Can the 2024 Twins Strike Out Less?
An evalution of where the 2024 MN Twins would hope to improve.
Let’s start by imagining a purely theoretical Twins team for this year. Let’s imagine that the front office were collectively bonked on the head and woke up today with a determination to improve—follow me closely here—in the areas where they were the most lacking in 2023.
If you believe this to be standard operating procedure, you clearly do not think like Derek Falvey, who has a long history of doubling and tripling down on his schemes. Think his three-season experiment with building a power-only roster after the lucky, juiced, unrepeatable 2019. This little shenenigan not only failed to produce a competitive team on the field, but ruined hitters up and down the farm system as the Twins schemed to train launch angle into their hitters—which is another way of saying, beat the contact hitting out of them and train them to strike out a lot more.
Striking Out Less
Moneyball orthodoxy is that strikeouts don’t matter compared to production. However, there is a tipping point, and the 2023 Twins were, so to speak, tipsy.
No, I’m being too nice. They were drunk on strikeout Limoncello.
The 2023 Twins ranked first in strikeouts and strikeout rate, and it wasn’t even close. The 2nd-place Mariners struck out 50 fewer times than the Twins, and the Twins were over 100 SOs clear of the third place Rockies. Their team strikeout rate (26.6%) was almost identical to the season rate of Max Muncy, and a full percent higher than Spencer Torkelson. Both these guys have been bashed for how much they whiff, but they should feel better knowing one entire team matched their ugly numbers.
Let’s dispel a myth here: striking out does affect team success. No doubt some people read the above stats and assume, “yes, but all the best teams strike out a lot too.” Well….
Worst K% Teams
Twins
Mariners
Rockies
Athletics
Angels
Giants
Tigers
Reds
Pirates
Yankees
So the Twins were the only team that was top-ten in strikeout rate to even make the playoffs, and they were first. This makes the 2024 Twins an outlier, and outlier behavior does not predict success over multiple seasons. Let’s address that.
Who struck out the most? Well, Joey Gallo, of course, because literally nobody has ever struck out like Joey Gallo. He is, thankfully, gone, safely signed to a deal with another team. Baseball media people have had some yuks recently looking at Joey Gallo’s incredible strikeout totals, but I want to put this out there: it is anything but funny when its your team employing him. In the middle of last summer, following a game in which Gallo struck out several times with runners on, I wrote 2,000 words of a piece complaining about him, but ultimately scrapped it because I knew I was just screaming into the void. I foresaw correctly that no matter how ugly it got, the Twins would keep him on their roster all season. I now present an excerpt from that piece to make the point about how much Gallo struck out in 2023:
If we examine all years since 2000, there are 508 players who have amassed 3000 PA. Joey Gallo’s career strikeout rate ranks first at 37.9%, over 3 points clear of Mike Zunino. Yes, Gallo has whiffed more frequently than Chris Davis, Mark Reynolds, Adam Dunn, Aaron Judge, and everybody else. So in his career, he is a crazy outlier. However, in 2023 his K-rate is 43.2%, which is over 6 percentage points clear of the second-worst whiffer (Brenton Doyle) among all hitters with at least 300 PA. So he’s the worst in the league by a wide margin.
But that’s for the full season, and Gallo started the season hot. Since June 1, Gallo has struck out 49.4% of the time. That’s once once for every time he’s done anything else. On this time scale (min. 150 PAs), Gallo has struck out 9% more than the next-worst hitter. Another jaw-dropping way to imagine this: for every time Gallo has reached base by any means, he has struck out 1.5 times. Yet another way: the difference between Gallo’s K-rate on this interval and second-place (Nick Pratto) is the same as the difference between second-place and 28th-place.
So he’s gone, good riddance. And there’s more good news: the next-highest strikeout rates on the 2023 Twins are all either gone or unlikely to see the field much. Gallo, Garlick (2nd), and Michael A. Taylor (4th) are all gone. Trevor Larnarch (3rd) doesn’t have a position and will probably be traded. Matt Wallner is 5th, and considering that he figures to be the Opening Day left fielder, that is a problem. He is a big lefty power hitter with big holes in his swing. His advertised ability to walk has not shown up in the Majors thus far, as he had an 80/28 SO/W ratio in his 76 games.
Contact, Eddie. Pleeeaasse.
Incredibly, however, he was one of seven 2023 Twins with a strikeout rate over 30%, and the others are also expected to be major contributors in 2024: Byron Buxton and Edouard Julien (a less hot frenchie when he strikes out). Julien figures to play second on Opening Day, although he may be holding a spot for Brooks Lee, likely the Twins leadoff hitter of the future.
Julien must improve in this area. His on-base ability is potentially elite, but it is hampered by his strangely mediocre contact rate. He also takes strike three a good deal, though having watched last summer, I am convinced he got screwed by bad calls as often as anyone. He truly does have good plate discipline:
Edouard Julien percentile rankings in Plate Discipline
Chase Rate: 100th percentile (lowest in the league)
Walk Rate: 98th
Sweet Spot rate: 92nd
Barrel Rate: 86th
Hard Hit Rate: 70th
K Rate: 8th
Julien is a bit of an odd bird statistically, having a league-leading chase rate (that is, lowest in the league) and yet a high strikeout rate. This would indicate he is swinging and missing at lots of pitches in the zone, and indeed, Julien ranks around the bottom quartile of the league in Whiff Rate (26th percentile). In hopes of finding some comps for Julien, I downloaded a CSV of these Statcast rankings and created a new column which was simply the difference between their ranking in Chase Rate and their rankings in K Rate.
