The Twins as the Orioles
In recent weeks, Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan have written about why the Minnesota Twins are unlikely to be the first-place Minnesota Twins much longer. Paul Molitor’s team is 31-21 (pending the outcome of today’s game), but for reasons outlined in the articles, a descent in the standings – possibly a steep one – is imminent.
Unless it isn’t. What if they continue to outperform their expectations and their peripherals? What if the Twins are this year’s Orioles?
There are similarities. Baltimore has made an art form out of winning close games and confounding skeptics, and that’s what Minnesota has been doing. Neither team is star-laden or in possession of an ace. Each has a manager whose attention to detail is borderline obsessive.
I brought up the Orioles comp to Molitor before today’s game, expecting him to pooh-pooh it. Instead, he lent credence to the idea that his team is somewhat akin to last season’s surprise AL East champs.
“I haven’t tried to compare how our club has been constructed, or how it’s playing, to other teams,” said Molitor. “But if I reflect on Baltimore last year, and the success they had, along with some really good players they match up well and aren’t a team that beats themselves. Buck is obviously one of the brighter managers in the game.”
Showalter shrewdly melds old-school and new-school, and Molitor is cut from the same cloth. The Twins skipper “believes in the gut now and then,” but stresses it is “foolish to ignore” analytic data. The team began shifting more last year when he joined the coaching stuff, and this season has seen an increase in both total shifts and effectiveness.
As for the Twins having won 11 one-run games and six two-run games, both Molitor and his stat-geek closer see reasons that sustainability could be plausible.
“Part of it is giving yourself a chance to win by having the right people in the right place,” said Molitor. “That’s whether it’s defensive metrics or the right pitchers at the right time. There is also the intangible of the makeup of your players and them knowing how to respond when games are on the line.”
“I know that our numbers don’t match our record, but every season there is a team that does something out of the ordinary,” said Glen Perkins, who leads the AL with 20 saves. “An example is the Cardinals when they set the record for (batting average) with runners in scoring position. They were probably a 90-win team and ended up being close to a 100-win team because they got hits when they needed to get hits. The regression didn’t happen as fast as it maybe could have, should have, would have, whatever. Actually, they didn’t regress.”
The 2015 Twins? Yes, they are likely to regress. Until they do, they’re a little like the Orioles, with a splash of Cardinals thrown in, and a fan base that can’t help but dream.
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
I like how smart Perkins is.
He’s smart, but he’s also informed. It’s especially fun because he’s a closer, who can’t gameplan like a starting pitcher and has to expect to come in to face some arbitrary point in the order. I’d love to know what he studies about the players on the opposing team at the start of each series, and what he reviews about his own performance.
I think the closer comparison may be that they’re a team that overperformed their talent level early in the year and then actually improved later in the year. The Twins have banked a lot of wins early and because of their awesome farm system can either call up guys or trade to improve in the second half.
The early 2014 Orioles were a below-average team that performed good/average in April/May/June and then became an above-average to great team later in the year. The 2015 Twins have the same potential.
If the As and the Astros switched their records in one run games, the As would be leading the ALW and the Astros would be in last place. Can anyone accurately predict teams’ one run game records for the remainder of the season, other than saying that they should be similar to their overall records? From what I’ve read on Fangraphs, the answer is no. That means that random variation has a large impact on the standings. I know this isn’t news. It just makes me a little skeptical when someone says that “Part of it is giving yourself a chance to win by having the right people in the right place.” A big part of it is just luck.
A big part of the success of many enterprises is luck. You don’t see many people jumping up to give luck credit when things are going well in any field.
Look at Facebook, some slightly better than Myspace product comes out before it, or Zuckerberg attends UC Berkley instead of an Ivy and maybe it doesn’t catch fire in the same way. The particular way many things in life instantiate themselves are happenstance, but you still have to put the work in to be in a position to profit from it.
A big part of how teams perform in one run games is due to how good of a bullpen a team has. The Astros have one of the best bullpens in baseball, while the A’s have one of the worst. The A’s have really only had one good reliever, while the Astros (and Twins) both have 3 great relievers. The difference in WPA between the Astros and A’s bullpen is 6.5 wins. While I don’t think the A’s will go 3-15 in their next 18 one run games, I also don’t think that they will be a .500 team in one run games for the rest of the season.
There’s a bit of a circular argument there, though. What makes us think the Astros have one of the best bullpens in baseball? Because they’ve done well in one-run games.
No. We think the Astros have one of the best bullpens in baseball because they’re second in the AL in ERA, first in FIP and xFIP. They’ve performed well above average in all games, so we expect them to perform well above average in one run games.