Minnesota Twins make history with Wild Card berth
By Jason Burke
On Wednesday night the Minnesota Twins clinched the second American League Wild Card spot after the Los Angeles Angels lost to the Chicago White Sox.
Obviously the Minnesota Twins would have preferred to have clinched while gaining a win over the Cleveland Indians at Progressive Field last night, but regardless of how they officially gained entry into The Dance, they’re in.
A year ago during a spring trip to Las Vegas I placed $20 on the Twins to win the World Series. I was looking for a team that had long odds (the Twins would have paid out a thousand dollars on this bet), but could conceivably make a run if a bunch of things went their way. My wife still taunts me with “the 2016 World Series champion Twins” from time to time.
Turns out I was way off last year, and based on the history of baseball, there would have been no reason to suspect that the 103 loss Twins from 2016 would have been even a little bit competitive this season, as Rhett Bollinger pointed out on Twitter yesterday.
Never. The Twins would be the first to ever go from 100 losses to the postseason the next year. https://t.co/oq8pFC1cxH
— Rhett Bollinger (@RhettBollinger) September 27, 2017
On April first, the Twins had a 3.6% chance of taking one of the Wild Card spots according to FanGraphs. Outside of the White Sox 0.0% chance at the beginning of the season, the Twins had the lowest chances of any team in the American League–and by the precedent set before them, for good reason.
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On August third, after the team had traded away closer Brandon Kintzler and the newly acquired Jaime Garcia, Minnesota had a 3.4% chance of reaching the postseason. They were four games below .500 and were seemingly focused on 2018. Then they started winning some games here and there, and continued to do so as other teams fell off the pace. The Twins just continued to hang around the .500 mark, which was good enough this season. As recently as September 5, they had just a 27% chance of claiming one of the wild cards. Then the Angels fell off a cliff and the Twins just kept Twinning, and here we are.
A big reason for that turnaround has been the emergence of some of the team’s younger stars (the same ones that I was looking to a year ago) providing a spark. In September, the Twins have the fourth most productive offense in the game, holding a collective 115 wRC+. That’s behind just the Oakland Athletics, Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees. The Yankees are their presumed Wild Card opponent, and if they beat the Yanks, then they’ll have a date with the Tribe as things currently sit.
They have ten players this month that have a wRC+ of 100 or more with Kennys Vargas leading the way with a 246 mark through twelve games. He’s also batting .440 with a .517 OBP during the month. Eduardo Escobar has driven home 21 to go with his eight home runs, and Byron Buxton has been worth a full win above replacement.
Their pitching staff has been fairly unremarkable for the entirety of 2017, playing within a similar mold to the Baltimore Orioles of recent years, but the main difference is that the Twins have talented arms in their rotation–they’re just not consistent just yet.
Jose Berrios can shut the opposition down, but he’s still fairly green in the majors, having tossed just over 200 innings over parts of two seasons. Ervin Santana can go through weeks of dominance, but then hold an ERA close to four for a month, like he has in September.
Kyle Gibson is 4-0 with a 2.81 ERA (4.06 FIP) in five starts this month and his walk rate–like many of the arms at Minnesota’s disposal–is well below the league average of 3.06.
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Does anyone expect the Twins to knock off either the Yankees or the Red Sox, depending on who wins the AL East? Not really. But nobody expected them to make the postseason either, and this team, even without Miguel Sano, is seemingly full of surprises.
They don’t seem to have the depth that other teams in the American League have, but as we saw from the 2014 San Francisco Giants, sometimes you can just ride one pitcher all the way to a World Series title. The Twins have a few days to find out who their Madison Bumgarner is.