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Gleeman: Flawed, injured Twins can’t keep pace, even in MLB’s worst division

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They couldn’t stay healthy, they couldn’t stop blowing late-inning leads and they couldn’t get hits with runners in scoring position. That’s the story of the Twins’ season so far. And, barring an unexpected run during their remaining 23 games, this will also be added as the final chapter: They couldn’t win the worst division in baseball despite holding a 4 1/2-game lead on July 5.

What’s especially frustrating about how the Twins have fallen from atop the AL Central is that neither the Guardians nor the White Sox needed to catch fire to surpass them. Cleveland is 33-26 and Chicago is 34-28 since July 5, modest 90-win paces. Yet because the Twins have gone 22-33, playing like a 65-win team for two-plus months, including 2-8 in September, they let it slip away.

After being swept at home this weekend by the first-place Guardians during a three-game series the Twins never led at any point, they now trail Cleveland by the same 4 1/2 games they led the AL Central by on July 5. Their playoff odds, which peaked around 80 percent in mid-July, have sunk to the low single digits, and the Twins have fallen under .500 for the first time since April.

It’s fair to note that few people expected the Twins to win the AL Central this season. Chicago was the heavy preseason favorite, according to both gambling oddsmakers and projection systems, whereas BetMGM set the over/under for Twins wins at 81.5 and FanGraphs predicted 82. Most people saw the Twins as a .500-ish team likely to finish second or third in the division.

Turns out, they were right. But it didn’t have to be that way.

There are different paths to a .500-ish record and the Twins have taken one of the least enjoyable, raising expectations with an impressive April and May only to spend the next four months failing to meet them again. May was the Twins’ last winning month, which means fans have spent the majority of this season watching a losing team with shrinking playoff odds.

They’ve had just two winning streaks longer than two games since July 1, and they were both followed immediately by longer losing streaks. It’s to the Twins’ credit that they’ve been able to take a punch and get up off the canvas over and over again, but it would be a lot more to their credit if they could avoid getting knocked down so many times. At some point, the referee will stop the fight.

Perhaps that’s asking too much from a team as banged up as the Twins. They’ve placed a league-high 31 players on the injured list for a total of 1,928 days lost, second-most in the AL, including 10 players out at least 100 days. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Twins have lost the league’s second-most Wins Above Replacement due to injuries, a clear link between the days lost and games lost.

How much stronger would the pitching staff look with some combination of a healthy Tyler Mahle, Kenta Maeda, Chris Paddack, Josh Winder, Bailey Ober and Jorge Alcala? How much more productive would the lineup be with healthy versions of Byron Buxton, Jorge Polanco, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, Ryan Jeffers, Miguel Sanó and Royce Lewis? They’d probably be in first place.

But it’s also tough to shake the feeling that the Twins were still capable of that, even with the never-ending injuries, if they’d simply stopped doing arguably the two most frustrating things a baseball team can do: Coughing up late leads with a bullpen implosions and wasting potential multi-run rallies by failing to come up with hits in clutch spots.

Twins relievers rank 10th out of 15 teams in ERA and Win Probability Added, which is plenty bad as it is, but the team-wide totals mask how much the bullpen has been carried by Jhoan Duran and how poorly the non-Duran relievers have performed. Duran is having one of the greatest rookie seasons ever by a reliever, posting a 1.72 ERA in 63 innings, almost all of them in high-leverage spots.

He leads MLB relievers with +4.54 Win Probability Added, nearly 20 percent higher than the second-best reliever. And yet the bullpen as a whole has been a big weakness all season because the Twins’ non-Duran relievers have combined for -3.93 WPA, which would rank dead last in the AL. You’d think it would be impossible for a bullpen with MLB’s best reliever to be so bad, but here we are.

There are 13 relievers in the AL with WPA totals worse than -1.00 for the year and four are/were Twins: Emilio Pagán, Tyler Duffey, Jharel Cotton and Trevor Megill. Their biggest bullpen pickup at the trade deadline, Orioles closer Jorge López, has a -0.65 WPA in just five weeks with the Twins and has already been demoted from ninth-inning duties after a series of rocky outings.

Twins relievers have made an MLB-high 43 appearances in which they lowered the team’s win probability by at least 20 percent, including an AL-high 14 times lowering it by at least 40 percent. And the bullpen’s issues have been magnified by the Twins’ rotation logging the AL’s second-fewest innings in a maddening mix of poor performances and quick hooks.

Twins starters have failed to complete five innings in an MLB-high 62 games, forcing an already wobbly bullpen to carry extra weight, with disastrous results. And in the rare instances when starters have been pushed to go deeper to ease the load carried by relievers, they’ve stumbled, allowing a .304 batting average and .525 slugging percentage the third time through lineups.

None of this should have been a surprise to the Twins. It was clear all offseason that they desperately needed significant rotation help, and they never went out and got it. Sonny Gray was the lone front-line starter added, along with cheap veterans Dylan Bundy and Chris Archer, and the oft-injured Paddack. Another front-line starter was added at the deadline in Mahle, but he’s already hurt.

There are ways to win with a poor rotation that requires protecting with quick hooks. And there are ways to win with an implosion-prone bullpen. But there are no ways to win with both, and after posting the AL’s second-worst ERA last season the Twins have improved only slightly to 10th. This is the fourth time in six Derek Falvey-led seasons that they’ve had a worse-than-average team ERA.

Much more surprising is the lineup, which is among the AL’s top five overall for batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage, ranking just 10th in AVG and 12th in SLG with runners in scoring position, including 14th in AVG and 13th in SLG with RISP and two outs. They get runners on base, but not across the plate. And some of the biggest names are the biggest culprits.

Carlos Correa’s overall 135 OPS+ is better than his career 128 OPS+ with the Astros, but with RISP he’s slugged just .330 without a homer, including hitting .162 with RISP and two outs. Max Kepler, who leads the team in RISP at-bats, has hit .196 in those spots, including .130 with RISP and two outs. Buxton has hit .145 with RISP, including 1-for-20 (.050) with RISP and two outs.

Injuries have decimated the lineup, leading to bench players and Triple-A depth getting overexposed in bigger roles than anyone intended, but the Twins scoring far fewer runs than their overall numbers would suggest also stems from lots of their veteran regulars, including Correa, Kepler and Buxton, simply not coming through consistently in spots where good lineups do their biggest damage.

Their lineup is above average overall, but sinks to the bottom of the league with runners in scoring position and thus can’t break through for enough big innings. Their rotation never got the help it clearly needed from the front office, so the coaching staff shields the starters with quick hooks, leading to a shaky bullpen collapsing under the extra weight from that approach. And everyone is injured.

It’s not very noteworthy for a team to finish around .500 after being projected to finish around .500. Perhaps the Twins were always going to be just another mediocre team. It looked that way all offseason and it looks that way today. Or maybe the never-ending injuries to key players removed whatever potential the Twins had of rising above that, even in a weak division there for the taking.

Whatever the case, no amount of injuries should provide full cover for a front office that failed to get the pitching help the Twins have so obviously needed for the past year, or for a coaching staff that never seemed capable of making the adjustments required to get the most out of the flawed pitching staff they did have, or for a lineup filled with big names who too rarely came up big.

Injuries can be blamed for a lot, but there’s plenty of other blame to go around.

(Photo of Rocco Baldelli: Bruce Kluckhohn / USA Today)

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