Minnesota’s playoff position has been fairly secure for some time, but Cleveland has edged closer in the standings for the division. While Cleveland didn’t necessarily make themselves better at the deadline, they did fix a couple monstrous holes in their lineup as they hope to get a lift from ace pitchers returning from injury. The Twins have responded with a move to shore up one of their weaknesses in the bullpen. While Sam Dyson might not have been the biggest name on the market, he ended up the best reliever traded this deadline, as Kirby Yates, Felipe Vázquez, and Ken Giles all stayed put. The deal was first reported by Tommy Birch and then confirmed by Dan Hayes. According to Birch, this is the deal:

Twins Receive:

• Sam Dyson

Giants Receive:

• RHP Prelander Berroa
• OF Jaylin Davis
• RHP Kai-Wei Teng

For the Twins, Sam Dyson presents an immediate upgrade and appealing option in high-leverage situations. The right-hander, who is still arbitration eligible next season, is a groundball specialist with just seven walks on the year. His 2.74 FIP and 2.47 ERA speak to how well he’s performed this season, and his 1.1 WAR ranks 19th among 165 qualified relievers. Dyson relies on a low-to-mid-90s sinker and a low-90s cutter that runs in on lefties and away on righties. Those two represent around 70% of Dyson’s pitches, with a four-seamer, change, and slider mixed in the rest of the time.

Dyson was a very good reliever for the Rangers in 2015 and 2016, but a rough start to 2017 saw the Rangers give up on him. The Giants reaped the benefits of letting Dyson work things out in 2017, and he has provided solid performances the past two seasons. With the Twins, Dyson should slide right behind Taylor Rogers as the second-best reliever on the team. For a bullpen looking for some stability, Dyson should provide exactly that.

As for the players sent to San Francisco, we’ve got three players with some pretty high variability when it comes to reaching their potential. Berroa and Teng are both listed as 40 FV on THE BOARD. Prelander Berroa is only 19 years old, has posted some high strikeout rates in the Appalachian League, and was likened to Fernando Rodney in the prospect report this spring. Kai-Wei Teng is only 20 years old and signed for $500,000 out of Taiwan. He’s made it to Low-A and has posted impressive numbers there. Longenhagen and McDaniel had this to say before the season:

His arm action is a little rough, and Teng’s lower slot makes it hard for him to get on top of his curveball consistently, but he’s very well balanced over his blocking leg and otherwise has a smooth delivery. At this age and size, it’s possible no more than the low-90s velo will come, but that might be enough if that curveball matures, because Teng’s changeup is also very good.

As for Jaylin Davis, he’s hit 25 homers this season between Double-A and Triple-A. He’s now 25 years old and there’s a lot of swing and miss to his game, but if he can access his power in-game, he might be able to contribute in the majors.

This deal looks like targeted quantity over quality, with the Giants looking to bring in players with upside they might not reach in hopes they hit on one of them. For the Twins, they got exactly what they needed — even if they didn’t land a starter — while only having to deal from the depth in their system.

Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Data Quality Engineer, Baseball Systems

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Description:
The Minnesota Twins are seeking a Data Quality Engineer to join the Baseball Research and Development group. This position offers wide-ranging exposure to current programming methods and frameworks in a fast-paced agile environment. With creativity and passion, this candidate will collaborate with the Baseball Operations staff to ensure good data hygiene across a growing set of disparate data sources. This position requires an intuitive and exacting passion for data detective work. By identifying patterns that affect data quality and by working directly with data scientists, the candidate will help to develop, deliver, and maintain tools to enhance model and decision accuracy. This position requires independent curiosity and a commitment to achieving excellence within a team framework. Strong communication and interpersonal skills will enable the candidate to enjoy engaging relationships with product users.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Build data quality assurance tools and procedures to identify and correct data inaccuracies.
• Design, maintain, and support data warehouses for reporting and analysis.
• Develop, optimize, and automate data workflows and pipelines ensuring data integrity and quality from external data integrations.
• Support the individuals of the Baseball Operations team by providing assistance and education on best practices when querying the data warehouse.
• Work with data scientists to ensure models and analyses follow best practice for accessing the data and are properly integrated into scheduled data processing workflows.
• Explore emerging technologies and recommend new tools and techniques for collecting and processing data.
• Develop visualization tools and reports that showcase research findings in creative, effective ways for a variety of different end users and use cases.
• Use an agile software development approach for quick roll-outs combined with incremental improvement process to existing systems and environments.
• Provide courteous and timely first-level contact and problem resolution for all Baseball Department users.

