Twins' bats have 'a lot of work to do' in early going

MINNEAPOLIS -- Had it not been for a scoring overturn -- granted, what looked to be a correct one -- that flipped a fielding error into an Alex Kirilloff RBI triple, the Twins would have had a zero in the hit column on Saturday afternoon until the final inning of the game.

It wasn’t just that the problem with getting hits with runners in scoring position persisted; the hits almost vanished altogether against a parade of seven Guardians pitchers in a 3-1 loss at Target Field -- and even at this early stage of the season, while the Twins are far from panicking, they’re already searching for answers.

“There's a lot of work to do on our end when it comes to approach as a collective group,” Carlos Correa said. “We've just got to figure it out sooner or later. We don't want to be here half a season trying to figure it out when we know we're capable of doing it a lot earlier.”

The offense hasn’t vanished entirely; the Twins’ patience has largely remained, and that’s still creating plenty of opportunities for them. Even as the hits evaporated on Saturday, they still stranded 11 runners on the bases, with chances created by seven walks, three hit batters and one reached on error.

But the big hit to cash in on those myriad opportunities has remained ever elusive.

Since Ryan Jeffers knocked an RBI single in the ninth inning on Wednesday in Milwaukee, Minnesota is 0-for-24 with runners in scoring position, including 0-for-12 in Thursday’s series opener against Cleveland and 0-for-11 on Saturday, when the Twins stranded at least one runner in every inning but the second and the fourth.

“You can't let the frustration get to you as a group,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I can't tell you that that's exactly what's going on, but taking a step back, seeing the ball better, making better decisions at the plate -- I think that's winning baseball more than anything else.”

Baldelli has said as much repeatedly over the past several days: He feels the Twins need to simplify and shorten up their approach from the beginnings of at-bats in pressure situations, and not just in two-strike counts.

That’s also something that came up amid Minnesota’s noteworthy bases-loaded struggles early last season, as the club’s preferred approach has been to wait for hittable pitches, then do damage to them. That’s perhaps how they end up with Jeffers falling to his knees while swinging and missing with the bases loaded in the sixth, or four inning-ending strikeouts to strand a runner in scoring position.

“Free swinging with guys in scoring position, generally not the way to go,” Baldelli said. “Again, you may run into one over the course of the game and get a big swing. But it's going to be a lot of rougher at-bats when you're going out there like that.”

Perhaps in an indication of the league’s adjustment to the Twins’ approach, they entered the day seeing the third-lowest fastball percentage in MLB as a team with runners in scoring position and carrying the fourth-highest swing-and-miss rate as a team in those situations. They’re swinging and missing at a whopping 47.4% of offspeed and breaking pitches in such at-bats.

These Twins are also wired to take a lot of pitches, as a whole -- leading to scenes like Edouard Julien watching five called strike threes over the past two games -- which means they’re seeing lots of pitches, then often missing the ones they do choose to aim for in those plate appearances.

As Baldelli often asks, the Twins often just need to “hit the ball forward” and simplify -- and, once again, they’re needing to make that adjustment early on.

“It’s always part of the discussion early on, maybe more so the last year or two,” Baldelli said. “It’s something I feel strongly about. It’s something we took upon ourselves, even in team meetings in front of everyone.”

But the Twins are also being careful not to overreact, because they’re also aware that this is game seven of 162. While the schedule doesn’t immediately get easier (the Dodgers are up next Monday-Wednesday), there’s plenty of time for them to correct course -- as they did last season.

“Tomorrow is a new day, so try to finish strong this week,” Carlos Santana said. “This happens. It's early, the first week. But we have to keep playing, keep playing hard and take an approach to make it good, and win games.”