#23 A new slant on Hunter Brown's breakout

Plus: The Twins?! And a hopefully fun request

Over the past few days, Zach and I have been taking turns texting each other something like “Twins??” periodically. By which we mean: Have you seen that the Twins are winning again?

Hey, it’s Hannah and over the first half of May, the Minnesota Twins went from seven games under .500 to six games over .500 by rattling off 13 wins in a row.

This is not totally unexpected — before Opening Day FanGraphs projected them to be an 84-win team that would probably make the postseason. But then they lost four in a row to start the season and were sitting at 13-20 before the win streak. Carlos Correa (remember when he was a top-10 player in baseball … back in 2021? Or even when he was Minnesota’s most valuable player despite playing just 86 games last year?) got off to a really, really slow start. Before the win streak started, he had a 60 wRC+. League average is 100.

As evidenced by the incredulity of the messages seen above, we didn’t really pay close enough attention for me to be able to tell you what changed. Zach is right that the pitching has been incredible. Since the streak started, the staff ERA is an MLB-low 2.06. I’m assigning myself a closer look at what Joe Ryan is up to lately.

But now the streak is over, anyway. It’s possible the Brewers would have prevailed on Sunday anyway — they tacked on another run after this play — but Jackson Chourio may have single-handedly snapped the streak when he robbed Royce Lewis of what would have been a game-tying home run by doing this:

But I have to think the vibe around the team probably changed a little after a pyrrhic victory for win number 11 in which Correa — an important part of the club even when slumping — and Byron Buxton did this:

Both are now on the concussion IL.

Will you hate me if I say I sometimes think about my own tweet from several years ago? It was late-September 2022, as the Twins tumbled from briefly sitting atop the division to finishing third and missing the postseason in the span of a month, and something inspired me to share this thought:

This isn’t even the first time I’ve talked about them being a total Pathos Team in a Bandwagon intro!

The Buxton-Correa collision and subsequent concussions (in a win!) is a shockingly on-the-nose distillation of the specific tragedy of the Twins. Namely: health stuff that plagues their most tantalizingly talented players and keeps them from ever living up to their full potential. It’s actually remarkable how many different ways one club can live out that dynamic over and over again.

Which is why it’s sort of perfect that the win streak ended on the day that the MLB Network research packet shared this fact before the game:

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A request

Per a conversation that played out in the comments on this post from last week, we’d love to know about the best “alt merch” for your local team. With all due respect, we don’t mean Breaking Tee or Baseballism or the like. We’re looking for unique collabs or local artists or even team-themed merch from local businesses. Think: Phillies merch from Heavy Slime; or the iconic The Mets hat; or this Meats hat that I thought was unique to my neighborhood butcher but is apparently not! As you can see, it’s the kind of thing you can really only know about the nearby teams. Hence, outsourcing!

Have something in mind? Send it to hellobandwagon@gmail.com.

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Hunter Brown’s rise can’t just be about the sinker

by Zach Crizer

This time a year ago, Hunter Brown had a 5.15 career ERA and a tenuous at best grip on his spot in the Astros rotation. Alex Bregman suggested he add a sinker, he turned it around, maybe you’ve heard this part. The 26-year-old once known for having a carbon copy of his idol Justin Verlander’s delivery is doing a different version of the impression now.

Over the past calendar year, he has a sterling 2.04 ERA. Thus far in 2025, his 1.43 ERA trails only the Yankees’ Max Fried, and his 56 2/3 innings are tied for the most among starters with nine starts. This is ace stuff. Maybe Cy Young stuff.

The story of Brown’s turnaround has, rightfully, focused on that sinker. Yet it’s his four-seam fastball that currently rates as the season’s most valuable pitch. Opposing hitters have seen it 310 times, and have just a .076 batting average (and slugging percentage) against it. That’s five singles in 66 at-bats, against 33 strikeouts.

When I say it’s the most valuable pitch, I mean that in cumulative run value terms, but it’s also true — and markedly weirder! — that his four-seamer is the best performing pitch on a rate basis among the 201 offerings that have been thrown at least 200 times, and the only traditional fastball in the top 15. This is typically the territory of whiff-happy secondary offerings. The rest of the top 10 at Baseball Savant goes splitter, changeup, splitter, changeup, changeup, slider, splitter, slider, slider.

The four-seamer is Brown’s most-thrown pitch, a primary weapon in that sense. But he throws it only 36% of the time because of how thoroughly he mixes in that sinker (22%), plus a curveball and a changeup (15% each), with a slider and a cutter sprinkled in.

Now, there’s a big, obvious good thing about this four-seam: It is averaging 97 mph in 2025, up a tick from 96 mph last year. What it does not do is move in any particularly special way. Coming into the year, some pitching analysts even worried that Brown threw a “dead zone” fastball, or a heater that moves too normally, that looks too much like what hitters’ eyes are trained to expect.

In the New Pitch Era, there’s a pull to constantly be differentiating your stuff from the herd, but Brown didn’t really do that. That’s why everyone is still talking about the sinker he’s been throwing since last May. That’s why I was surprised to find his fastball atop the leaderboards.

As Brown goes from nice rebound story to Cy Young contender, we need to move the conversation forward. This Astros breakout, it seems, is more about juxtaposition than transformation. Juxtapositions, really. I have two that I think are worth monitoring.