The Twins May Have Weakened a Weakness
Let’s talk about the Twins for a moment. No, you probably don’t want to talk about the Twins, I understand, but it’s Christmas Eve, and the eight or so of you who are unfortunate enough to be in an office right now will probably be happy to talk about something, I think. And the Twins, certainly, are something.
Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan took a look at projected 2015 team defenses, and within that piece was a list of teams that you wouldn’t really want to be included on:
Now, the three worst defensive teams, projected:
- Astros
- White Sox
- Twins
It’s difficult to dispute that from a Minnesota perspective, because while Jeff noted the obvious caveats of attempting to project defense, the 2014 Twins finished 29th in DRS, 24th in UZR/150, and 27th in Defense. One of the teams regularly behind them, Cleveland, will no longer have a left side of the infield that occasionally lined up as Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana. They’ll still be below-average, but they might not be a train wreck. The Twins? The Twins’ main non-pitching move this winter has been to import baseball’s worst regular defender from a year ago, Torii Hunter, and park him in right field.
Perhaps you can see where this is going, because seeing the Twins on the bottom of Jeff’s listing made me realize that I’ve written about this before. Last May, for ESPN, I wrote that the composition of the Twins had proven to be a very bizarre construct, in that a pitching staff that just did not miss bats was backed up by a defense that did not turns balls in play into outs. That issue was exacerbated by the fact that the pitching staff was full of flyballers (tied for the highest FB% in baseball at the time) and the outfield was a particular trouble spot, defensively. Mostly manned at the time by Chris Colabello, Sam Fuld, Chris Herrmann, and Jason Kubel, a bad outfield was doing a mediocre pitching staff few favors.
Of course, that was only seven or so weeks into the season, and the danger with any sort of analysis that early in the year is that making judgement calls based on small samples can easily and quickly turn around to bite you. (Hey, remember when Charlie Blackmon made the All-Star team?)
Now, with the retrospect of a full year of data, we can see the full impact. The 2014 Twins pitchers ended up with the fifth-highest flyball percentage in baseball and the 30th-best — or, you know, “last” — strikeout percentage, numbers you’re surely aware of. The 2014 Twins outfield ended up being the fifth-worst DRS unit that we have on record dating back to 2003:
Worst DRS outfields, 2003-2014
360) Dodgers, 2010, -76
359) Mariners, 2013, -70
358) Yankees, 2005, -66
357) Rockies, 2004, -51
356) Twins, 2014, -50
Last year’s top defensive DRS outfield, as you may have guessed, was the Royals, at +46. Yes, that’s a 96-run difference. Yes, the numbers are saying that defense alone in just the outfield was worth 10 wins between the two teams. If that sounds high, maybe it is, but then also think about Oswaldo Arcia, Josh Willingham, Kubel, Colabello, and friends; now think about Alex Gordon, Jarrod Dyson, and Lorenzo Cain. Maybe it’s too low. The unsurprising end result is that the team’s ERA-FIP — that is, a measure of how much a team’s runs allowed out-performed or under-performed fielding-independent metrics — was the second-highest of the last seven seasons:
Highest ERA-FIP difference, 2008-2014
1) Rockies, 2012, 0.63
2) Twins, 2014, 0.60
Pitch-to-contact pitching staff allows flyballs in front of an outfield that isn’t very good at catching flyballs ends poorly, the headline would read if anyone would run such a headline, and you probably already know most of that. It’s not necessarily my intention to rehash the last year so much as it is to provide the setup for the year to come. Surely, the Twins didn’t plan to have such a combination. Sometimes, the pieces just land that way. But then, we haven’t seen much this winter that indicates that they’re desperately trying to change that.
So far, the three moves the Twins have made have been to import Hunter, Ervin Santana, and Tim Stauffer. Each of the three moves is defensible in its own way, and Santana and Stauffer quickly become two of the team’s better strikeout pitchers, as depressing as that may sound. It’s just that not only is none of this reversing the trend of last year, it sure looks like it’s making it worse.
