Generally, the theory is that even top prospects bust. Byron Buxton is the toppest of top prospects, but even that distinction can’t protect him from failure of one kind or another. Exploring that theory is much more difficult when you’re the player himself. Or the writer asking that player about those expectations and the difficulties he’s been having so far. “You’re going to have a stamp on you wherever you are, but I try to put it to the side,” the struggling Twin said recently before a game with the Athletics. It’s hard not to empathize.

The theory with Buxton is that the tools are there but that he needs to make an adjustment to major-league pitching. It’s looked bad, but the talent is in there.

In 195 major-league plate appearances so far, Buxton has struck out 36% of the time and walked just 4% of the time, for a 32-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates. It’s a toxic combination. And rare. Consider: among 106 top-10 prospects since 1990, only Javier Baez has recorded a worse strikeout- minus walk-rate differential in his first 200 plate appearances.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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Jose Berrios has a 6.75 ERA. His FIP is 5.63. He’s walked 16% of the batters he’s faced this season. He’s averaging more than 20 pitches per inning, and in two starts he has completed just 9.1 innings. He also has three good, major league-quality pitches with the potential for a fourth. He’s struck out more than 30% of the batters he’s faced. He could win Rookie of the Year, and — with arguments to come from Lucas Giolito, Tyler Glasnow, Alex Reyes, Blake Snell, and Julio Urias — he might be the most exciting pitcher to make his big-league debut this season.

Berrios doesn’t turn 22 until the end of the month, but he has ridden a quick and steady ascent to the majors. In 2014, he dominated High-A and held his own in a handful of starts at Double-A. Kiley McDaniel ranked him the 24th-best prospect in baseball during the 2014-15 preseason before he proceeded to mow down opponents in Double-A and Triple-A, striking out more than 25% of batters at both levels and walking less than 6% of them. Berrios entered Spring Training with an outside shot to win a starting job, but struggled with command in both his major-league and minor-league games.

In three minor-league starts this year, Berrios still produced his share of walks. But also struck out 20 of the 66 batters he faced and allowed just three runs, earning a promotion when Ervin Santana hit the disabled list. His first two starts have been a mixed bag, featuring both flashes of the potential that make him a top prospect with a comp to Pedro Martinez and show how he can be successful in the big leagues, but also an inability to consistently attack hitters in the strike zone, leading to unfavorable counts and walks.

The chart below shows league-average plate-discipline numbers as well as Berrios’ own numbers over his first two starts.

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A.J. Pierzynski has played baseball for a very long time. He’s one of the few players to predate not only the PITCHf/x era (2007-present), but also the Baseball Info Solutions era (2002-present). He’s one of just six active players who played in the 1990s — the others are Carlos Beltran, Adrian Beltre, Bartolo Colon, David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez. They are all well celebrated and beloved players. Pierzynski does not fit in that group.

If you’re familiar with Pierzynski, you likely know that his opponents generally have not been all that fond of him. A Google search for “A.J. Pierzynski hate” turns up plenty of results. Rather than focus on that, I thought it would be fun to find some nice to things to say about Pierzynski.

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We continue to find ourselves very much within the “it’s too early to care about this statistic” period of the 2016 Major League Baseball season. Does your favorite player have a good WAR? How’s that young starter’s ERA? These are some examples of questions you probably shouldn’t be asking after 25 days. The data isn’t really more or less relevant than any other 20-game stretch; it’s just awfully hard to find meaningful patterns within any set of 20 games.

This is especially true for relief pitchers who have generally thrown seven to 10 innings at this point in the season. Unless a guy’s stuff is noticeably different or they appear injured, you’re simply not going to be able to use this early-season data to update your player evaluations in a significant way. What you can do during the early days of a new season is look for harbingers of change. Basically, is a player trying something new? A few weeks is enough to notice things, even if it isn’t enough time to speak forcefully about their likely impact.

With the appropriate amount of skepticism attached, let’s notice a thing about Minnesota Twins pitcher Trevor May.

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This hasn’t been a particularly fun season for Twins fans. Not only do they have an abysmal 7-14 record, but their young players — who are supposed to usher in a new era of Twins baseball — haven’t been performing. Top prospect Byron Buxton has been all sorts of terrible, minor-league performer Max Kepler hasn’t been much better, and Miguel Sano has underwhelmed (with the exception of a walk-off single last night) due to an alarmingly high strikeout rate.

