Luke Keaschall keeps hearing the same message from Grady Sizemore: relax, trust yourself and go make the play.
“He just tells us to be free, be relaxed and ready out there,” Keaschall said. “He wants us to be comfortable and go get the ball; pretty simple.”
The problem for the Twins is that comfort has turned into a little too much freedom in center field.
Keaschall has been in the outfield for just over a month, with 246 innings there overall and 137 of them in center. He’s working through the learning curve, and nobody expects perfection.
But the bigger issue is where he’s starting before the pitch even leaves the hand. The Twins have left that initial spot up to him, and that hands-off approach is costing them.
Keaschall said last week in the home dugout at Target Field, “I just follow the card,” Luke Keaschall said last week, standing in the home dugout at Target Field. “I take the card Grady makes for me and go where he tells me.”
That card handles the shading from batter to batter. What it doesn’t settle is the default starting point, and that’s where the trouble begins. Keaschall has been positioning himself deeper in center than almost anyone else in the sport, and that depth has made routine-looking plays harder than they should be.
The result has shown up in all the wrong ways. On one recent ball, Keaschall couldn’t finish a catch that Statcast gave a 90% catch probability based on his starting position, the ball’s landing point and its hang time. He got off on the wrong route and then hesitated as he bent in toward the sinking liner.
Other plays have been even more revealing. Keaschall has missed balls that should have been easy, and because of where he began, some of those plays don’t even count against him in certain defensive metrics.
But that doesn’t excuse the starting point; it exposes it. One liner he turned into a triple carried just a 5% catch probability in Statcast’s view, yet if he had been 10 feet shallower against low-power Nico Hoerner, the odds would have looked very different.
Whether Keaschall would have made the catch from there is fair to question. Starting that deep, though, gave him no real shot.
Derek Shelton said the idea behind that setup is to help Keaschall feel less fear and reduce the danger of retreating toward the wall. In practice, it hasn’t solved much.
Keaschall has still gotten too close to the wall and watched balls skip past him. He’s also short-armed possible catches near the fence, apparently thinking about the collision before finishing the play.
And when balls come in front of him, he’s been forced to charge recklessly, with bad outcomes following more often than not.
The Twins need to step in now. Waiting for Keaschall to gradually inch forward on his own is not fixing the problem, and it’s leaving a key defensive spot exposed while Byron Buxton is on the injured list. Sizemore’s guidance can only go so far if the starting point stays wrong, and right now that’s exactly where things stand.
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