Qualifications, Skills, and Abilities:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field or equivalent work experience.
• Software development experience, including requirements definition, design, development, testing, implementation, and iterative improvement.
• Expertise with SQL, relational databases, database design, and data cleaning techniques.
• Ability to process and transform data from a variety of sources and formats.
• Experience with C#, Java, Python, R or other similar language that interacts with data.
• Knowledge of data visualization packages such as Plotly or ggplot is a plus.
• Proficiency evaluating and improving the performance of SQL queries.
• Understand software development best practices and long-term maintainability of code.
• 2+ years of relevant work experience.
• Strong work ethic, curiosity, initiative, and problem-solving skills.
• Open mindedness to learn new technologies and embrace different ways of thinking.
• Passion for baseball is preferred; passion for problem solving is required.

Physical Requirements:

• Ability to lift and transport items up to 55 lbs.
• Must be able to sit for extended periods of time.
• Must be able to move throughout all areas and levels of the ballpark.
• Ability to relocate to the Twins Cities area.

To Apply:
External applicants should apply using the application found here.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Minnesota Twins.

The last two seasons, Jose Berrios has been on the periphery when it comes to considering the best pitchers in baseball. In 2017 and 2018, he put up three-win campaigns and his 6.1 WAR ranked 22nd among pitchers, just behind Blake Snell, Kyle Freeland, and Mike Clevenger, and just ahead of Jon Gray, Charlie Morton, and Kyle Hendricks. It’s a good group to be associated with, and a few of those players have had great seasons, but with Berrios putting up two similar seasons, he’s not viewed in the same way as Snell and he hasn’t been quite good enough to move himself into the top 10 or 15 pitchers in the game. That’s changed this season, as Berrios has been more aggressive, reduced his walk rate, and become more effective against lefties, all of which has resulted in a season that’s put him firmly among the top 10 pitchers in the game.

After an uneven debut season in 2016 at just 22 years of age, Berrios registered solid efforts in 2017 and 2018. Here’s how those seasons compare to what Berrios has been able to do this year:

The big positive change is the reduction in his walk rate. Berrios has achieved that number mostly by pitching more in the zone. He’s sacrificed his strikeout rate slightly, though he’s made up for that loss by doubling his infield fly rate. Berrios’ FIP this season might not seem drastically altered from the previous two seasons, but with the change in run environment, the three-tenths difference means more than a win over the course of a full season. Berrios did suffer a blister issue in his last start against Kansas City, but currently remains on schedule to start later this week with hopes that the issue is a minor one. Read the rest of this entry »

We are truly living in the age of blazing fastballs. Pitchers are throwing harder than ever, and measurements like spin rates are getting recognized as a crucial tool for effectiveness. At the same time, the fastball is also getting rarer than ever, but the pitch is still quite valuable and that will never change. Having the most valuable fastball in the league is something that will catch a lot of fans’, scouts’, and front office members’ attention.

It’s easy to think that the most effective fastball in 2019 would be that of a classic fireballer. One could guess names like Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, or Max Scherzer. While those three are all having good seasons, our metrics have so far crowned someone else as having the best fastball of 2019 so far. The current fastball champ is none other than Jake Odorizzi. Depending on how much you’ve been following the Twins, you may be surprised to hear that Odorizzi has a 2.24 ERA and a 3.00 FIP in 14 starts this year. He’s boasting a career-best 28.3% strikeout rate while limiting home runs (0.71 HR/9IP) despite being an extreme fly-ball pitcher (29.4% ground-ball rate). Prior to this year, Odorizzi’s been known as a decent, middle-to-back-end pitcher, but not quite a top-of-the-rotation caliber starter like he’s been this season.

Arsenal-wise, Odorizzi’s fastball has been his best pitch in his career. It has accumulated 59.6 in wFB while the only other pitch that netted a positive value is his slider at 2.9. His other pitches — a cutter (-10.3), curveball (-8.2), and changeup (-18.9), have not. He’s done that without significantly backing off fastball usage, having used it 55.4% of the time in his career. This year, that figure is that 60.7%, which is the highest after his debut 2012 season (71.1%) in which he made only seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play a little game. Here is a Statcast leaderboard of the Barrels per plate appearances leaders (minimum 50 batted ball events). Without looking it up, try to figure out who’s behind Gary Sanchez:

