Willi Castro has proven this season that he can handle many positions, countless roles. Evangelist, it turns out, is one of them.
The Twins utility man spent his media session at the All-Star Game this week preaching the gospel of the Twins, an overlooked and underrated contender, perhaps even for postseason success, he said.
"We're going to battle. We have the team," Castro said Monday in Arlington, Texas. "We have the hitting. We have the pitchers. We're going to do great. We're going to keep playing the baseball we've been playing for the last month. We're going to come back even stronger. We're going to win a lot of games, that's what I know."
He surely couldn't have given that sermon back in April, when the season already felt like a lost cause. After absorbing a lifeless 6-1 home loss to the Tigers on April 21, the Twins were 7-13 on the season, hitting .195 as a team, averaging fewer than 3.5 runs per game and on an 0-for-19 skid with runners in scoring position.
Carlos Correa was on the injured list, and Royce Lewis had been since Opening Day, two of their most dynamic middle-of-the-order hitters watching a promising season spiral out of control. "There is urgency here," manager Rocco Baldelli insisted that day. "We can't pitch and play like this and think things are going to be fine. Our guys know it's not just going to be fine."
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It would have been difficult that day to imagine that Baldelli's final assessment of his team heading into the All-Star break sounded so completely different.
"I honestly am very proud of the way we played in the first half. We have [played] a lot more good baseball," Baldelli said Sunday in San Francisco. "We have a lot of work to do still, but our guys can go home, relax, prepare for the second half and feel good about the way we performed as a team."
Yes, somehow that same team that owned the fifth-worst record in the major leagues on that April day now prepares to begin the season's second half Saturday with a 54-42 record — the franchise's third-best mark at the All-Star break in three decades.
That amazing turnaround happened because the team with the worst batting average in the league back in April has hit .269, best in the majors, since that day. Those same players have scored 399 runs since then, also the best in either league and an average of 5.25 per game.
And they have posted a 47-29 record over those three months, better than every team except the Phillies — who, coincidentally, they will face at Target Field next week.
"We had a lot of guys find themselves at the plate, have excellent at-bats, and we could string some things together," Baldelli said. "It was one through nine, whoever we put out there. No matter who we put in there, the guys performed. That's the makings of a good team."
If not necessarily the most consistent. After that mid-April low point, the Twins went on to win 12 consecutive games. And also lose seven in a row, including three apiece to the Yankees and Guardians. And win nine of 12, lose five in a row and win eight of nine.
"I couldn't take any more of that streaky stuff. It was more than a little bit. It was excessive," Baldelli grumbled. "Most of that was early — it was offensive streakiness. But we settled in. Willi Castro did a nice job moving toward the top of the lineup. Carlos [Correa] swung the bat good. [Jose] Miranda got incredibly hot. Finding consistency as a team, that's baseball."
The Twins, as Castro demonstrated, are a noticeably more confident team now, certain among themselves that their talent has stepped forward as the season has marched on. The Twins hope sometime in the next week to add Lewis, the third baseman who returned in June and provided a month's worth of astonishing hitting — 10 home runs and a 1.039 OPS in just 24 games — before suffering an adductor strain.
"You look at this lineup, you add a guy who rips lefthanded pitching," catcher Ryan Jeffers said of Lewis and his .750 slugging percentage against lefties, "and you're just making us deeper and better. I feel like as good as we've played, you haven't seen us at our best yet."
Staff writer Bobby Nightengale contributed to this report.