It’s difficult to be too hard on Hunter, of course, because he’s 39 years old. The expectation shouldn’t be that he’s going to be anything other than brutal in the outfield, and while you don’t really need a visual aid to compare last year’s worst right fielder to the best, I’ll show you the made/missed charts between Hunter and Jason Heyward anyway:
The point isn’t at all that Hunter should be as good as Heyward. The point is that he’s being asked to do something he’s no longer capable of doing, and on a team with the basically-positionless Kennys Vargas (as well as Joe Mauer), designated hitter time is going to be difficult for Hunter to come by.
That’s a big problem for a pitching staff that already has what StatCorner considers the worst regular 2015 AL catcher in pitch framing, Kurt Suzuki, to deal with, and the two additions, while again reasonable on their own terms, may be limited in what they can add. It’s true that Santana, once a noted flyballer, has regularly decreased his flyballing ways, finding himself just outside the top 50 last year.
However, as we discussed here last month, Santana’s GB% and FB% both decreased, and that’s not an issue only because his LD% shot up — it’s because a very nice-looking increase in strikeout percentage was nearly identical to the gain that pitchers get by moving from the AL to the NL, as he did. Back in the AL, expect that strikeout rate to drop somewhat. Balls that don’t miss bats have to go somewhere, and that’s into the field of play.
This would all seem to be a massive problem, though GM Terry Ryan doesn’t quite agree…
I saw [Hunter], I think, maybe seven games or so (in 2014),” Twins general manager Terry Ryan said Wednesday. “His defense for me was more than adequate. He’s not the type of guy that you’re going to say, ‘Oh, he can go over there and play center for a length of time,’ but I would guarantee you he could go out and play center field for a couple days and you wouldn’t really miss too much.”
“You can use the metrics or you can use the eye, and you should use both. In this instance, I think we’ve seen (Hunter) play probably 30-35 games as an evaluation process this year, and for the most part the lowest grade we had on him was average range. That’s pretty good.”
…and while we know that defensive metrics aren’t infallible and that major league teams likely have somewhat of a better handle on the data than we do, it’s hard to parse that as anything other than favorable PR for a returning team icon who was signed largely for his own PR. After all, if you look at the non-catcher defensive rankings for each Twins position on our depth charts, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture:
First base: Mauer (tied-20th)
Second base: Brian Dozier (15)
Shortstop: Danny Santana/Edwin Escobar (24)
Third base: Trevor Plouffe (27)
Left field: Arcia (26)
Center field: Aaron Hicks/Jordan Schafer (17)
Right field: Hunter (28)
You can quibble on the edges with some of those if you like. In particular, Plouffe feels far too low coming off a well-rated 2014, though he also had several poorly-rated seasons prior to that (and is coming off a broken left forearm). Maybe in your head, you move a few guys up or down a few spots. But other than right field, this is largely the same group that was ranked so poorly last year, and Hunter is hardly an improvement.
This isn’t a condition that can last forever. Byron Buxton is coming. Santana played mostly center last year, and he could always go back, though Paul Molitor has indicated that he regards Santana as his shortstop. Stauffer, at least, gets grounders, though his impact is limited as a reliever. Santana should allow slightly fewer flies than his predecessors, though Tommy Milone might give that right back. But it took just a few weeks into the 2014 season to see that the combination of pitching staff and defense, particularly outfield, was going to be a problem. It doesn’t look better now; it only looks worse, and since defense is generally cheap to buy, this isn’t a financial issue for a small-market team. For the only AL Central team that hasn’t positioned itself to try to make some noise in 2015, standing still is a just a step back.
Mike Petriello used to write here, and now he does not. Find him at @mike_petriello or MLB.com.
I’m one of the 8 unlucky people trapped in an office because I was massively sick earlier this week and used up my PTO. This is unrelated but well, it’s something. While delirious from a fever my wife was asking me questions. I was later told the conversation went something like:
Her: What can I get you/ do for you?
Me: Just do the Minnesota plan
Her: What?
