Joe Mauer Is Back When The Twins Need Him Most

The Minnesota Twins are a Rubik's Cube that refuses to properly align. Last year's team was projected to finish in the American League cellar while biding time before a cluster of new jewels were sufficiently polished. Instead, Minnesota dashed toward, and ultimately fell short of, a wild card bid on the backs of tenured types like Brian Dozier, Trevor Plouffe, Kyle Gibson, Ervin Santana and Glen Perkins.

Regression was inevitable in 2016, the thinking went, but it would be warded off by the talented influx of youth—all those unpolished jewels. Miguel Sano, Byron Buxton, Max Kepler and Jose Berrios were finally ready and gleaming. The regression has come as expected from the veterans. But the youngsters have done nothing to soften its impact.

The Twins are just 8-25. And amidst all this disarray, they have found themselves back where they always were. Even down to their former superstar. Joe Mauer is once again Minnesota's silver lining. Mauer's bat has finally clicked back into place—the hometown idol turned millstone (he is owed $23 million per year through 2018) has turned back into an hero.

There were some dark years for Mauer. Over the last two seasons, he posted a combined 2.0 fWAR— less than half of his total from 2013 alone. He slugged all of .380 last season which actually represented improvement over 2014, when he mustered only four home runs. When his OBP sunk to a career-low .338 last year, it seemed like the Twins were forced to win despite Mauer rather than because of him. This was an entirely reasonable conclusion: here stood a 32-year-old franchise catcher turned franchise first baseman with the pop of a backup middle infielder. He seemed finished.

What happened next was more of a deep cleanse than a complete rejuvenation. Mauer isn't reclaiming his MVP form, but he's maximizing the skills he still has. The power hasn't and isn't coming back: his lone home run is one of just eight extra-base hits on the season. But while he can't hit far, he at least hits hard. As of Wednesday, Mauer's 9.6% soft contact rate is ninth-lowest in the major leagues; his 37.2% hard hit rate is right in line with his pre-2014 norms. The rest, he's doing even better: Mauer's walking at a career-best 17% clip and striking out just 12.6% of the time. The gap between them is fourth-best in baseball, and a personal record. His 29.8% line drive rate represents yet another individual benchmark.

He is back to being Joe Mauer, in other words, the cerebral yogi steeped in the rhythms of hitting. He has never quite received the acclaim that should have accompanied those skills, though, because Mauer's story is one of unmet demands that always were a touch excessive. He spent nearly a decade racking up .300 averages at catcher—even becoming the first and only AL backstop to win a batting title—yet the nagging never ceased about how a 6-5, 225-pound slab of marble should crank more home runs. The Twin Cities insisted he pick up where Kirby Puckett left off and take the club to the World Series, never mind that the rotation rarely boasted more than two competent pitchers at a time or that longtime manager Ron Gardenhire's tactical acumen could charitably be labeled "old school."

It's always been easy to fetishize him as a Midwestern Superman, right down to the contoured face and squall blue eyes. Perhaps that's why, just this week, Minnesota finally batted him leadoff for first time in his career, despite his hitting profile always being a snug fit for the job. It was never enough for Mauer's virtuosity to shine on its own. It had to come in the context of lifting up everyone and everything around him.

No one, not Mauer, or any other baseball player, can do that. He's certainly not up to the task this year, for reasons that again have more to do with everyone else than him. This season's damning revelation isn't that the Twins are, even by their owner's admission, "a total system failure," but that there's more reason than ever to question the organization's capacity to carry out a reboot and honor the twilight of Mauer's career by fielding a competitive team.

For example, rather than trade third baseman Plouffe, a slightly above-average regular, to accommodate Sano, their future in the middle of the order, Minnesota went the other way and squeezed the hulking 23-year-old Sano into right field, where he maneuvers with all the grace of a Caterpillar plowing through a rock pile. Eddie Rosario can't play and has been blessed with ample opportunity to prove as much; Kepler probably can, so naturally he began the year tethered to the bench and has since been banished to Triple-A. That may not be a bad thing, per se, given how Buxton's own demotion has jump-started his bat. The conundrum with calling him back up concerns whether or not the major league coaching staff is equipped to actually develop him, given Buxton's career line of .195/.239/.316 and Sano's regression at the plate during his sophomore season.

Berrios has flashed promise since joining the rotation last month but, even if he pans out, there's the matter of four more rotation spots and precious few strike-throwers to fill them after the organization overemphasized pitching to contact—a not-entirely-awful idea that's nonetheless combusted in a "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" kind of way.

Mauer would be forgiven, then, for suspecting he's wandered into a fever dream from 2007, in which he and a powerhouse first baseman—then, Justin Mourneau; now, pudgy Korean import Byung-Ho Park—are forced to carry a mediocre lineup and are dragged down by an underwhelming pitching staff.

He has finally wiped off years of bilious questions about leaving behind the catcher's position (even though no one with a medical license will ever clear him to do it again.) He politely ignored the side-eye that came when he pinned the last two years' worth of struggles on blurred vision lingering from too many concussions. And now that he's vindicated, Mauer hasn't tut-tutted those same skeptics for whipping up puff pieces about the special eyewear that refocused his eyesight. Instead, he's just hit.

None of this is to argue he warrants a special commendation. Joe Mauer is paid handsomely to deliver all of this and more, and even amidst this resurgence still probably falls short of the mark he would have liked to hit. Yet after two-plus years as the Twins' albatross, there's a symmetry to Mauer finding his groove right when the struggling Twins most need it. The Twins are misfiring everywhere. But at least Joe Mauer hasn't run out of bullets.