What's wrong with the Twins? Failure is a team effort in the worst sense

Though he wasn't here to witness it, Josh Donaldson understands enough about the 2019 Twins to know what would happen if that team fell into the 14-27 nightmare the current team is enduring: Turn up the music and hit more homers.

"When your offense breaks home run records, when it scores a ton of runs, it covers a multitude of sins," Donaldson said amid the worst start he has experienced in his decadelong career. "As a team, we're not playing well. You have starting pitching, you have bullpen, you have defense, baserunning, hitting home runs — yeah, there's a lot of facets of the game we're not playing well right now."

That's self-evident, of course, but it's also a shock, considering this team was widely favored to defend its back-to-back AL Central championships. After all, seven of the nine projected regulars in the Twins' lineup were major parts of that 101-victory team only two seasons ago, and only one of those holdovers — 40-year-old Nelson Cruz, the steadiest contributor in the group — is older than 30.

Yet, one-fourth of the way through the 2021 season, they likely are the most disappointing team in the major leagues. They have the fewest victories (14) in baseball and worst record in the American League.

Only one team in baseball history has started this poorly and still made the postseason, and hope for a turnaround is quashed by struggles in almost all facets of the game and injuries that have forced them to rely on several minor league call-ups.

The Twins, who added Donaldson for offense in 2020 and Andrelton Simmons for defense in 2021, are on pace to score nearly 200 fewer runs than that 2019 team did. And those flaw-hiding homers? If things remain the same, they will hit 221 this year, nearly one-third fewer than the major league record of 307 they set two seasons ago.

"The power, it's still there. It hasn't gone anywhere. But it's not something you can conjure up whenever you want, on command," manager Rocco Baldelli said earlier this month. "As the weather warms, as we settle into a [night-game] routine, those things will help."

What's odd, though, is that the offense has declined while the fundamentals remain relatively strong. The Twins hit the ball harder than any MLB team, on average, and do it more often, too, according to Statcast data. They are the only team with an exit velocity of 90 miles per hour, and their hard-hit percentage through Tuesday was .436.

Despite that, only four teams have worse results when runners are in scoring position, a critical failure for a team that is only 5-9 in games decided by one run.

Their chief task this spring was to find an everyday replacement for left fielder Eddie Rosario, whose contract was not renewed. So far, they haven't succeeded. Alex Kirilloff didn't earn a spot on the team in the spring, then injured his wrist when eventually summoned. Jake Cave got most of the playing time until his own injury sidelined him. The result? The Twins have the worst production from left fielders than any AL team: A combined .183 batting average, .242 on-base percentage and .260 slugging percentage and easily the fewest runs scored.

But as Donaldson points out, more scoring would only obscure how total the collapse of a playoff team has been. And no unit has been worse than the pitching staff.

Starting over

The continuity of the lineup doesn't apply on the mound, where the Twins undertook an overhaul despite strong results during 2020's short season. The starting rotation, for instance, had a composite 3.54 ERA in 2020, better than every AL team but Cleveland. This year, with J.A. Happ and Matt Shoemaker replacing Rich Hill and Jake Odorizzi, with Randy Dobnak's role thus far limited to long relief, that ERA is more than a full run worse: 4.63, or 11th-best in the league.

The underlying numbers illustrate why that's true. The Twins have the lowest swing-and-miss percentage in their division, and at a time when strikeouts continue to rise, the Twins have returned to their ball-in-play roots. Minnesota starters average only 7.5 whiffs per start, next-to-last in the league.

Most baffling is the sudden decline of Kenta Maeda, last year's Cy Young Award runner-up who gave up only one run this spring training. Instead of building on that success, Maeda is getting hit hard at twice the rate as last year, striking out only two-thirds as many as in 2020 and getting ahead of hitters at the lowest rate of his career.

"He's really close. As far as throwing the ball in the strike zone, it hasn't changed. He's still doing it. [The difference is] where he's throwing it in the zone," pitching coach Wes Johnson said. "It's minor. His stuff's there. [He's] literally a half-inch off and paying the price for that right now, but we're moving in a good direction."

The back end

The bullpen, however, is the real disaster. After posting their best bullpen ERA (3.62) last season in more than a decade, this year's rebuilt pen has been bludgeoned by hitters, posting a 5.28 ERA that, like the rotation, is better only than Detroit. And it's not just their own runs they are allowing. Twins relievers allowed only 29% of inherited runners to score a year ago, third best in the league. This year? That rate is 70%, in a league in which no other team is above 45%.

"The group in aggregate has not performed as well as we anticipated, but the very reasons we pursued a lot of those players are the very reasons we still believe in some of them. We're trying to resist the temptation of holding a stock portfolio where we're selling stocks low," General Manager Thad Levine said. "There is a sentiment that maybe we've endured the underbelly of [performance] and now we're going to get the fruits of the reasons we pursued some of these players."

That goes especially, it seems, for Alexander Colome, the veteran closer who handed the most critical innings in April and allowed runs to score in six of his first nine appearances, blowing three saves and absorbing three losses.

"It's been unfortunate. It hasn't been just one guy, and the results haven't been all on him," Baldelli said, though he has not used Colome in a save situation in May. "We're going to need him, and I have confidence he'll be ready when we do."

Catching up

Meanwhile, the Twins defense, particularly in the absence of center fielder Byron Buxton, has been shockingly mediocre. They are among the league leaders in turning ground balls into outs, but rank in the bottom five for catching fly balls and line drives. They have allowed more unearned runs than any AL team and, statistics aside, have missed plays or committed late-inning errors that have directly resulted in four avoidable losses.

"It's not just the wins and losses, it's the way these games have played out that has made them especially tough to stomach," Baldelli said. "We're not making all the plays, frankly, that we should. Mistakes are part of the game, we know that. But we've had some situations that have been exacerbated by missed plays at the wrong time."

Injuries have plagued the Twins since the first inning of the first game, when Donaldson strained a hamstring. A month later, after a breakout April that earned him an AL player of the month award, Buxton was lost to a hip injury that will sideline him for weeks. A positive COVID-19 test sidelined Simmons for 10 days, and Kyle Garlick and Max Kepler soon tested positive and entered quarantine, too. Now the virus has been contained, but Kirilloff and Cave are sidelined because of wrist and back injuries.

Attitude adjustment

The worst injury, however, the one that has suffocated the team's expectations and all but eliminated its postseason hopes, isn't a physical one, Levine suggests. Winning requires an air of assurance, a brash belief that you're the better team, he said. And the Twins have lost that.

Just not permanently, he hopes.

"When your team is going through a swath of games like we're enduring right now, there's a natural faltering of team confidence. I would just like to see us play with the level of confidence we believe is reflective of the talent that's on the field," Levine said. "It starts with regaining a sense of identity. Part of our identity was a team that comes to the ballpark every day expecting to win. We need to get back to that place first, before we can address any isolated part of the team."

Whenever that happens, history says it's probably too late. Only two teams, the 1914 Boston Braves and the 1974 Pittsburgh Pirates, have started 14-26 and qualified for the postseason. Only the "Miracle" Braves fell, like the Twins, to 14-27.

The Twins are 11½ games out of first place, and the White Sox look like they might be the AL's best, most balanced team.

Levine says the organization is undaunted.

"With confidence will come winning innings, with winning innings comes winning games, with winning games comes winning streaks, and then who knows what may transpire?" he said. "I'm quite confident we can get there."

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