In most games this season, the Twins figure to have a better starting pitcher than their opponent.
Unless, of course, it happens to be one of those games where the best starting pitcher in baseball is simply named "whomever is facing the Twins' lineup."
That's a polite way of saying the Twins have really good starting pitching this year, and what could also be described as streaky hitting.
Maybe that hitting description sounds overly polite, too, but it's accurate. On Monday's Daily Delivery podcast with Patrick Reusse, I dusted off some old math terms from the distant past for an explanation: mean, median and mode.
The mean is the average of all numbers in a group. Through 35 games, the Twins have scored 4.34 runs per game. Going into the weekend, it was a little higher — almost exactly at league average, as La Velle E. Neal III pointed out.
The median is the middle number in a group when they are listed in order. That number for the Twins is four runs — roughly half of their games they have scored more than that, and half of them they have scored fewer. Again, that's fine.
Ah, but the mode. That's the most common number in a set. And the most common number of runs the Twins have scored in a game this season? Two. They've scored that paltry total seven times. Two other times they've been held to one, and three times — like Sunday — they have been shut out.
As great as the pitching has been — No. 3 in MLB in overall team ERA (3.33) and No. 2 in starter ERA (3.19) — you can't win when you don't score. And it's hard to win when you only score once or twice.
