Sliders: The Twins are extreme strike-throwers. That’s a good thing, right? (2024)

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-seasonMLBcolumn that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball.

When you’re lost in the wilderness, the first thing you want is a map to safety. And when you’re alone on the mound with a fresh pile of runs by your name, the calculator in your brain can provide it. How many scoreless innings to respectability?

Chris Paddack of the Minnesota Twins resisted that temptation the other night, when the New York Yankees bruised him in the Bronx. If a pitcher’s ERA starts soaring, Paddack said, “We have to make sure we don’t look up at that scoreboard and start doing math.”

Good advice, to be sure. Yet it’s math that gives the Twins’ pitching staff its operating premise: Hitters aren’t as good as you think.

“We had a meeting in spring training where they showed us that in the year 2023, there were 54,000 pitches thrown right down the middle of the zone — any count, any pitch — and the percentage of extra-base hits was, like, 6 percent,” said Pablo Lopez, an All-Star last season.

“It puts things in perspective. Why would I not want to take those odds? Why would I try to be too fine too early in the count? And then there’s the other thing: You cannot strike anyone out until the batter has two strikes. So you want to be in the zone, you want to challenge the batter, and then you take your shot when you get it.”

Entering Thursday’s games, the Twins were one of just two teams — with the surging Philadelphia Phillies — whose pitchers averaged more than nine strikeouts and fewer than three walks per nine innings. Only Seattle had a better strikeout-to-walk ratio than the Twins’ 3.55 mark.

Pete Maki, the Twins’ pitching coach, said the team recently changed its opposing-hitter scouting charts from a nine-box strike zone to halves: up or down, in or out. Very rarely will they get more specific, Maki said, and the worst approach of all would be to nibble around the edges.

“We talk about how it is versus how it seems,” Maki said. “So a guy who hits 50 homers a year, what’s his home run rate? It’s about 8 percent. He goes deep eight times out of every 100 plate appearances, times six (for 600 at-bats) — that’s 48 homers. So that means 92 times when that guy steps up to the plate, out of 100, he doesn’t leave the yard. Sometimes it feels like, ‘Dang, this guy leaves the yard every other day.’ No — it doesn’t happen.”

But it does happen to the Twins with discouraging regularity. As proficient as they’ve been in the most basic element of pitching — throwing strikes — the Twins ranked 19th among the 30 teams in ERA, at 4.20. The long ball is the culprit: Only the wretched Chicago White Sox have allowed more homers per nine innings than the Twins’ 1.3.

It wasn’t as much of an issue last season, because Sonny Gray gave up homers at the lowest rate in the majors (0.4 per nine). But Gray left for St. Louis in free agency, and most of the Twins’ best pitchers have natural fly-ball tendencies. The odds favor pitchers, but they guarantee nothing.

“That possibility is there; it’s part of the 6 percent, so it’s going to happen,” said Lopez, who has allowed 13 homers in 13 starts. “If you could limit them to be solo homers, great. But you can’t let the possibility of them happening take away from the aggressiveness, the conviction in your pitches.”

With Lopez having an uneven season (5-6 with a 5.45 ERA), the Twins’ steadiest starter has been Joe Ryan, who allowed just seven homers through his first 11 starts. Then came June 1 in Houston, when he gave up four home runs in a 5-2 loss.

The Twins try to save their out-of-the-zone, swing-and-miss pitches for two-strike counts, but sometimes, Ryan said, he needs to be more careful. There are strikes and then there are quality strikes — the difference between control and command.

“I probably throw too many strikes, at times,” Ryan acknowledged. “It’s more trying to not throw strikes as much. If you said, ‘Just throw a strike every single pitch,’ I could do that, but it wouldn’t be the best result. You want to still be disciplined enough; you get four balls to work with.”

Three balls, really, because the Twins do all they can to avoid the fourth. It is a point of pride, manager Rocco Baldelli said, that his team rarely pitches around an opposing hitter.

“You want the other team to have to earn it,” Baldelli said. “It’s not easy to string together hits in today’s game. Run scoring, it’s not easy to do. It’s hard, and it’s getting harder. If we can keep guys off the bases by making them swing and trying to create outs that way, it’s a positive step. I think it’s something that we should lean into and be happy about.”

Forget the math, perhaps, but remember the odds.

Pub trivia for the London series

As MLB makes its third visit to London this weekend, it’s a good time to look at the list of recent players from the United Kingdom. This won’t take long.

While Baseball Reference counts 40 major leaguers born in the U.K. from 1835 through 1900, just 10 have been born there since then. Remember these names and impress your friends at the pub!

Bobby Thomson: Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1923, Thomson’s family moved to the U.S. three years later. By far the most famous U.K. baseball export, Thomson hit the “Shot Heard Round The World” on Oct. 3, 1951, vaulting the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers for the pennant.

