Minnesota Twins 2016 Season In Review
The Minnesota Twins finished the 2016 season with a victory, but that left their record at 59-103, worst in major league baseball. What can they take away from 2016?
The Minnesota Twins ended up the season in line for the #1 draft selection in the 2017 draft as a “reward” for having the worst record in the league. While it sounds like nothing good could come out of a season like this, there were good things, and it’s important to take a look at the good as well as the bad. Being the positive folks that we around CTTP are, we’ll start with the good…
The Good
Brian Dozier – Dozier was absolutely remarkable in 2016. He took off in the second half of the season on a power surge that put him among the elite of all time in power numbers in major league history as a second baseman. His final numbers were really solid all around as he hit .268/.340/.546 with 35 doubles, 5 triples, 42 home runs, and 18 stolen bases, scoring 104 runs and driving in 99.
Ervin Santana – In a season where the American League really doesn’t have a dominant starter, “Big Erv” would warrant serious Cy Young Award consideration if he had the team behind him to give him a better win-loss record. On the year, he went 7-11 with a 3.38 ERA and 1.22 WHIP over 181 1/3 innings, posting a 53/149 BB/K ratio.
Brandon Kintzler – After Glen Perkins was unfortunately lost for the season, the Twins thought they had a great back up option in their right-handed set up man to the lefty Perkins in Kevin Jepsen. Instead Jepsen was released after a horrid attempt at the role, and the team tried a number of options before Kintzler took hold of the closer role and simply shut things down. He was working with a less than winning club, but Kintzler saved 17 games with a 3.15 ERA and 1.23 WHIP over 54 1/3 innings.
Fernando Abad – The Twins needed another left-handed arm in their bullpen, and they grabbed Abad without a whole lot of fanfare in the offseason, thinking he would help shore up a bullpen that was really their biggest hindrance to a playoff run in 2015. When the team went in the tank, anything not buttoned down was available for trade, and Abad had performed so well after getting a low-market deal that the Twins should have been able to cash in. Abad threw 34 innings for the Twins at a 2.65 ERA and 1.21 WHIP as a lefty specialist.
Youth – While the Twins intended to build through youth for 2016, once the season took a turn South, they really let the young guys run free, which should help the team in the long run. Byron Buxton, Max Kepler, Miguel Sano, Eddie Rosario, and Jorge Polanco all received 250+ plate appearances and are all under 25. Tyler Duffey and Jose Berrios each made at least a dozen starts. Kintzler was the only member of the primary bullpen pieces that finished the season that was over 30 years old.
Okay, not everything was super, though, when you lose 103 games, so let’s take a look at the rough stuff.
Next: The Bad
The Bad
The Consistency – So, here’s the weird thing: I went to find where there was an odd spot of poor records on the season – like against right-handed pitchers or during the day, something like that. The team did have a very good July, when they were 15-11, but other than that month, they had no month that they won more than 10 games the entire season.
However, the consistency of bad was crazy. Their winning percentage at home was .370; on the road it was .350. In the first half, they posted a .364 winning percentage; in the second half, it was .356. In extra inning games, they were a .375 team, compared to .360 on the season overall. In one-run games, they had a .341 winning percentage. In blowout games, they had a .298 winning percentage. Lastly, their record in interleague play was a .400 record. They played all season in every type of game with a consistent record of a 100-loss team.
Youth – Yes, this was on the good things, but it also deserves to be here as well. While it’s excellent to get young players the experience to hopefully get better, there were certainly plenty of young players who struggled badly, like Jose Berrios and his 8.02 ERA and 1.87 WHIP over nearly 60 innings. Kyle Gibson followed a season where he flashed a lot of promise with a clunker where he couldn’t get healthy and also posted a 5.07 ERA and 1.56 WHIP over 147 1/3 innings pitched. Trevor May was moved to the bullpen, and while he struck out 60 over 42 2/3 innings, he allowed a 5.27 ERA and 1.31 WHIP. Miguel Sano, Max Kepler, Kennys Vargas, and Byron Buxton hit .236, .235, .230, and .225, respectively.
