Ah, another Yankees-Twins playoff series. A retelling of a familiar tale. A classic first-round matchup simmering with revenge narratives. A chance for the Twins to change the course of — oh.

It’s over already.

While both NLDS series proceeded to white-knuckle Game 5’s, and the Rays forced the Astros to contemplate elimination, over in Minnesota, the Twins were quietly dispatched by the Yankees in exactly the way pretty much everyone feared that they would be.

This was a brutal tradition of the 2000s, in which the little-guy Twins would arrive, fresh from contention, and the Yankees, cementing their legacy as the underdog-kicking playoff behemoths, would squash them with elite talent and the favor of some twisted gods. Yet another Twins postseason defeat is behind us, and we’re left with more questions than answers. These games have historically been comprised of bummers, boners, and brims pulled low. Today is the anniversary of one of them, and we’re going to examine it.

For Twins fans, this story needs no retelling, but unfortunately, we must relate the tragic set dressing: The Twins dropped Game 1 of the 2009 ALDS 7-2, but had singled together a 3-1 lead late in Game 2. Alex Rodriguez shattered the delicate balance with a two-run shot off All-Star Twins closer Joe Nathan to tie it up. The game went into extras, and in the top of the 11th, Joe Mauer led off, and this happened:

On the one hand, this is baseball: It is nothing without its X-factors. Its chaos. Its precious human element. On the other, you can tell this is a conspiracy because of how grainy the footage is, or at least reasonably speculate. Read the rest of this entry »

For a moment, it looked like Will Smith would be the hero. In the bottom of the ninth, sandwiched between the two cataclysmic half-innings that abruptly ended the 106-win Dodgers’ season, they had a brief flicker of hope when with one out and one on, Smith hit a drive off Daniel Hudson that looked as though it might — might — make him the hero, with a walk-off home run that sent the Dodgers to the NLCS. It was hardly implausible given that the 24-year-old rookie had hit two of the Dodgers’ major leauge-leading seven walk-off home runs this year, or that nearly half the drives hit to the specifications of which he struck Hudson’s hanging slider — 100.3 mph, at a 26 degree launch angle — have left the yard over the past five seasons.

It wasn’t to be.

Smith’s drive fell short as, ultimately and in more gruesome fashion, did the Dodgers. There will be plenty of time to dissect the larger situation but for the moment, consider the batted ball, which had a 69% of becoming a hit and a 46.1% chance of going out based on similarly struck spheroids. When it didn’t, it was just the latest in the genre of hold-your-breath moments that wound up producing mutterings that maybe the baseball has been de-juiced this October — that is, that the postseason ball is different from what’s been used in the regular season.

It’s not hard to understand why this notion has taken hold. So far this month, we’ve seen home runs hit at a lower frequency than during a regular season that set all kinds of records for long balls, and scoring rates have fallen as well. In the blur of Division Series games, many a hard-hit ball appeared bound to go out — at least based upon the way our brains have become calibrated to this year’s nearly-numbing frequency — only to die at the warning track. Yet it’s harder to make the case that something is different given a closer look at the numbers, both traditional and Statcast, at least if you’re not Baseball Prospectus’ Rob Arthur, whose model to calculate the drag on the baseball by measuring a pitch’s loss of speed does suggest something is afoot. More on his latest findings below, after I present my own analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

The 16-straight postseason losses is a story hard to ignore. So is the fact that 13 of those defeats — Monday night’s ALDS ousting being the latest in that inglorious stretch — have come at the hands of the Bronx Bombers. October has indeed been a cruel month for the Minnesota Twins.

Remember Prince singing, “Two thousand zero zero, party over”? Since the dawning of the 21st century, Kirby Puckett’s old club has been a playoff piñata.

That’s not going to be the primary focus here. Words will be spilled on the just-completed series — mostly from the mouths of the participants — but let’s not forget that the future is what matters most (not just for the Twins, but for all of us.) As Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk… the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”

Back in 2004, with the Red Sox on the brink of elimination in the ALCS, Kevin Millar defiantly told the Yankees: “Don’t let us win today.” With the Twins facing their own lose-one-and-you’re-done scenario, I mentioned Millar’s proclamation to Trevor May in Sunday’s workout day press conference.

”Don’t give us an inch, because we’ll take a mile,” May responded. “That’s been something — when doors have been opened for us all year, we’ve exploded through them. That’s what we’re looking to do.”

