OtB Quick Links (09.30.09)

We (John Bonnes, Nick Nelson, Seth Stohs and myself) are putting the finishing touches on the second TwinsCentric offering that should be available shortly after the season ends.  This will be a beast of a book, encompassing all the decisions and pratfalls of being in the Twins GM position this offseason.  As opposed to the first foray into the e-book market, the TwinsCentric Trade Deadline Primer, this publishing will be available in both tree-saving e-book form as well as an easily transportable hard-copy made only from evil trees.  Check in over at TwinsCentric website or the TwinsCentric Facebook page for further details on the forthcoming book.  Because of this project, content here has been sparse.  For now, gnaw on some links and tidbits until tonight's game three showdown:

Those of us watching at home would notice that the turnover at Comerica appeared a little light.  Detroit Free Press columnist Drew Sharp questioned Tigers' fans fortitude during this October-like baseball in September.   

ESPN's Jerry Cransick fawns all over Justin Verlander's 129-pitch outing last night.  Taking a look at his speed graph, you'll notice that Verlander was not only very good at altering his velocity, able to go from a low of 78 to a high of 99-mph:

I do believe in the use of flexible yet moderate pitch counts prevent injuries.  In the same way you wouldn't red-line your engine on a cross-country vacation, pitchers need the throttle taken up every so often.  Verlander has had three-straight starts with at least 126-pitches and a minimum of 120 in six of his last ten outings.  Yes, Jim Leyland likes to elude to Verlander's strong frame and conditioning however that does not necessarily shield from overuse and throwing when tired.  The Twins' manager was certainly in awe as well. "There were innings where we didn't have much of a chance," Ron Gardenhire said. "And, he was still winging it at 98 after 120-some pitches. That guy's a stud."  What is frequently mistaken as being studily, is known as a pitcher's "dead cat bounce".  The dead cat bounce is a finance term that means as something approaches a decline or recession, there will be a quick uptick before dropping back down.  If that doesn't help, imagine dropping a cat out of a skyscraper and then seeing the feline smash the ground, only to bounce back up a few feet before coming to rest in a bloody heap.  Got it?  Applying that theory to a pitcher, we find that around 100-pitches, a his velocity declines.  Likewise, at the 96-pitch mark, Verlander was no longer throwing as hard has he did from pitch number 50 forward.  Then around pitch number 120, he's rearing back and firing 98-mph peas.  Verlander was most likely fatigued.  His arm was no longer able to sustain an effortless fastball like he did from 50-100, but was now reaching back to gain that added velocity, working against his muscles natural instincts that say he should be finished.  It is under these circumstances that shoulder and arm injuries begin to occur.                

The debate between whether Ron Gardenhire is a legit candidate for Manager of the Year or the largest impediment to becoming the a post-season lock (personally, I believe it is the former rather than the latter) but Yahoo!Sports Jeff Passen undoubtedly believes that Gardy's command has been a central reason why the Twins are still in this race.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Dejan Kovacevic says that the Pirates can on a little strong in their efforts to sign Dominican super-prospect, 16-year-old shortstop Miguel Angel Sano, that Pittsburgh's aggressive courtship drove Sano right into the arms of the Minnesota Twins.  "I'm very thankful to get this chance to sign with the Twins," Sano said. "I'm going to work very hard to try to get to the majors in two years."  With the current lack of system depth at short, Sano does have the opportunity to make a meteoric rise, however, with $3.5 million invested, the Twins will handle him with care.  Nick Nelson takes an in-depth look at what the signing means to this organization.

During the Twins visit to Canada a few weeks ago, you may have noticed two Umpires sitting in the front row in Toronto emulating all of the motions of a real umpire on the FSN broadcast.  Baseball Digest Daily's Matt Sisson reports that the duo, Tim Williams and Joe Farrell, have had quite a bit of success with their bit.  As a day job, the pair work as traders on the Toronto Stock exchange but acquired the official umpire equipment after running into real umpires at a steakhouse.  Since then, they've been guests at Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium and now, Fenway.

Strib columnist Jim Souhan is right, the Twins are right back were we started from but with fewer games. 

At SI.com, Joe Posnanski looks at the Twins-Tigers series and declares "m'eh."

John Dewan releases his MVP winners based upon Total Runs.  (Spoiler: It's not Joe.)

Charley Walters informs us that Ron Coomer is potential yet another former Twins first baseman to own a pub-restaurant in the Target Field neighborhood.  

Starting with strikes big for Twins

This was not how the Twins rotation was supposed to look come September.

