mains on the modern TTO penalty
Link to Rob on the TTO penalty in the past
Link to Matt Trueblood’s Twins preview
Link to Aaron on impact Twins rookies
Link to Aaron on the playoff losing streak
Link to Aaron on the closer-less bullpen
Link to Aaron on Cruz
Link to Aaron on Colomé
Link to Aaron on Simmons’s defense
Link to Aaron on a Kirilloff extension
Link to Travis on Garver’s framing
Link to Dan Syzmborski on hitter bust candidates
Link to Evan on the Tigers’ spending
Link to Evan on Baddoo

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Spring training taking place on (what is hopefully) the back end of a pandemic makes for different routines and challenges, and not just for players and coaching staffs. Media relations personnel are impacted as well. Due to COVID-19 protocols, how they’re going about their business is anything but ordinary.

Dustin Morse is among those having to adjust on the fly. Now in his 16th season with the Minnesota Twins — his sixth as Senior Director of Communications — Morse is doing more than masking-up when he arrives at Hammond Stadium every morning. With face-to-face interactions limited, he’s juggling responsibilities in an increasingly-virtual world, and with one of his favorite areas of the Fort Myers facility off limits.

“Not being in the press box is a real change,” explained Morse, who along with colleagues Mitch Hestad and Elvis Martinez have either Tier 1 or Tier 2 status. As they’re allowed in highly-restricted areas, they can’t mingle with reporters or with others in less-restricted areas. “One way we’d been doing it with Derek [Falvey] and Thad [Levine] is that they’d give me information and I’d deliver it directly to the media during spring training. My usual office there is right behind the press box, and we’d have almost-daily briefings. That’s not allowed this year.”

Nina Zimmerman, who is on Morse’s staff as a communications assistant, is being entrusted to run the press box. Her responsibilities include official scoring, keeping track of substitutions, and announcing when players are available to speak to the media in-game. Not being in a tier, Zimmerman doesn’t have access to restricted areas. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2016, Matt Shoemaker had a career year. He made 27 starts, threw 160 innings, and compiled 3.5 WAR on the back of a 3.88 ERA, 3.52 FIP, and truly pinpoint control (4.5% walk rate). In the four years since, he’s thrown 166 innings — total. That’s been worth 1.3 WAR, with his 4.12 ERA, 4.73 FIP, and 8.2% walk rate all representing steps back from his peak form.

Of course, as a pitcher, his services are still in demand: There are never enough arms to cover the innings that teams need, and you can always dream on someone returning to their peak form. This year, that need and dream belong to the Twins, who signed Shoemaker on Sunday to a one-year deal worth $2 million as he attempts to reprise his former success.

From late 2016 to ’20, everything that could go wrong for Shoemaker did. On September 4, 2016, he was hit in the head with a line drive that fractured his skull. He rehabbed from that injury in time for the 2017 season, only to have his year cut short by forearm tightness; he eventually had a compressed nerve surgically corrected. When he returned to the field, his arm still hurt, and he missed most of 2018 after surgery on an elbow tendon.

That was enough for the Angels, who non-tendered Shoemaker, but his woes were only beginning. After signing with the Blue Jays, he tore his ACL during a rundown (as a fielder, but still!) after only five starts. After yet another rehab, he returned for an abbreviated 2020. Even then, he couldn’t stay on the field, missing the better part of a month with shoulder inflammation.

That’s a truly grim five-year stretch, the kind of injury past that some pitchers can’t recover from. But while some pitchers’ arms are never the same after that kind of luck, Shoemaker has been effective when he’s taken the field. It hasn’t been great — as I mentioned above, his ERA, FIP, and walk rate have all been worse — but he’s still been playable, and it’s easy to convince yourself that a healthy Shoemaker might add back some velocity and pick up where he left off.
Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Sabato went in the first round last summer because of his bat. As Eric Longenhagen wrote when putting together our Minnesota Twins Top Prospects list, “teams were about as sure of Sabato’s hitting ability as they were of any player’s in the 2020 draft.” An accomplished slugger at the University of North Carolina, the 21-year-old first baseman is a masher with an admirable offensive ceiling.

Defense is the question mark. At 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, Sabato is built for power and not speed, with some pundits already projecting him as a DH. The Rye, New York native’s take on that opinion might be best-expressed as, “Not so fast.” Sabato sees himself as a more-than-capable fielder who can help his team on both sides of the ball. As for what he can do with a bat in his hands, let’s just say that he agrees with the scouting community. Sabato isn’t cocky, but he certainly doesn’t lack confidence.

———

David Laurila: You were a middle infielder in high school, and now there are people projecting you as a designated hitter. What are your thoughts on that?