Me: The Minnesota plan, like the Twins
Her: I don’t understand what you mean
Me: I don’t think they do either, the division is so stron…and I passed back out
Swear on my life this is a true story. Happy holidays!
I also swear on your life this is a true story.
Hey, maybe we got the same flu.
Always interesting to hear from family members the things I allegedly said “while delirious from a fever.”
It appears that you were actually more lucid than I was in recent days. It is kind of interesting though to be really feverish for a couple of days—sometimes I swear that I’m having an out-of-body experience.
Perhaps the GM of the Twins is having OBEs a little more often than he realizes, lol.
You have to wonder why the Twins let Ben Revere and Dernard Span leave. These were young ball players that were not expensive at the time. It’s a shame that with their new stadium for added revenue,they are still being cheap.This huge area will support a winner.
They traded Span and Revere because they believed that they got what their value was. The Twins knew we weren’t contending so they traded Span for Alex Meyer, a top 20 prospect, and Revere for Trevor May, who threw a lot of innings last year for the club, even though they weren’t mind blowing numbers, and Vance Worley who was coming off a very nice season but then tanked. With Buxton coming up through the system and then Eddie Rosario (hopefully!) right behind him to play LF I think this is just a short term problem when Arcia goes back to RF.
The Twins didn’t sign Torii Hunter to be who he was for the Twins in ’02 for example, but he definitely has value. I am in high school and I heard people at school who I have never heard talk about baseball in my life excited about Torii Hunter and saying how they wanted to go to games just to watch Torii Hunter. He is singlehandedly going to raise revenue for the Twins as people come back to watch him play. I know that he isn’t a sabermetric darling anymore, but with his clubhouse presence and the revenue increase he will provide value for the Twins, maybe just not on the field of play.
Although it sounds unbelievable, one must ask oneself: “What does Torii Hunter’s agent gain from lying about being in high school?”
I would disagree with the motion that Hunter makes the defense “worse”. Metrics or not I can’t accept he is a worse option than what they ran out there last year. I see Hunter as more a missed opportunity to significantly upgrade a weakness. Though considering the alternatives in free agency it wasn’t clear there existed an obvious upgrade. And factoring in Hunter’s expected offensive contributions he is an overall upgrade.
“I have a narrative and refuse to consider alternatives”
‘“I have a narrative and refuse to consider alternatives”’
Exactly.
Maybe Steve just feels the same way Hunter does. Basically that if you believe in them, you’ve never played the game and don’t know anything about the game. Should be an interesting conversation between Hunter and Perkins, because Perkins is a strong believer of advanced stats.
It’s not his job to care about stats, it’s his job to play baseball. Poorly, most likely, but who cares what he thinks about defensive metrics? I know for a fact that the writers on this site don’t care what Torii Hunter thinks about advanced statistics.
Yes, his job is to play baseball…and part of that is knowing as much info as you can. If your ego tells you that you’re a good defender and the stats, and even just any non-bias eyes, say you aren’t, then maybe instead of dismissing things that conflict with your ego, one should look into improving or doing whatever he can to imporve since his job is to be the best he can be right, not to be delusional about his abilities.
According to Zack Greinke, the job of most great players is to ignore as much of that information as they can. http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/09/04/zack-greinke-there-were-guys-i-played-with-that-were-so-stupid-that-theyre-really-good/
And then there’s Sam Fuld.
Good for Grienke. One man thinks it, it must be true. Perkins uses it and has said it’s helped his game. He doesn’t think about it while on the mound, but it’s helped him. And me pointing out Perkins saying that also proves nothing.
There is absolutely no excuse to not use every available means to improve at your job. One likely shouldn’t dwell on during a game, but dismissing info as worthless, like Hunter does, makes no sense.
I 100% agree with you that they should. I just don’t think they do, and that’s ok too. Let the Perkins’ and Fulds of the world use them to their advantage, and be rightfully lauded for it.
I care that defensive stats are properly used. To say Hunter is the worst defensive RF is laughable. He is, at worst and only if the stats are accurate on s one year sample, the worst defensive RF of players who played the vast majority of innings for his team last year. That is not a large number of players.