Difference between Chase Rate ranking and K Rate ranking, 2023 Hitters
Brandon Belt, 95
Edouard Julien, 92
Ryan Noda, 92
Jack Suwinski, 91
Chris Taylor, 81
Jake Rogers, 79
Matt Chapman, 78
Aaron Judge, 77
Mike Trout, 77
Kyle Schwarber, 74
As I figured, the vast majority of all hitters have a differential of less than 60, since these two things typically predict each other. The weirdos like Julien, however, tend to share the traits of good Barrel Rates and bad Whiff Rates. There are some very mediocre players here and some very good ones, so any conclusion I draw is questionable, but I would observe that the best hitters with a similar high differential to Julien are all massive power threats, and hit the ball hard.
This suggests what Julien needs to do: make more contact, or make better contact. If Julien starts to make more contact, his strikeout rate will drop, of course, but what may lead to better outcomes would be simply hitting the same number of balls harder. If pitchers begin to fear Julien’s power and pitch around him, he will take a huge number of walks and his value as a player will skyrocket.
Byron? Buxton?
Buxton will never not be a strikeout machine. It is too late in his career to picture him developing plate discipline, and in 2023 he was really flailing. Among 293 hitters with at least 300 PAs, Buxton was in the top 30 in strikeout rate. His percentiles suggest he neither laid off pitches out of the zone (53rd in Chase) nor hit pitches in the zone (19th in Whiff %).
The thing with Buxton, of course, is that unlike Julien, he theoretically provides positive value on defense, and the Twins appear determined to play him in the field until they inevitably cannot, a week into the season. However, unlike in 2023, I do not see the Twins continuing to force it. If he proves unhealthy, he will not be given the DH spot, which will be used to spell Jeffers and minimize Julien’s defensive impact. When, tomorrow, Buxton suffers the injury that makes it impossible to play center, he will no longer play, simple as that.
I’m trying to make light of what’s really a very sad situation. Buxton may be physically incapable of playing the sport he is indisputably excellent at. Buxton is not a highly touted bust—he did become the player we all believed he would be, with a peak that we really saw in real life: he was among the best players in the sport. It is impossible to project 2024 for Buxton beyond saying that leaving the unfixable strikeouts aside, Buxton played All-star caliber baseball as recently as a year and a half ago.
Byron Buxton, 2021-2022 (153 games, 636 PA)
.257/.327/.576, 47 HR, 36 doubles, 116 / 34 strikeout-to-walk ratio, 149 OPS+
Imagine the offense the Twins would have if you got that production out of him for even 120 games. But of course, this is the annual Twins Trap, and I refuse to fall into it. Any production you get from Buxton is bonus. The team must be a good team without his ephemeral projections.
New Additions
The 2024 Twins will likely regress toward normal strikeout levels for the simple reason that they have made a few substitutions which cannot help but improve things on that end. The newcomers:
Manuel Margot Career | 91 OPS+, 90 wRC+, 17.8 K%, 7.8% BB%
2023: 91 OPS+
Carlos Santana Career | 114 OPS+, 116 wRC+, 16.5 K%, 14.5 BB%
2023: 109 OPS+
Both these guys are well below the league average K% of 22.7 for their careers, but Santana’s walk rate is the star here. A little Statheading tells me that there have been only 14 players since 2000 to play in as many games as Santana with a career OBP as high as his (.356). Santana will essentially replace the first base at-bats of Donovan Solano and Joey Gallo, who combined for 105 SOs in 381 at-bats while playing first in 2023, which is a 27.6 K%. Santana’s career suggests that he will convert about 40 those strikeouts to something else, and a lot of them will be walks, something Solano and Gallo combined to do only 10.7% of the time.
Margot has almost never been a league-average hitter. Baseball Savant, which centerstages quality-of-contact stats, should put a content warning on his page:
Manuel Margot : Power :: Butterfly : Aggression
2023: 3.9% Barrel rate, 37.8% Hard-Hit rate, 28.6% Sweet Spot rate
These are all lower than the man he replaces, Michael A. Taylor; in fact, Michael A. Taylor actually hit 21 home runs in his 388 PAs, thanks to an above-league-average 13.5% Barrel rate. For the less math-oriented, this is to say that Michael A. Taylor put the Barrel on the small white ball more than three times as often as Margot did.
While strikeouts matter a lot more than the Twins like to admit, in the case of Margot, they probably don’t. Margot will strike out about 16% of the time where Taylor struck out 30%, but you would likely still take Taylor’s production (he’s also still a superior defender, though they are both good). Where Margot could make up some ground is in converting some of those extra balls in play into hits. The problem is, he probably isn’t able to. In an eight year career—far too large a sample size to dismiss—Margot has a sub-.300 BABIP, with several seasons far below that line. His career-best .332 BABIP corresponded to his best season. In 2022, he slashed .274/.325 en route to a 105 OPS+ at Tropicana. Clearly, this is indicative of chronically weak contact, not paired with the elite speed which can turn some ground balls into hits. He has, for most of his career, been a defensive specialist.
With the new additions, the plan should be simple: Santana logs 500 PAs, and Margot logs as few as possible. Let’s imagine Kiriloff and Buxton play a full season in the field—signs are seen in the sky, the earth gives forth her dead—in that case, Margot would only be needed as a defensive replacement in center, and his bat would barely see the light of day. As it is, he’s likely to get a similar number of PAs to Taylor last year, though if the bat proves as ugly as on paper, I could see many, many of his CF innings being once again dumped on Willi “I Play 57 Positions But None Well” Castro.
The difficulties of striking out less will be on full display today when the Twins face KCR frontliner Cole Ragans (in 96 IP last year, 11 K/9).