Written By Tom Schreier (ColdOmaha.com)
Photo Credit: Brian Curski
It’s been a strange start in that people have been up and down. We’ve had some injuries, and we’re trying to find our identity still a little bit in terms of who the core guys are gonna be.
— Paul Molitor before a 9-2 loss to the Detroit Tigers on Friday
The Minnesota Twins have pieces. They have positive things going for them. Joe Mauer is hitting again. Phil Hughes and Ricky Nolasco have had good starts. Eduardo Nunez and Danny Santana have been a spark at the top of the lineup. Oswaldo Arcia has come back to life, and Byung Ho Park is having no trouble hitting home runs in America.
It’s hard to acknowledge all of this when the team is 7-18 on May 1. It’s hard to see the positives when the Twins finished with 83 wins last year, made it clear they wanted to win the AL Central this season, and are already 10.5 games behind the Central-leading Chicago White Sox. It’s hard not to see this team finishing with 75 wins, especially when that’s where many national pundits saw them finishing this season.
“It kinda depends on the kind of person you are, if you need to find things that kind of spur your hope,” said manager Paul Molitor on Friday when asked if his team needs to look at how they’ve played since starting 0-9 or have a clean slate in May. “I kinda look at big picture. The competitiveness of how we’ve played as opposed to where we stand and the exact record.
“But yeah, you could say that, other than our road record, which is fairly abysmal to this point — there’s been a lot of good games on the road, but we haven’t found ways to win except for one — I kinda like how we’re playing.”
If someone looked into a crystal ball and said that Hughes and Mauer had returned to form, Eduardo Escobar and Nunez were hitting and that Park was hitting balls into North Dakota, a Twins fan could reasonably conclude that the team was off to a hot start and likely to make the playoffs for the first time since 2010. Add that much-hyped prospects like Byron Buxton, Jose Berrios and Alex Meyer have already been in a Twins uniform this year, and it only would make the case that much stronger.
“I probably have the same interest as a devout fan does of this organization,” said general manager Terry Ryan last Friday. “Hey, we finally got a look at Berrios. We finally got a look at Sano. We finally got a look at Buxton. They’ve been reading about them for about four years, and when they come up, you’d like to see everything fall into place for them. It doesn’t happen that way many times, but sometimes it does.”
What that fortune teller may have skipped over is that Meyer and Tyler Duffey, a fifth-rounder who had success in the rotation last year, are up because Kyle Gibson, Ervin Santana and Glen Perkins all hit the disabled list this year. Trevor Plouffe, who is emerging as a team leader and took to Twitter after the 0-9 start to encourage fans to stick with the team, is also on the DL.
Making matters worse is that outside of Mauer the team has been erratic at the plate, and the bullpen has been uncharacteristically poor to start the season. Kevin Jepsen, who arrived midseason last year and took over as the closer when Perkins got hurt, has blown three of five save opportunities. May and Meyer have struggled with control. Casey Fien has shown glimpses of his past self, but has also let things spiral out of control at times.
Hughes appears to be the biggest victim of the lack of run support. He struggled in his latest start, but went seven innings in three of his first four — the fourth being a six-inning complete game he tossed in a 7-4 win over the Milwaukee Brewers early in the season.
“I’d like to see all our starters have a few more W’s in their record, but the way we’ve played early hasn’t been conducive to that happening, even when they’ve given us good starts,” said Molitor. “So Phil’s kinda fallen in that category as much as anybody. He’s had a nice start to the season, we just need to back him up a little bit better.”
There’s a winning combination with the Minnesota Twins, it’s a matter of how quick they find it and if they’ve fallen too far behind already. This team has suddenly become eerily reminiscent of the 2012 and 2013 Twins teams where Mauer was an on-base percentage machine, but Minnesota struggled to drive in runs and some of his best years were wasted on losing teams.
The big difference, of course, is that this year’s team has much better starting pitching. Even Berrios, whose 11.25 ERA after a four-inning start betrays how good he was at times, displayed the stuff he has that got him named the best pitching prospect in Minnesota’s minor league system.
“The other day with Berrios, he wasn’t sharp, we could all see that,” Ryan said of Berrios’ first start. “They fouled off an unbelievable amount of pitches. It didn’t matter if it was a curveball, a fastball or changeup. I think the best thing I can tell you about that outing is he wasn’t afraid to use his stuff. He mixed in a ton of changeups, he threw a lot of breaking balls, and his fastball probably didn’t have the kind of command that I had seen in four days previous.”
The other major difference is that after struggling to drive in runners during the 0-9 stretch, the Twins have shown a better capacity for doing so later in the month. “I don’t think there was a fundamental change,” said Molitor. “Guys, I think, kind of understood the whole mindset of trying to get hits and slowing themselves down and realizing the pressure is on the pitcher as much as themselves. But we got away from it a little bit early, shows the mental side of it, and how it can be challenging, and how strong you can be when things are going a little bit adverse.”
The pressure is on now for the Twins to put it together before May gets away from them. As loyal fans who stuck it out with the team during the four losing seasons know, meaningless games in June make for an awful long season. It would be quite a shame, given how Mauer has returned to form, Arcia has found his swing and Hughes is pitching well again. Not to mention that Target Field still has a new park smell and has been upgraded in the offseason, and most of the fanbase has been patient as the Twins try to return to what they once were.
“We have a high patience level in this organization. We always have,” Ryan said in the middle of April. “But there comes a time when obviously you look at the record — you’ve gotta get going. We can’t let the month of April get by.” In some ways, no matter how well some individual players have played at times, April did get by. The key now is to make sure that May doesn’t either — 7-18 is an awful large deficit to make up, even this early in the season.
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