Fire Gardy

I’ve often joked that the best cure for a struggling team is to face the Twins. Team-wide slump? When you’re done with us you’ll all be on fire. Bullpen wrecked up and overused? We’ll give your starters a couple of complete games and you’ll be good to go. Obviously, though, this “fix the opponent’s problems” thing is not some sort of deliberate strategy. And maybe it’s random, and this happens to all teams.* So I’m wondering why it happens.

* But since this is the bloggingest blog of blogs, we’re just going to go ahead and assume that a general feeling I have is true and go from there. I don’t see any problem with it.

I want to focus, right now, on team defense. I know our pitchers have been getting lit up and every offense we face looks like the ‘27 Yankees, but what’s more interesting than more “What’s wrong with Baker and Liriano?” / “Well it’s early, let’s not panic” discussions is why teams seem to fare better in the field against us than they do normally.

We opened the season against the Mariners, and in a four game split their outfield defense shined even brighter than everyone had expected. Their entire defense was +10 runs in just 4 games, or something absurd like that, and if they kept up that pace for the whole season they’d set the record for the best defense of all time; naturally, they have since come crashing back down to earth and their defense is doing about as well as expected.

** Hey, pictures! I figured I’d look for pictures of the guys who made good plays against the Twins in these series. ESPN had five full pages of pictures of the Red Sox / Twins game, but less than one page of the Mariners / Twins matchup. And they didn’t have anything of Franklin Gutierrez or Endy Chavez, who were the guys who won those games! Sad.

This week in Boston, we got clobbered in a doubleheader. But in the second game, we were touching up the pitcher and smacking the ball all over the field; it just so happened that their defense caught fire when we did it. Six lineouts on rocket shots, two of which turned into double plays. Ellsbury tracked down long fly balls in center. Teams don’t usually play defense like that,* so what got into the Red Sox that day?

* There’s a reason 70+% of line drives end up as hits, and it’s because teams don’t usually play defense like that.

I’m going to go ahead and throw out the idea that teams somehow “try harder” against the Twins. It doesn’t make sense, and can’t be verified either way.

So what’s going on?

When I was a kid, and trying unsuccessfully to be a pitcher, my dad always told me that the most important thing was to throw strikes, to pitch to contact, to get the ball in play — the reason for this was that at that level, lots of walks and strikeouts lead to boring games and that’s not good for anyone. In order to keep the kids on my team involved, plenty of balls in play were in order. My ability to throw a ball slowly, accurately, and without movement meant I was a master of getting kids to hit the ball. It gave my fielders a lot of work to do, but ultimately wasn’t that good for my performance as a pitcher.*

* Although I did get to “good hit” to everyone on the other team as we were shaking hands after the game. For what that’s worth.

Since baseball players are famously trapped in an adolescent mental and emotional state, and they all apparently also have ADD, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that similar effects may be in play. Especially given that major league teams don’t even take fielding practice any more.

This, then, comes back to the Twins’ organizational hitting philosophy. As a team, the Twins put the ball into play early in the count, and rarely walk or strike out. That keeps the game moving quickly, and it increases the team’s batting average at the expense of OBP and slugging. But it also keeps the opposing starter’s pitch count low, and it keeps opposing fielders in the game such that they’re more primed to make plays.*

* One of the things I often accuse the Red Sox of is dragging the games out so long that by the 7th inning, the other team is bored and just wants to go home, allowing the Red Sox to pull out wins at the end of the game when the other team is mentally out of it. It’s like that kid who was a dick head on the field, and when you were fed up with him and left, he danced around in “victory.” I am positive that Kevin Youkilis was that kid.

I like the fact that the Twins play fast games, and I think putting the ball in play is a more exciting way to play baseball. However, I was already apprehensive about the tradeoff, given the decrease in walks and extra base hits that come along with this strategy. If another tradeoff is that the opposing defense actually performs better because of it, it seems to me that it’s about time to consider changing the ball-in-play philosophy.

What are your thoughts? Am I off base here? Or might there be something to the concept that hitting the ball early in the count and limiting walks and strike outs can keep the defense on its toes?