 

Back in April, the prevailing assumption among Twins fans was that a combination of Scott Baker, Francisco Liriano and Kevin Slowey would be headlining any sort of playoff push, acting as the key ingredients to the must-win series.  The year certainly has not played out as scripted.  Flash forward to the season’s final full month where one is post-operative (Slowey), one is battling to regain his rotation spot (Liriano) only because it became abundantly clear that a kid who started the year in AA was over his head and the other is Scott Baker, who has been as advertised.  Replacing Liriano and Slowey is Carl Pavano, who was left-for-dead in Cleveland (wasn’t he the one that - almost - no one in the Twin Cities wanted?), and the other, Brian Duensing, has made just eight starts in double-decker stadiums.

 

Yes, the threesome has gone 6-3 with a 2.92 ERA in 13 September starts but this is a month that is hard to gauge true performance.  A large swath of teams have checked out of the Hotel Pennant Race and provide innings for guys that were taking buses through Appalachia at the beginning of the summer.  The Cleveland Indians are one such club.  Since the beginning of the month, the last place Tribe has rotated in members of both the CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee trades.  Pitcher Carlos Carrasco, a member of the Phillies until this past trade deadline, had his fourth start which exemplifies this.  After making most of his previous two years of starts in Lehigh Valley and Reading, the wayward Indians allowed the 22-year-old to get some on-the-job training against the Detroit Tigers.  Predictably, after three decent innings, the Tigers eventually got to the youngster, denting him for four runs in five innings and walked away with a one-run victory and a full three game lead over the Twins.

 

Thanks to the division-heavy schedule, games against playoff-ready teams like New York, Los Angeles and Boston seemingly transacted eons ago, leaving the soft underbellies of Chicago, KC and Cleveland remaining.   The only challenge left is the tough, chewy meat of the Tigers sandwiched between two Wonder Bread weekends against the Royals.  To tame the Tigers, the Twins will unleash that trio of Duensing  (9/29), Pavano (9/30) and Baker (10/1) in Detroit for the final three games of the four-game series.   Again:  Perkins Nouveau, Sneery McSneerson and Big Spot Scott.

 

What Twins fans can cling to is the fact that these three have thrown strikes - especially that all-important FIRST STRIKE.  Yes, Bert Blyleven yammers on about the significance of that first-pitch strike during broadcasts but what does that actually do?  

 

Month of September	First  Pitch Strike %
Baker	69.7
Pavano	68.4
Duensing	60.3
League Average	58.2

 

For those that are unfamiliar, the difference between starting 0-1 and 1-0 is night-and-day.  Nah, that’s not even a good comparison.  It really should be two incomparable items, like night-and-pants.  For instance, when American League hitters fall behind in the count 0-1, they tend to hit .640 OPS.  That turns hitters essentially in Tigers’ offensively inept Gerald Laird (.637 OPS).  That is a manageable prospective.  Meanwhile, when the pitch flints outside the strike zone, hitters average a .863 OPS after the count starts with a ball.  This gives hitters the opportunity to hit like Jim Thome did for the Sox (.864 OPS). 

Baker, Pavano and Duensing have excelled in this arena, jumping on hitters and holding them to a .270 batting average this month thanks to their strike zone aggression.  Conversely, part of the reason Jeff Manship scuffled so much in his four September starts was his inability to get ahead of hitters (a 43.2 first-strike percent) and wound up posting a .950 OPS.  His most recent outing was brutal in that context.  This has left the door open for the return of Francisco Liriano, who since his August start in Texas, has struck out six in 5 2/3 innings.  Fear not, as Liriano, in his limited duties, is right behind Baker and Pavano in first pitch strikes in September (his 68 percent this month is far better than his year average of 55 percent).  If the lefty can maintain this control, he gives the Twins a fourth strong starter to enter the final week with. 

The Igniter.

When Michael Cuddyer shot John Danks’ first offering of the sixth inning over the right-center field wall in Chicago -- lifting Minnesota to a 6-to-2 lead -- the home run was the 12^th of such leadoff bombs for the Twins right fielder.  Just two innings earlier, the righty had tagged the White Sox’s southpaw for a double past the diving Scott Podsednik in center to open that inning, only to score moments later on Brendan Harris’s double play ball to short. 

 

While his early season struggles with runners-in-scoring-position have been exhaustively debated, Cuddyer produced well as the first Twin to bat in an inning for the duration of the season.  In 135 leadoff plate appearances, Cuddyer is hitting .328/.378/.720 with 12 HRs, 11 2Bs and 1 3B by far one of the best hitters on the team under this situation.  In addition being on base in 38 percent of those plate appearances and driving himself in 12 times, he has come around to score in 16 other occasions.  Understandably, leading off an inning presents less of an opportunity for scrutiny then folding under an RBI-condition but beginning a scoring drive should be no less celebrated then eventually scoring the run itself. 