Aaron Sabato: “Guys read the height and weight, then they’re, ‘Oh, he played shortstop a couple years ago and now he’s on a corner at first base; he must be trending toward DH.’ I don’t see it that way at all. My feet move really well, my hands are really good. If you watch me — my actions and the way my body moves — you’ll know that I’m not a DH. Obviously, I’m not going back to the middle of the infield, but whether it’s third or first — I know it’ll most likely be first — I can play a corner. I think I proved to the coaches, and the staff, down in instructs that they didn’t draft a DH. They drafted a guy who could field, maybe an at elite level.”

Laurila: How big were you in high school?

Sabato: “My weight wasn’t as high — I was probably 215 — but I was chubbier. I grew an inch or two in college, and I also thinned out.”

Laurila: How were you playing shortstop as a “chubbier” kid? Were you at a small school? Read the rest of this entry »

On September 4, 2020 in Kansas City, Alex Colomé had one of those nights where he just didn’t have it. It took him 40 pitches, only 23 for strikes, to get four outs and preserve a White Sox 7-3 victory over the Royals. With one out in the ninth, he missed a location with the second best of his two pitches. James McCann set up in and Colomé missed out with a 94 mph fastball, which Jorge Soler nailed with an exit velocity approaching 110 mph. If Soler had pulled the ball, it would have been in the seats, but he thankfully couldn’t get around on it; the ball went oppo, and a well-positioned Nomar Mazara easily jogged it down. Check out the end of the video as Colomé shakes his head, knowing he made a mistake, and maybe a couple, in terms of both location and pitch type.

Ten days later in Chicago, Colomé wasn’t especially sharp but kept runs off the board to finish up a 3-1 win over the Twins, who became his new team this week as he inked a one-year deal with a unique mutual option. With two outs in the ninth and looking to end the game, Colomé had the rare extreme miss with his signature cutter. Yasmani Grandal wanted one down and out, knowing Buxton couldn’t do much damage there, but Colomé delivered a center-cut meatball that the center fielder hammered. The good news was that the ball was a line drive to the left fielder. The bad news? That left fielder was Eloy Jiménez, who absolutely zooed the ball, resulting in an inside-the-park home run that was later reversed to a ground-rule double.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the moment the offseason officially started five days after the end of the World Series, the most predictable headline of the winter was “Nelson Cruz Signs One-Year Deal With the Twins.” It took three months, but last night it finally happened, with ESPN’s Jeff Passan reporting the signing and MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand adding that the deal will net Cruz $13 million.

Cruz, who turns 41 in July, is an ageless wonder, even though that number gives teams looking at eight-figure investments significant pause. Two years ago, he was a free agent after an exceptional run with the Mariners during which he put up a 147 wRC+ and averaged 41 home runs a season. He lobbied hard for a two-year deal, but most teams countered with one-year offers. It was understandable: Cruz has been defying the aging curve for years and has no value beyond the bat, so if Father Time suddenly catches up to him, he becomes a candidate for a quick release. Back in 2019, he was pushing 39 and coming off a declining season in terms of your standard triple-slash line, but the underlying metrics looked good, as his strikeout rate was actually declining, and his exit velocities were in line. Still, most models would not be especially kind to Cruz or any player entering his age-39 season. These are not the years when players start to slip a little; they’re the ones when players fall off the cliff.

Here at FanGraphs, Cruz ranked as one of the top 20 free agents on the market that winter, and I was shocked, surprised and frankly quite impressed to see that ZiPS still saw the good in the player, projecting a minor bounce-back 2019 campaign at .266/.348/.500. The Twins took the plunge by meeting Cruz halfway on his multi-year demand, paying him $14 million for the 2019 campaign with a $12 million option for the following year.

They were rewarded amply. Instead of falling of the cliff, Cruz instead rocketed higher, putting up a career-high OPS of 1.031 and making his 2020 option a no-brainer. The cliff avoided him again that season, and the production was similar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Casey Mize plans to be a different pitcher in 2021. Not just in terms of results — the rookie right-hander had a 6.99 ERA and a 6.47 FIP in seven starts with the Detroit Tigers last year — but also with how he employs his arsenal. Not surprisingly, data will be playing a role. Mize has a history with pitch design that dates back to his days at Auburn, and those efforts have only increased in pro ball.

I asked the first-overall pick in the 2018 draft what technology has taught him about his pitches, and how it’s shaping his efforts to improve.

“It’s pretty much a horizontal profile,” Mize responded. “We’re starting to take the four-seamer up a little bit to add a little more vertical, because it played so well last year. My splitter is super vertical, and we’re trying to really maximize that, because my slider has more of a horizontal break.”