But by all means respond to people who have some skepticism and interpret stats slightly different than you with lame assumptions and ad hominems.
yeah, if it was only one year and if he wasn’t turning 40, I’d be skeptical too. Neither of those things are true though. He turns 40 next season and he had -10 runs saved in 2013. It’s as if you don’t think there’s a correlation between getting old, in baseball terms, and defense getting worse.
To the Greinke/Perkins discussion, maybe advanced metrics help some guys alot while hurting others, alot. Remember Greinke suffers from an anxiety disorder and the additional pressure of the media/fans/stats etc. is probably counter productive to him. As someone with a moderate to sever anxiety issue anywhere you can alleviate pressure, even if it means ignoring truths, can often lead to a net gain…
“There is absolutely no excuse to not use every available means to improve at your job.”
Exactly what percentage of the US population does this? I know a lot of very professional people, and am myself a highly sought after and highly rewarded consultant. I can think of zero people I would describe as “using every available means to improve at their job”.
That said none of us make millions of dollars at our job. But still this seems an odd standard.
I agree Hunter is delusional, and he would be better off if he was not. But the idea that everyone r even a few people out there are just all about professional improvement is laughable.
What exactly do you think Hunter could improve if he believed strongly in defensive stats? Would that give him more range?
His job is to play baseball. Fangraphs writers’ jobs are to analyze that play. How Hunter views that analysis won’t have any effect on the Twins WL record.
Your beef should be with Ryan, not Hunter.
Oh, I definitely have issues with Ryan too. Anyone who can look at how our OF played defense last year and say they weren’t that bad needs to have his judgment questioned big time.
False. Hunter is better defendively than Colabello and Parmelee. He is bad but was still good enough to play in the field almost every game. Since he kept playing he was penalized with negative statistics that the part time players he is now replacing didn’t log enough innings to have a worse cumulative number – unless you really feel the need to make conclusions based on small sample sizes of defensive stats.
That’s why the main point is that the Twins didn’t get worse, they more missed an opportunity to upgrade.
The fact that the Tigers kept running him out there on a regular basis doesn’t mean he was actually good enough to do so. He was the worst defensive RF in the game and he turns 40 next season. From a defensive point of view only I’d rather have Parmelee in RF than Hunter.
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that the fact that Colabello and Parmelee didn’t get enough defensive innings to accumulate the same counting stats as Hunter in the OF don’t make them better.
They got a -15 UZR/150 from their primary RFs last season.
Hunter has never been worse than that in a significant sample.
The only way to think that Hunter will be significantly worse than their RFs were last season is if you (idiotically) hold a single season of UZR as a gospel indication of true talent.
yes, it would be idiotic to figure a guy who has had a sharp defensive decline in 2013 and then again in 2014 will still be bad in his age 40 season.
Yes, I agree, provided that all you have is a single season of UZR.
It would be deeply idiotic to hold that as gospel.
There’s a reason Hunter’s projected as a -5. I’d expect a -10, personally, but that’s still a sight above what they ran out there last season.
I watched Hunter every day for the last two years and he is an upgrade on no one. One of the worst defensive OF I’ve ever watched*.
* = age 38-39 Hunter only, I know he used to be good.
Oh, he’s a terrible defensive OF at this point. I’m just saying that he’s probably better than Colabello and Parmelee, both of whom were 1Bs.
yeah, if it was only one year and if he wasn’t turning 40, I’d be skeptical too. Neither of those things are true though. He turns 40 next season and he had -10 runs saved in 2013. It’s as if you don’t think there’s a correlation between getting old, in baseball terms, and defense getting worse.
Any reader that believes a writer doesn’t use “narrative” is challenged. “I prefer incoherent non sequiturs mixed with numbers.” The anti-narrative rant really sounds stupid.
It’s going to be worse. Arcia was barely passable as a right fielder and this move pushes him into left field while replacing him with the worst right fielder in MLB. Center field isn’t going to be positive, either.
The first paragraph completely sums up my day. Just happy to see a new post of some sort.
