Notes on the Twins’ Stretch Run Swoon

Mini dives on team defense, the absent offense, and the grind coming for the young hitters

When the Twins swept a Friday doubleheader from the Guardians on August 9, they found themselves at 65-50, a game and a half behind in the division standings and two games ahead of their competitors for a wild card berth. FanGraphs estimated their chances of making the postseason at 89.2%.

Since then, they’ve gone 16-25 to enter the season’s final week on the outside looking in at the playoff picture. Sitting one game behind Detroit and Kansas City and just a half-game ahead of Seattle, the Twins’ playoff chances have dropped to just better than a coin flip with six games left.

Courtesy of FanGraphs

There are plenty of explanations and things to blame for this stretch run swoon. Ben gave us his views on that late last week. Off the field, most of the finger-pointing has been toward the ownership, with some measure belonging to a front office that whiffed on nearly all its offseason moves (not you, Carlos Santana).

On the field, it’s difficult to point as easily to any one particular thing, because the Twins have been terrible in every facet of the game. Here’s how they rank in some key stats since August 9th:

Offense:

• Runs: 20th
• OBP: 26th
• BB%: 30th
• SLG: 25th
• HR: 25th
• SB: 30th

Pitching:

• ERA: 21st
• FIP: 12th
• K-BB%: 10th
• BABIP: t-26th
• LOB%: 22nd
• Bullpen WPA: 28th

The offense hasn’t hit and the pitching hasn’t been good enough to win the resulting low-scoring and close games. In that span, the Twins are 8-13 in games as decided by 2 or fewer runs, and 2-17 in games where they scored 3 or fewer runs. Flip even just a few of those and the current conversations around this club are probably quite different.

Converting Outs

I’ll dig into the offensive outage in a second, but I also want to highlight that the team defense hasn’t made it easy on their depleted and stretched pitching staff. The little things, like turning routine plays into outs and making the slightly more difficult plays take on outsized importance in tight contests. We’ve mostly paid attention to the hitting and pitching, but the Twins team defense has a role in this downswing, too.

Here’s a month-by-month breakdown of how Statcast views their glove work:

Data from Baseball Savant

Through mid-summer, they were a top-10 defense (at least in the “eyes” of Statcast). In August they ranked 27th in Outs Above Average (OAA) and they are 26th in that stat so far in September. Defensive metrics are noisy in small samples, but this change is clear.

Taking it further, three positions stand out as particularly problematic: Center Field, where a combination of Willi Castro (-3 OAA), Austin Martin (-4), and Manuel Margot (-1) have been poor in Byron Buxton’s stead; Left Field where Margot (-2) and Martin (-3) have been butchers, but Trevor Larnach (+1) has been solid; and Third Base where José Miranda (-7) has displayed all the reasons the Twins didn’t want him to play third base anymore.

Of course, those plays not made might not have been as impactful if the Twins’ offense hadn’t fallen into a collective slump at the worst time.

Hacking Away

It’s well known that this team is built to hunt for mistakes that they can pull in the air. An accepted byproduct of that approach is strikeouts, which were the Achilles’ heel of last season’s club. While they’ve been much improved on that front this season, you might be wondering if a major culprit in the weak bats recently is a return of that scourge. They have struck out more frequently since August 9 — 23.0% compared to 21.1% before — but that’s merely a shift from the 10th-lowest rate in the league to the 15th. Strikeouts aren’t to blame.

Instead, the Twins have tried to hack their way out of their slump indiscriminately.

Minnesota hitters have the 2nd-highest swing rate of any team in this stretch (50.7%), up from a tie for 16th (47.7%). They’ve chased 32.1% of pitches they’ve seen out of the strike zone, the 4th-highest rate and an increase from 28.2% (t-14th) before. At the same time, their whiff rate has only increased slightly, from 25.5% to 26.6%, which is why their strikeout rate hasn’t increased more significantly.

