Top-10 Twins

I hope Bryant will respond to this and offer his opinions, but I doubt it. He is too busy taking boat trips to small islands off the mainland of Washington to have dinner-dates to really devote himself to this website at this moment. This moment of course being the final push to the playoffs for our favorite baseball team. The way I see it Bryant and I have already wasted about five 24-hour days of our lives to this website so why quit now?

With 18 games left it is time to dive into the top-10 Twins of the 2008 season. This is not based purely on statistics but rather on my arbitrary opinion. Feel free to comment.

1. Justin Morneau: This should be un-debatable. No Twin has performed better or carried a heavier load than Justin Morneau in 2008. He has played in every game for the Twins, he is in the top-10 in the American League in hitting and is second in the RBI race. More impressively for a team that has needed to take advantage of every offensive opportunity this season, Morneau has hit .372, with a 1.12 OPS, 91 RBI and eight home runs with runners in scoring position this year.

There has been considerable discussion in other Twins related websites about the comparison between Morneau’s 2006 MVP season and Morneau’s 2008 MVP-like season. Let me just say this, in 2006 Justin Morneau spent the bulk of his season (especially the portion where he began hitting like Joe Dimaggio) in the five hole, hitting behind Michael Cuddyer’s career year and in-front of Torii Hunter. Remember that Cuddyer hit .284 that year with 24 homers and 109 RBI, so while he may not have been as pure of a hitter as Mauer has been this year, there is no doubt he was considered a major threat by opposing pitchers. Hunter hit .278 with 31 home runs and 98 RBI, not exactly a slouch of a player protecting Morneau from the sixth slot in the lineup.

This year Morneau has had Mauer in front of him and a combination of Delmon Young and Jason Kubel behind him. He has been the teams lone consistent power threat all season, and his home run numbers have dropped because of it. But he has become a more complete hitter, shown in the average obviously, but also in his 40-plus doubles and his 70 walks.

There has been no better player for the Twins this season, and the decision to sign Morneau to an six-year contract in the off-season was the Twins best.

2. Joe Mauer: The best swing in baseball, the most patient approach at the plate of any Twin, the ire of any number of idiots who troll around Twins message boards, Joe Mauer is the best catcher in baseball and one of it’s truly bright stars. It only takes a few appearances by free-swinging 20-year-old’s like Delmon Young or Carlos Gomez to appreciate what the Twins have in Mauer. His 4.06 pitches per plate appearance are good for 16th best in the league, and he is currently third in batting average and second in on-base percentage in the AL. If this is what we get from Mauer for the rest of his career I think that people would still find a way to be disappointed. Mauer at 6′5″, 230 pounds, has the stature at the plate that makes it seem unbelievable that he has only eight home runs this season despite appearing in 130 games.

Still, I think most fans are coming around to the idea that Mauer’s power will come when Mauer wants it to, a seemingly preposterous notion that a player can just turn-on power, Mauer has shown that when he wants to let his bat fly he can. It was around mid-June when the press and the blogosphere got wise to the fact that Mauer had only hit two home runs through the first 70-odd games of the season. So for the next two months Mauer seemed to take more chances on inside pitches and began blasting some clutch home runs deep into the right-field seats. From June 27 through August 16 Mauer hit six home runs and quieted some of the critics to his game.

What I thought I saw in that stretch was a player just letting every one know - from pitchers to fans to writers - that if he wanted to he could do that all year, but that just doesn’t seem to be Joe Mauer. And with Justin Morneau hitting behind him for the foreseeable future, I don’t think that’s a problem.

3. Denard Span/Alexi Casilla: With the injuries to Michael Cuddyer, Adam Everett and Mike Lamb the Twins should have been in trouble this year. Throw in the fact that Carlos Gomez proved himself to be a terrible lead-off hitter and the Twins needed these two players to produce, and they did.

When Span was called up for the second time on June 30 the Twins were 45-38, two games back of the White Sox, and making their push towards the top of the standings. Span spent the beginning of this stretch hitting out of the ninth spot before being called into lead-off duty on July 22. Since that moment Span has hit .289 with .366 on-base percentage. He has also scored 53 runs, drove in 36 RBI and stolen 15 bases in 75 games. The numbers are not dominant or overwhelming but compared with what Gomez was doing for the first 93 games of the season (.247 avg, .281 OBP) they have been essential to the Twins success.

Casilla followed a similar line of success, since he was inserted into the starting lineup, for good, on May 20 until he went down with a finger injury on July 28, Casilla hit .318 with 37 runs, 36 RBI, three home runs and 16 walks to 23 strikeouts in 58 games. Casilla provided for Joe Mauer what the team had hoped Gomez would do, a player to get on-base and keep pitchers concerned about his speed, giving Mauer better looks.