That’s not what happened, of course. Monday’s 5-1 loss put Minnesota’s 2019 season in the history books, and what comes next is some meaningful tinkering. Without it, an implosion looms as a possibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Minnesota Loses 5-1 to New York

Sports fans tend to have an inferiority complex. You can see it in the lexicon: East Coast bias, curses of billy goats and Bambinos, jinxes, stadiums where we just never win, bad umpires, scheduling conspiracies, unfair rules, pithy charges of Southern Exceptionalism. The NFL now reviews plays for pass interference, mostly because a bunch of Louisianans rioted after a bad call in a big moment. Speaking of replay, I’d wager that we’ll be stuck with the tedious and disruptive system we’ve got now for a good long while: Not because it’s necessarily the best way to do things, but because such a setup seems like the most effective bulwark against those stinkin’ umps who just have it out for (insert team here).

These inferiority complexes are silly, of course. They are the whiny and simplistic dimension of the fanhood experiences that nobody else cares to hear about, alongside stories about your fantasy team and the time you got a great deal on tickets at the last minute. It reflects poorly on just about everyone.

I’ll grant a temporary exception for fans of the Minnesota Twins.

It has now been 15 years and three days since the Twins won a playoff game. That evening, Johan Santana started at the Stadium. Minnesota wore gray pinstripes and hats with an ‘M’ above the brim. Jacque Jones hit a two-run homer to account for the only scoring. Hall of Famers Mike Mussina and Mariano Rivera pitched for the Yanks; John Olerud played first base. Somehow, MLB managed to run a playoff game in less than three hours. It was a different time.

By this point, it seems callous to run the numbers again, so we’ll be quick. The Twins have lost 16 playoff games in a row. That’s five divisional exits, four at the hands of the Yankees, with a Wild Card game defeat to the Bombers mixed in for good measure. There’s nothing magical or predictive about this little run. There isn’t any thread between the Corey Koskie–Torii Hunter Twins and the ballclub that lost last night; they don’t even share a home stadium.

The Twins have usually been underdogs in these games, though only slightly so. The Orioles were far bigger long shots in every matchup they had against New York this year and last, and even that feeble and overmatched club managed to win a quarter of those games. For Minnesota, the streak is undoubtedly frustrating. It’s a narrative that has fed on itself for at least a decade now. It sucks and it’s a shocking confluence of events, but that’s all there really is to say about it from an analytical perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Reynolds was a pleasant surprise in a Pittsburgh Pirates season that was anything but. While the frustratingly-frugal team he plays for plodded to a last-place finish in the NL Central, the 24-year-old outfielder put up a .314/.377/.503 slash line. Displaying better-than-expected pop, he stroked 37 doubles and went deep 16 times.

Clint Hurdle wasn’t expecting that kind of production from the switch-hitting rookie when the Pirates broke camp in Bradenton. The since-ousted manager admitted as much when I asked him about Reynolds in the waning days of the season.

“I don’t think I had on the radar that Bryan Reynolds would be hitting .314 on September 25th,” Hurdle said. “From what I’d heard from our scouts, and what I’d seen in the spring, I thought we had a good young player… and it would be interesting to see how he developed. [But] I didn’t have any expectations.”

Nor did a lot of people, although he didn’t exactly came out of nowhere. Reynolds was a second-round pick out of Vanderbilt in 2016, and he came to Pittsburgh from San Francisco as part of the Andrew McCutchen trade. He ranked ninth on our Pirates Top Prospects list coming into this season, with the following commenting his bio standing out: “We keep waiting for Reynolds’ BABIP to regress (it hasn’t).”

Those same words could be written today. His impeccable bat-to-ball skills were no less impressive at the highest level, as Reynolds logged a .387 BABiP in 546 plate appearances against big-league pitching. The approach he brought with him from college played a big role in his success. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Thus far in the Division Series, a Yankees lineup whose relentless efforts to control the strike zone yielded an American League-high 5.82 runs per game despyte myriad injuries is treating the Twins with a familiar ferocity that has become their signature. On Saturday evening, for the second night in a row, two teams that looked quite evenly matched on paper and pixel, and far disconnected from a history that produced four Division Series pummelings by the Yankees from 2003-10, yielded a lopsided result. Grinding out at-bat after at-bat with their signature plate discipline, the Yankees staked themselves to an early lead against starter Randy Dobnak, then pounced when the 24-year-old rookie got into a jam. Didi Gregorius‘ grand slam off reliever Tyler Duffey was the coup de grâce in a seven-run third inning that backed yet another impressive postseason start from Masahiro Tanaka and carried the Yankees to an 8-2 victory. They’ve pushed the 101-win Twins to the brink of elimination as the series heads to Minnesota and have now won 15 of 17 postseason over the Twins dating back to 2003, including a major league record 12 straight. The Twins have lost a record 15 consecutive postseason games overall.

