Minnesota Twins: The other free agent starting pitchers

Wade Miley

We begin looking at this group of lower tiered free agent starting pitchers by looking at the one that was most recently linked to the Twins, Wade Miley. Don’t feel bad if a Miley rumor doesn’t do much for you, or if it even repulses you. That was not the feeling toward Miley early on in his career while in Arizona, but since then it has been a bit of a tough go for the lefty.

The positive for Miley is that he has been healthy. Logging 30 or more starts in each of the past five seasons. The problem is when those 30 starts are giving you the type of results that they did in 2017 you may rather not have Miley starting any games for your team. Miley had an ERA of 5.61 and his 5.27 FIP wasn’t any better. A walk per nine rate of 5.3 didn’t help matters for Miley either.

As mentioned above, Miley did have some good seasons early on in his career with Arizona. The hope for every team that has rostered him since that All-Star season in 2012 is that he would regain that All-Star form. Taking a look at Miley’s Brooks Baseball card isn’t encouraging either. Miley’s most used pitch is a sinker and is described as basically not sinking. He is able to throw his four-seam fastball that induces a lot of ground balls counting towards one of the few bright spots in Miley’s performances as of late.

Hopefully, this is just a matter of the Twins doing their due diligence on every available starter. Miley just doesn’t appear to have much to offer the Twins at this point in his career that the Twins don’t already have on their roster.