Ditto here. Basically, we’re legally required to be open, and we have minimum staffing levels. And I’m basically last in line in terms of seniority. So yay to working the day before and after Christmas/Thanksgiving/New Years/etc.
The many of us waiting around airport terminals for connecting flights say hi to the 8 stuck at work. Thanks for posting stuff to keep us occupied.
Hi! Happy to help.
Hello from one of the 8 stuck at work. I can hit the road in 30 minutes. Until then, I’m happy to chuckle at the Twins.
I’m pretty sure “Weakening a Weakness” means making the weakness less prevalent…
Yeah, I’m one of the eight.
It was never about this year for the Twins, so the goodwill generated by Hunter’s one year contract outweighs the fact that he makes a bad team slightly worse, and many of these guys will be long gone before MN’s window opens.
I’m guessing you’re under the assumption that a good chunk of the Twins prospects are going to be very good when history shows that’s unlikely. It’d be nice if they could start by staying healthy. It’d also be nice if the pitcher (Meyer) they traded Span for would get promoted to the Twins sometime soon. For being such a supposedly great prospect, it’s sure been a long wait.
I have a hard time believing that window is actually anywhere near close to opening.
Good point. That makes this year especially irrelevant, doesn’t it?
And means that a non-Twins fan flooding a comment board about an irrelevant signing is especially in need of something better to do with his life.
Yes, somehow I’m a non-Twins fan who has been a huge fan of the team for 30 years with a name of handle of ThePuck. You’re doing your typical childish slamming of people who say things that are true that you don’t like. You’re a genius.
The Twins basically paid 10M for nostalgia and a nice smile (barf).
along with a racist, a homophobe, and a guy who believes in discrimination.
If I wasn’t clear…those are additional descriptions of the same guy that the Twins paid 10M for nostalgia and a nice smile.
I see a Hunter fanboy is out in full force. Who cares what kind of human being he is as long as he used to be good for the Twins once. Discrimination is no big deal. It’s perfectly okay to use his fame to support the suppression of a whole group of people’s rights because, hey, he’s just a 39 year old from Arkansas…so it’s okay he’s like that. Wasn’t that the same kind of thinking that was used to justify people not wanting black people to have voting rights or rights of any kind?
At least Hunter had the guts to say what he felt publicly. He is probably just staying true to his religious upbringing. I mean, to assume that professional athletes have intelligent, enlightened views on anything is asinine. If you start submitting athletes to your politically correct litmus test you should just quit being a fan. That said, I would pay to see Ted Nugent eaten alive by a grizzly bear.
Yeah, it was brave to have the guts to say it…hiding his homophobia by invoking the religion card. Then be a complete coward and not only avoid a question about supporting a candidate for governor, but slam the reporter when he was asked about it. Why didn’t he own his comments and answer without getting all defensive, being the brave man he is?
Brave…I’m not sure we have the same definition
So, what other great qualities do you have that you want to share with us, aside from a candid and oft self-touted abhorrence of bigotry and bad fielding?
First off, who cares what his political views are. I would be far more surprised if a 40 year old man from Arkansas was supportive of gay marriage. Second, a racist? Must have missed that one.
Oh, the Latino thing. How is that racist?
yeah, I suppose calling a whole group of people black imposters isn’t really racist. my bad.
I see a Hunter fanboy is out in full force. Who cares what kind of human being he is as long as he used to be good for the Twins once. Discrimination is no big deal. It’s perfectly okay to use his fame to support the suppression of a whole group of people’s rights because, hey, he’s just a 39 year old from Arkansas…so it’s okay he’s like that. Wasn’t that the same kind of thinking that was used to justify people not wanting black people to have voting rights or rights of any kind?
I’m not saying I agree with his views, I don’t, but you can’t force people to change, and I choose not to let that get under my skin. It must be a hard life for you worrying about what everyone else’s beliefs are. When the time comes that gay marriage is a non-issue – and it will – he will have to reconcile his stance as being backwards. Until that day though, what do you expect from him? Would you like to have a conversation with him and change his mind?