Of the Yankees’ first 21 batters, 14 reached base, via 10 hits, three walks and one hit-by pitch. Amid that parade, every member of the lineup save for Giancarlo Stanton reached at least once, and Stanton, for his part, delivered a sacrifice fly. For the night, the Yankees collected 11 hits and eight walks — against a team whose walk rate was an AL-low 7.2% — while striking out just six times.

“Up and down the lineup, guys are hungry,” said Aaron Judge, who while batting second walked and had two singles within that early span, and later added another walk.

“I absolutely do think it’s contagious,” said manager Aaron Boone regarding his team’s plate discipline before the game. “It’s something we preach ad nauseam… I do think those guys take that to heart and really, as a group, have some faith and trust in each other and take some pride in knowing that, when they do that as a group, it benefits all of them because it wears people down. It nets more mistakes over time, and more often than not, when we do that, we’ve been able to kind of break through at some point.” Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is unpredictable, to a point. It’s a round bat and a round ball; anything can happen in 75 plate appearances. You’ve heard the platitudes. It’s not wild randomness, though. When the pitcher throws the ball to home plate, it won’t turn into a bouquet of flowers halfway there. Smashed line drives become hits most of the time. The Astros were always likely to win the AL West this year. The Dodgers outcome was similarly predictable.

In the same vein, we knew a lot about this Yankees-Twins series coming in. Maybe we didn’t know the outcome, but we could intuit a few themes. There would be dingers, more dingers than you can probably believe. The Twins hit the most single-season home runs by a team in baseball history this year, and the Yankees hit exactly one home run less than the Twins. There would be high-octane relief work; the Twins had the best bullpen FIP- in baseball while the Yankees were second, with both bullpens finishing in the top three in WAR.

And of course, the games seemed likely to go long. There’s a certain undefinable characteristic about Yankees playoff contests that leads to baseball in the hours. The team has long been at the forefront of the three true outcome trend in baseball, and in recent years they’ve spearheaded the transition to the modern, bullpen-heavy style of postseason play. Even ignoring that, however, the playoffs and the Yankees mix together to produce tension, and tension slows the game down.

Want an example? When Kyle Gibson walked Giancarlo Stanton in the bottom of the seventh inning, Cameron Maybin stepped in to pinch run. The game wasn’t over by any means, but the leverage index was a mere 0.24. Gibson walked Gleyber Torres on six pitches, with a stolen base in between. The sequence took what felt like an interminable three minutes and 40 seconds — signs checked and rechecked, long, focusing breaths, pickoff throws, and batting gloves readjusted until they fit perfectly.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How did the ball end up in Gibson’s hands, with the Yankees up 7-4? Naturally, there were five home runs involved. It is 2019, after all. James Paxton, a great condor of a pitcher with arms the length of legs and legs the length of really long legs, is a fly ball pitcher in Yankee Stadium in 2019 — Jorge Polanco took him out of the park on the ninth pitch of the game.

Though Paxton regrouped and José Berríos danced through trouble in the first two innings, they weren’t fooling anyone. Nelson Cruz deposited a 98 mph fastball into the short right field porch for a home run in the top of the third, though Paxton’s greatest skill, his elite strikeout rate, meant that both blasts were solo home runs.

Berríos wasn’t so lucky. The Yankees scratched runs across in un-Yankee-like ways. Edwin Encarnación doubled home DJ LeMahieu, who had reached on a pop-up Luis Arraez couldn’t track down. Gleyber Torres plated two when the Twins booted a double play ball that would have ended the inning. Berríos was hardly sharp — he allowed four hits and three walks in just four innings of work. Still, he kept the ball in the park, something rarely seen in modern baseball, and got three runs for his troubles.

After the Twins managed a small-ball run against Paxton (Polanco again, singling home Arraez), Rocco Baldelli went new school. He pulled Berríos, who needed 88 pitches for his four innings, and went to the aforementioned lethal bullpen. Zack Littell had a 2.68 ERA this year — surely he would be up to the task.