Trade Returns – The team knew they were struggling early and could have started to field offers for valuable pieces like Fernando Abad and Eduardo Nunez, but instead their total return for those two players were Adalberto Mejia and Pat Light, which is incredibly uninspiring. They also turned around on trade deadline day and moved young hard-throwing prospect Alex Meyer along with veteran Ricky Nolasco for Hector Santiago and Alan Busenitz, a journeyman minor league reliever. While you can’t judge a trade immediately for sure, the trade return is quite disappointing for pieces that were in demand on the market.
Attendance – The Twins opened Target Field, one of the more impressive baseball stadiums in the game, in 2010. Its capacity would lead to attendance of just short of 3.2 million if the Twins sold out all 81 home games. The Twins could not even top 2 million people at games in 2016, and this is after the team had a big 2015 season that one would think would lead to an uptick in ticket sales. Of course, in the team’s time in Target Field, the Twins have had two above-.500 seasons out of seven. They’ve lost 90 or more games every single time that they weren’t above .500. Fans are beginning to talk about the team being either terribly bad or a contender.
Next: The Ugly
The Ugly
The entire Terry Ryan saga – Ryan was fired on July 18th, and the Twins just finally got in a president of baseball operations recently when they hired Derek Falvey, the assistant general manager of their division rival Cleveland Indians. In between the team had to negotiate through two trade deadlines, and as noted in the previous page, it did not go well.
On top of that, the departure of Ryan ends a career with the team that went back to his time as a pitcher in the Twins system in the mid-70s. Stories that came out regarding his departure and how Ryan and Twins ownership clashed over the future direction of the team and that he had known for a month that he was out as GM, but the team allowed him to keep his job until he was ready to end his tenure in mid-July. That put the Twins in a terrible position as far as getting a new GM in place to negotiate the trade deadline.
Byron Buxton’s first half – Buxton had an exciting last month and a half of the season and flashed the elite talent he has always possessed, leading off the final game of the season with an inside-the-park home run. However, when he went down to AAA for a month in August, Buxton was playing his ever-present elite defense, but he was also hitting .193/.247/.315 with 1 home run and 9 stolen bases. He returned on September 1st, and he hit .278/.343/.495 with 8 home runs in September and October. That first half, though, drastically affected his development, and many around the game are beginning to question if Buxton won’t be a guy who is more prospect hype than career production.
Jose Berrios – One of the top prospects in the entire game coming into 2016, Berrios was expected to take over a starting slot in the Twins rotation, even if the Twins were competing, early in the season. Berrios got his chance for sure, but he couldn’t get the ball into the strike zone in the major leagues, an issue he’d never really had in the minor leagues. After walking from 4.7-8.8% of hitters in the minor leagues, Berrios walked 12.4% of major league hitters he faced in 2016. He finished with an 8.61 ERA, and even though he allowed a higher-than-normal .364 BABIP, his FIP was still 6.37, so it’s not as if he had a great season.
Pitching – When you allow the second most runs per game of any team in the league, and your park actually slightly favors pitchers, you have had a terrible pitching staff. Not one single member of the pitching staff that ended the season with the Twins had an ERA under 3.00 – no matter how few innings you lower the bar to.
They are the only team in the major leagues that can claim that this season. Some of that was due to the injuries to key performers on the staff, but really, the Twins under Terry Ryan relied far too frequently on pitching staffs made up of guys who were “pitchability” pitchers, and when a guy like that loses even a tick on his stuff or his control/command, he’s suddenly an infinitely less effective pitcher.
Berrios is one of the first of a new kind of pitcher working through the minor league system, a type that may flame out more frequently before ever throwing a major league pitch, but the ones who make it are impactful big leaguers.