The Major League Baseball Season begins today. The Twins kick off their season tomorrow. I gave a preview of the team in my podcast yesterday (If you don’t want to listen, and why would you, I think the Twins will win 71-72 games this season) that signals a significant improvement over last year. Indeed, I think the Twins will have at least a 10 win improvement this season. But they haven’t done anything this offseason, how could that be?
Well, consider how badly last year started. They went 9 games before they could collect a victory, and were behind the 8ball extremely early. Sure, there hasn’t been much turnover since the end of the 2016 season, but there have been lasting changes that occurred over the course of the season last year. The Twins are definitely better than they were at the beginning of last season.
Consider all these new faces on the opening day 25 man roster as compared to what the Twins fielded last year:
Max Kepler
Robbie Grossman
Jorge Polanco
Jason Castro
Chris Gimenez
Hector Santiago
Adalberto Mejia
Brandon Kintzler
Matt Belisle
Taylor Rogers
Craig Breslow
Justin Haley.
That’s a 48% turnover last year. Half of the team is new over last year, including 5 guys (20%) brought in by the new front office, and 2 guys brought in by the still employed Rob Antony. That’s not nothing. Couple that with a Pythagorean win-loss last year that was 7 games better than their actual record, and yeah, I feel pretty good about the chances the Twins will be better than last year, and by more than a little bit.
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