Yeah, not so much. Littell walked Aaron Judge and hit Brett Gardner, with a wild pitch sprinkled in for good measure. Baldelli had seen enough, and he went to the big guns; Tyler Duffey, he of the 34% strikeout rate, 54 ERA-, and 67 FIP-. His strikeout prowess was as advertised, as he recorded all three of his outs via strikeout. His run prevention prowess, on the other hand, was worse; he allowed a walk and a double in the midst of those strikeouts, and the Yankees retook the lead.

Aaron Boone is no stranger to the reliever carousel — Paxton was out of the game in the top of the fifth, and a parade of relievers followed. Tommy Kahnle surrendered a home run, but the Yankees bullpen mostly did what the Twins’ equally excellent bullpen could not; it managed to keep the hits and walks from clustering together, as five walks and two hits, including the aforementioned home run, led to only a single run for Minnesota.

The Twins bullpen couldn’t keep up their end of the bargain. From 5-4, where the game stood after Duffey’s up-and-down inning and the home run Kahnle allowed, they couldn’t hold the line. There were two solo home runs, difficult to avoid in this day and age, but the clustering abandoned them too. But now I’m getting ahead of myself again. Let’s get back to the seventh and Kyle Gibson.

Back on the mound, Gibson regrouped and took a deep breath. He struck out Gary Sanchez on four pitches. Didi Gregorius was next, and it took eight pitches and five minutes and 51 seconds for Gibson to walk him. Gio Urshela didn’t get the message; he put the second pitch in play, a fly ball too shallow to score Maybin from third. It was all for naught, though. DJ LeMahieu lined a hanging slider into left field, plating all three runners, to turn the game from not very suspenseful to not suspenseful at all.

The rest of the game, of course, took nearly an hour anyway. There was no suspense left; no runs were scored. Brusdar Graterol poured 100 mph gasoline past Yankees hitters for two strikeouts in a perfect inning, and the odd couple of J.A. Happ and Aroldis Chapman closed things out for the Yankees. In some sense, the last part of the game was a breeze.

But in another sense, the end of the game matched the overall tenor of the evening. In the real world, time is linear. One minute it’s 6:01, and the next it’s 6:02, on and on until the day is over. In Yankee Stadium, however, it’s not like that. It’s a full count, forever and always, and time never passes. There are runners on, leads to protect at any cost, tension felt deep in a pitcher’s bones.

Aroldis Chapman walked a batter in the ninth, a play that could hardly have been less meaningful — the Yankees had a 99.9% win expectancy before the walk and a 99.7% expectancy afterwards. Even still, the cameras caught Aaron Boone in the dugout, unsubtly swearing. Chapman threw a few pitches to the next pitcher, stepped off the mound for a deep breath, and regrouped. He looked in for the sign, shook his head, and looked in again.

The game ended not long after that, with an uncharacteristic first-pitch pop up. It was hardly an unexpected conclusion, what with the Yankees having been up six runs for nearly an hour, but it still felt like a great accomplishment. The stands were half-empty, the Bronx faithful streaming out to the 4 train in a vain attempt to beat the rush, but the game went on unabated, and felt like it might never end. The natural state of playoff baseball in Yankee Stadium is to beat on, borne ceaselessly from stressor to stressor, and it felt shocking when the game was suddenly finished. Time of game: four hours, 17 minutes.

The 2019 Twins fell one win shy of their franchise record (102), set back in 1965 by a team that included future Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew, as well as Tony Oliva, Mudcat Grant, and Jim Kaat. That season ended with a Game 7 World Series loss to the Dodgers — Cy Young winner and World Series MVP Sandy Koufax pitched a three-hit shutout — and it wasn’t until 22 years later that the Twins finally won their first championship since moving to Minnesota.

Reaching the World Series again will require a roster with limited postseason experience that isn’t quite at full health — it’s easier to name the position players who weren’t injured over the past month or two — to get past the Yankees, who have one of the best lineups in baseball, and either the Rays or Astros, who each have three starting pitchers capable of shutting down any opponent.

Here’s how every member of the Twins’ 2019 ALDS roster was originally acquired. The team’s full RosterResource Depth Chart and Payroll pages are also available as a resource.

