The 2023 series on team offense continues with the Minnesota Twins. The Twins finished seventeenth in the majors and seventh in the American League in 2022 with 4.30 runs scored per game.

This season I am using FanGraphs Roster Resource Depth Charts* as the source of default lineups. That Rocco Baldelli batting order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections.   That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

• Best lineup: 4.73
• Probable lineup: 4.62
• Worst lineup: 4.47
• Regressed lineup: 4.35

Do the Twins realize how far out of whack their lineup looks compared not only to the LAT, but compared to the conventional wisdom for most of the history of baseball? The Twins default order puts Byron Buxton in the lead-off slot, a player with a relatively low OBP but lots of power. They bat Max Kepler fourth. While in the past, Kepler generated a high isolated power, hits are few and far between for him. (The golf adage, hit them far and not too often applies to Kepler.)

A hitter like Buxton needs runners on base for his hits to do the most damage. The Twins have him batting behind eight and nine hitters with .314 and .313 projected OBPs respectively. In what universe does a team not want Carlos Correa, with his .356 projected OBP batting ahead of Buxton?

In addition, the LAT tends to bat Kepler eighth, a spot the regression uses for the worst hitter on the team. So the Twins put one of their weak hitters in one of the most important slots in the lineup.

I actually wonder if the Twins trade Luis Arraez because Buxton wants to bat first, and getting rid of Arraez was the only way to make that happen.

The low spread between the best and worst lineups serves as a silver lining in all this. The talent is homogenous, so the order doesn’t matter that much. They are only leaving 18 runs on the table. Maybe it’s better to have happy players.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in this series:

• Introduction
• Los Angeles Dodgers
• New York Yankees
• Atlanta Braves
• Toronto Blue Jays
• New York Mets
• St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies
• Houston Astros
• Boston Red Sox
• Milwaukee Brewers
• San Francisco Giants
• Texas Rangers
• San Diego Padres
• Arizona Diamondbacks
• Cleveland Guardians
• Colorado Rockies

*This is the best version of this information I’ve seen, with everything you might want to know on one page.