KANSAS CITY -- The Twins really didn’t need another reminder of their inexplicable season-long futility against left-handed pitching, but a game like this will really, really drive the point home.
Sunday afternoon’s performance against Royals lefty Ryan Yarbrough might as well have pounded some exclamation marks and underlines onto the “right-handed bat” item already written on the Twins’ Trade Deadline shopping list.
Especially when another anemic offensive showing led to a 2-1 loss and a bad three-game sweep against last-place Kansas City.
By the time the Twins next take the field on Tuesday in St. Louis, the 5 p.m. CT Trade Deadline will have come and gone. That offensive need nor the bullpen depth had yet been addressed as Minnesota dejectedly left the Kauffman Stadium field for the final time this season -- and it looks like the club could use some additional help.
“It drives some points home for me, but I don't know if it drives any points home for the organization as a whole,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “There's a lot of things we have to do better right now. We're not playing good baseball going into the Trade Deadline.
“We've mixed some really good baseball in with some really bad baseball, and it's probably evened out to not good enough.”
At this point in the season, with Jorge Polanco back from the injured list to get nearly the full complement of the Twins’ best hitters back in the lineup, the team has just about everything it has waited for internally.
Yet, as Minnesota lost a fifth straight game, Yarbrough sliced through the Twins’ lineup using only 78 pitches in seven innings of one-run ball.
The crafty southpaw’s fastest pitch of the afternoon was 88.3 mph, but the only damage against him came on a 445-foot homer by Matt Wallner, the only left-handed hitter in Minnesota’s lineup.
The Twins entered the game last in the Majors with a collective .657 OPS and .218 average against southpaws. MLB as a whole has a .739 OPS against left-handed pitchers; among Minnesota season-long regulars, only Kyle Farmer and Joey Gallo have done better than that, along with the injured Royce Lewis and the newly healthy Polanco.
“There’s no real excuse for it,” Farmer said. “We’re just not hitting lefties. Sometimes, that happens. I mean, look at the Dodgers. In past years, they never hit lefties well, either.
“You just don’t see them too often, so it’s a little different.”
Considering the Twins’ offense is built around a pair of right-handed sluggers in Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton, they should be better than this against lefties, especially with right-handed role-players like Farmer and Donovan Solano in the lineup.
But they just haven’t been, and there’s no real sense as to why.
“I don’t have a great answer for you,” Ryan Jeffers said after a long pause. “We haven’t faced a ton of lefties in general. What, have we faced 20 the whole year, if that, maybe?
“So, is there a lack of sample size, maybe?”
As the front office has maintained, much of the change has to come from within -- and perhaps, at this point in the season, such broad improvement against lefties isn’t coming. But, at last, something actionable they can do in the next two days is to find someone who can help.
Among rental corner outfielders, there’s the likes of Teoscar Hernández of the Mariners (.883 OPS against lefties), Tommy Pham of the Mets (.871) and Randal Grichuk of the Rockies (1.066).
If Minnesota wants a hitter with control, they could pursue someone like Lane Thomas of the Nationals, though that price could be steep.
Again, the Twins will primarily have to look within and expect Correa and Buxton in particular to step up -- and the latter has returned from paternity leave on a 5-for-8 run with four doubles and a hit-by-pitch.
By the time they take the field next, they’ll have their answers -- though the skipper isn’t relying on that as a fix-all.
“I think when you look big picture, take a step back at the team that we have right here, I think we have a very good team,” Baldelli said. “I'm not sitting here begging for anything at all. I think we have players that can get the job done.
“If we do things, we'll work with them and we'll adjust, and we'll figure all that out when the time comes. But we're not there yet.”