Yankees-Twins Breakdown: Twins Failed to Minimize Opportunity and Faced the Consequences

          

  

     Every week, Greg Bedard, arguably the best Patriots writer out there, writes an article breaking down the Patriots game from the previous week. He runs through the film, goes through each play and then picks apart what when right and wrong and highlights some top plays that led to the outcome of the game. His coverage inspired me to do so for the MLB 2019 playoffs.

            Doing a thorough analysis of each series requires a little more than just skimming through the box scores and deciding X went wrong or X went right and therefore decided the series, so in doing so, it might take a little longer than the next day to do so for each series. That is my hope, to get to each series. Baseball is a little different than football too. Although formation is important in baseball, a series is less about the angle a defender took to a ball or location of a pitch than it is for a football game. Most of the analysis feels like it will come from certain appearances or usage than a pitch. Without further ado, let’s break down the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins, a series that ended in a Yankees sweep.

            New York Yankees vs Minnesota Twins

            In this sweep, the Twins seemed like no match for the Yankees. They won each game by four or more runs and utterly dominated games one and two with their offense. It doesn’t take a rocket science to understand that the Yankees went into the series with an elite offense, outranking at least in the top five in most offensive categories and above the league average in every category. That carried into the postseason. With postseason teams averaging four games in the post season, the Yankees played only three and outhit the average in some of the most important categories (23 runs vs. playoff average 16, .293/.403/.525 slash line to a playoff average of .239/.313/.409). So, the Yankees held the advantage over the Twins just by stepping into the batter’s box.

            What interests me though, is how bad the Twins’ pitching, who ranked as one of the better staffs during the regular season, pitched throughout the series. They had the worst pitching out of any playoff team, ranking last in ERA (7.56), last in BAA (.293), 5.67 walks per game vs a playoff average 3.25, and 7.67 runs allowed per game vs. a playoff average four. I chose these stats because they create an even playing field for all teams. If I compared total runs against, the Nationals gave up the most, but have also played the most games in the playoffs. Same with strikeouts, with the Twins striking out the least out of any divisional series team but also playing the least amount of games. The Twins bullpen was atrocious, which was surprising due to how good some of those pitchers were during the regular season. For instance, Tyler Duffey allowed four runs in just 1 2/3 innings after just 16 in 57.2 innings during the regular season (2.50 ERA). Zack Littell could only get one out in two appearances, allowing two runs after pitching to a 2.68 ERA in 37 innings and 29 appearances during the regular season.

            One matchup stuck out like a sore thumb in which I think explains what went wrong the most for the Twins in this series. In game one, down by only one run in going into the bottom of the sixth, so a pretty influential part of the game, the Twins went to Cody Stashak out of the bullpen. Stashak wasn’t the worst pitcher for that situation at first glance. In the regular season, Stashak had a 3.24 ERA, 3.01 FIP, and gave up only 0.4 walks per nine and struck out nine batter per nine. He had sported a 1.93 ERA in his last nine appearances (9.1 innings pitched during that span) while striking out 12. However, batters tend to hit Stashak hard. Batters hit Stashak at a .289 rate with 12 of 29 opponents’ hitting going for extra bases (.475 slugging). The Yankees had hit Stashak the hardest out of any team other team in baseball too. In only two innings of work against the Yankees, Stashak had given up four hits to the Yankees. Makes sense that the best hitting team would give Stashak troubles. To make matters worse, Stashak had troubles against the top half of opponent’s lineups. Against Stashak, opponent’s number one batter hit .273 with a .455 slugging percentage in 11 at-bats. Fourth and fifth hitters went a combined 11-for-27 with four doubles, one triple and one home run against Stashak. Who do the Twins use him against? DJ LeMahieu, the Yankees’ number one batter, who hits a home run to dead center field, followed another homer by Brett Gardner of Stashak to break the game open again at 7-4 Yankees. The Twins would not get any closer for the rest of the game.

            The same thing happened in game two when the Twins brought in Duffey to stop the bleeding going into the third inning, in which he then gave up four runs on two hits and one walk in a seven-run inning for the Yankees. Duffey was worse on the road than at home throughout the season and even if that doesn’t necessarily mean causation, because Duffey does have good numbers in many different situations, including in high leverage situations, it shows that the Twins’ bullpen just couldn’t execute against the best hitting team in baseball. Duffey should have been better statistically, but failed to locate pitches, giving the Yankees too much opportunity to strike. Even if the pitching staff minimized all the risk they could, their manager didn’t reduce risk enough on his end. He put his pitchers in some situations that come with added risk. Against the best hitting team in baseball, it makes sense that any opponent would have to minimize any opportunities for the Yankees to get ahead. The Twins failed at that and it resulted in a sweep.