Last year, the Minnesota Twins won the American League Central division without much more effort than a brisk walk. Their 87 wins made them the weakest division winner since, ironically, the 2009 Twins also won 87, but they proved to belong by beating the Toronto Blue Jays in the Wild Card round, their first playoff win in about 20 years. The ALC looks to be an unexciting division once again, so will they take advantage?
Notable subtractions with their 2023 bWAR: OF Joey Gallo (0.5), SP Sonny Gray (5.3), SP Kenta Maeda (1.1), SP Tyler Mahle (0.5), OF Michael A. Taylor (1.9), Donovan Solano (1.7), RP Emilio Pagán (1.4), 2B/3B Jorge Polanco (2.0)
Additions: CF Manuel Margot (0.6), RP Steven Okert (0.5), Anthony DeSclafani (0.2), RP Jay Jackson (0.8), RP Daniel Duarte (0.6), 1B Carlos Santana (2.7)
Last year, within all MLB, the Twins ranked 6th in MLB in wRC+ (109), 5th in ERA (3.87), and 3rd in FIP (3.89). It’s a wonder how they only won 87 games with such ranks; even with a bunch of losses in free agency (and almost no meaningful additions thanks to the reduced money they’re getting from the Bally’s bankruptcy), the Twins are still projected to win 89 games according to PECOTA. Zips agrees they should win the division again, even with just 84.
The Twins aren’t easy to project; they’ve been the most confusing team in the division for the past few years. They’ve been competitive since 2017 when they landed a Wild Card spot after a 103-loss campaign the year before. Since then, they’ve posted below-.500 seasons as often as they’ve won the division. A big reason for some of their recent struggles has come from injuries in their pitching staff; their 2021 and 2022 seasons saw no Twins starter toss as many as 150 innings. In 2023, they had three such pitchers, two of whom were very good. The problem is that one of those excellent pitchers was Sonny Gray, who moved to St. Louis in free agency.
How good the Twins are will likely also depend on the performances of their highest-paid players: Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa. Buxton is one of the elite baseball talents but has only played about 50% of all games over the last five seasons. What’s more concerning is how he wasn’t particularly good when he *did* play last year, posting a below-average wRC+ while exclusively DH’ing. It doesn’t get much better when you consider he’s already turned 30, and the previous two seasons saw him post strikeout rates above 30%, even if it comes with increased walk rates as well. In an analogy that Royals fans might appreciate, Byron Buxton is like Adalberto Mondesi: a player who’s truly unique when he has it together but has it together so rarely that it’s not easy to see a bright future.
Next is Carlos Correa. He underwent one of the weirdest free agency trials of all time, having two teams nullify their agreed-upon deals before returning to Minnesota, supposedly due to health concerns. Correa would prove the doubters wrong by playing 135 games, but they might have been the least productive 135 games in his career, posting just a 1.4 bWAR when his career average up until last season was 4.9. Correa posted his career-worst wRC+ the previous year (outside of the pandemic season) and plummeted down in pretty much every offensive category: his career-worst batting average and OPS, his fewest home runs hit since 2018, his lowest walk rate and highest strikeout rate since 2020, and an MLB-leading grounded double plays.
I’ll defend these players a bit: Buxton declared himself ready to play center field again this season, which will not only make him a more valuable player just by playing the position (one he plays quite well, at that), but also frees up the DH spot for the newly-signed Carlos Santana, who will add even more on-base skills to the team that had the highest walk percentage in the American League last year. Correa, meanwhile, is still in a prime age-29 season and has bounced back from down years before.
Beyond those two, the rest of the Twins lineup is suitable as noted, but rife with platoon options. Eleven players posted a wRC+ above 100 in the Twin Cities last year, with the best coming from third baseman Royce Lewis, the #1 overall pick from the 2017 draft. He did so with the smallest sample size and very fortunate batted ball luck, but projections such as ZiPS and THE BAT still expect him to be a quality player in the 3-4 WAR range. Edouard Julien, another top prospect who graduated last year, also pulled a lot of weight in the lineup and expects to be another young stud moving forward. With Ryan Jeffers, Max Kepler, and Matt Wallner also projected to be above-average offensively, the Twins’ lineup should still be good even with a few of their better hitters leaving the team.
The pitching, on the other hand, might be subject to a more significant decline. The good news is that Pablo Lopez finished 7th in Cy Young voting while underperforming his peripherals, holding the best-expected ERA and fifth-best expected FIP in all MLB last year. He is an excellent pitcher the Twins were wise to invest in, a veritable strike-thrower with the potential to throw 200 innings in a season. The bad news is that Sonny Gray was about equally great and left the team, replaced by Anthony DeSclafani, whose ERA last year was over two full points higher. Heavy lifting must come from their in-house starters, Bailey Ober and Joe Ryan, whose strikeout to walk ratios ranked in the top 10 of starters with 140+ innings last year. Ryan might look mediocre based on ERA alone, but projections expect him to be a more respectable starter next year. Minnesota is also getting back Chris Paddack after going down for Tommy John in 2022; if all goes well, the Twins could expect to have at least four decent or better starters with a bullpen projected to be average or better.
My prediction for the Twins is about where they were last year, so around 85 wins. I think their pitching might take a step back, especially if/when they experience an injury to one of their key starters, but their hitting has the potential to be even better than last year. The bigger question is: will it be enough to win this (supposedly) weak division again? Next time, we’ll dive deep into the second-place finishers: the Detroit Tigers.