One of the important ways that this new swing-happy approach has made an impact is that their walks have dried up from 8.1% (15th) to 6.5% (dead last), which has cramped their ability to start and sustain rallies.

The Twins on-base percentage with the bases empty and no outs (i.e., leading off an inning) has fallen from .332 (5th) to .252 (last) in the last six weeks. The story is similar with one out and the bases empty, with their on-base percentage falling from .330 (4th) to .273 (25th). To make that tangible — if they had maintained their previous levels, they’d have had something like 47 additional base runners aboard early in innings since August 9.

It’s difficult to score consistently by relying on two-out rallies. The recent dearth of run-scoring opportunities is overshadowing that the club has been doing a pretty good job converting the limited opportunities they do create into runs. Since August 9 they’ve hit .281 with runners in scoring position (5th-best), up .237 (21st) earlier in the season. That even includes a .321 mark with the bases loaded.

Power Outage

One of the ways the Twins offensive design can compensate for struggles with strikeouts or the vagaries of clutch hitting is by hitting the ball for extra bases and out of the ballpark. Those quick strikes, even if only solo homers, make a world of difference. But those have evaporated, too. The team has hit just 38 homers since August 9, which ranks 25th in MLB (down from 10th). Their slugging percentage has fallen from 5th (.429) to 25th (.370)

That falloff is nearly team-wide, with only Kyle Farmer and Christian Vázquez having higher slugging percentages recently than they did earlier in the season. But, it’s been particularly acute for three young hitters who played major roles in driving the offensive production earlier in the year: Royce Lewis, José Miranda, and Ryan Jeffers.

In Lewis’ case, it turns out that he does “do that slump thing”, just like everyone else. In our sample period, he’s hit .225/.262/.326 for a 64 wRC+. That’s down about 50 points of average, 100 points of on-base, and 330 points of slugging from earlier this season. His approach at the plate has broken down as he’s swinging and chasing a lot more, especially out of the zone away. That’s also coincided with reduced bat speed, perhaps due to fatigue or the lingering effects of the leg and core injuries he suffered earlier in the season:

Pitcherlist has an all-encompassing metric that puts together runs generated from swing decisions, contact, and power, called Process+. It tells a clear story for Royce. His decisions have eroded and his contact and power haven’t been able to compensate for it, as you can see clearly in the chart:

With Miranda, it’s hard not to look back at the fastball he took to the head for a hit-by-pitch from Detroit’s Alex Faedo in late July as a turning point. To that point, Miranda had hit .324/.364/.517 (.377 wOBA). In fairness, he was probably a bit out of over his skis with that production, thanks to his electrifying hit streak earlier in the month.

However, since that HBP, he’s produced just .216/.241/.309 (.239), with increased strikeouts, decreased walks, and lower contact quality metrics. His Process+ chart reflects a sustained decline since late July, driven by lower-quality swing-take decisions and a loss of power:

In Ryan Jeffers’ case, it might just be a story of wearing down under the largest workload of his career. Jeffers has played in 22 more games and taken 112 more plate appearances than he did last year already this season and his bat has steadily tapered off as the second half of the season has worn on. He hasn’t homered in a month (since August 20), falling behind Carlos Santana for the team lead in that category, and his slugging percentage since August 9 is about 80 points below what it was before. At the same time, he’s swinging more, chasing more, and missing more. It’s a bad combination:

One Good Week

All that said and for as tough as things have been, back in March I think nearly all of us would have signed up for being a game out with six games left. Especially with those games scheduled to be played at Target Field. Thanks to the team’s good work earlier in the season, they hold the tiebreakers over all of their playoff spot competitors, as Ben detailed yesterday.

One good week is all it will take. In baseball, those can come out of nowhere, despite all evidence to the contrary.

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John writes for Twinkie Town, Twins Daily, and Pitcher List with an emphasis on analysis. He is a lifelong Twins fan and former college pitcher. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFoley_21.