Minnesota Twins: Can the Twins fix Chris Archer?

The Minnesota Twins are on the lookout for pitching and an opportunity to revive a former All-Star could be a sneaky way to upgrade their rotation.

For the past couple of seasons, the Minnesota Twins have been on the lookout for a true ace. While Jose Berrios has been shoehorned into the role the past couple of seasons, reality set in as the team barrelled its way back into serious contention last year and the Twins pitching staff fell apart prior to being swept by the New York Yankees.

While many are fixated on the Twins’ ability to spend like crazy this offseason, the option of trading to fill one of their four holes in the starting rotation remains in play. The benefit to this is that if the Twins can find a pitcher that is at a modest salary, they could turn around and use that money to go harder after higher caliber free agents such as Zack Wheeler or even Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburg. (Hey, dream big!)

For that, the Twins will have to look for upside and if I told you the opportunity is there to add a former two-time All-Star to the rotation, you would probably jump on it, right?

That opportunity could be there by trading for Chris Archer. It wasn’t long ago when Archer was one of the brightest young aces in baseball, but after being traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the summer of 2018, he has disappointed mightily as part of a full-blown dumpster fire in the Steel City.

While his recent numbers will have Twins fans flashing back to the days of Terry Ryan’s bargain-basement pitching days, Archer could be a solid buy-low candidate that could help the Twins reap the benefits later.

What happened to Chris Archer?

Before we see what the Twins can do to fix the problem with Archer, we first have to identify the problem. Where that story begins seems to coincide with his trade from the Tampa Bay Rays to the Pittsburgh Pirates where he was randomly swapped for super prospects Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow. While those two have flourished with the Rays, Archer has done the opposite for the Pirates.

Over a season and a half with the Pirates, Archer has not lived up to his billing of being an ace to replace the Gerrit Cole mistake two years ago. His 6-12 record came with a 4.92 ERA and his walk rate jumped nearly a full base on balls per nine innings as he posted a 3.8 BB/9 rate compared to 2.9 with the Rays.

While the walks have gone up, so have Archer’s hard-hit balls, which have seen him allow 33 home runs over 172 innings with the Pirates, an astronomical jump after allowing 117 long balls in 1,063 innings in Tampa Bay.

A big culprit of this is Archer’s use of the sinker. According to Baseball Savant, Archer came into the majors using his sinker throughout the first three seasons of his career including a career-high 19.5% usage rate in 2014. He then put that pitch away for three of the most successful seasons of his career from 2015-17, where he made two All-Star appearances, threw over 200 innings in each season and compiled a 3.44 ERA.

In the last two seasons, however, Pittsburgh has implored for him to bring back the sinker and the results have been downright bad. Although he doesn’t use it often (10.4% usage rate), the pitch has been ineffective because of its tendency to hang. Overall, Archer’s sinker dropped an average of 15.7 inches, which was nearly six inches below the MLB average.

That led opposing hitters to tee off for a .378 average with a .778 slugging percentage against the sinker making it by far his least effective pitch.

With the Pirates fixated on having their pitchers get ground balls as opposed to striking guys out, they’ve had a long history of wasting talents such as Archer, Cole and Charlie Morton. That’s where a change of scenery to Minnesota could come in handy.

How can the Twins fix Archer?

The obvious answer here is that the Twins will tell Archer to stop using the sinker and that’s a great idea considering the success he saw in his other pitches. His other two most frequent pitches had much better results as his four-seam fastball (39.9% usage rate) held hitters to a .243 average and .458 slugging percentage and his slider (35.5% usage) was even better with a .233 opponent average and .379 slugging percentage.

While it’s a different situation from starter to reliever, the Twins did the same thing by telling Tyler Duffey to play to his strengths last season. After floundering throughout the first four seasons of his big league career, pitching coach Wes Johnson implored him to use his four-seam fastball (up to 51.4% usage rate in 2019 from 36.7% in 2018) and slider (37.4% in 2019, 7% in 2018) more and it resulted in a career year and a 2.50 ERA.

A similar rebound could happen for Archer in Minnesota. While his overall stats in Pittsburgh have been brutal, his stuff is still good enough to miss bats as evidenced by a 10.8 K/9 rate and a 30.1% chase rate.

Those numbers are good enough to fit a team philosophy more in line with the rest of Major League Baseball by opting to rack up strikeouts rather than pitching to contact.

* Duffey’s usage stats according to Baseball Savant