The Twins are presently weighing in at below the league average in runs scored, but have some sort of interesting characteristics in that below-average offense which are eye-opening insofar as being out of the norm for a Twins team. Sooooooooooooo, let's take a look.

At just below 4.40 runs per game, we can classify the present output of this lineup as somewhere between "meh" and "shitty". They've had some bounceback from a pretty terrible April, so I think that we should err towards the "meh" side of that but they haven't bounced back to exhibit anything greater than that, stomping of Jeremy Bonderman notwithstanding.

They don't hit a lot of homeruns, at 14th in the AL. That's not new. They aren't hitting a lot of doubles, at 10th in the league. That is new.

But what has caught my attention in particular is the two mundane cousins of the three true outcomes - walks and strikeouts. The Twins spent most of the aughts being dinged by nerds like me (but not actually me) for not caring enough about plate discipline and OBA. There's a bunch of reasons why this wasn't a valid critique (drafting and developing Joe Mauer being one, their insistence that their pitchers avoid walks being another) but it's always been true that the Twins don't really draw a lot of walks as a team. This year, though, they rank 5th in the AL - right behind three SABR-friendly teams (BOS, OAK, TBR) and a team with two guys putting together HOF-caliber peaks in the middle of their order (DET) that probably couldn't avoid a ton of walks if they tried.

That's weird. Though it's being driven by known quantities Willingham and Mauer. Willingham has made up for his nosediving batting average by drawing enough walks to, honestly, kind of make up for it. And Mauer is being Mauer, at least in this regard. Giving regular playing time to rookies who made their MiLB bones by knowing the strikezone a bit (Hicks and Parmelee) has also helped, as have veteran hitters like Morneau and Doumit. In short - this team can work a count. That bodes well if the offense is ever to truly turn a corner.

What's additionally weird is the strikeouts. The Twins rank sixth in the AL in that category, and the surge has been driven by exactly the same people. And Brian Dozier, who has just been terrible. Mauer's mounting strikeout total is kind of odd too, though I'm not really sure what to make of it as he pounds out what has heretofore been a vintage Mauer season at .335/.417/.490. There should be another shoe there for him, but since this is so unusual for him, the other shoe may be that he just stops striking out so much. There's no existing trend to point us to that conclusion, but it certainly seems possible.

The slightly cool thing with Mauer is that if he's selling out for more power - it's sort of working. He's on pace to hit over 50 doubles and fifteen homeruns. Not earth-shattering 2009 stuff, but the kind of numbers that would (should...) put him strongly in the MVP race on a better team. So as long as the other shoe isn't a plummeting average then I'm whatever with this.

But the rest of these assholes? I don't know. I have a hard time caring about Willingham's batting average. He'd obviously be better if he made more contact, but he's still getting on base almost 36% of the time and if you split the difference and turned a bunch of those walks into singles, then I doubt a BA/OBA line of .250/.360 really scores than many more runs for this team. Or, rather, not enough to make it that much better. Singles are better than walks, just not by nearly the amount that people think. Particularly when they're being hit by creaky robots like Willingham.

Anyhow, if I'm envisioning a .500 Twins team it would be nice to pretend that there was a playoff-calibre offense being held back by the rotation that's so bad that I don't even like talking about it in this enormous post. But that's not really the case right now. The only thing this team has going for it is lineup potential and shitty competition. If Detroit starts playing the way it should (actually, the way it has, just with more wins - they've been unlucky and when that stops and/or Leyland stops making relief decisions it's going to get ugly for the AL Central) then it wont really matter playoff wise, but I think we were all prepared for that.