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My Twins 2024 MVP ballot: Ranking the 10 best players on a team that needed more

7 October 2024Last Update :
My Twins 2024 MVP ballot: Ranking the 10 best players on a team that needed more

This time every season, I vote for team MVP and rank the 10 most valuable Minnesota Twins, with notes on how I came to rank each player.

This year is trickier than most, because the team’s season-wrecking 12-27 collapse in August and September wiped out much of the usual motivation to praise individual performances. Beyond that, between their injuries and second-half fades, the Twins didn’t have many full-time standouts to praise.

Carlos Correa, Matt Wallner and Byron Buxton were the only Twins hitters to produce an OPS at least 20 percent better than league average, and they played just 86, 75 and 102 games, respectively. And no pitchers with an ERA at least 20 percent better than league average logged more than 72 innings for the Twins this season.

In fact, setting aside production, the Twins had just two hitters (Willi Castro and Carlos Santana) with more than 470 plate appearances and two pitchers (Pablo López and Bailey Ober) with more than 135 innings. All of them had good seasons, but MVP? Castro and Santana each batted below .250 with a sub-.750 OPS. López and Ober each posted an ERA around 4.00.

With those caveats out of the way, here’s my annual Twins MVP ballot.

1. Carlos Correa, SS

Trust me, I’d prefer my team MVP pick not be someone who played just 86 games, but finding a worthy alternative is difficult without focusing entirely on durability rather than MVP-caliber performance.

Correa didn’t play a lot, missing two weeks with a strained oblique and two months with plantar fasciitis, but he was awesome whenever he was in the lineup. He hit .310/.388/.517 in 367 plate appearances for a 152 OPS+ that led the Twins and was third among MLB shortstops behind Bobby Witt Jr. and Gunnar Henderson. It’s also the second-best OPS+ of Correa’s career.

His defense remained strong, even with one healthy foot in September, and despite all of the missed time he led the Twins in Wins Above Replacement. Correa also came through in clutch situations, hitting .284 with an .812 OPS with runners in scoring position and .314 with an .874 OPS in high-leverage spots to lead the Twins in Win Probability Added.

There are definitely compelling MVP arguments to be made for other players, but Correa was clearly the Twins’ best player whenever he was on the field. And for a season in which the Twins had zero healthy, full-time elite performers, that’s enough to begrudgingly get my team MVP vote for the second time in Correa’s three years in Minnesota.

2. Byron Buxton, CF

All of the above applies similarly to Buxton, who was just slightly less great than Correa on a per-game basis while playing slightly more often.

Buxton missed two weeks with a knee injury and a month with a hip injury, totaling 102 games and 388 plate appearances — both his most since 2017. He hit .279/.335/.524 for a 137 OPS+ that was second to only Aaron Judge among MLB center fielders. He hit .358 in high-leverage spots and resumed playing great defense after being limited to only designated hitter in 2023.

Buxton’s lengthy injury history means his bar to clear for “success” from a durability standpoint is low, but in terms of both health and hitting this was the second-best year of his career. After a slow start coming back from offseason surgery, he hit .290/.350/.580 with 17 homers in his last 70 games. Overall, he was second to Correa among Twins hitters in WAR and WPA.

And the Twins played at an 88-win pace with Buxton in the lineup, versus a 74-win pace without him, continuing a career-long trend around his impact.

3. Griffin Jax, RP

There’s a team MVP argument to be made for Griffin Jax in that no player who was on the active roster all season thrived more in their role. However, his role involving only 276 plate appearances — 91 fewer than Correa and 112 fewer than Buxton, without factoring in their defensive contributions — makes that argument a stretch. Still, it was a spectacular relief season.

Jax pitched a team-high 72 games as a high-leverage setup man and closer, posting a 2.03 ERA with 95 strikeouts in 71 innings. He held opponents to a .184 batting average, walked just 1.9 per nine innings and allowed only four homers. And he was consistently great in an otherwise flammable bullpen, with a sub-2.75 ERA in five of six months and a high of 3.65.

He pitched a ton, worked almost exclusively high-leverage spots and was really good in them, leading all Twins pitchers and placing 12th among American League relievers with +2.20 WPA. With him, the Twins’ bullpen ranked 19th in WPA. Without him, they would have dropped to 27th, with a collective -0.60 mark. He was as valuable as any setup man in baseball.

4. Carlos Santana, 1B

Santana was the Twins’ best full-time position player, which is remarkable for a 38-year-old who hit .141 through his first 20 games. They resisted the urge to write him off as washed up, and Santana hit .253/.342/.460 with 23 homers in his final 130 games, playing every day. His overall 109 OPS+ in 594 plate appearances was merely solid, but his glove made a huge impact.

Santana was brilliant at first base, constantly sprawling to steal hits from opposing batters and scooping up would-be errors for an often shaky infield. Santana and Doug Mientkiewicz are the best-fielding Twins first basemen I’ve watched in two-plus decades covering the team, and the stats agree: Santana led MLB first basemen with 14 Outs Above Average.

5. Willi Castro, UT

Castro led the Twins in games (158), plate appearances (635) and runs (89) despite never having a set starting job. As injuries and demotions changed the Twins’ plans, Castro stepped in for Royce Lewis at third base, Correa at shortstop, Buxton in center field, Edouard Julien at second base, Correa at shortstop again, Trevor Larnach in left field and Buxton in center again.

Castro was the epitome of a super-utility player, showing up to the ballpark knowing he was going to play without knowing where. He’s the first player in MLB history to play 25 games at five positions in a season. He slumped badly in the second half, but still finished with an above-average 102 OPS+ thanks to hitting .247/.331/.385 and being hit by a team-record 21 pitches.

6. Bailey Ober, SP

Ober got rocked for eight runs in his first start of the season, and then did his usual thing with a 3.60 ERA over his last 30 starts. He easily set career-highs in innings (178 2/3) and strikeouts (191), and was more consistently solid than López on the way to similar 4.00-ish ERAs. Ober went five-plus innings in 27 of 31 starts and allowed three runs or fewer in 23.

7. Pablo López, SP

Similar to his 2023 breakout, López had some early struggles before getting on a midseason roll, going 9-2 with a 2.35 ERA across 15 starts beginning in mid-June. But this year’s early struggles dragged on longer, and his dominant roll ended with a seven-run clunker at Fenway Park on Sept. 22 that inflated his ERA to 4.11 and deflated the Twins’ playoff odds.

8. Matt Wallner, RF/LF

Wallner got off to a brutal 2-for-25 start that earned him a quick demotion to Triple-A St. Paul, where he waited almost three months for another shot. It finally came in mid-July and he made it count, hitting .282/.386/.559 with 12 homers in his final 62 games to lead the Twins in OPS and rank eighth in the AL during that span, when the lineup’s other young hitters collapsed.

9. Joe Ryan, SP

Joe Ryan was the Twins’ top starter through early August, when a strained shoulder ended his season. At the time of the injury, he was in the AL’s top 10 for innings (135), strikeouts (147), batting average against (.216), xERA (2.90) and xFIP (3.44), adding 1.7 mph to his average fastball versus 2023. Ryan, like the Twins as a whole, had about two-thirds of a really nice year.

10. Simeon Woods Richardson, SP

Forced into the rotation in mid-April, way ahead of schedule, Simeon Woods Richardson never gave up the gig. He ran out of gas in September, but only after the 23-year-old rookie saved the Twins from months of rotation chaos by consistently going five-ish solid innings, posting a 3.69 ERA in 22 starts through late August. He got thrown into the deep end and stayed afloat.

(Photo of Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)

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