 

What do we make of this in understanding Cuddyer’s contributions?  For the better-half of the season, Cuddyer had floundered when faced with an RBI situation (although he has improved threefold since the beginning of the month) but managed to sustain a rather torrid output when there were no runners on base (.962 OPS).  What’s more is that he did even better starting an inning (1.098 OPS).  Are we to believe that Cuddy folds under pressure?

 

Baseball happens in a series of vacuum situations that we like to analyze, evaluate and segment.  We do so even with the foreknowledge that these events happen in such a tiny statistical bubble that it is nearly impossible to properly label the results as anything other than a sample-size fluke.  For instance, Delmon Young has hit .268/.292/.385 for the balance of the season.  However, position a runner in scoring position for him (which has happened 97 times in 2009) and Young suddenly has turned into a .310/.333/.437 hitter.  How did that happen?  Does he thrive under pressure?  Did testosterone and endorphins overtake his body and helped him concentrate all that much more in order to plate that all-important ribbie?  Is there an aroma that Young could smell when a runner was on base, as Mike Redmond suggested in 2006, that alerted him to try more?  Or does Delmon Young just enjoy getting his name in the paper and therefore tries just a little bit harder when he can be the hero? 

 

Some of that could be true, I suppose.  I’ve never taken a whiff from the batter’s box at the Metrodome with Joe Mauer dancing off of third.  The reality is that the outcome of such small sample sizes fluctuates wildly from year-to-year and the element of luck is ever-present.  In The Book, the analysts concluded that it takes 600 plate appearances to appropriately conclude a trend to be true.   These 30-to-150 plate appearances a year with a runner in scoring position or leading off an inning does not provide an accurate depiction of the hitter.  Yes, better hitters might hold a better batting line with RISP but in the same vein, a bad hitter can dink-and-doink a handful of hits and become a .300 hitter in those circumstances as well.  That said it is far more probable that Delmon Young is a .677 OPS hitter overachieving by 100 points with RISP because of his plate appearance totals rather than the other way around.         

 

Going back to Cuddyer’s explosive performance as a leadoff hitter, his condition is much of the same as Young’s RISP numbers.  The right fielder is hitting a massive 243 OPS points higher when he begins an inning.  His real performance resides between his vacuum numbers – a roughly .900 OPS hitter.

The 'Neau Morneau Effect

 

It is hard to consider that the Twins would have a gnat’s ass chance of slipping past the Detroit Tigers without their All Star first baseman in the lineup.  The truth, however, is we have not had him in the lineup since mid-July.  Up until July 22^nd, Justin Morneau shot lasers and rainmakers around the nation’s ballparks, hitting .316/.398/.588 with 23 HRs and driving in 78 runs.  From the 22^nd on it was like a parasitic-likeness of Alexi Casilla on creatine inhibited his body, guiding him to eke out a .175/.281/.351 batting line with 7 HRs and 22 runs batted in.  This was not Justin Morneau.  This was Matt Tolbert interloping in the heart of the order. 

 

The question is how many games did this second-rate Morneau’s bat situated in the middle of the lineup cost the Twins?  Could it be worth three in the win column over the course of 48 games?  When the Grande Canadian was chugging on all cylinders, he was driving in runs with ease, hitting .354/.473/.659 with 12 extra base hits with runners in scoring position (RISP) from the beginning of the year until July 21^st.  In 45 at-bats with runners in scoring position from the 22^nd on, Morneau had hit .178/.283/.200 with just a solitary extra base hit.  Getting out 53 percent of the time versus 72 percent of the time is a significant difference – especially in the context of what should be your RBI man (and the guy who comes to the plate in RBI situations most frequently).  In that same span of games, the rest of the lineup hit .292/.360/.453 with runners in scoring position.  His continued presence undoubtedly hurt the kinetic efficiency of the lineup.* 

 

*Naturally, you can lump the stubborn insistence on using Orlando Cabrera at the two spot as well.  Since coming over to the Twins, Cabrera has hit .244/.275/.372 in the two hole.  So, the Twins had sandwiched the game’s best hitter in Joe Mauer – who is retired in a major league low of 56 percent of plate appearances – with two hitters that have been out in 73 and 72 percent of their plate appearances respectively. (blink, blink).  It would seem only a season-ending back injury will get Ron Gardenhire to reconsider the lineup structure…then again, as some in the game would say, baseball isn’t played on a calculator.

