Four Reasons the Minnesota Twins Have Fallen Apart

The Minnesota Twins have won the AL Central Division for two straight seasons. Last season, even with a highly talented Chicago White Sox team primed to take over AL dominance for the near future, the Twins were able to hold them off.

Most predicted that the White Sox would overtake Minnesota in the Central this season, but expected the Twins to remain competitive and be in the mix for a Wild Card spot. Instead, Minnesota is struggling to even catch the Detroit Tigers, who most predicted to be among the worst teams in baseball before the season started.

Minnesota is in last place in the AL Central, two games behind the Tigers, and they have the worst record in baseball at the moment.

A lot has clearly gone wrong for the Twins, but here are four reasons things have gotten particularly bad for Minnesota.

Their pitching has had a historically bad fall

The Twins have had a lot of deserved attention for their power hitting since 2019, but those power numbers have overshadowed the fact that they’ve also had pretty good pitching. That has not been the case this season.

Writing for FiveThirtyEight, Neil Paine points out that, if Minnesota’s pitching doesn’t dramatically improve, they’ll be one of only five teams in MLB history to go from the top 10 in pitching wins above replacement (WAR) to dead last in that category. Paine also points out that Minnesota has the fourth-worst team ERA in the league. 

The Twins have also gone from hitting a lot of home runs to giving up a lot of them. They’re the worst team in the league in home runs allowed per nine innings.

Questionable managerial decisions

Not many buttons that Rocco Baldelli pushed in his first two seasons as Twins manager went wrong. That hasn’t been the case this season.

Baldelli’s lineups have drawn criticisms. His in-game choices have as well. 

Not everything can or should be pinned on a manager, of course, and Baldelli is still very young in his managerial career. With a patchwork rotation and bullpen that is struggling, his options are much more limited than they were his first two seasons. But Baldelli’s decisions to perhaps rest key players too much and otherwise shown more-than-necessary caution have brought more scrutiny on his performance this season than in his first two as manager.

Baldelli is also a supporting player in White Sox manager Tony LaRussa’s rant at his own player for hitting a home run on a 3-0 count late in a blowout of the Twins. LaRussa expressed frustration at Yermin Mercedes and encouraged the Twins to retaliate. Twins pitcher Tyler Duffy obliged by throwing behind Mercedes the next day, and now Duffy and Baldelli both received suspensions for it.

Their offense is no longer potent

Make no mistake, pitching has been the biggest issue for the Twins. But an offense that has gone from historically powerful to pedestrian is also a factor.

The Twins can still score runs – their 205 runs scored is currently second in the AL Central and sixth in the American League. 

They’re hitting just .240 as a team and have a .733 OPS. In a season in which several offenses have struggled, those numbers aren’t awful necessarily, or at least wouldn’t be insurmountable with even slightly below average pitching. But compared to their own recent work, they’re pretty far off. The Twins had a .270 average and a .832 OPS as a team during the 2019 season in which they won 101 games.

The Twins are built to mash the ball, and when they’re doing that, a strategy of using a patchwork pitching staff could work. But when the offense is sputtering, the pitching is never going to bail them out, especially this season.

The schedule has been brutal

The Twins have been done no favors by the schedule-makers. The White Sox are obviously a team they have to face a lot as a division rival, but they’ve already played Chicago six times. They’ve lost five of those matchups.

Adding to that, they’ve also played the AL-East leading Boston Red Sox four times, the AL-West leading Oakland Athletics three times. They lost five of those seven games.

Essentially, more than a quarter of their first 45 games have been against the three best teams in the American League. That stretch would be tough for any team. 

The Twins could get key pitchers healthier and make other adjustments to the lineup and still turn things around. But no one expected the team to have such a dramatic fall after their rise the last two seasons.