Keith Lampard: Born in Warrington, England in 1945, Lampard’s family moved to Oregon in 1949. Like Thomson, Lampard ended a game with a home run — as a rookie for the Houston Astros on Sept. 19, 1969. He never hit another.

Les Rohr: Born in Lowestoft, England in 1946 (his father was with the U.S. Air Force), Rohr was the first high school player ever chosen in the MLB draft. The New York Mets picked him second overall in 1965 from Billings West High School in Montana, and while Rohr beat Don Drysdale as a rookie two years later, injuries limited him to six career games.

Tom Waddell: Born in Dundee, Scotland in 1958, Waddell grew up in New Jersey. Though undrafted out of Manhattan College, he impressed an Atlanta Braves scout named Hank Aaron (yes, that one) and signed after a tryout in 1981. Waddell would pitch three seasons for Cleveland with a 4.30 ERA.

Danny Cox: Born in Northampton, England in 1959, Cox, whose father was in the Air Force, attended high school in both Germany and Georgia. He was a mainstay of the St. Louis Cardinals’ rotation in the 1980s, pitching the team to the 1987 World Series with a Game 7 NLCS shutout against the San Francisco Giants.

Paul Marak: Born in Lakenheath, England in 1965, Marak went to high school in New Mexico. He made seven starts for Atlanta in late 1990, including a shutout, and actually made the team as the fifth starter the next spring. But rainouts wiped out his turn and the Braves — en route to an unlikely NL pennant — sent him down in mid-April. Marak never made it back.

Lance Painter: Born in Bedford, England in 1967, Painter was raised in Wisconsin and pitched in the majors for 10 seasons, mostly with Colorado and St. Louis. In 2005, he served as the pitching coach for Great Britain at the European Baseball Championships.

Phil Stockman: Born in Oldham, England in 1980, Stockman grew up in Australia and won a silver medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics. He made the most of a 10-game career in the majors, allowing just one run in 11 1/3 innings for the Braves.

Chris Reed: Born in London in 1990, Reed grew up in California and signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers as a first-round pick out of Stanford. A graduate of Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda, Calif., Reed served two non-consecutive terms in affiliated baseball, retiring after the 2016 season but returning in 2018. He pitched just two games in the majors, for Miami in 2015.

P.J. Conlon: Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1993, Conlon pitched three games for the Mets in 2018 with an 8.22 ERA. His parents (Irish father, Scottish mother) met in the U.S., moved to Belfast, and returned to California when P.J. was two. They were part of a large family contingent for his MLB debut in Cincinnati when Conlon became the first Irish-born player in the majors since 1945. “You could see them in the stands, waving the Irish flags,” said Conlon, who had the flag stitched on his glove. “They’re proud of it, and I’m proud of it.”

Gimme Five

Five bits of ballpark wisdom

The resume of Ruben Amaro Jr.

Above a glass case of World Series memorabilia at the Baseball Hall of Fame, there’s a photo of the Phillies celebrating their first championship in 1980. On the edge of the mob around Tug McGraw is Ruben Amaro Jr., then a 15-year-old bat boy. His father, Ruben Sr., was the Phillies’ first-base coach.

Now 59, Amaro Jr. is probably the only person in major-league history to serve in all of these roles: bat boy, player, general manager, coach and broadcaster. Before a game last month, in the NBC Sports Philadelphia booth, he talked about the best and worst parts of each of his five occupations.

Bat Boy, Phillies, 1980-1983: “The best part was being so close to players I idolized and admired greatly, Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose and Steve Carlton, and just being able to watch them literally at ground level. To kneel next to them while they were in the batting circle and have them talk to me about their at-bats, it was just crazy stuff. And to be on the field with my dad as a coach, in uniform, that was special. The worst part was the heat on the Astroturf, man. It was smokin’. In the middle of August, that thing was like 130 degrees.”

Player, Angels, Phillies, Indians, 1991-1998: “One of the greatest things was being able to line up in 1992 on Opening Day in front of my family and friends at Veterans Stadium. Lenny Dykstra got hit in the hand that day, and the next game I had like my best game ever: two doubles and a homer. I think I was leading the league in OPS the first week of the season. The worst part of that, though, is that my dad at the time was working for the Detroit Tigers, so he was not around for that. He didn’t get a chance to see me play until late in that season, in San Diego. That was a bummer.”

General Manager, Phillies, 2009-2015: “Being in the World Series at Yankee Stadium, we were all together with our families down the left-field line, right next to the dugout. And (assistant) Benny Looper looked over at me and said, ‘I want to congratulate you. There’s never been a GM who took over a team that Pat Gillick just left and ever got to the playoffs, let alone the World Series.’ I didn’t realize that. And then I was sitting there thinking, when Cliff Lee was pitching that first game, ‘I’m the GM of this team. How crazy is that?’ I was asked to come up and take pictures with the First Lady and the Second Lady, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, because they’d brought out the first pitch. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, how do you get to do this?’

