A few weeks ago, a fellow Twins fan asked whether I thought there was any chance the team gets back to a .500 winning percentage this season. Um, no, assuming one's rooting interest isn't allowed to overwhelm the rational faculties. At the time the team had played around 60 games. What reason was there to suppose the remaining 100 would be very much different? I know these month-by-month summaries are a little artificial, but by the time three are up it seems reasonable to think a pretty realistic portrait has come into view. This is why, according to lore (and reality), the team in first place on the Fourth of July usually finishes in first place, too. Three months of games is a representative sample.
In April the Twins were 9-15. Then in May they went 13-16. In the month just finished, they won 11 games and lost 14. They aren't a fifty-fifty team.
Yes, key players have missed a lot of games with injuries: Buxton, preeminently, and Garver just when he'd begun to smack the ball all over the yard. Others too, sure, but it happens around the league. I think the real culprit is their starting pitching. Here's a selection of pitchers who have started at least five games this season, with ERA in parentheses:
Happ (5.83)
Shoemaker (8.06)
Maeda (5.56)
Dobnak (7.83)
Ober (5.84)
They've played 78 games and one of these five guys has been the starting pitcher in 48 of them. Hard to win when you're allowing runs at these kinds of rates. Within their division, only the first-place White Sox have scored more runs than the Twins, but no one has allowed more.
One can still take pleasure in individual performances. It's fun to watch Luis Arraez play baseball. Berrios has pitched well. Nelson Cruz is laying claim to being one of the great late-bloomers in baseball history—it's his 41st birthday today, and he leads the team in batting average (.307), OPS (.963), homers (18), and RBI (44). It looks as if guys like Kirilloff and Larnach have a chance to be good major-league players and it'll be fun to watch them get better (I hope they get better). At the other end of the spectrum, Miguel Sano, who so far this season has struck out 83 times in 200 at-bats, is now riding the pine most of the time. At least he has 14 homers and 34 RBI, both second best on the team. Kepler, I think, has been underrated as a bust: he's hitting .199 with 6 homers and 27 RBI. It's not that hard for a 41-year-old to be producing more runs than those two guys!
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