It’s overreaction week!
In case you’re unfamiliar, OPS+ is a fairly basic stat. It starts with a player’s OPS (on base percentage + slugging percentage) and then adjusts it to the league average OPS in a given season with 100 as exactly average. An OPS+ of 80 means your OPS is 20% worse than league average, 120 means 20% better. In a similar vein is wRC+ (weighted runs created +), which measures a player’s ability to get on base and hit for extra bases via the Runs Created statistic, adjusts that figure for ballpark/era and compares it to league average.
All the lead up is to explain EXACTLY how the Twins can fix their offense. And it all starts with one man: Carlos Correa.
Carlos Correa has an OPS+ of 3.
Carlos Correa has a wRC+ of 5.
The Twins’ offense will be better once Correa improves. Sometimes, it’s really that simple!
All joking aside, it’s important to remember that the season is incredibly long and is a game of sample sizes. There’s a lot of things the Twins have done well on an individual and team basis that should lead to more hits and runs going forward, especially comparing it to other AL Central rivals. Spend a little bit of time on the Baseball Savant leaderboards and you’ll feel much better about the lineup.
The Twins rank 12th in hard hit rate, while the Guardians, Tigers, and Royals rank 27th, 28th, and 30th, respectively. The Twins are 9th in barrels per plate appearance, while the other 3 ALC contenders are similarly low.
Savant also has plenty of info on expected stats, which essentially measure how well statistical models would predict the offense to be performing based on measurements like quality of contact, launch angle, strikeouts, walks, and the like. The Twins’ team batting average is .198 while their expected average is .238, the second-worst differential in baseball. They are also second worst in differential between SLG and xSLG and the worst in differential between wOBA and xwOBA. I don’t say this to justify nearly getting no-hit my Martin Perez and the White Sox, but the Twins are also just getting unlucky.
You can see the same on an individual basis. Edouard Julien has a .475 OPS but a .664 xSLG and .573 xWOBACON, both of which are top 20 in all of baseball among players with 15+ plate appearances. In terms of differential between wOBA and xwOBA, the Twins have the most unlucky player (Julien) and three others in the bottom 15 (Correa, Ryan Jeffers, Ty France).
There’s still plenty to improve, don’t get me wrong. Their walk rate is in the bottom five in baseball and outside of Matt Wallner and Trevor Larnach, most players aren’t even seeing that many pitches. The Twins have plenty of talent in this lineup with reinforcements on the way in the likes of Brooks Lee and top-50 prospects Emmanuel Rodriguez and Luke Keaschall. But let’s allow these expected stats to balance themselves out before we start jumping ship.