CLEVELAND – Byron Buxton sat before his locker in the road clubhouse at Progressive Field before a game last week, intermittently scrolling through his smart phone and chatting with several nearby teammates. As I approached Buxton to request an interview, his clubhouse neighbor, Miguel Sano, morphed from a 6-foot-4, 260-pound third baseman to clubhouse bouncer. He was prohibiting me from addressing Buxton until I paid a fee, something of a toll. He was joking, I think, and I played along, asking if he would give me a receipt for business expenses. While Sano, who’s known for his loquaciousness and sense of humor, prompted some laughter in the corner of the Twins clubhouse, he was also perhaps trying to protect his teammates a bit from another prying journalist.

Buxton wore the label of “No. 1 Prospect in the Game” for multiple years, which has placed his offensive struggles at the major-league level under great scrutiny. But no one has placed more pressure on Buxton than himself. And that pressure was creating something that prevents success from occurring in the batter’s box: anxiety.

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Chris Gimenez is an effective communicator. It’s not the primary reason the journeyman backstop keeps finding a job, but given the importance of that trait to his position, it’s certainly a factor. Along with versatility and catch-and-throw skills, forging a relationship with a pitching staff is very much one of his strong suits.

Gimenez is wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform now, one year after playing a meaningful role on Cleveland’s AL championship club. It wasn’t his first season on a winner. Prior to joining the Indians, the 34-year-old veteran suited up for Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Rays teams that tasted October baseball. As you might expect, he had quality role models at each of those stops.

Gimenez talked about the value of not sugar-coating communication and the importance of embracing analytics, at the tail end of spring training.

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Gimenez on being honest and not coddling: “Communication, between all parties, is something that all good teams have. It’s the same in the dugout and on the field. That open line of communication where somebody can say something freely, at any time, and not have people take it the wrong way.

“You get into some heated situations during a game. Whether it’s a catcher going out to talk to a pitcher, or a manager or coach coming to talk to somebody in the dugout, you need that open line of communication. If you’re sugar-coating something, you’re not doing anybody any favors.

“On the mound, you have to know which guys you can go out there and get on their rear ends a little bit. You also have to know which guys you have to coddle. But at the same time, you’re coddling in a way that you’re getting on their rear ends a little bit. It’s an art form.”

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It’s not just the White Sox who have been an early AL Central surprise. There are also the Twins, who, at 15-14, stand just a game and a half behind the Indians. Now, the Twins are not as good as the Indians. For all I know, the Twins might not be as good as the White Sox. You don’t want to overreact too much to a season’s first five weeks. But you might at least want to understand how the Twins have gotten here. One part of the answer: a much-improved defensive unit.

Last season, by Defensive Runs Saved, the Twins ranked 28th in baseball. By Ultimate Zone Rating, they again ranked 28th, giving them an average rank of…28. This season, by DRS, the Twins rank third in baseball. By UZR, they rank fifth, giving them an average rank of 4. That’s an average rank improvement of 24 places.

Here is how every team has moved so far, according to the same method.

There are, obviously, other teams who have played better defense. And there are other teams who have played worse defense. Here’s just another area where the Blue Jays underwhelm. But no one’s moved quite like the Twins have. This is just an InstaGraphs post, so I’m not going to dig in too deep; the Twins have gotten better at catcher, shortstop, and in the outfield, in particular. By pitching WAR last year, the Twins ranked 28th. This year they rank 27th. By hard-hit rate last year, Twins pitchers ranked second-worst. This year they rank second-worst. And yet by BABIP allowed, last year, the Twins ranked second-worst. This year they rank 10th-best. It’s nothing amazing, but the Twins have been able to prevent some hits. That’s something they struggled to do a season ago. The Twins haven’t ridden some complete fluke to an above-.500 record.

Incidentally, I know this isn’t about the Cubs, but as you’ll recall, last year the Cubs set a team BABIP record. This year their BABIP allowed is tied for 14th. Okay! I don’t have anything for that quite yet.

The Minnesota Twins have a defense. The Minnesota Twins have an offense. We’ll see about the pitching staff. We’ll see about Jose Berrios. You can squint and see something interesting in development here.

To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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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.

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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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