Park banged

13 pitchers and what do you get?

Not, to the apparent surprise and consternation of those around Twins training camp, ByungHo Park:

Crazy stuff. Twins reassign Shuck. Option Murphy and reassign PARK.

— LaVelle E. Neal III (@LaVelleNeal) March 30, 2017

A few thoughts from one who would have kept Park:

* If the Twins are opening with a 13-man pitching staff, they're almost certain to maintain a 13-man pitching staff all season.

* We probably should have seen a 13-man staff coming. On Wednesday Ervin Santana, the obvious opening day starter, couldn't get through five innings. Hector Santiago, who starts today against the Triple A squad, has all of 13 Grapefruit League innings. The post-surgical Phil Hughes has struggled more than impressed this month. And the Twins have few off-days in their early April schedule.

Bottom line: The Twins right now can't expect that their starters are going to eat innings.

* That said, there was an obvious alternative to sending Park to Triple A: dumping Danny Santana.

Park may be a one-tool player, but that tool -- power -- plays. Santana does nothing well enough to put him in the game to do it.

Park isn't on the 40-man roster, and Santana is out of options, so doing it this way keeps both in the organization. But I don't see a lot of value in keeping Santana around. He's third-string everywhere.

* A co-worker was jeering Thursday evening at the notion of Robbie Grossman as the base DH. It's not as ridiculous as Grossman's play in left field as 2016 wound down, and it's what I expected to emerge when spring training opened.

Grossman lacks Park's power, but he does get on base, and that was a significant failing in the Twins lineup last season.

* This does leave the lineup vulnerable to left-handed pitching, with no significant right-handed alternative to Joe Mauer, Eddie Rosario and Max Kepler, each of whom struggled against southpaws last season. Two of them were going to play against lefties even with Park around; now all three will. And if Paul Molitor is as reluctant to platoon Jason Castro as I suspect he will be, that will make four exploitable lineup spots for lefties.

Roster not set yet

The Twins didn't set their opening roster Wednesday, They did trim two more pitchers, Alex Wimmers and Nick Tepesch, both non-roster invitees.

Twins bullpen will be Brandon Kintzler, Ryan Pressly, Taylor Rogers, Matt Belisle, Craig Breslow, Michael Tonkin and Justin Haley.

— Rhett Bollinger (@RhettBollinger) March 29, 2017

I'm not impressed, but all bullpens are in a state of flux. There will be changes. 

Molitor has told relievers not to expect roles that will be "overly definitive ... we've got some idea how it's going to play out."

— Mike Berardino (@MikeBerardino) March 29, 2017

Not really sure what that means. It's a lot easier to determine the roles with this collection than it was last year, when Tonkin was jammed into a long-relief role that never fit his skill set. Rule-5 pick Haley fits that role. 

Anyway ...

There remain a few "battles" to be decided: DH (it will be ByungHo Park, not Kennys Vargas), backup catcher (it will be Chris Gimenez, not John Ryan Murphy) and fifth starter (where the conventional wisdom has Tyler Duffey beating out Aldaberto Mejia, although I'm not so sure about that). Supposedly those announcements will come today.

I suspect one holdup is how to clear spots on the 40 man roster for Park and Gimenez. One can be gotten by putting Glen Perkins on the 60-day disabled list. The other will require releasing or waiving somebody, and which somebody may be a point of internal disputation.

Notes quotes and comment

Two more cuts from Twins camp on Tuesday: the suddenly homer-prone Buddy Boshers and non-roster invitee Tommy Field. Boshers was optioned out, Field reassigned.

Boshers' departure, and Ryan O'Rourke's injury, pretty much secures a bullpen spot for Taylor Rogers, and I'm fine with that. My sense is that Rogers is the better pitcher, but, as I said before, I don't know that I can prove it.

Field ... I never considered him a candidate for a utility job, and I'm a bit puzzled that he made it into the final week of camp.

More cuts -- and something at least close to a definitive opening day roster -- expected today.

---

An interesting piece here by Grant Brisbee, who found video of two games, one in 1984 and the other 2014, with almost exactly the same number of pitches, baserunners, runs, mid-inning pitching changes. The 1984 game took 2 hours 31 minutes; the 2014 game took 3 hours six minutes.

Why the difference?

I was certain that Brisbee would find that the difference is in the commercial breaks. Not really.:

Based on one unscientific deep dive into a pair of similar games, though, the biggest problem with the pace of play is, well, the pace of play. Pitchers don’t get rid of the ball like they used to. Hitters aren’t expecting them to get rid of the ball like they used to. It adds a couple minutes to every half-inning, which adds close to a half-hour.

---

Toby Gardenhire was named to the Rochester Red Wings coaching staff. The son of the former big-league manager was already part of the player development system, but now the Triple A team has an extra full-time coach.

This is almost certainly rooted in the auto accident early in spring training in which Mike Quade, the Rochester manager, was rear-ended and wound up needing shoulder surgery. He can't throw batting practice. Neither, because of a shoulder injury of his own, can hitting coach Chad Allen. There is a certain amount of physical labor involved in coaching. Young Gardenhire will get to do a lot of it.

