Minnesota Twins: Spring Feigning

For Minnesota Twins fans, putting too much weight into Spring Training performances should be avoided.

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Spring Training is a beautiful tradition that begins each baseball season. For players, they are able to kick off some of the rust from the off-season. For fans, they are able to come out of their baseball hibernation to begin eating up story lines and talk about new trends with their favorite teams. Despite the positive qualities of early spring ball, there are some pitfalls that both teams and fans trap themselves in each season. 

The first trap that many fans fall for is giving too much weight to whether your team wins or loses a game. This is a mistake for a couple reasons. First, the players themselves are not playing at their full capacity. Some pitchers haven’t faced live batters since September of the previous season, and many batters use spring training to try out new approaches at the plate.

Additionally, managers don’t use their players with winning in mind, instead they are trying to ensure that all of the players on the roster get some at bats or some innings of work in. When the players are in the game for the purpose of season prep and the managers are making moves to spread playing time somewhat evenly, it doesn’t make much sense to put stock into the outcome of a game. For example if spring training records were indicative of success in a season, the 2015 Oakland Athletics would have been in the World Series in last season. Instead the Athletics finished with 68 wins and 94 losses. In the same line of thought, the Minnesota Twins would have been the greatest team of 2004. 

the Minnesota Twins would have been the greatest team of 2004.

Another common pitfall is to over-hype a player’s outlook based on their spring training performance. Of course it is exciting to see Byung-ho Park immediately succeed against major league pitching, but to put too much stock into that early success would be a mistake.

Spring training success does not always predict how a player will perform once the season begins. Take, for example, Chris Herrmann.  The former Twins catcher played in twenty four spring training games last season, providing the largest sample size of any Twin in 2015. Over those games, Herrmann hit an impressive .302. Yet by the end of the 2015 season, Herrmann posted only a .146 batting average. For Arizona this Spring, Herrmann again appears to be enjoying success posting a .353 batting average, but it seems unlikely that his spring training numbers will carry over to the regular season.

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Of course this does not mean that spring training is not without merit. Just as players and teams are getting back into the swing of things, pre-season baseball is also an opportunity for fans to get back into a rhythm of keeping up with their club. Baseball sites, including Puckett’s Pond, love to dissect each spring training game and each player’s performance for the purpose of regular season projections. Just as with the exercise of spring training itself, this is just our way of kicking the rust off, since the slate will be wiped clean on April 3rd when the regular season begins.