I think that Span and Casilla are in line with Joe Nathan in regards to their importance to a team that needed a small number of players to have very good years to make up for the glaring problems of the team’s offensive production and pitching staff. The bullpen has been awful and Joe Nathan has been the only savior in the late innings, but without Span and Casilla stepping in for the woeful performances of Adam Everett, Mike Lamb, and Carlos Gomez and the injury to Michael Cuddyer, the Twins are not in this race.

4. Joe Nathan: Nathan’s numbers speak for themselves: 61 innings, 1.03 ERA, 36 saves in 42 opportunities. What those numbers don’t show is how, just like Morneau, Nathan has had to carry an entire bullpen on his back. With the number of blown opportunities by the likes of Guerrier, Reyes, Crain, Bonser, Bass, Breslow, and now Guardado, the Twins have needed Nathan to hold down every single game that he comes into, and for the most part he has. But when Nathan struggles, as he has over the last month - and this is going to sound ridiculous - going 0-1 with six saves, three blown saves, and one blown lead, and a 0.63 ERA, it shows just how important it is for him to be perfect when given the chance.

In fact just writing this right now gets me irate because I can’t stand thinking about the Twins bullpen in any capacity unless I am solelyfocused on Nathan. With the loss of Neshek at the start of the year there would have been ample room in this list for a middle relief pitcher to step up and be one of the most important players on the Twins roster, but instead, if we were doing a bottom-10 on this Twins roster I can guarantee you that five of those spots would be reserved for our middle relief, the rest for Livan Hernandez, Mike Lamb, Craig Monroe, Adam Everett, and most likely Gomez or Harris.

5-7. Scott Baker/Nick Blackburn/Kevin Slowey: It is hard to decide on who has been the most important starting pitcher for the Twins, so lets just give it to all three. The numbers are eerily similar.

Baker:          8-4, 147.2 innings, 3.66 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 119 K’s, 15 quality starts

Blackburn: 10-8, 176.2 innings, 3.67 ERA, 1.29 WHIP,   89 K’s, 18 quality starts

Slowey:      12-9, 146.1 innings, 3.63 ERA, 1.09 WHIP, 111 K’s, 12 quality starts

Eerily similar there, but nothing more impressive than the other. Although Slowey going 6-3 with a 2.81 ERA since July 22 is certainly worth mentioning.

8: Francisco Liriano: Liriano is doing everything that every fan hoped he would after he was called up in August going 5-0 with a 1.57 ERA and 44/12 strikeout-to-walk ratio. But I think the most important aspect of Liriano’s performance has been the erasing of the tremors that Twins fans had when Livan Hernandez approached the mound. Lets just enjoy a quick one reminder of what Hernandez was, and is, and how nice it is to not have him pitching here anymore.

Hernandez in 2008: 11-11, 6.81 ERA (highest ERA of any qualifying pitcher in baseball), .344 BAA, 1.67 WHIP. Since joining Colorado Hernandez has gone 1-3 with a 9.85 ERA and is probably going on the disabled list.

Liriano on the other hand is starting to look like a number one pitcher. His velocity is down of course, as everyone wants to point out, but the effective use of his change-up has made him a more complete pitcher, and it should also put less strain on his arm then when he was throwing 45 sliders a game in 2006. If the Twins were to make the playoffs with time to set their rotation (unlikely) he would have to be your number one pitcher.

9: Jason Kubel: After missing 2005 and absolutely suffering through 2006 Jason Kubel appears to have found his groove as the Twins everyday DH (or at least as everyday as you can be in Ron Gardenhire’s lineup). Kubel now has back-to-back seasons of solid production and if he can start to hit left-handers with more consistency (something that was never a problem for Kubel when he was coming up through the Twins farm system) he could become the pure-swinging power threat that Twins fans have been longing for since he first appeared in 2004.

While he hasn’t been as dominant as Morneau or anywhere near as consistent as Mauer, he has certainly been the Twins third best hitter this season with a .277 average, 17 home runs and 71 RBI (all career highs). What has also been important, and something that many Twins fans may have forgotten, is that Kubel has accepted and became a designated hitter for this team, simple right? Well just to refresh every one’s mind, last season Jeff Cirillo appeared at designated hitter 21 times for the Minnesota Twins. Jeff Cirillo, 21 games as a power threat from the designated hitter position, that happened.

Along with Brian Buscher appearing to have solidified himself for the time being at third base the Twins have actually found a way to fill their gaping needs from the 2007 off-season from inside their own organization, and not from free agent signees Mike Lamb and Craig Monroe.

10: Delmon Young:

http://www.twinscast.com/blog/2008/08/19/get-off-of-delmon-young/ 

(enough said).