Andrew Morris has spent much of his rookie season looking like one of the Twins’ quieter bullpen wins, and the numbers have backed that up. After beginning the year as a starter with the St.
Paul Saints, he moved into a relief role in the majors and settled in fast. Over 60 1/3 innings, Morris has put up a 3.43 ERA, and the contact-quality metrics paint an even stronger picture: his barrel rate and average exit velocity both sit in the 91st percentile or better among major-league pitchers, while his hard-hit rate checks in at the 85th percentile.
That kind of bat-missing? Not quite.
That kind of bat-dulling? Absolutely.
His expected ERA is down at 3.10, which says his work has been better than the surface results.
Lately, though, the box scores have been rude to him.
Morris has given up at least three runs in two of his last three outings, and both came in spots that hurt the Twins badly. On August 16, he allowed three earned runs in the eighth inning against the Phillies, who entered that frame down by one before finishing off a sweep of Minnesota.
Then on Saturday in San Diego, Morris was tagged for four runs in one inning and took the 7-5 loss. That outing also flipped the game in the Padres’ favor, and the Twins again ended up being swept.
It would be simple to pin those losses on Morris and move on. He was on the mound when the games turned, after all. But the details matter here, and they tell a more complicated story.
Against San Diego, three of the four runs Morris allowed were unearned. The inning included a catcher interference call and a fielding error, and without those hiccups the Twins might have come away with the lead still in hand.
Morris himself wasn’t getting shelled. Only two of the seven balls put in play against him were hard-hit, and he also piled up five whiffs on 19 pitches.
The Padres were willing to put the ball in play, and they found just enough soft contact, plus Minnesota’s defensive mistakes, to cash in. Morris did his part by attacking the zone.
The inning in Philadelphia had a similar feel, even without the defensive caveat. All three runs were earned there, but the contact still wasn’t loud.
Just one of the seven balls put in play against Morris was hard-hit. He mixed his pitches, stayed in the strike zone, and avoided the kind of damage that usually leads to a crooked number.
Instead, bloopers and ground balls found space.
That doesn’t make the outcomes any easier for the Twins. The runs still count, and Morris still has to be the one on the mound when an inning unravels.
But there’s a real difference between a pitcher getting squared up and one getting clipped by a string of soft contact that happens to fall in. Morris has looked much more like the second version.
Since reaching the majors, he’s consistently seemed better than the results on paper. The metrics say it.
The eye test says it, too. And these last two outings only add to the case that he’s been doing a lot right in a season where he wasn’t even supposed to be a major-league reliever when it started.
His knack for limiting hard contact has helped him carve out a bullpen role, and there’s no obvious reason to think that skill has suddenly vanished because of a couple of ugly lines in the scorebook. Baseball can do this sometimes.
Soft contact sneaks through. Errors extend innings.
Aggressive hitters find just enough bat on the ball to keep things moving. Morris is running into that kind of stretch now, and it’s costing him.
At some point, the luck should swing back. If it does, the results ought to start lining up more closely with the pitcher Morris has actually been.
The one warning sign, though, is that he’s still allowing plenty of balls in play in the first place. That’s where the fine line for relievers lives.
High-leverage arms usually miss more bats, because the fewer balls that get put in play, the less room there is for bad breaks to pile up. Morris has done a nice job making contact soft, but the next step would be making even less of it happen.
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