Team Offense, Minnesota Twins

A healthy Justin Morneau is a key to the Twins improving their offense. Photo: Tony Ding/Icon SMI

The series on team offense continues with the Minnesota Twins. The Twinkies finished twenty fifth in the majors and thirteenth in the American League in offense last season, scoring 3.82 runs per game.

The CBSSportsline probable batting order is the one manager Ron Gardenhire is likely to write up this season. The OBP and slugging percentage used come from the Marcel the Monkey forecast system. T Plugging those numbers in the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) produces the following results:

Best lineup: 4.83 runs per game
Probable lineup: 4.76 runs per game
Worst lineup: 4.50 runs per game
Regressed lineup: 4.41 runs per game

The Twins projections show a big split between the top five hitters in the line and the bottom four in terms of OBP. To Gardenhire’s credit, he keeps the five players with OBPs over .340 together in the order. The LAT likes to bat this group 9-1-2-3-4, while Ron goes with the more traditional 1-2-3-4-5. By placing them together, however, Gardenhire comes very close to the optimum runs per game.

Much more important for the Twins, however, is that Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, and Denard Span stay healthy so they can live up to these projections. If they are truly healed, there’s a good chance they exceed these numbers.

If that happens, however, it may not be enough. Scoring one run more per game would lead to about 16 more wins than in 2011, bringing them to around .500. They’ll need better pitching as well to make the playoffs.

You can see the results of all the teams on this Google spreadsheet as the series progresses.

Previous articles in this series:

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March 22, 2012

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