“The worst part was having to tell my kids that I was let go. I’d sort of prepped them, because I knew at some point it was going to happen — even before I got the job, I told them: ‘Things aren’t going to go well for Dad. The first three years of my tenure, they’re going to be loving on me, but after that it’s a crapshoot, because I knew at some point we’d jump off that cliff.’ But when it happened, I had to get them out of school because I didn’t want them to find out on Twitter or have another kid tell them I got fired. So I was speeding up 95 to go to their school, and I’m calling the guidance counselor: ‘Get them out of class as fast as you can, because I want to let them know.’ So that moment, having to tell them, was very emotional.”

Coach, Red Sox (2016-17) and Mets (2018): “I was ecstatic in Boston. Being able to put the uniform on and work with (a staff) I had a real bond with was really fun. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to be in the clubhouse with my teammates again!’ I was the outfield guy, and I got to work with players who were really, really wonderful: Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, Jackie Bradley Jr., Chris Young and Brock Holt. I don’t know if they were humoring me, but they were always very respectful of what I had to say. And Mookie Betts is one of my favorite people, one of the best athletes and hardest-working guys I’ve ever been around. There’s just so many good things I could say about Mookie; I have a man-crush on him.

“The Mets wasn’t my best experience, because I don’t think they knew what they were doing. Mickey Callaway didn’t have a whole lot of guidance or support. I tried to sit with him every day and help him with things, but who was supporting him? Who was helping him become a manager? Nobody. That made it tough.”

Broadcaster, Phillies, 2020-present: “When I was with the Cleveland Indians, I was starting to bounce around a lot and thinking about what I could do after baseball. I was sitting in the back of the plane with (broadcaster) Arch Manning — Rick Manning, but we called him Arch — and I said, ‘Dude, tell me about your job.’ He said, ‘Ruben, if you ever, ever, ever get a chance to do one of these jobs, take it and don’t ever let it go. It’s the greatest job you could ever have, to watch baseball and talk about baseball — and nobody blames you for anything.’ And I can honestly say this to you: There’s no downside for me in this job. There really isn’t. I get to talk about baseball, which is my favorite thing to do, and I get to do it with spectacular people in my hometown. Like, who gets to do this? I’m really, really fortunate.”

Off the Grid

A historical detour from The Immaculate Grid

Olmedo Saenz, Oakland A’s/Born outside U.S. 50 states and D.C.

More than 200 players qualified for this square on Wednesday, including the Panama-born Saenz, who played nine seasons for the White Sox, A’s and Dodgers from 1994 through 2007.

I remember Saenz, nicknamed “Killer Tomato,” for two things. In 2000, the Yankees sent Roger Clemens to the mound in the Bronx to try to close out the A’s in Game 4 of their division series. Saenz greeted him with a three-run homer in the first — “He flipped it right out of here,” Clemens said — leading a rout that sent the weary teams on an overnight flight to Oakland for Game 5 the next day. (The Yankees won.)

The other is from a story by my friend Ben Shpigel in 2013. Shpigel was covering the Jets for the New York Times and knew that their irascible coach, Rex Ryan, was once an avid Strat-O-Matic player. On a rainy summer afternoon, Shpigel arranged to play a game against the coach to study his strategy in a different setting.

They used a set from 2004, when Saenz had an .856 OPS for the Dodgers that caught Ryan’s eye. “Who’s this Olmedo Saenz guy?” he wondered aloud, and then used his card in the game. And “this guy Olmedo, the guy I’ve never heard of” — as Ryan reminded Shpigel during their game — came through with a double in the coach’s 6-1 win.

“I love coaching football, don’t get me wrong,” Ryan said. “But I just love baseball.”

And that day, the mysterious Olmedo Saenz made him love it just a little bit more.

Classic clip

“Van Lingle Mungo,” by Dave Frishberg

On its own, the name Van Mungo is more odd than mellifluous. But when you add his middle name, as the jazz pianist Dave Frishberg did in 1969, you get something timeless and elegant, fit for a song title: “Van Lingle Mungo.”

Mungo was born 113 years ago Saturday in Pageland, S.C., where he died in 1985 at age 73. A Depression-era pitching star for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he made five All-Star teams and led the majors in strikeouts in 1936.

But it was his name that gave Mungo a lasting mark, as the inspiration for Frishberg’s stylish ode to the game of his youth. Frishberg filled the song solely with names he plucked from The Baseball Encyclopedia, creating a 1940s version of “Remember Some Guys” with a bossa nova beat:

Heenie Majeski, Johnny Gee

Eddie Joost, Johnny Pesky, Thornton Lee

Danny Gardella

Van Lingle Mungo

The song brought a sudden surge of recognition to Mungo, who was then working part-time at a dry goods store in Pageland. He told the New York Daily News in 1970 that he was getting hundreds of letters from fans every week.

“I’ve been out of baseball 25 years,” Mungo said, “and it sure is nice to be remembered.”

(Top photo of Pete Maki and Chris Paddack: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)