In honor of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, which starts April 7 — and is actually a thing! — FiveThirtyEight will be focusing our attention on the most intriguing team in each division. Today we take a look at the American League Central, which had a new champ last season but whose old champ […]
The Minnesota Twins have MLB’s second-best record over the past two-plus seasons (trailing only the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers), earning a pair of division titles over that span. They’ve scored the third-most runs in baseball and rank fourth in OPS, with a reputation as one of the most devastating offensive teams in the game. But […]
When Derek Falvey, chief baseball officer of the Minnesota Twins, was in the Cleveland Indians’ front office in the early 2010s, he started attending college coaching clinics. He visited events like Pitch-A-Palooza and the coaching boot camp at the Texas Baseball Ranch. He would sit in the back of conference rooms and listen. “On the […]
The Minnesota Twins were one of the best stories of the 2017 MLB season: Coming off a 59-win campaign in 2016, they won 85 games and made the playoffs seemingly out of nowhere. Minnesota even spotted itself an early three-run lead against the Yankees in the American League wild-card game (before promptly giving it away […]
It will come as no surprise to anyone following baseball that, when we ran an early preseason version of our 2019 MLB projections, the Cleveland Indians came out as heavy favorites to win the American League Central. Cleveland has won the Central in each of the past three years, by a comfortable margin of 12.7 […]