 

From July 22^nd until September 12^th, when he last played, the Twins went 17-25 the games Morneau was in and 5-1 the games he was out (either for the dizzies or a mental break).   In that 48 game stretch of substandard offense from their cleanup hitter, the Twins scored 4.66 runs per game, roughly 0.25 runs less than they would when he was healthy in the first 94 games.  Since his removal from the lineup, the squad has averaged 6.5 runs per game and has gone 3-0 (bringing the ‘Neau Morneau record to 8-1 since July 22^nd). 

 

This is not about Morneau per se, rather it about getting the most efficiency out of your lineup:  A healthy Morneau is a superior choice for cleanup (or third, for that matter) than just about everyone else on the roster (save for Kubel against a righty who favors fastballs).  The injured version was simply a detriment.  It is a shame that it took a season-ending injury for the manager to react.

OtB Twins Notes: 09.14.09

Kelsie Smith notes that Ron Gardenhire is satisfied with the shape his bullpen is in.  Since the demotion of Philip Humber on August 28^th, opponents are hitting just .200/.263/.357 for the relievers.  Jesse Crain has been particularly tough, as opponents are just 2-for-22 with five strikeouts and no extra base hits.  The two members that are having the most problems are the two newest Twins, Jon Rauch and Ron Mahay.  The pair have allowed hitters to go .282 (11-for-39) with 2 doubles and 2 home runs in their brief tenure in Minnesota.

 

While Rauch will be in a Twins uniform in 2010, Gardenhire told Smith that he is encouraging the front office to bring back the impending free agent Mahay.  With the trials and tribulations faced by all lefties not named Jose Mijares, it not unexpected that the manager would request an additional lefty in the ‘pen.   Craig Breslow and Sean Henn failed to neutralize left-handed batters, allowing them to hit .230/.331/.418, now both are out of the organization.  Meanwhile, Mahay has been far short of dominant against his left-handed brethren as same-sided opponents have hit .281/.309/.483 in 94 plate appearances.  Combine that with the fact that righties have obliterated him this year (.337/.429/.594) and his usefulness falls under the category of “urinal cake”.

 

Justin Morneau was out of the lineup on Sunday, taking a much needed mental day, although the off-day was proclaimed to be in response to a stiff back from his headfirst slide on Friday.  Since July 22^nd, when he was hitting .316/.398/.588, he has gone .175/.281/.351 thereby Punto-izing his batting line.  Plenty has been made on recent broadcasts about his “stepping out” on his swings but what are the adverse affects?  Much of the source of his offensive woes can be attributed to his inability to drive the ball to the opposite field.  Prior to the extended slump, Morneau held a .346 average and a .638 slugging line on balls hit to left.  Since his decline, Morneau has hit just .133 and slugged .233 going that direction.

 

Joe Christensen reports that Gardenhire addressed the issue of his outfield for 2010 and Gardy stated that he wanted Denard Span to be entrenched in a position rather than shifting around from foul pole to foul pole.  Undoubtedly, Span’s presence in the outfield is critical to success.  On top of being a great leadoff hitter, he provides range that covers huge swaths of land.  Gardenhire believes that Span and Michael Cuddyer will be his two starters in 2010 and the third member is still under consideration.  The final outfield spot could go to either Carlos Gomez or Delmon Young, neither of whom impressed offensive.   What should give Gomez the edge (or rather, what a wiser organization would recognize) is defense.   A few months ago when writing about Jarrod Washburn, BP’s Jonah Keri documented how the Mariners improved so quickly (and frugally) in 2009 was by acquiring defense for pennies on the dollar.  Defense is an undervalued commodity and Gomez can provide that – he’s fourth on John Dewan’s fielding bible at +15.  Span, on the other hand, is +8 and 13^th among CF but has shown he is much more suited as a corner outfielder (his arm is not strong enough to make deep throws in center).  The Twins can improve by several wins in 2010 by simply playing Gomez and Span in the outfield every day.

 

Rochester first baseman Brock Peterson was named the International League’s Batter of the Week after compiling a five-game stat line of .765 (13-for-17) with 2 doubles, a triple and 2 home runs.  Peterson will be a minor league free agent this offseason but he recognizes the writing on the wall in Minnesota: “I love the Minnesota Twins.  I’d like to be a Twin my whole career, but Justin Morneau isn’t going anyway.”

 

Bill Reynolds, a columnist at the Providence Journal, visits with the recently retired Twins prospect Jay Rainville about his transition from the game.

 

Tyler Kepner at the NY Times Bats Blog examines the runaround Sean Henn received during his traded last week by the Twins to the Orioles for the PTBNL (or cash).  Henn has just surrendered a 1-2 home run to Shelley Duncan while pitching for Rochester and figured his season was done when he was not called up to Minnesota in September.  Settled back in Dallas and ready for the offseason, Baltimore contacted him and told him to get his butt to Boston.  Ah, the life of a fringe major leaguer.