Jul. 2—Rocco Baldelli’s postgame presser Wednesday was about as close as a modern manager gets to putting his team on blast.
His takedown of the Twins’ subpar hitting occurred at the same time that the squad held a “players only” meeting, traditionally a sign of desperation.
That was followed by an off day, followed by a game in which the Twins scored eight runs and popped three homers and returned to first place … after which they won a 1-0 “slugfest.”
Certain talking heads on Bally Sports North can babble about the attempted reset, but the reality is that it doesn’t matter if the hitting coach runs the pregame meeting or if Kyle Farmer is offering undefined “incentives” for undefined performance.
Joey Gallo and Max Kepler hit the major leagues in 2015. Michael A. Taylor arrived a year earlier. They are who they are; they aren’t going to be reprogrammed into Luis Arraez as hitters, or even Austin Hayes. They play good to great defense, they hit some homers, and they make lots of unproductive outs.
The 2023 Twins have a lot of that. Too much of that. It’s a roster problem, and it’s not easily fixed.
The Twins figured to build the lineup around Carlos Correa, Byron Buxton and Jorge Polanco, but that trio has been limited by injuries. They hoped to see some young players grow into bigger roles, but Jose Miranda flopped, Trevor Larnach struggled against breaking stuff and Alex Kirilloff and Royce Lewis have, again, been limited by injuries. (Lewis returned to the injured list this weekend.)
Dick Bremer, talking about Baldelli’s penchant for shuffling the batting order, noted in the finale of the Atlanta series that Willi Castro was the only Twin to hit in the same slot (fifth) twice in the three games. I am less concerned about the shuffling as that Castro is repeatedly hitting in the middle of the lineup.
And so the Twins are running 11th in the 15-team American League in runs scored. To be fair, their underlying stats suggest they are essentially a league-average offense; the difference between those underlying stats and the actual results is almost certainly their repeated failures with the bases loaded, and that’s probably just random luck.
Probably. I’m still of the opinion that RBIs say more about opportunity than ability, but as I wrote here a few weeks ago, Gallo is prompting me to reconsider that.
Gallo and his .195 batting average entered Sunday with an OPS+ of 120, meaning that he is, by that formula, 20% better than the average hitter. Seriously. I doubt that a lineup of nine hitters like Gallo would score 20% more runs than league average.
On Thursday I decided that the Twins should designate Gallo and Kepler for assignment and move on to Larnach and Matt Wallner. In the next two games, Gallo homered twice and Kepler hit a homer and made a possibly game-saving ninth-inning catch. Go figure.
There are no easy answers. But the Twins are at risk of wasting the best starting rotation they’ve had since Johan Santana’s heyday because they can’t score runs with any consistency. No meeting can solve that.
Edward Thoma is at [email protected]. Twitter: @bboutsider.