What Has Gone Wrong For the Minnesota Twins in 2021?

Major League Baseball is the best baseball league in the world, with millions of fans following it and the teams participating in it. While most of these teams have achieved great feats over time while playing in this league, there are a few who have not been able to keep up with the others and have fallen off the pace in recent times. When it comes to playing at the highest level, many teams tend to falter in the long run due to the lack of the right players and inconsistent performances, which have led to the decline of some of the top teams in each sport all over the world and the teams in MLB are no exception to this rule.

Here we will have a look at some of the major reasons why one of the top teams in MLB, the Minnesota Twins, have faltered drastically this season. The players, especially the pitchers have underperformed this season for the Twins, making them vulnerable in front of the batters of the opposition teams. Minnesota has saved some of its worst pitchings for the worst possible moments — ranking second-worst in clutch pitching, fourth-worst in OPS allowed with runners in scoring position and two outs, and fourth-worst in the share of base runners left stranded at the end of innings.

This being one of the reasons for the failure of the Twins in MLB this season, their players have not been able to play well in most of the matches this season and have suffered bad results. They are the worst clutch-hitting team in the league, producing 2.9 fewer wins than we’d expect from their context-neutral stats simply by underperforming in high-leverage situations. This includes everything from Minnesota’s comparatively anemic .648 OPS with runners in scoring position and two outs (down 20 per cent from their overall norm) to the team’s .668 mark late in close games (down 16 per cent).

If we look at the overall performance of the team in MLB this season, we can see that it has been a disaster on most fronts for the Twins in 2021. They rank seventh in OPS, ninth in batting average, fifth in slugging, third in isolated power and seventh (in a tie with Tampa Bay) in the all-important weighted runs created plus (wRC+). They also have the second-highest average exit velocity of any team, tied with Atlanta and Boston. This has caused the catastrophic performance of this popular MLB team as they face a tough fight ahead of them this season.

Going ahead, the team currently owns the league’s worst fielding-independent pitching (FIP) mark and fourth-worst ERA. No team is allowing more home runs per nine innings. Overall, Minnesota ranks dead-last in pitching WAR, putting them on pace to become just the fifth team in the expansion era (since 1961) to drop to the last place in pitching value a year after finishing among the top 10. This is a warning sign that the Twins need to take seriously and work on the aforementioned loopholes to come back strongly and make a mark in MLB once again.