The first steps came during 2016 offseason with the hiring of the analytically-focused major league coach Jeff Pickler and the signing of free-agent catcher Jason Castro. A three-year, $24.5 million deal seemed like a lofty sum to pay for Castro, who had only one 2-WAR season under his belt, but he was going to make the entire pitching staff better because of his pitch framing.
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In 2016, Minnesota ranked second to last in the American League with -16.2 framing runs from their catchers, according to Baseball Prospectus. Castro finished third in pitch framing runs that year. It was a natural fit.
“I don’t think it [framing] was something that was specifically talked up at that point. I think it was understood,” Castro said on Minnesota’s recruitment that winter. “It wasn’t too long after [signing] that we talked about those sorts of things.”
Castro didn’t steal as many strikes in 2017, but he and backup Chris Gimenez still combined to be worth +8.2 runs, causing a near 25 run swing in the Twins’ favor.
While Minnesota’s pitchers now had better catchers to throw to, they had an even better defense behind them. In 2016, Twins fielders posted the worst fielding percentage in the AL (.979) and the second worst DRS (-60). In 2017, they had the second best fielding percentage in the league (.987), which, along with some defensive realignment, let them save 20 runs in the field.
Overall, the Twins allowed 101 fewer runs with their DRS and pitch framing improving by 104 runs.
The biggest changes were in the outfield. Robbie Grossman saw his defensive innings cut. The Miguel Sano experiment in right field was done, replaced by Max Kepler. Center fielder Byron Buxton broke out as well, jumping to the top of the Statcast leaderboards in defensive outs above average. Those three changes alone accounted for 40 of the 80 defensive runs saved.
Then there was Castro, who was +10 in the field, while his predecessor, Kurt Suzuki, was -12. That was apart from pitch framing, too. He, again, was the only notable addition to the defense. The pieces Minnesota had were just better utilized.
“I think a lot of it just takes care of itself in the types of players that we have,” Castro said.
And, of course, you can’t talk about run prevention without talking about shifts, which may be a bit of a tender subject in the Twin Cities because of Brian Dozier. But Dozier’s barking about unwritten rules are a negligible side effect to what some infield rearranging has done for Twins pitchers.
It’s not that they have just adopted shifting. Going by Fangraphs’ team splits leaderboards, the 2016 Twins shifted for 1,050 batters faced while the 2017 squad did so 1,134 times, marking only an 8 percent increase. The difference was the effectiveness of the shifts. In 2016, opposing batters recorded a .291 wOBA against the Twins when they were shifting, which was middle of the pack. In 2017, the league average against shifts dropped about three points. The Twins saw a 15 point drop, holding batters to a .276 clip — the fifth lowest in baseball.
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Nobody in the locker room would divulge any company secrets on how Pickler and Co. did it, but getting Sano back in the infield and bouncing him around surely helped compared with the less defensively gifted Trevor Plouffe. That and a willingness to experiment.
“For the most part, we’re all pretty open to whatever they want us to do,” Buxton said. “We’re willing to do it, try it out, and if it doesn’t work, we just kind of put it to the side and go back to what we’re doing.”
Buxton is also a product of breaking from defensive norms, playing more shallow than most center fielders because his elite speed can take away bloop singles while still catching up to deep fly balls.
“We’re not afraid to try new things and try to challenge ourselves to get better,” he said.
Buxton believes that precise positioning leads to more wins, and with more wins, more confidence in the field. Confidence to not only trust precise positioning, but to lay out to try to make a diving play when the opportunity arises.
“It makes you more comfortable to go out there. To take more chances,” Buxton said. “We just went out there, played ball and had fun.”
Which leads us to the 2018 Twins, who seem destined to do better across the board in every aspect that sparked the turnaround.
Take small sample sizes with caution, but the Twins are deploying even more shifts per game in 2018, setting up a skewed alignment against 94 batters faced through their first seven games: an average of roughly one and a half an inning. Again, it’s not shifting for the sake of shifting. They’re holding batters to a .153 wOBA when they shift — the best mark in baseball.
Castro is a prime candidate to steal more runs behind the plate, especially with a year’s experience with his new staff. Buxton, Sano and Kepler are all a year older and wiser and should improve, too. And with a playoff berth behind them a flurry of offseason additions, Buxton says they are confident.
That confidence and those results were the selling points pitcher Addison Reed needed to sign with Minnesota this winter. He did not seem to care much about how they did it, just that they did it.
“As a player, I look at ERA, I look at wins, I look at losses. I don’t look at ‘wXRZ,’” Reed said, inventing a new stat. “You can tell a lot from your eyes, about how a team will be, how a team is.”
What Reed saw was a team that gave him the best chance to win. To get there, Minnesota had to look at their defense differently.
