MINNEAPOLIS — For the second time in three years, the Minnesota Twins lineup has stumbled badly out of the gates and the team has started 3-6 despite getting a decent performance from the pitching staff.
Back in 2022, the Twins hit .186 with a .613 OPS through the first nine games, scoring an average of 3.2 runs and producing two runs or fewer five times.
Advertisem*nt
Through the first nine games this season, the Twins hit .181 with a .593 OPS, scoring an average of 2.9 runs and producing two runs or fewer five times.
New season, same frustrating story.
It’s important to note that league-wide scoring is annually at its lowest in April when pitchers are generally thought to be ahead of hitters coming out of spring training and cold weather hinders power hitting. In other words, the Twins are certainly not alone in struggling to produce consistent offense, in 2022 or now.
“This isn’t the type of environment where you’re normally going to score a ton of runs,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “You’ve got to win tight ball games this time of the year. We’re playing through mist and cold and things like that.”
However, the Twins’ punchless Aprils go well beyond any league-wide trends, and of course, their opponents have managed to avoid the same dreadful hitting numbers while playing in the same conditions.
Tyler Glasnow ties a career-high with 14 Ks! pic.twitter.com/vgpYe8mapV
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 10, 2024
In the 64-year history of the Twins — more than half of which has been played calling a roof-less ballpark home — here are the lowest team hit totals through the first nine games of a season:
•52 hits in 2022
• 53 hits in 2024
Here’s the lowest Twins batting average through the first nine games:
• .181 in 2024
• .186 in 2022
Delving a bit deeper into the early season struggles, two common denominators emerge: strikeouts and pulled fly balls. In both 2022 and 2024, the Twins struck out at MLB’s third-highest rate through nine games and were among the league leaders in fly balls to the pull side, which is the type of ball in play that loses the most value in cold, windy conditions that turn would-be homers into long outs.
Advertisem*nt
When a lineup struggles to make consistent contact, and the rare contact it does make is especially ill-suited for April’s conditions, the degree of difficulty can be insurmountable. And this season, whatever chances the Twins had of making a recipe of strikeouts and pull-side fly balls work has been wiped out by hitting an MLB-low seven homers and batting .117 with runners in scoring position.
“It’s harder to hit in weather like this,” Baldelli said. “The ball doesn’t really go anywhere, even when you do hit it well. You find ways to still have success. But hitting in July (at Target Field) and hitting in an April night game here, it’s two totally different types of ball games.”
Overall this season, the Twins’ collective .593 OPS is 88 points below the .681 league average and ranks 29th out of 30 teams, ahead of only the uncompetitive Miami Marlins. Of the 12 hitters with double-digit at-bats for the Twins, only Alex Kirilloff (1.110), Carlos Correa (.914) and Manuel Margot (.833) have an OPS above league average. And the other nine have an OPS below .625.
“There’s a lot of work to do on our end when it comes to (the lineup’s) approach as a collective group,” Correa said. “We’ve got to figure it out sooner than later.”
It’s fair to note Twins hitters have also been hurt by poor umpiring, and they’ve been somewhat unlucky as well with hard-hit fly balls and line drives finding gloves for outs, but that can only explain away so much. With a .215 expected batting average that’s 29th out of 30 teams, better than only the lowly Oakland Athletics, the Twins simply haven’t put enough high-quality balls in play.
“You just want to see adjustments being made, guys paying attention to exactly what’s going on in these situations,” Baldelli said. “And then trying something different. And we can do that. We have different methods and different ways to approach these things, and we need to take them into the game.”
Maybe a little unsanitary, but Tanner cooked on the mound yesterday.#ForTheLand pic.twitter.com/RtdfVtJOHW
— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) April 5, 2024
Everyone in the Twins’ clubhouse seems to agree that changes are necessary, but opinions differ on the root cause of the problem.
Is the coaching staff creating flawed game plans and scouting reports that fail to put the hitters in position to succeed against certain pitchers? Or are the hitters not doing a good enough job of following the game plans and scouting reports?
Advertisem*nt
Are the hitters not making in-game adjustments reacting to what they see from pitchers? Or did the front office assemble a group of stylistically similar hitters incapable of those adjustments and destined to stall in imperfect conditions?
“You can’t force production from an offense, but you can force the work and the preparation that goes into it,” Baldelli said. “I talk about it all the time, probably mention it every day. As long as you’re getting ready in the right manner, then you’re doing everything you can do. Because once the game starts, there’s only so much you can do. You’ve got to go out there and react at that point.”
These aren’t new questions for the Twins. They faced them at this same point in 2022, and again last season when the lineup ranked among the league’s worst for the entire first half. Given that the same questions are still being asked, it’s obvious the Twins haven’t found the answers. But that’s not quite accurate, either. They have found answers, but the solutions have only been temporary.
After hitting .186 in the first nine games of 2022, the Twins recovered to rank among the American League’s top five in batting average, OPS and runs scored for the remainder of the season. They were really bad for about two weeks, and then a top-five lineup for 5 1/2 months.
Last season’s early struggles lasted for the entire first half, as the Twins entered the All-Star break ranked 11th in runs scored among AL teams. And then they had one of the league’s best offenses after the break, trailing only the Houston Astros in second-half OPS and runs scored.
“We know we’re capable of doing it,” Correa said. “We just don’t want to waste a whole half of a season before we figure it out.”
There’s no denying how inept the Twins have looked at the plate early on this season and how hopeless that can seem in the moment, but they turned things around after a similarly horrible start in 2022 and again after a very rough first half in 2023. And they did so with the same manager, the same hitting coaches and many of the same hitters they have today.
It would be great if the Twins could stop digging this same hole every year, but at least they should know how to climb out of it by now.
(Photo of Carlos Santana striking out in a game: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