More on batting orders

The Monday print column explored some of the questions and issues involved in drawing up a batting order for the Twins. Here's a tangent I left out:

Which inning do you suppose has the most runs scored? For most teams -- for the league as whole -- it's the first inning. American League teams last year scored 1,326 runs in the first inning. The next highest: the fifth inning (1,308). Third highest: the third inning. And the inning with the fewest runs (excluding the ninth, which the home team often doesn't hit) is the second (1,166).

This makes sense, because the first inning is the only inning in which the lineup is set up as the manager idealizes it. And if the best hitters are arrayed at the top of the order, that leaves the weaker ones at the bottom -- and they're going to hit in the second inning. One could boost the even-numbered innings by moving some good hitters lower, but that ultimately takes at-bats away from whoever is lowered (about 13 plate appearances a year per lineup slot).

Second question: You may expect that the No. 1 spot in the order leads off the most innings, because it automatically does to start the game, and you would be correct. Which lineup spot leads off the second most innings?

The answer is No. 5. Which is interesting because the stereotypical No. 5 hitter is pretty much the opposite of a leadoff hitter. The stereotypical No. 5 hitter is a slow right-handed hitter with power but lacking on on-base skills. It's a hitter better suited to finishing trouble than starting it -- but he's often tasked with starting it. (For the 2016 Twins, the revolving door in the fifth slot combined for the second lowest OBP, better than only the No. 9 slot.)

Oddly, the 2016 Twins didn't follow the usual pattern of runs scored. Their most productive inning was the third (106 runs), followed by the fifth (95). The first tied with the seventh for fourth place (78), although the Twins lost out on a seventh inning once, so on an average basis the seventh was ever so slightly more productive.

I suspect this is connected to using Brian Dozier as the leadoff hitter so much. Their best power hitter was guaranteed to have nobody on base for his first at-bat. They had to turn the lineup over to have any chance of having somebody on for Dozier,

Batting orders probably have just a marginal effect on runs scored, but managers feed off marginal advantages. I'm not convinced Paul Molitor's batting orders last year maximized the possibilities.

The weekend cuts

The Twins made a handful of moves over the weekend:

Pitcher Jose Berrios was optioned to Triple A; pitcher Drew Rucinski, a non-roster invitee, was reassigned to minor league camp; and outfielder Drew Stubbs, another NRI, was released at his request after being told he would not make the 25-man roster.

There are those who think Berrios lost out on the rotation by spending two-plus weeks with Team Puerto Rico and not pitching much. I think Berrios' spring training fate was sealed early in the offseason, when pitching coach Neil Allen designed a fastball-location program and said that it would be a factor in promotions,

Berrios has impressive velocity, but he leaves too many pitches over the heart of the plate. The Twins made a point of stockpiling rotation options. Trevor May got hurt and Ryan Vogelsong failed to impress, but there are still Aldaberto Mejia and Tyler Duffey, Justin Haley and Nick Tepesch. Berrios had to demonstate fastball command this spring, and he didn't; even if he had, he may have needed one or two more guys to get hurt/fail.

I thought at the start of camp that Stubbs had a chance to make this team, but his chronic contact issues did him in again. He's a four-tool player, but the the hit tool is so inadequate that it makes his power and speed pretty much useless. I think there's a real good chance he'll be back; he's going to try to find a major league team that will give him a bench job, and I doubt he'll find one. I make it at least 50-50 that he plays center field in Rochester next month.

J.B. Shuck is still in camp, but I can't see him beating out Robbie Grossman for the fourth outfielder job -- or Byungho Park, indirectly (with Grossman as the DH and Shuck on the bench).

Pic of the Week

Adam Jones takes a homer away from the Dominican's
Manny Machado in a signature moment from the World
Baseball Classic.

The 2017 World Baseball Classic lived up to the last part of its name, and that's not just the nationalist in me celebrating the United States finally taking the title. There were some really outstanding games and moments, not the least of them this catch by Adam Jones off his Baltimore teammate.

There are plenty of things I would change about the WBC given absolute control of the sport, but nobody has that, and the things I'm not fond of are necessary compromises to make the tournament happen.

And making the tournament happen is better than not having it.

Bring on the regular season. Let's see what it has to offer that can match Jones' catch.

A bad sign for the bullpen.

J.T. Chargois had
a 8.64 ERA in 8.2
innings this spring.

 

The Twins optioned out J.T. Chargois Friday, deleting from the roster -- at least for the beginning of the season -- the bullpen arm with the most upside.

Later Friday Michael Tonkin, who may be the beneficiary of Chargois' rough spring, fed his gopher again. Dick-n-Bert, broadcasting the game from Fort Myers, preferred to dwell on Tonkin's K-rate last season, and certainly there's nothing wrong with 80 strikeouts in 71 innings. There is with 13 homers in that same span.

I opined in an earlier post that if the Twins demote Chargois to avoid putting Tonkin on waivers, they were making a mistake. That opinion still stands.

But it may well be that Alex Wimmers -- removed at the start of the offseason from the 40-man roster and thus a non-roster invitee -- is ahead of Tonkin. He pitched before Tonkin did Friday. I may be even less enthused about Wimmers than I am Tonkin.

The Twins seem, again, headed in the direction of a bullpen of mediocre stuff. Bullpens are always a work in progress, and I can't claim that Chargois has pitched well this spring, but this is a bad sign.