Things are about to get a bit more fun for Twins fans, however, as top pitching prospect Jose Berrios is set to debut tonight against the Indians. Based on minor-league performance, the Puerto Rican righty looks like he’s more than ready for the show. He’s been carving up minor-league hitters for a few years now, and has been especially dominant since Minnesota promoted him to Triple-A last July. In 15 starts over that span, he’s struck out 28% of opposing hitters and walked just 6%, resulting in a 2.33 ERA and 2.78 FIP. All that and he’s not even 22 yet. Berrios was a consensus top-30 prospect heading into the year. John Sickels (ninth overall) was the high man on Berrios, while Baseball America (28th overall) was the low man.

Unsurprisingly, KATOH loves it some Berrios. With a projected 10.0 WAR over the next six seasons, he appeared 12th overall on KATOH’s top-100 prospect list. Among pitchers, he ranked second behind teenage uber-prospect Julio Urias. With a ~30% strikeout rate, Berrios has missed plenty of bats in the minors. Since minor -eague strikeout rate tends to be very predictive of big-league success, this bodes well for Berrios’ long-term future.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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Inevitably, after just a week and change’s worth of games, we find players on teams that have gotten off to slow starts saying things about how it’s just April, and win-loss records don’t matter too much. Outward optimism is sort of a prerequisite if you’re a professional athlete — whether you truly feel it or not — but there’s no doubt the majority of players who make these comments most likely believe them. It is early, and there’s plenty of time left in the season. But, as Jeff pointed out this week, the games matter! Playoff odds have changed. For the Braves, they never really had a shot to begin with, so starting 0-8 doesn’t change too much. But for the Minnesota Twins, their longshot campaign to make the playoffs this season has taken a faceplant.

Let’s talk about the Twins first, as they’re the big story here, and the American League Central is likely to be one of the most competitive divisions in baseball this season. Though our projections liked (and still like) Cleveland’s team this season, the Royals have declared war on those projections, and the Tigers and White Sox have built interesting teams with upside. That is true to some extent for the Twins as well: they’re building for the future, sure, but they also have some intriguing breakout candidates who could theoretically propel them into contention in a division that doesn’t have a clear-cut top dog. Those are the makings of a potentially great four- or five-way division battle throughout the season! Or else, that was the idea until now, eight games into the season, when the Twins find themselves 0-8. Here’s what that has done to their potential playoff odds (click on the image for a larger version):

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It’s funny — a couple months back, Jeff did a little study on the teams about which we’ve written the most and least. At the time of his study, we’d written fewer articles about the Twins than any other team, since 2008. And I’d bet a good chunk of those articles were about the Twins’ pitching staff, and their avoidance of strikeouts, or something similar along those lines. Well, here’s a new Twins article! And, guess what, it’s about strikeouts again!

Except, well:

I’m sorry it has to be this way, Minnesota.

In case it’s not clear, those aren’t just the top two names on the strikeout leaderboard of Twins batters with at least 20 plate appearances this season, those are the top two names on the strikeout leaderboard of all batters with at least 20 plate appearances this season. Miguel Sano is sixth. Eddie Rosario is 15th. Things haven’t gone particularly well for the Twins thus far. They’re 0-8.

And I suppose this post could be about Byron Buxton, or collectively all those names I named, but I don’t meant to pile on. Sano will be just fine, and his strikeout rate really isn’t that much higher than we’d expect it to be. Rosario just isn’t particularly interesting. Buxton’s struck out 13 times and walked zero in 25 plate appearances, and actually, that should probably have its own post, but I’ve already done all this research on Park, so this is what you’ve got for now. Someone will get to Buxton soon enough. Let’s talk about Byung-ho Park, who’s struck out exactly as often as he hasn’t.

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When Chris Colabello’s first ball in play this season, a line drive with a recorded exit velocity of 103 mph, went directly into the glove of opposing shortstop Brad Miller, it seemed a cruel yet fitting reminder that nothing is given at the start of a new season.

Not even for Colabello, who appears to have used a strong 2015 season to finally lock down a secure job in the major leagues. He produced offense at a level 42% above league average last year when controlling for park factors, and he did so for a playoff team, eventually forcing his way into more than the short side of a platoon with Justin Smoak. He’s not set to play every day for the Toronto Blue Jays this year, but he should have the larger share of a time-split at first.

He appears to have, at long last, made it. Assuming he can keep it up, that is, which few think is a certainty. For most of his baseball career, people have been looking for reasons why Colabello won’t succeed, even now that he’s doing so.

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