After their firesale, the 54-60 Twins welcome the 57-58 Royals for a series at Target Field in Minneapolis. I gotta be honest – this Twins team now just looks like a collection of guys. I don’t want to disparage any individual person. Every guy in the minors works hard to make it to MLB. But … really? I’ve never heard of 99% of their roster. This seems to be a recurring theme on Fridays, where I just can’t name most dudes on the opposing team’s roster. That’s just exacerbated with the Twins tonight.
In fact, if you look at the Twins lineup tweet, the caption says “Let’s Experience it”. Experience…what exactly? You can’t come up with anything better than “if you watch us, you will experience a baseball game”? I feel like that’s a borderline Jon Bois “watching baseball” post.
I guess the Twins held on to ace Joe Ryan, who is in fact in the midst of an excellent season. His ERA is only 2.83, and that’s supported by a 3.15 FIP. The underlying metrics like him. It’s not hard to see – high strikeouts, low walks, low homers. All the things a pitcher wants. He’s matched his career high in fWAR with a big chunk of the season still remaining.
The Royals will start Seth Lugo, who was last seen having a rough start against Toronto. He went only 4 2/3 innings and walked more guys than he struck out. Overall this season, Lugo’s worse in several ways – he’s walking more guys and giving up more homers. He’s limited the damage by having a low BABIP and high left-on-base rate, but those tend to regress toward the mean. His curveball just doesn’t have near the juice this year compared to last year. It’s got less movement, fewer whiffs, and he happens to be throwing it just a little more than he threw it last year. Throwing more of a worse pitch…well…I don’t know man. Lugo’s got so many other pitches that something else should be effective to get him through.
The Royals will continue with the Yastrzemski leadoff role and India being bumped further down the lineup. That seemed to work just fine, so I imagine they’ll roll with it until it stops being fine.
The game will start at 7:10pm US Central. You can watch on FanDuel Sports Network Kansas City or listen on the Royals Radio Network.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com ’
