I got asked the question in my chat this week. Dave also got asked it in his. What do you do to solve Byron Buxton’s problems at the plate? This is essentially the question. People want to know. The answer, to me, is you let him play. It seems that we get these questions each April about a phenom struggling in his first taste of a full major league season. So while I’m writing this piece with Buxton in mind and as the lead example, it is also sort of universal.
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My two-year-old is in love with reading books right now, which is awesome. Our current favorite is The Day the Crayons Quit, which is affectionately known as “the crayon book” around here. Unfortunately, some books have made their way into our house which I don’t enjoy reading, with my least favorite being Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I regularly move the book to random locations where it can’t accidentally be found, since I hope to never read it again.

That’s probably how Byron Buxton feels right now. Whenever his career is over, it’s now going to include a record of the start of his 2017 season, and I’d imagine he’d like to take the record of his first seven games and shove them in a corner where they will never be found.

The Twins lost yesterday 2-1 to the Tigers, but because they have a 2.07 ERA through their first seven games, Minnesota is still 5-2, a surprisingly strong start for a team not expected to contend this year. But despite making a few fantastic defensive plays, they’re winning in spite of Byron Buxton, not because of him.

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While Byron Buxton’s first week was discouraging owing to the presence of his ongoing contact issues, another former uber prospect, Miguel Sano, put together a promising opening week during the Twins’ surprising start to the season.

Sano’s resume is dotted with its own swing-and-miss issues, and strikeouts will always be a part of Sano’s game as a three-outcome slugger.

But when Sano makes contact, special things happen. According to Statcast data, he finished 13th in average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives last season (97.0 mph) — minimum 100 batted ball events — and second in 2015 (99.2 mph), trailing only Giancarlo Stanton, a frequent comp for Sano.

After giving us a taste of his promise in 2015, Sano dealt with injury, inconsistency, and perhaps an ill-advised position change last season.

But things are looking up for Sano in 2017. As Dave Cameron noted earlier this year, there’s evidence he possesses the athleticism to handle third base, the position to which he’s returned this year. And Sano received an interesting — and perhaps crucial — swing tip this offseason.

In an age when more hitters are receiving help from non-traditional sources — such as private hitting instructors, for example — Sano received some advice this offseason while home in the Dominican Republic, where he encountered former major leaguer Fernando Tatis.

Sano recalled the exchange last month for Phil Miller of the Star Tribune. From Miller’s piece:

Tatis, whose son Fernando Jr. is a top prospect in the Padres organization, watched Sano take batting practice and made a suggestion.

“He said hands up high takes me too much time to [get in position to] swing,” Sano explained, demonstrating the extra motion required to trigger his swing. “Put my hands lower, and it’s just one move. Faster.”

The result, according to Sano? “If I put [my hands] lower, I have more time. I can see the ball more,” he said. “I start them down, see the pitch, and boom.”

Consider Sano’s hand placement last season in this at-bat…

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During our marathon Opening Day chat at FanGraphs on Monday — you can revisit all 27,000 words here — I was tasked with following the 4 p.m. ET games. That slate of games featured an unfair fight between Clayton Kershaw and the Padres, the entrance of Zach Britton into a tie game against the Blue Jays, and the Twins against the Royals. While I flipped between games trying to maximize the use of the one available television in my living room, I tried to take in most of Byron Buxton’s day at the plate.

As you’re probably aware, Buxton was once the consensus No. 1 prospect in the game. He, unfairly, drew Mike Trout comps. While he’s certainly not anywhere near Trout the batter, Buxton is one of the premier athletes in the game. He made the first five-star catch of the season Monday as MLB.com documented both with video and Statcast data.

But Buxton will never fully unlock his potential, his considerable potential, until he cuts down on the swing and miss in his game.

Even during his excellent September, when he offered hope of a turnaround, a .287/.357/.653 slash line, and nine home runs over the final 29 games of the season — exhibiting burgeoning power to go with his plus-plus speed — Buxton still struck out in 33.6% of his plate appearances. He finished with a 35.6% strikeout rate for the year, a mark that was largely responsible — along with a healthy dose of infield pop ups — for his unsightly .225/.284/.430 slash line and 86 wRC+. His strikeout rate increased four points from his brief exposure to major-league pitching in 2015. And he even struck out 28% of the time during his demotion to Triple-A last season, covering 209 plate appearances.

Judging from my weekly chats here, Buxton is of some interest to many this year given a strong finish to 2016 that coincided with swing adjustments, including a return to the leg kick he used in high school but which was originally phased out by the Twins. He struck out in 20% of his at-bats this spring. While perhaps not ultimately significant, it was preferable to striking out in more than a third of his plate appearances.

This time of year always carries a small-sample disclaimer. It’s April. We don’t want to make too much of performance. But I was curious to see if Buxton, on Day One, would seem different, improved — as far as his approach goes — from the Buxton of 2015 and 2016. I was in search of compelling anecdotal evidence.

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Brandon Kintzler doesn’t fit your standard closer profile. The 32-year-old righty isn’t a power pitcher, at least not in terms of missing bats. He averaged just 5.8 strikeouts per nine innings last year while earning 17 saves with the Minnesota Twins. Featuring a sinker that he threw 82% of the time, at an average velocity of 92 mph, he had a 61.9% ground-ball rate and 3.15 ERA.

