A year ago at the start of July, the Twins were 11 games below .500 and effectively out of their division race. After looking like a team on the rise at the end of the 2017 season, they finished last season 13 games behind the Indians in the AL Central. A shift in direction was in order.
During the 2018-2019 offseason, they replaced manager Paul Molitor with 37-year-old Rocco Baldelli, who had no major league managing experience, and from November to February they acquired C.J. Cron, Jonathan Schoop, Nelson Cruz and Marwin Gonzalez for the offense that had scored 738 runs in 2018 (13th in MLB) and hit 166 home runs (23rd). Through about the first three months of 2019, the Twins are nine home runs shy of matching their home run total from all of last year, and they have the third-highest run total in baseball — with the margin between first and third being just two runs.
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The offense is clicking, and it’s paying off. The Twins have eight players with double-digit home run totals this season. No team has ever had that many reach 20 in a season, and if the pace they’ve set continues, the Twins could be the first to do it.
Thanks to this newly supercharged offense, the Twins are manhandling their division and have the second-highest winning percentage in the American League. They’re looking more like a team ready to realize the promise of the 2017 wild card group.
“They wanted an aggressive ballclub, and they wanted to be able to score runs, and I think we’ve done a good job of doing that so far,” Cron told SN. “I think with the additions they brought in, it was a pretty obvious and clear focus on guys with power, and they wanted guys who were aggressive in the zone.”
The Twins plucked Cron from the Rays last November when they put him on waivers, and this year he’s rewarded Minnesota with 17 home runs and an OPS of .833. Cron spent four seasons with the Angels, stuck behind Albert Pujols on the depth chart, and only after leaving Anaheim was he able to break out. Last year, Cron hit 30 home runs for the Rays, making him an appealing addition for a Twins roster starved for power and run production.
Max Kepler, who has a team-high 21 home runs and already one more than he hit in 2018, said that with the infusion of new bats on the roster he’s seen an organic shift in the offense.
“Our approach used to be more passive, taking more pitches,” Kepler said.
Now, without a top-down organizational mandate or even suggestion, Kepler said, the team has followed the lead of some of the new faces by being more aggressive at the plate. Cron is a prime example. In his early days with the Angels, he said, they wanted him to try to take more walks, so he fought his natural instinct to be aggressive in the box. Since moving on to the Rays and now the Twins, Cron’s walk rate is down, and he’s swinging at the first pitch he sees almost a third of the time.
As a team, the Twins average 3.79 pitches per plate appearance, where the league average is 3.95. They swing at the first pitch just over 33 percent of the time, where the league average is 28.9. In 2018, they averaged 3.99 pitches per plate appearance and swung at the first pitch only 25.3 percent of the time.
Baldelli agreed that the team has benefited from more aggressive hitters, but he said that the Twins are also successful because of an offense that’s better balanced than it was a year ago.
“We have good hitters and guys who have gotten the job done for us spread throughout our lineup. We also have guys that are very different in the way they do it and the way they get through their at-bats,” Baldelli said. “We have some guys that are very patient, we have some guys that work at-bats that are passive. We have some guys that are pretty free swingers and get it done that way.”
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This kind of lineup forces opposing pitchers to do a lot of different things to get through it, Baldelli said. And it’s something the veteran newcomers have recognized about this Twins team.
“It’s the balance of the lineup that we have,” Cruz said. “And everybody is different in a unique way. That’s what makes us even more dangerous for pitchers. Yea, we’re aggressive, but it’s a mix, you know.”
Cruz, who signed a one-year, $14 million deal with the Twins in January, called it the ideal lineup.
“Even the guys that don’t play every day, when they go and play, they give you good at-bats,” he said. “We don’t feel like we’re missing anyone without the regular lineup.”
Cron, who is also on a one-year deal with the Twins, said that he sees his role with the team as complementary to the core pieces that were already on the roster. Guys like himself, Cruz, Gonzalez and Schoop are there to magnify the abilities of the players like Kepler, Eddie Rosario and Jorge Polanco.
“That’s the core of this team, and that’s why we are where we are,” Cron said. “We kind of came in and try to fill the gaps a little bit, and that’s kind of what the veterans do on teams like this.”
The group of newcomers has arguably had a positive ripple effect. Consider Kepler, who had never hit higher than .243 in his career. He’s up to .269 so far this season with more home runs at the halfway point than he had all of 2018. Or Rosario, who has already been a great hitter over the past two seasons, but has seen improvements in his power numbers and OPS. Polanco’s OPS is more than 100 points higher than last year, and he’ll be a starter in the All-Star Game for the first time in his career.
The second half of the season will tell whether the Twins’ resurgence is real, but everything they’ve done through the first three months points to yes. They’re set to win their division handily and go up against the best in the American League for a bid at the World Series, thanks in part to the change that veterans like Cron and Cruz have brought to the team.
“I love it. I think our lineup constitution is really good,” Cron said. “I just can’t assume that’d be comfortable for an opposing pitcher to know that there’s not going to be any easy strikes. You’re going to have to execute every pitch, and if you make a mistake we can capitalize on it.”