Mize acknowledged that his two-seamer profiles as horizontal as well, getting more arm-side run than depth. It’s a pitch he’s favored, but that’s one of the changes currently in the works. The 23-year-old hurler not only plans to elevate more four-seamers, he intends to up its overall usage. His two-seamer will be used primarily “to mask the splitter,” a pitch he likes to have diving below the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody Signs an Infielder Tuesday concluded with the Twins reaching agreement with Andrelton Simmons on a one-year contract worth $10.5 million. Originally a Brave until a 2015 trade for Erick Aybar and prospects sent him to the West Coast, Simmons hit .297/.346/.356 over 30 games for the Angels in 2020. Unless something incredibly bizarre happens, he will become Minnesota’s starting shortstop, prevent a bunch of runs, and assist the Twins in their quest to win their first playoff game in forever.

Let’s start with the least fun part of this article: the grumpy caveat. Back in May of 2019, Simmons injured his left ankle trying to beat out a grounder and, after a misstep, was unable to put weight on it. It landed him on the injured list for a month, and he missed another month later in the season with an injury to the other side of the same ankle. In the first week of 2020, he did it again, spraining his ankle in a July game against the Athletics, costing him nearly half of the abbreviated 2020 season. Leg and foot injuries are no laughing matter for a middle infielder: There have been plenty of aging second basemen and shortstops who had their careers dramatically waylaid by such injuries. Jose Offerman is the first example that comes to mind; when his legs started being an issue, he went from a .391 OBP second baseman to out of baseball in a blink of an eye.

Simmons hasn’t been fully healthy in two years, and a player with his skill set is more reliant on having healthy feet and legs than a plodding slugger at first base or DH. But $10.5 million is practically peanuts, and the Angels are getting even more of a discount than the associated risk entails. Over 2017 and ’18, he hit .285/.333/.419 to go with his typical sterling defense, enough to combine for over 10 WAR. The Twins may not get that player, but they’re also not paying for that player; if you pay 2018 Andrelton Simmons on merit, $10.5 million would be long gone before you even get to the All-Star break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch Keller has only thrown 69-and-a-third big-league innings, and he’s already had a remarkable career. The baseball gods are a big reason why. In his 2019 rookie season, the now-24-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander had a 7.13 ERA to go with a 3.19 FIP, and this past season he had a 2.91 ERA to go with a 6.75 FIP.

Hello, BABIP.

In an almost-inexplicable quirk of fate, Keller followed up a .475 BABIP — the highest one-season mark in MLB history — with a .104 BABIP in 2020. No pitcher who threw 20-or-more innings in last year’s pandemic-truncated campaign had a smaller percentage of balls put in play against him fall safely to the turf. This happened with an average exit velocity of 88.5 mph, which was higher than the 87.6 he’d allowed in 2019.

Ben Lindbergh wrote about Keller’s snake-bit season for The Ringer last spring, and the conversation they had prior to publication is what brought the data to the fore.

“I remember getting off that phone call and looking it up myself,” said Keller. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. That’s crazy.’ I knew that I had a high BABIP, but I had no idea it was the highest in history. Once he told me, it wasn’t like I was coming back to the dugout thinking, ‘Man, I think I’m having some bad luck.’ It was actually on paper, as a stat. It was, ‘No, seriously. I was having bad luck.” Read the rest of this entry »

Between Jose Quintana, J.A. Happ, and Joe Biden, quite a few old lefties have found new homes lately. The news on Happ came relatively late yesterday, so if you missed the details, he’s now a Twin after agreeing to a one-year deal worth $8 million, per ESPN’s Jeff Passan and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman.

The departures of Rich Hill and Jake Odorizzi left a hole in the back of Minnesota’s rotation. Happ’s a perfectly capable fill-in, though the move does raise questions about whether the Twins are done enhancing their rotation, and whether the team is good enough to retain the AL Central crown as currently constructed.

In nine starts for the Yankees last season, Happ notched a 3.47 ERA and a 4.57 FIP. That second figure was a significant improvement over his 2019 production, as home runs were a major bugaboo for him back when we last had fans: Yankee Stadium’s cozy confines and a drag-free baseball led to a 1.90 HR/9 ratio and a FIP well over five. While his homer rate dropped a tad below 1.50 per nine in 2020, it was the .220 average batters hit on balls in play that buffed up his ERA.

In a way this marks a return to form. More than a decade ago, Happ first made his name in Philadelphia as a starter who significantly outpitched his peripherals; the gap between his ERA and FIP in Philly was so wide that when the Astros acquired him in a trade for Roy Oswalt, all we had to say about him was “while he has some value as a league minimum guy for the next couple of years, he can be replaced.”

It wasn’t exactly a straight line between then and now, but Happ again looks like a durable innings eater who can provide something approximating league average production out of the rotation. He’s 38 now, but hasn’t shown too many signs of aging. His velocity has dipped a tick over the last two years, though he’s within half a mile per hour of the gas he had in his Blue Jays days. He’s barely missed a start over the last three years and just posted the highest swing-and-miss rate of his career. Steamer, ZiPS, and intuition all have him pegged as the fourthiest No. 4 starter who ever slotted into the fourth spot of a rotation. Read the rest of this entry »