The Twins quietly respectable last month
The All-Star break is a great time for hitting the reset button. The majority of players get a nice four-day vacation in a sport that rarely ever sees more than a day off. It’s also a nice time for fans to assess where their team is at, as team success can be a bit overwhelming over the course of a 162-game season.
The 2016 Twins are a perfect example of that. The team got off to such a dreadful start — 18–42 in their first 60 games — that it is easy to miss the fact that they are playing .500 ball (14–14) over the past month. (The reverse example of that is the 2016 Chicago Cubs who started the season 47–20, but are just 6–15 since June 19.) There have been several strong players performances for the Twins in the last month, and if they can play .500 ball the rest of the season, that should at least give the team a little better feeling heading into 2017. Let’s take a look at some of their strong performances over the past 30 days:
Brian Dozier: .291 BA/.383 OBP/.602 SLG
This is the biggest “sight for sore eyes” for Twins fans, as Dozier was in an absolute tailspin for the first couple months of the 2016 season. When combined with the fact that he fell apart in the second half of 2015, it was mighty tempting to write Dozier off as a player simply lost at the plate. However, Dozier has been absolutely scorching the past month, and even if we go back to May 25, he has a .290 batting average with 10 home runs over that 43-game stretch.
It will be interesting to see if Dozier can keep this up, though. He had his biggest success in June and did so despite pulling the ball more than ever, something that had been seemingly an issue for Dozier in terms of killing his batting average. He did hit the ball as hard as he ever has in June, so that will solve a fair amount of problems, but he is also hitting just .108 in ten games in July. Dozier will be one of the most interesting players to watch the rest of the way.
Kurt Suzuki: .400 BA/.423 OBP/.680 SLG
Suzuki has been an absolute revelation for the Twins in 2016. The 32-year-old catcher is hitting .294 for the season and playing above-average defense behind the plate. In what has been a lost season for many Twins, it’s been a Suzukaissance (Suzuki-Renaissance), and surprisingly quite legitimate. The numbers show that Suzuki is indeed hitting the ball as hard as he has in his entire career, so his success has not merely been a nice run of luck in the first half. It would be great to see the lovable backstop keep this up for another season or two.
Kennys Vargas: .471 BA/.609 OBP/1.294 SLG
Sure it has only been six games, but those six games have been such BEAST MODE for Vargas that he has been the Twins third-most valuable hitter over the past 30 days (per Frangraphs wins above replacement). In those six games, Vargas has three home runs, nine runs scored, four RBI and has drawn six walks compared to just three strikeouts.
Over the course of a full season that would come out to 81 home runs, 243 runs, 108 RBI and 162 walks. Watch out Babe Ruth!
Obviously those numbers are (incredibly) skewed by the small sample of six games, but we are only two years removed from Twins fans making some (probably race and weight skewed) comparisons of Vargas to David Ortiz. Vargas doesn’t need to be Ortiz, but if he can provide some nice pop to compliment Sano in the middle of the lineup for the next couple of seasons, that could be huge.
Max Kepler: .252 BA/.331 OBP/.553 SLG
We covered Kepler in pretty close detail on this page recently, so we don’t need to go too much into his breakout. Just note that he is even Turvey-curse impervious, as he has hit two home runs in the four games since he appeared on the Times sports page.
Miguel Sano: .282 BA/.391 OBP/.538 SLG
Sano has played 10 games since retuning from the DL, and his stats look much closer to his excellent rookie season than his slightly disappointing beginning to his sophomore campaign. In fact, comparing his rookie slash line of .269/.385/.530 to the numbers above and they are nearly identical. That’s great news for Twins fans, and shouldn’t be too surprising. If there is one Twin I trust completely to be a stud it’s Sano.
Questionable “Ed’s”
We’ll end with a trio (Eduardo Nunez, Eddie Rosario, and Eduardo Escobar) who have all been hitting well, but have quite a few red flags. Nunez has enjoyed the most success of the bunch and is fresh of his All-Star Game debut, but as has been written on this page before, it’s not often that a 29-year-old suddenly quadruples his value overnight. I’d love to see the Twins sell high on Nunez and trade him to a contender for a couple of nice prospects.
Rosario is back up from Triple-A and has hit .387 in his seven games back at the major league level, but the same issues seem to be there, as he is yet to draw a walk in 32 plate appearances. Major league pitchers are simply too good at finding your weakness when you absolutely refuse to take a walk. Don’t expect this to last unless Rosario starts improving his plate discipline.
Escobar is one of my personal favorite Twins, but he has some of the same issues as Rosario. He has 41 strikeouts to just eight walks in 2016, and that’s tough to cope with. The recent power surge — all three of his home runs this season have come in the past 30 days — is a good sign, though, as he has shown signs of some pop before, and that was egregiously missing in the first couple months.
* * *
The pitching has been a whole nother matter, with only Ervin Santana (and mayyyyyybe Kyle Gibson if you squint hard enough) providing any real value, and optimism, at this point. However, the sticks were what drove the Twins to success in 2015, and hopefully they can’t make the second half of a bit more entertaining for their fans.