I don’t worry about what everyone else’s beliefs are. I get concerned when a celebrity uses his celebrity status to support discrimination. And then he has the nerve to get upset when he gets called on it, because apparently it’s only okay for him to use his celebrity as a baseball player to support a candidate for office by doing commercials…as long as he is not asked about doing so later.
He’s a baseball player, not an intellectual. Nobody cares what the thinks, they just care about what he does on the field.
‘Nobody cares what the thinks, they just care about what he does on the field.’
Johnston, what if a player, using his celebrity as a baseball player, said he was supporting a governor for re-election because the governor would fight to make sure people could only marry within their own race and/or within their own religion? Would people care then, or would it then be okay to have an issue with him using his celebrity to actively push for discrimination?
That’s not “politics” it’s bigotry. Bigotry doesn’t have a party affiliation.
It gets me when people describe equal rights movements as politics. Yes, more conservatives than liberals are not supportive of gay rights but there are plenty of conservatives who are.
Being an abolitionist wasn’t a political affiliation.
Human rights aren’t political positions. You’re on the side that wants dignity respect and rights for everyone as the default human condition or you’re a bigot. Period.
So, actually, that does really matter to me.
The Hispanic thing i MAY be willing to cut him some slack and believe that was just a terribly ineloquent and poorly thought out statement.
Probably not but i can try.
The other stuff is just being a bigot and it should be pointed out and condemned at every opportunity
Nice article but it’s Eduardo Escobar not Edwin Escobar
Stauffer has explicitly stated he wants to start and he’s an excellent long reliever but a terrible starting pitcher.
Happy Holidays!
“Stauffer has explicitly stated he wants to start….”
Bullshit. But, you know, keep feeding your narrative. http://m.twins.mlb.com/news/article/104823494/minnesota-twins-sign-pitcher-tim-stauffer-to-1-year-deal
“I’m pretty open and flexible to do whatever,” Stauffer said. “I’ve been able to bounce back really well from pitching multiple days in a row. So whatever they have a need for, I feel like I can do it for them.”
Funny this article comes out now. I did something the other day that meshes well with this article. Its pretty nice timing. I took a look at MLB 2014 data and split it into two parts, pitching/defense, and hitting/offense. The average MLB team had 61 poor pitching/defensive games this year, and plays in 22 slugfest games, winning 11 of those contests. So this means that 50 games, net of slugfests won, are lost by pitching and defense. The flip side is that poor offensive efforts are only responsible for 31 losses a year on balance. I defined a slugfest as both opponents scoring 5+ runs in a game, and ‘your team’ whoever you are rooting for, wins in a slugfest
win, or obviously, loses the game in a slugfest loss. Now on to the Twins, they had 82, count’em, 82 – a guaranteed losing season – games that contained either a poor pitching/defensive effort. They managed to win 10 slugfest games out of the 30 they played in (20 slugfest losses), leaving a net of 72 losses directly attributable to poor pitching/defensive efforts. What’s the big deal? Well the 82 poor P/D, 72 net losses due to P/D, and 20 slugfest losses were all the worst/highest in MLB 2014. The Twins 10 slugfest wins, 16.5 runs scored average, 165 runs total, the 20 slugfest losses, 294 runs total, 14.7 runs scored average between the Twins vs whatever opponent. The Twins actually had one of the better offenses in MLB, with only 20 games lost being the responsibility of the offense, rather than the typical 31, the lowest in MLB, but it just didn’t matter much. The other stat I created was answering a hypothetical question: if an MLB team could win every game, going 162-0, winning every single game by 1 run, how many runs would they need to score in order to do so? The answer for the Twins: 939, the average in MLB 2014 = 820, The Twins required the 2nd most runs behind the Colorado Rockies in 2014 who needed 980 runs. Incidently, the Rockies had 20 slugfest losses too, and played in 32 slugfest games, the most in MLB, the Twins were 2nd with 30. I plan to ultimately split the data in 3 parts, Pitchers and Catchers defense, fielding defense positions 3-9, and offense/hitting. So 20 losses due to Hitting for the Twins, 72 due to pitching and D. Gives you a 60-92 record.
oops 70-92 record, mistyped.