I’ll give you a hint: he’s a catcher. Another hint: he’s on the Minnesota Twins. And no, it’s not Willians Astudillo, as much as we wish it were him. The answer is Jason Castro. Granted, Castro only has 92 plate appearances to his name this season. He also has accumulated 2,839 plate appearances over his career and, as far as Statcast has detected since 2015, he’s never hit the ball this hard. His career-high in average exit velocity was 88.6 mph back in 2015. He’s coming off a 2018 season during which he hit for an average exit velocity of 86.8 mph, his lowest in the Statcast era. In 2019? 92.6 mph. Here’s the difference between 2019 Jason Castro and his 2015-2018 self:

Read the rest of this entry »

While many of the division races in baseball look quite similar to those in 2018, the AL Central has gone topsy-turvy. The Indians, despite a lackluster offseason, looked to be the clear favorite, with the Twins the only realistic threat to their recent dominance. That has turned out not to be the case, with Cleveland hanging around .500 as we enter the third month of the season and Minnesota holding a 9 1/2 game advantage, the largest divisional lead in baseball. I’d like to say I saw this coming, but I did not, and if I claimed otherwise, readers would no doubt out me as a filthy, filthy liar.

What was my complaint about the Twins? While they were considerably busier in the offseason than their rivals on the Cuyahoga, I was disappointed that they didn’t do more. Nelson Cruz was a solid short-term addition, and players like Marwin Gonzalez, C.J. Cron, and Jonathan Schoop all improved the depth of the team’s talent base, but I thought they should have been even more aggressive in their winter investments. Joe Mauer’s contract came off the books, and in a division with only one real 2019 rival, my belief was that it would be a mistake to start the season with a lower payroll than in 2018. Just one year before, the Twins aggressively pursued Yu Darvish and while that would clearly not have been a boon for the team that season, it represented them really pushing chips with the high-rollers when the opportunity presented itself.

But it has turned out that the need for a Bryce Harper or a Manny Machado or a Patrick Corbin wasn’t so pressing after all. Jake Odorizzi‘s continued development and Martin Perez’s unexpected velocity have a lot to do with it as well, but the Twins wouldn’t be where they are if a change in their offensive philosophy hadn’t paid off in spades. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into spring training ahead of the 2018 season, there was a fair bit of optimism regarding Jorge Polanco despite a so-so 2017 campaign. He earned a starting job in 2017, but some early season struggles spiraled after a death in the family. He lost his starting position and heading into August, his 47 wRC+ was the worst in baseball among those players with at least 300 plate appearances. Polanco basically salvaged his season over those final two months by putting up a .317/.377/.553 slash line with 10 homers and a 145 wRC+ in 234 plate appearances. At 24 years old, he looked like he was building on his solid prospect status as part of a young Twins core expected to contend. An 80-game suspension for PEDs announced in spring 2018 robbed Polanco of the first half of games and the latter half of the season was rather uneventful, with a decent 110 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. Through two months of the 2019 season, Polanco has been the best player on the team with the best record in baseball.

Jorge Polanco is hitting a robust .335/.405/.583 with a 160 wRC+ and a 2.6 WAR. That ranks eighth in all of baseball and is already half a win better than his preseason projections. After that decent half-season in 2018, it’s fair to call this season’s performance a big surprise, though it wouldn’t be fair to say he’s never done this before. Below you’ll find Polanco’s 50-game rolling wRC+ since the the 2016 season when he first got a real shot at playing time:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins have done a lot of winning lately.

Entering games on Monday, Minnesota was 36-16. No team in baseball had more wins, and no team in baseball had a better record. They’ve been buoyed by a potent offensive attack, becoming just the second team in baseball history to hit 100 home runs over their first 50 games in a season. Their pitching, too, has been quite good, as one might expect for a team that is already 20 games over .500 this early into the season.

Clearly, the 2019 season is going just about as well as the Twins could have expected. They’ve already built a double-digit lead in the AL Central, and their playoff odds reflect this newfound dominance:

The only place where the Twins were struggling was in attendance. As Craig Edwards chronicled at the end of April, baseball attendance to begin this season was a mixed bag. But the Twins in particular seemed to face difficulties putting people in the seats at Target Field. At the end of April, their average home attendance of 17,007 fans was the ninth-lowest in baseball, and their year-over-year change of -4,065 fans per game represented the third-most per game of any team.

Those weren’t promising numbers, especially for a team that had jumped out to a 17-10 record after the first month, holding an early AL Central lead.

In the weeks since, though, the Twins’ attendance has seen a major turnaround. On Sunday, Target Field hosted its largest crowd since 2016, with an official attendance of 39,913. That represented the third time in four games that the park hosted a crowd of at least 30,000. With that in mind, take a look at the Twins’ 5-game rolling average attendance since the beginning of 2017. (Single admission doubleheaders were counted as one game for this graph.) Read the rest of this entry »