The Evil Twins?

If you’re familiar with Star Trek lore, the crew of the Enterprise had “evil” twins from a parallel universe (recognizable for having goatees). Though I’ve never actually seen the Star Trek episode, I did see the South Park episode that referenced it. The evil twins have opposite personalities from their normal universe counterparts. So far this year, when watching the Twins, I almost expect too see a field full of goatees. This team was supposed to hit. Their starting pitching was supposed to stink. That’s what we knew about this team coming in. So far, the exact opposite has been true. The starting pitching has been pretty good for the most part and the lineup has been awful. After scoring five runs in a three game sweep by the Royals, they sit near the bottom of all major offensive categories.

All this is meant to demonstrate that small sample size trends in baseball are relatively meaningless. This team has too many hitters to be this bad, and over the course of a long season, the starting pitching is going to break down. There just isn’t enough talent there. You can’t be a successful MLB staff and strike out the fewest number of hitters in the Major Leagues. In fact, the Twins are actually striking out one fewer hitter per nine innings this year than the past two seasons in which they struck out the fewest hitters in baseball.

The Twins’ record is actually a pretty accurate representation of what we should expect. It’s just that The Twins got there in exactly an opposite fashion to what we should expect the rest of the year.

Also, I suspected all along that Aaron Hicks would find himself back at AAA at some point for some additional seasoning. That’s not an indictment on him as a player. He’s just a guy that seems to really compound his struggles sometimes. Torii Hunter was the same way. A return trip to AAA after some extensive MLB time really helped Torii get his career on track. I think the same could hold true for Hicks. Unfortunately for The Twins, they are kind of stuck with him right now, as Joe Benson is struggling at AAA and Darin Mastroianni is dinged up. I won’t be surprised to see Hicks go back down in a week or so, once Mastro gets healthy.