Hey that’s some interesting stuff there. My email is brentsbentworld@gmail.com. if you finish this and post it on a blog or write it up is be interested in checking out out. Not sure if it will work but it sounds…. Interesting. Email me when you finish it if you can.
Terry Ryan has come out and said he doesn’t believe the Twins defense was that bad last year. He puts the problem almost all on the pitching. The pitching isn’t going to get significantly better until the defense is addressed, especially since the kind of staff you’ve had for years focusing on putting the ball in play more than any other team in the game. Picking the worst defensive RF in baseball last year who will turn 40 during he season doesn’t help the situation.
I would agree with Terry Ryan, however most of what a pitcher does is defensive in nature anyway, and part of the 3 true outcomes, trying to increase your strikeout rate, lower the walk rate, and trying not to give up as many homers.
you agree the Twins defense wasn’t that bad last year? I’m sorry, I watched almost every game and can’t for the life of me figure how you could believe that. And certainly, the metrics don’t agree with you either.
Well, if the Twins’ pitchers had struck out every batter, the Twins’ defense wouldn’t have been so bad.
See, it’s really all the pitchers’ fault.
Hypothetically: A pitcher could go out and throw 81 consecutive strikes, striking out 27 consecutive batters, and still lose the game as the catcher drops some third strikes and lets people steal 2nd, 3rd, and home.
I place the likelihood of this in a game as right up their with a pure TTO staff that doesn’t need a defense behind them in a year.
From an interview with Terry Ryan, excerpted from the excellent Twins Offseason Handbook from TwinsDaily (http://twinsdaily.com/store/product/4-2015-minnesota-twins-offseason-handbook/):
PH: Some of the on-field stuff over the year here… outfield defense, particularly the corner outfield spots, seems to have been the worst unit in baseball. Do you have plans to address that area to help your pitching staff?
TR: Well, one of the positions, Willingham was in left, so I guess you are alluding to that. Willingham, whatever he got to he caught. Center field, Santana helped us, thank God he arrived on the scene because ultimately he developed into a usable center fielder that hadn’t played there much. And the guy in right has got a reputation for being in the lineup for his bat and he’s a work in progress. So we’ll be looking for outfield but I’m not as concerned about the outfield defense as maybe it sounds like you are. Yeah, we got a lot of work to do.
PH: You don’t think your pitchers are concerned about it?
TR: Pitchers should be concerned about defense, yeah. Pitchers ought to worry about themselves.
PH: What did Jordan Schafer show you when he came in here?
TR: I think he came in here and did a nice job. He fulfilled all the things that we lost when we traded Fuld. You didn’t mention Fuld, but Fuld was pretty good here. And Schafer was pretty good here. And Hicks was pretty good here. And some of those guys played corner outfield so I’m not real sure that you’re going to tell me we had the worst outfield in the game — I don’t agree with.
This is why I was mad when the Twins traded both Span and Revere. To be sure, the return was good, but the Twins left themselves with no center fielder. Hoping that Aaron Hicks would work out was foolish (but hindsight is 20-20). And that’s why last year we had too many instances of infielders in the outfield. I’ll never forget watching Bartlett flounder in left field. I can’t wait for Buxton to take over center.
The verdict is very much in limbo status as to whether or not the return for Span was good. We should probably see Meyer actually play in the majors for a bit before deciding that. Revere isn’t much of a player, so if May turns out to be a serviceable starter or pretty good reliever, the Twins will have done well.
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=fld&lg=all&qual=300&type=1&season=2014&month=0&season1=2014&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=25,a
Several names on that list of the worst defenders surprised me.. mostly first basemen. Seems I was mistaken in thinking of Loney and Hosmer and Freeman as being above-average defensively. Dexter Fowler also.
UZR is well known for not being able to accurately account for a lot of the glovesmanship that goes into being a 1B.
