A Twin Killing

You might recall, back months and months ago when the NBA playoffs were in their second round; or third, I can't keep track; Memphis led Golden State two games to one and supposedly knowledgeable sports analysts began their Chicken Little dance around the Warriors.

Steph Curry & crew proceeded to win the next three games, take the series in six and earn their way to the league championship for the first time in 40 years.

It's easy to do the same thing with the long baseball season. Who could blame a St. Paul resident for thinking that the first 60 games of the season are representative of something for their beloved Twins.

Alas, there is nothing in the record, besides 33 wins and 25 losses, to suggest the Twins are even average. A peak behind the curtain, the kind of thing we couldn't do in the halcyon days before advanced metrics, suggests Minnesota has taken a long ride on a carpet of smoke, mirrors and just plain luck.

When you're among the best teams in the league, you tend to be particularly adept at some element of the game, or generally adept at all elements. The Twins are neither. Here is their offense:

• middle of the pack in batting average
• fifth worst in OBP
• third worst in slugging
• with the fourth fewest home runs and
• fourth worst in steals and caught stealing

The Twins lead all but three AL offenses with 12 triples, but I doubt that's the reason that they've scored the fifth most runs.

Huh?

Yes, a pretty substandard offense has scored more runs than 10 of the other 14 teams. How? Good timing -- what the geezers in the retirement home call "clutch hitting," bless their hearts. But if clutch hitting is hardly a thing among individual players, it's certainly a passing wind at the team level.  The sequencing of Twins hits have produced runs so far. Expect karma to start making amends in Minneapolis right soon.

The formula is similar on the defensive end. Pitchers have allowed the fewest walks in the league, but registered the fewest strikeouts and allowed the most hits. They keep the ball in the park reasonably well (sixth out of 15), and the result is the eighth best ERA, which is dead center for the league, about what you'd expect.

So the pitching isn't carrying them.

On defense, Baseball Reference rates the Twins just slightly below average. Baseball Prospectus isn't that sanguine. Either way, the gloves haven't transformed weak pitching into shutouts.

Is there some magic formula at Target Field? The team has prevailed in one-run games, but not enough to dress a talent-challenged team in Wild Card clothes. Closer Glen Perkins has turned out the lights consistently (five runs in 27 innings and a league-leading 21 saves) but the rest of the pen is a mish-mash that fails to scream "secret sauce."

In short, the Twins are nothing special, despite the special status in the standings. Those with deadlines and column-inches to fill will credit manager Paul Molitor for teaching his charges "how to win" and settling them down after a poor start. But real people know that managers, even great managers, even Hall of Fame former players, even really smart people with spectacular emotional IQs, can't turn the 2015 Twins into a pennant contender.

Reporters can't interview luck, can't describe it, and won't be received well in the clubhouse if they refuse to credit their sources with the good results those sources have produced. But luck is the reason Minnesota began the season 30-19 and luck is fickle.

The fall won't be pretty because, like fire, luck is a great servant but a terrible master.

Just One More Good Year

Sandy Koufax's bifurcated Major League career would have made Henry Jekyll proud: the mediocre first half (seven years, 36-40, 4.06, six wins against replacement) and the spectacular second half (six years, 129-47, 2.24, 44 wins against replacement.) 

Considering the totality of his career achievements, Koufax is a pale shadow of the average Hall of Fame hurler. Yet omitting the Left Arm of God from Cooperstown is unthinkable. His peak years, in which he posted ERAs an astonishing 43%, 59%, 86%, 60% and 90% better than league average, were the equal of anyone's, ever.

Where Koufax's career was an avalanche, Don Sutton's was the inexorable drip, drip, drip of a waterfall in drought. Sutton truly excelled in just three seasons, but his reliably good performance across 23 years earned him a bust in the Hall as well.

Thus the premise for the widely used "JAWS" rankings for Hall of Fame contenders: both full career value and peak value are relevant. Whereas some players earn their ceremony for sustained excellence, others get in with bursts of greatness.

This is why 2013 is so important for Robinson Cano's Hall of Fame resume. Cano has not played nearly long enough to accumulate the career numbers for the Hall, but another eight-win season catapults him to average peak WARP for Hall of Fame second basemen. After that, it would just be a matter of accumulating the remaining 30 WARP or so over the second half of his career. That feat is accomplished by playing well, if not spectacularly, for another six-seven years before tailing off in his late 30s.

It's not quite fair to say Cano's age-30 season is a make-or-break campaign for his Hall of Fame resume. He's young enough, after all, to slip for a year or two before rebounding in another season. The Hall is filled with gentlemen who were absent from the discussion at age 30 but sprang into it thereafter. Paul Molitor jumps to mind: although he was a seriously fine player in his first nine seasons, he'd never cracked .842 in OPS before his age-30 campaign. In his 30s, he perenially batted above .300, crossing .850 OPS six times, including three seasons above .900. Molitor also contributed value to the Brewers - and then Toronto and Minnesota -- every year through his age-40 season.

More numerous are the meteors who start their career on fire but flame out just when this discussion might have begun. Dwight Gooden found his cliff at age 25, but Fred Lynn posted five 4+-win seasons in his first seven years, then starting after age-30 never reached that height again.

So it's premature to place the burden of Robby Cano's Hall of Fame case on the shoulders of 2013. But another performance like last year's, or the year before or the year before that, begins to put him in the rarefied air that is breathed only along Otsego Lake.

Injuries limited Roy Halladay to 156 innings and a 4.49 ERA in 2012, adding almost nothing to his Hall pass. A bounce-back 2013 would really solidify the case for old Harry Leroy, because he's right at the standards on both career and peak. He owes some of his voluminous value to durability -- 220 innings or more in each of the six years previous to last -- which Hall voters and the general public seem to esteem less than actual greatness. Another top-five pitching performance this year would make it difficult to deny Halladay entrance in 2020, or whenever. The question is whether at 36 he possesses the might to once again throw 230 frames of sub-3.00 ERA. (There is this hope: it's a contract year for Halladay.)

The noodle just began wrapping around this question and these two names emerged from the goo. If you are thinking of a player whose ticket might be one more good year from getting punched, put his name in the comment section and we'll dig in.