And then there’s his background. A 40th-round pick by the San Diego Padres in 2004, Kintzler was pitching in an independent league three years later — and not particularly well. The Brewers nonetheless gave him a chance, and he rewarded them by beating the odds and making it to the big leagues. After solid seasons as a setup man in 2013 and 2014, things once again went south. Following an injury-ravaged 2015 that saw him throw just seven innings, Milwaukee cut him loose. The Twins signed him prior to last season.

Kintzler is well acquainted with operating rooms. Since entering pro ball out of Dixie State College, he’s undergone repairs to his shoulder, elbow, and left knee. All have had major impacts on a career that has seen him go from non-prospect to arguably the least-respected closer in the game.

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Kintzler on his sinker-heavy approach: “I think everyone has different stuff. We all have different deception. We all have different… everyone talks about spin rate. I just think everyone is different. What I do works for me. I found out that what makes me successful is attacking with my fastball and forcing action. Could I try to strike out more people? Probably. But that means too many pitches, and I want to throw every day.

“The slider was my pitch coming up through the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Though it started with a strikeout and a ground out, the World Baseball Classic appearance by Jose Berrios Wednesday didn’t end well. He allowed a single to the scuffling Nolan Arenado, then hit Eric Hosmer and walked Andrew McCutchen before he was replaced. In essence, the outing encapsulated the ups and downs of Jose Berrios as a pitcher: tantalizing stuff, near-fatal flaws. If you focus on the former, though, maybe the latter is just an adjustment away from being a faded memory.

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Previous editions: AL East / NL East.

Opening Day is just over the horizon, though we have to navigate the remainder of the World Baseball Classic and the entirety of March Madness first. In the meantime, let’s continue our look at the upcoming season, with the third of our six divisional previews.

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I’m going to be up front with you: that headline is seriously misleading. Based on what we can tell, Miguel Sano is probably not a good defensive player. Last year, though, to try and get the club’s offense going, the Twins decided to try Miguel Sano in right field. Regret kicked in pretty quickly.

He played right field most days for the first couple of months of the season, until a strained hamstring put him on the disabled list for the entire month of June. During the month that the team didn’t have to watch Sano chase balls around the outfield, they decided that they didn’t really want to see that ever again. When he returned to the team at the beginning of July, he was promptly moved back to third base. He split his time between there and DH over the rest of the year.

As a pretty large human being, Sano certainly doesn’t look like an outfielder, and while we only saw him out there for a little over 300 innings, the early returns weren’t particularly positive.

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Byron Buxton was drafted second overall in 2012. Between that point and the loss of his rookie eligibility last season, he was eligible for four rounds of preseason prospect lists. Almost universally, he appeared at or near the top of those lists. Consider, for example, his place among the rankings published annually by Baseball Prospectus during that time frame:

• 2013: #8
• 2014: #1
• 2015: #1
• 2016: #2

Barring injury, the 2017 season is going to be the 23-year-old Buxton’s first full one in the majors. Under traditional circumstances, there would be a round-the-clock coverage of this budding superstar’s march to the top of every relevant leaderboard. Yet we find ourselves in non-traditional circumstances for a couple of important reasons.

To refresh your memory: in the summer of 2013 — Buxton’s first full season as a professional — we were only a year-plus into the Mike Trout experience and we were decidedly not taking it in stride. J.J. Cooper, writing for Baseball America, stoked the fire of comparisons between Trout and Buxton. As baseball fans are wont to do, the crowd took Cooper’s consideration of the subject to another level, and the layman’s impression of Buxton went from “really good outfield prospect” to “might be another Trout.” Buxton built his own hype in 2013, racking up a .944 OPS across multiple levels. In his first full year out of high school, Buxton’s numbers were great and people were giving reports to prospect writers suggesting he was truly elite.

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To preview MLB spring training, Tyler Kepner examined the competitive “window” status — that is, the realistic possibility for contention — of all 30 major-league clubs earlier this month for the New York Times. Kepner employed four logical window designations: closed, open, closing and opening.

I think reasonable people can mostly agree that the Cubs’ window of contention is open, and the White Sox’ window is closed. The Royals’ is perhaps closing, and the Braves’ is opening (if not in 2017, then soon). While we will not agree on every status, it’s an interesting exercise.

Windows of contention are an interesting concept, particularly in an era of two Wild Cards in each league. How do teams balance the future and present? How do clubs play a so-so hand knowing the unpredictability of the game? Few teams are able to sustain long windows of contention. The Braves of the 1990s and early 2000s and the Cardinals of the 21st century have done it as well as any team in the in the Wild Card era.

It’s also easier to operate if you suspect your window is either completely open or closed. If you’re the Cubs and Indians last deadline, you’re willing to trade significant young assets for impact relief help. If you suspect your window is closed, like the White Sox, you’re willing to deal assets like Chris Sale and Adam Eaton. There’s a clarity in decision-making, in creating a strategy and plan to implement.

Said Texas Rangers GM Jon Daniels to FanGraphs’ David Laurila on charting a course:

“Something our management team has talked about a lot is the mistake we made our first year here, in 2006. We were caught in the middle. We convinced ourselves that if A, B, and C went right, we had a chance to win, and I think you can make the case that, for any team, it’s not a sustainable strategy.”

Being caught in the middle is the most difficult position for a club. Consider, for instance, a team with some relatively young stars at the major-league level. The front office thought this core of players would form the foundation of a contending team, but it’s not surrounded with the requisite depth, prospects or resources to realistically contend and sustain. The White Sox entered the season in that position. In the meantime, they’ve chosen a course. The Angels, Diamondbacks, Marlins, and Twins could all face difficult decisions in choosing paths in the not-too-distant future.

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