Part of that us that the local sports casters always think that the home team 1b is really, really good with his glove. But they can’t all be the best at that.
My ballplayers are the best ballplayers and I won’t hear otherwise!
That table is factoring the positional adjustment, though. So many 1st baseman appear not necessary because they were terrible defenders, but because they were bad defenders at the easiest defensive position.
Ex: James Loney is 11th despite having a -1.8 UZR/150. He was a slightly below-average defender, but because it was at 1B, he was rated as the 11th worst defender overall.
You can’t really blame the twins fip era difference on their defense. Their rotation consists of some of the most well known fip underperformers in all of baseball.
Seriously. Ricky Nolasco is like the poster boy for the “FIP-based WAR is silly” faction.
This article makes me think Hughes was a true boss last season. How on earth did he overcome throwing to the worst pitch-framer in front of the fifth-worst defense?
Well, his FIP was 2.65 while his ERA was 3.52. He would have gotten a lot more national attention if he didn’t have a defense that kept his ERA over 3.50.
FIP says he was the 6th best starter in the majors last year, but his ERA says he was 42nd. While I’m not sure I’d say he was as high as 6th, there certainly weren’t 41 starting pitchers better than him.
So the Twins had poor outfield defense and they added a poor defensive outfielder. Yeah, I think they may have weakened what was a weakness for them. Great analysis, Petriello. All those charts with data basically selected at random also convincingly settled this controversial topic.
Also I am a d!ck hole.
And have a micropenis :((
#SadChristmas
The disconnect the Twins have between their pitching and defense is infuriating. They’re convinced that the pitching staff woes have been due to having terrible pitchers instead of acknowledging that the defense is terrible. Remember, this is the same team that got rid of the elite J.J. Hardy because he didn’t pass the eye test.
Well, they have been dead last in strikeouts I think every year since 2011, so I’m pretty sure the pitchers had something to do with it. Even the Royals defense probably wouldn’t have kept their ERA much under 5. Everyone not named Phil sucks.
“he could go out and play center field for a couple days and you wouldn’t really miss too much”
“a couple days” means 2 games. There are folks who hear or say the word “couple” and cogitate that as “few” or “several”, thus 2-and-not-too-many-more; I don’t know how prevalent this is, I just know that a significant portion of those who I ask about their apparent use of it confirm that’s what they mean. I would have thought that ‘not-too-many-more’ must have some upper limit, but when I ask, turns out the same folks who use it that way also don’t envision a specific upper limit.
In theory, in a pinch a given team could slot a minor league LH first baseman into a regular outfield assignment for, oh, 6 weeks or more, and remain competitive.
Well that certainly was a lot of words.
I guarantee if you had this stupid metrics back in the 80s it show that Puckett and Gladden and Blyleven were horrible players as well guess what two of those in HOF. These metrics don’t mean crap. They were just invented for agents to pat they’re fat pockets
Um…you do realize that newfangled metrics, perhaps more than any other single cause, helped to get Blyleven elected to the HOF, right?
This is depressing, yet one thing keeps coming up in the back of my head. Hunter was a golden glove CENTERFIELDER. Is it possible that he has just gotten so accumulated to roaming center that the corner slot seems foreign to him? I’ve watched a multitude of Torii’s games after leaving the Twins, and a lot of his fielding mishaps come across as coming from a person placed in the wrong position. Is Terry on to something? Obviously Torii doesn’t posses the same acceleration that he once had, yet, from my own previous baseball experience, playing right field is a HELL of a lot more different than playing center. Is it possible that Torii could post a positive metric if moved back to center? I’ve been a Twins fan for the past 20 years and believe me, you don’t just completely fall off from what his previous performance was. Torii has stayed physically fit (unlike Andruw Jones), and would it be that far fetched to roll with him back in center until Buxton takes over? I’ve always felt that Torii got forced from his position and has yet to learn the RF. Let the 40 year old have a chance and see what he can do. If he can’t, then the hell with it
He’s played 601 games in right, and been a regular there for 4.5 seasons. This isn’t about inexperience.