Homegrown (13)

• Kyle Gibson, SP: Drafted First Round (22) 2009
• Jorge Polanco, SS: Amateur Free Agent (Dominican Republic) July 2009
• Max Kepler, OF: Amateur Free Agent (Germany) July 2009
• Miguel Sanó, 3B: Amateur Free Agent (Dominican Republic) October 2009
• Eddie Rosario, OF: Drafted Fourth Round 2010
• José Berríos, SP: Drafted First Round (32) 2012
• Tyler Duffey, RP: Drafted Fifth Round 2012
• Taylor Rogers, RP: Drafted 11th Round 2012
• Mitch Garver, C: Drafted Ninth Round 2013
• Luis Arraez, INF/OF: Amateur Free Agent (Venezuela) November 2013
• Brusdar Graterol, RP: Amateur Free Agent (Venezuela) August 2014
• Cody Stashak, RP: Drafted 13th Round 2015
• Randy Dobnak, RP: Undrafted Free Agent August 2017

Total WAR: 30.0 Read the rest of this entry »

Jake Odorizzi heads into the postseason on the heels of a career year. In his second season with the Minnesota Twins, the 29-year-old right-hander has a 3.51 ERA, a 3.36 FIP, and 178 strikeouts in 159 innings. If won-lost records are your cup of tea, Odorizzi boasts a snazzy 15-7 mark going into Saturday’s presumed start against the Yankees in ALDS Game 2. (There’s an outside chance he’ll be held back for Monday’s Game in Minneapolis.)

An uptick of velocity on all of his pitches has played a role in Odorizzi’s success. That’s especially been the case with his heater, which former FanGraphs colleague Sung Min Kim — hired recently by the KBO’s Lotte Giants — called “The best fastball of 2019” back in June.

What was behind Odorizzi’s increased velocity and the improved performances that came with it? I asked him that question when the Twins visited Fenway Park in early September.

———

David Laurila: You’re having your best season. To what do you attribute that?

Jake Odorizzi: “I did a new training program this past offseason. I worked with a gentleman in Plant City, Florida named Randy Sullivan. That was at the Florida Baseball Ranch. Kyle Gibson used him last year. Justin Verlander has done some work with him, as well..

“I’d felt like I was out of whack mechanically. Health-wise I was good, but I needed to get more out of my body, maybe use my mechanics a little bit better, a little bit smoother. I did some weighted-ball stuff; I did a mobility program. I kind of unlocked some more torque in my body. I was able to separate my upper half from my lower half instead being like a one-piece — everything goes at once, and it’s stiff. Read the rest of this entry »

Nelson Cruz was 25 years old when he made his major league debut in 2005. At the conclusion of the 2008 season, he was 28 years old and had a .743 OPS in 611 career plate appearances. By and large, he was little more than a fringe player with an uncertain future in the game, his third decade on planet earth looming on the horizon.

Since that time he’s been one of the game’s most prolific hitters. From 2009 through this past season, Cruz has slashed .280/.349/.537, with 379 home runs. No player in either league has gone deep more often over that stretch. And he’s showing no signs of slowing down. At age 39, the Fountain of Youth firmly within his grasp, Cruz just banged out 41 home runs, and logged a career-high 1.031 OPS, in his first season with the Minnesota Twins.

Cruz sat down to talk about his career path, and his overall approach to hitting, when the playoffs-bound Twins visited Fenway Park in early September.

———

David Laurila: Is hitting simple, or is it complicated?

Nelson Cruz: “When you do it good, it’s really simple. When you’re struggling, it’s really difficult. In my case, it’s about how my body feels. If I wake up and feel energized and fresh, I know I’m going to have a good day because my swing is going to be fluid. On days where my body isn’t rested enough, I feel like I have to force my swing to go through the zone.

“That said, you do the repetition every day, so even without thinking your swing goes through the same path — it does what you practice over and over. So it’s easy, but at the same time, it can get complicated on you.”

Laurila: Your career didn’t take off until you were in your late 20s. Was the impetus for that breakthrough more mental or physical in nature?

Cruz: “I think everything, but the mental part is the one… just to be able to have an approach every day, to have a routine to follow. You wake up and you know what you’re going to do to prepare for that game. You know what you’re going to be thinking at the plate — you’re going to have an idea of what to expect from the pitchers, and the situations, you’re going to face that day.”

Laurila: Were you an immature hitter early in your career? Read the rest of this entry »