Like a lot of power hitters, Twins slugger Miguel Sano has a propensity to get dialed in for hot stretches at the plate — and locked out in freezing cold streaks at other times.
With three big swings, Miguel Sano goes from dismal to average
The Twins first baseman is capable of getting hot, as he showed again with three home runs Tuesday in a 5-4 comeback win.
May 19, 2021 at 4:56PM
It's a frustrating fact of life made more frustrating by the fact that Sano has been more cold than hot lately: much of 2020, save for a streak that got his OPS up to .888 by Sept. 8 and was followed by a .413 OPS in his final 14 games, then a dismal start to this year.
But he showed again Tuesday why you can't flat-out give up on him, and I talked about his three-homer game on the Daily Delivery podcast.
While it shouldn't be treated at this point as anything but a pleasant blip during an otherwise grisly season for both Sano and the Twins, Sano's display almost single-handedly won the game for the Twins.
That his game-tying third homer in the eighth came after both Rocco Baldelli and Tyler Duffey were ejected as part of the ongoing manufactured controversy over Yermin Mercedes hitting a home run off of Willians Astudillo only adds to the narrative.
Perhaps more interesting in the short-term is the jolt the game gave Sano's stat line: A slugging percentage and OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) that hadn't been above .263 or .577, respectively, since April 6 (just a few days into the season) suddenly vaulted up to .390 and .703.
Being league average is nothing to brag about, particularly for an allegedly slugging first baseman, but Sano is pretty much league average now (.394 and .706 are those marks this season). His OPS jumped 152 points in just one game.
The feast-or-famine nature of Sano's game, both in terms of streaks and strikeouts, can be frustrating. He tends to arrive at his numbers in somewhat the same way that Andrew Wiggins seemed to do (also to great frustration) with the Wolves.
A basketball player who scores 36, 12 and 12 in three games has an average of 20 but probably helped you win just one. Sano has still hurt more than he has helped this season with a negative win probability added.
But hey, getting hot even for the briefest of moments beats the alternative of staying cold forever.
When he was hired after the disastrous 2016 season to reshape the Twins, Derek Falvey brought a reputation for identifying and developing pitching talent. It took a while, but the pipeline we were promised is now materializing.
