Scott Baker and Ace-dom

This offseason, Twins fans spent a lot of time whining about Zack Greinkie, and how the Twins needed to find An Ace. Maybe we found one?

Scott Baker pitched another gem yesterday, throwing 7.1 shutout innings and lowering his ERA to 3.15. For the season, he now has 101 strikeouts in 105.1 innings. That puts him in 6th place in the American League, behind James Shields, Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, David Price and Jered Weaver. Those names sound a lot like Aces. It puts him above names Twins fans like to lust over, like CC Sabathia, Ricky Romero and Josh Beckett. And, of course, Zack Greinke.

By the way, it also puts him above Francisco Liriano, both in raw numbers (Liriano has 61 K) and K/9 rate.

But I’m not here to argue about whether he’s An Ace. My experience with people that say they want An Ace is that they don’t want to define what An Ace is. What they really mean is they want “that guy.” Anyone besides that guy (this offseason, it was generally Greinke or Cliff Lee) is not An Ace. It’s a convenient way to whine about how grass the green is someplace else.

Instead, I want to know: should we have seen this from Baker?

In some ways, we did. Back in October, we ran a two part series looking for Hidden Aces that started on the TwinsCentric blog and finished up on TwinsGeek.com. The method was simple: pick all those pitchers who had enough innings to qualify for an ERA title and then sort them by how good they were at striking out people. Greinke was 38th on that list, so we decided to look at the one above him on the list and see if there was any chance of the Twins acquiring each pitcher.

I think its worth going back to read that series, because some of the names really jump out. We wondered if James Shields might be a good target for a bounce back year. He might just start the All-Star game. We wondered if Toronto’s Shaun Marcum could be had in a trade. Milwaukee did just that, and he’s leading their rotation which is leading their team which is leading their division.

And we found another name on that list we didn’t expect to find: Scott Baker. Here was what was written:

First, I should point out that he had the second highest ERA of anyone on this [Hidden Aces] list, second to Jamie Shields. But it’s also worth noting that his strikeout rate and walk rate this year were very, very good. He just gave up too many damn hits. Oh, and led the league in slumped shoulders.

It turns out I could say the same thing about Jamie Shields (#18 yesterday), and I’m fairly confident Shields will bounce back. Would other teams be saying that about Baker? Are they wrong, or would a little distance give us a better perspective? And how much did the elbow problems, on which he had surgery immediately following the season, play into things?

This whole exercise is making me wonder if he is a very good candidate to have that breakout year we’ve been waiting for. He just turned 29 years old. His career strikeout rate is over 7 per nine innings. His walk rate is close to 2 per nine innings. His hit rate was below 1 per inning for the last two years. He is exactly the kind of sneaky good struggling pitcher that I would target just looking at his stats. Oh, plus, he’s relatively cheap.

That doesn’t mean he belongs on a list of possible aces. But he’s exactly the kind of sleeper that suddenly breaks through and everyone looks back and wonders how they didn’t see it coming. Shouldn’t we know better? Didn’t we just go through this with Liriano?

Before today I wouldn’t have given two cares about whether Baker got traded away this offseason. Now, I’d love to see him stick around, because I want to see what kind of year he has. I suspect I’m going to want to see it happen with him as a Twin.

What does all this mean? Probably that we got lucky, both as prognosticators and Twins fans. But it absolutely means we are doing this exercise at the end of next season, too.

Consistent Change

As I was editing the Twins Official Scorecard this weekend, I checked a fact dug up by Eric Johnson of tkTwinsCities.com. He claimed:

“The Twins 2011 Opening Day lineup looked like this:

Span
Nishioka
Mauer
Morneau
Young
Kubel
Cuddyer
Valencia
Casilla

Since Opening Day, that lineup has been on the field exactly one time. And that was on April 7th.”

The seemed a little far-fetched, so I checked it out. Which is where I found out that the truth is even worse.

According to baseball-reference.com, they didn’t even have those same players in the lineup on 4/7. On 4/7, Thome started over Delmon Young. In fact, they have NEVER started those same players in the starting lineup together since Opening Day – not in any combination.

Now, I imagine that isn’t terribly rare. For instance, if a player from that Opening Day lineup is out for the season with an injury, that would happen. A team would simply plug a new player into that position and roll with that lineup. But injuries have prompted the Twins to take that inconsistency to a whole different level. Through 75 games (that would be through Saturday’s game) the Twins have sported 71 different batting orders.

Read that last sentence again.

I’d love to show you the order that the Twins have used the most, but the truth is that they have NEVER used exactly the same batting order more than twice. And it isn’t just because they are having guys bat in different places in the order. They also haven’t fielded any defensive lineup more than three times all season. The daily lineup tweets are as suspenseful and random as lotto numbers.

The moral of the story? While it’s tempting to shift our criticism to the offseason or the fielding or the starting pitching or the bullpen, the fact remains: the story of the season is injuries. I know writers are tired of writing about it, and the team is tired of talking about it, and readers are tired of reading about it. That’s because this string of bad voodoo has gone on forever.

But its length just compounds its impact. Just because we have run out of adjectives beyond “ridiculous” to describe its effect, doesn't make it any less important.