DH

In honor of MLB increasing the pace-of-play this season, I'm also increasing the pace of my Twins position previews.

It's only fair.

The Twins are one of the few Amecican League clubs who have rarely had a regular DH. They like alternating their regular position players into the slot as a way of giving them a day off without losing their bats from the line-up. Lately, Jim Thome was the closet thing we had to a real DH, but even he was a specialist depending on if a righty or lefty was pitching. Jason Kubel was used the same way.

That kind of made sense for the Twins. Joe Mauer didn't have the knees to catch every day, but at one time, he was considered the best hitter in baseball. As good a catcher as he was, his bat was far more important to the Twins success.

Last year, they tried Kendrys Morales out as their mostly full-time DH. That's the first time they had attempted that since David Ortiz was a pup. After dumping Morlaes, they tried out their own version of a man-mountain, Kennys Vargas in the slot.

He had great success in August at the position, batting .308, but quickly faded in September, batting only .228 that month with greater playing time. Most say he didn't have a very good command of the strike zone and pitchers learned to exploit that.

He worked on that weakness in winter ball this off-season drawing far more walks than was usual for him. He apparently IS learning patience at the plate. He is the anticipated Twins DH this season.

But what if he fails? Well the Twins have a real lousy catcher on their roster. And he's not there because of his glove. He's there to give our primary catcher a break every now and then and to HIT. Someone once described his defensive prowess as a "genuine handcap." (OUCH!)

The thing is, Pinto hits so well that they may leave him play catcher more just to keep his bat in the line-up. That brings us back to Vargas. IF BOTH HIT WELL, BOTH WILL MOST LIKELY PLAY A LOT.

And let's not forget, we have an outfielder who is the equivalent of Pinto on defense attempting to play left field for us this year. Arcia has got a pretty good bat as well. IF Vargas fails, we could be tempted to leave Pinto behind the plate and switch Arcia to DH.

Does anybody else see a trend here? The Twins hit GREAT last year. They also had the second worse metric fielding stats in all of baseball. If not for Cleveland's historically bad defense we would have easily been the worst. The Twins really shouldn't have to worry about their DH this season . They have lots of good options there. It's just that you don't want to see any of them near a glove.