With the best record in baseball, the Minnesota Twins are the biggest surprise of the first quarter of the baseball season, especially with the way they’ve pitched. They’ve cut their ERA from 4.50 last year to 3.74 this year. Their rotation (21-9) has more wins than any rotation in baseball.
How they’ve done it shouldn’t be a surprise. Minnesota jumped heavily into an analytic-based approach to pitching. The advances in technology and data have weighed much more heavily on the run prevention side than the run production side, which is why it is harder to get a hit today than any time in the past 110 years, except for 1967 and 1968.