Previous installments in this series:

• Ervin Santana
• Kyle Gibson
• Hector Santiago
• Phil Hughes

The Twins play their first game on Monday, so it’s time to wrap up our Twins rotation preview. On Thursday, it was announced that Adalberto Mejia will be the team’s fifth starter coming out of camp. Mejia is an exciting young prospect, but he has only pitched 2.1 innings of Major League ball. That’s not a lot of available PITCHf/x data. Rather than subjecting you to a deep dive into each of his 41 pitches for the Twins last year, we’re going a different route for our last preview.

Continue reading Twins Rotation Preview: Tyler Duffey and Jose Berrios →

Previous installments in this series:

• Ervin Santana
• Kyle Gibson
• Hector Santiago

We’ve reached the last lock in the Twins rotation: Phil Hughes. Next week, we’ll start breaking down options for the fifth starter position.¹ But before we get there, let’s break down Hughes’s game.

Continue reading Twins Rotation Preview: Phil Hughes →

Previous installments in this series:

• Ervin Santana
• Kyle Gibson

This week, we continue our Twins rotation preview by taking a look at Hector Santiago. Acquired from the Angels midseason last year, he figures to be a fixture in the Twins rotation for the 2017 season. It’s a good week to brush up on your Santiago knowledge, because you’ll probably be able to see him pitch in a meaningful game within the next couple of days! He’s on the Puerto Rican roster for the World Baseball Classic, and they’re playing three games in a row: they face Venezuela today, Mexico tomorrow, and Italy on Sunday.

Continue reading Twins Rotation Preview: Hector Santiago →

This week, we continue our series on the Twins starting staff by taking a look at Kyle Gibson. For the series introduction and the first installment on Ervin Santana, look here.

Gibson’s 2016 season was a bit of a step backward; from 2015 to 2016, his ERA jumped from 3.84 to 5.07, and his FIP increased from 3.96 to 4.70. Nevertheless, Gibson is a lock for the 2017 rotation, and will try to bounce back. Let’s take a look at the tools he’ll use to do it.

Continue reading Twins Rotation Preview: Kyle Gibson →

Series Introduction

Last week, I introduced the Pitcher Count Predictivity Score, a new stat to measure pitch mixing. PCPS is a very general, simplistic measure. It has to be! There are so many different types of pitchers, with such diverse arsenals of pitches, that a stat must be very broad to apply to all of them. This broadness is an asset, in that it allows us to compare very different pitchers on a similar scale, but it also means that PCPS doesn’t tell the whole story about a pitcher.

Continue reading Twins Rotation Preview: Ervin Santana →