(KWMN)- As Major League Baseball nears the All-Star break, the Twins sit not-so comfortably atop the AL Central.
At 47-38, they hold a 4.5 game lead on the Guardians and six games ahead of most people’s pre-season division champion White Sox.
For a team that didn’t carry much weight in pre-season expectations, they’ve so far proved that they are contenders, if not front-runners, for the division crown.
But, even at 47-38 and crushing their pre-season projections, one could argue that this team should and could be better. The hitting is there, as it has been in years past, ranking in the top 10 in the majors in AVG, home runs, and RBIs. Yet one thing that’s plaguing this team and could be the reason a division title is their ceiling, is relief pitching.
How bad is it?
According to baseball-reference.com, The Twins rank 2nd to last in the league with a save percentage (how often a pitcher gets the save if the opportunity is there) of 51%, they’re 3rd to last with 17 (!!) blown saves and they only rank ahead of two teams above .500 in bullpen ERA. They’re also 3rd to last in inherited score percentage, which is a fancy baseball metric that measures the difference between runs scored on starting pitchers versus relief pitchers. For the Twins, more (much more) runs against are coming in relief.
To further put those numbers in perspective, of the 38 games the Twins have lost this season, 44% of them came after the Twins were leading after the starting pitcher exited the game. Split the number of games they’ve blown in half and they’d be tied with the Astros for the second-best record in Major League Baseball.
As bad as those numbers are, they have a 4.5-game lead in the division and are nine games above .500. But no one cares about a pennant flying in centerfield that reads ‘AL Central Division Champions’. Fans only want to see one that reads ‘World Series Champions’. It’s no secret that a team needs great pitching to find that success in October. Not just great starting pitching, but great relief pitching too. Since ’09 only three teams have won a World Series that ranked in the bottom HALF in the majors in save percentage (’19 Nationals, ’13 Red Sox, ’11 Cardinals) and those teams weren’t nearly as bad as the Twins have been in relief.
What makes this such a hard pill to swallow is Taylor Rogers. Rogers was traded from the Twins right before the season began to the Padres for starting pitcher Chris Paddack and relief pitcher Emilio Pagan. Paddack can’t escape the IL and Pagan has been nothing more than a disappointment. Pagan boasts an abysmal 5.34 ERA and has blown the 2nd most saves in the majors at five. Rogers, on the other hand, is having one of his best seasons, ranking 2nd in the majors in saves and is 11th in save percentage among all relief pitchers with at least 10 saves.
Of course, Hindsight is 20/20, and a healthy Chris Paddack does make this trade look a lot better but the biggest problem with the Twins is and has been relief pitching, not starting pitching. It’d be nice to still have Rogers on the team.
With all that being said, the numbers should naturally improve. With more games, the percentage of saves will rise and the number of blown saves won’t look as bad. That is based on the assumption that this atrocious pace of bad relief pitching doesn’t continue. On a postive note, the Twins are a lot better than most expected them to be, but if a young and budding team like the Twins really wants people to start taking them seriously and they want to go deep into October, fixing their relief pitching is step one.
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