THOMA COLUMN | Swing and a miss: The Twins' Gallo gamble
Apr. 3—"You are going to hate Joey Gallo," the Yankees fan told me about a week before the season opened. "There's going to be a runner on third and one out ..."
"And he's gonna strike out," I concluded his sentence for him. "I know."
Gallo is an extremist, and I'm not talking about his politics, if any. He exists on the far edges of batting statistics.
He has as much power as anybody in the game but it comes with a godawful whiff rate. He may be an 80 on the 20-to-80 scouting scale for power, but a 20 for the hit tool.
And so we wind up with a powerful fly ball hitter with just three career sacrifice flies, a slugger who in recent seasons inspired the invention of now-prohibited four-man outfields but who now provokes opponents to put one of their three allotted outfielders in short right.
Three True Outcomes — Gallo strikes out, he walks, he hits home runs. He came up with one of those three results 238 times in 2022 in just 410 plate appearances.
More than half the time, it doesn't matter where you put the fielders against him.
Unlike Adam Dunn (who last played in the majors in 2014) or Miguel Sano (who remains unsigned after the Twins cut him loose early in the past offseason) — two other prominent low-average sluggers — Gallo has genuine defensive value. The two-time All-Star won two Gold Gloves as an outfielder with Texas, and at first base in the opener he started the first 3-2-4 double play in my memory, a key moment in the Twins win.
But that only goes so far. Gallo has to hit.
He's on a one-year, $11 million contract with the Twins as he tries to rebuild his value after hitting .160 last season. Point one-six-zero. He struck out in almost 40% of his plate appearances in 2022.
At that point, the distance of his long balls and the quality of his defense doesn't matter. A .160 batting average and 40% K rate is unplayable.
And yet Gallo is not that far removed from being a useful player. In 2021 he had an OPS+ of 121, meaning that he was 21% above league average as a hitter — despite a .199 batting average. He hit 38 homers with 111 walks split between Texas and the Yankees.
He also had just 77 RBIs, almost half of them himself. Which ties back to the Yankee fan's complaint.
It also helps explain why the Twins experimented this spring with using him as a leadoff hitter. The best version of Joey Gallo has enough walks to be above-average at reaching base, but too constricted to be productive at bringing in runners.
Whether he hits leadoff or at the bottom of the order, Gallo's probably under pressure to produce. The Twins' investment in him is low enough, and their options numerous enough, that they could quickly pivot to a different option.
Gallo is playing first base now because Alex Kirilloff is sidelined, but the Twins remain publicly optimistic about Kirilloff's post-surgical wrist. It's certainly conceivable that Trevor Larnach will hit well enough to stay in the lineup if and when Kirilloff returns, which would put the playing time pressure on Gallo and/or Max Kepler.
Time is not on Gallo's side.
Edward Thoma is at ethoma@mankatofreepress.com. Twitter: @bboutsider.
