One of the best parts of being a Twins fan is watching the team draft a player, bring him up through the minors, seeing him break into the majors, and (sometimes) be successful. It's one of those things to take pride in. Like, look at Joe Mauer (except for you, Blame Mauer bot).
Mauer is every fan's dream. He was a number one overall pick who moved through the system with ease, put up historic numbers with the big kids, and brought the team accolades and many, many victories. It's just so satisfying.
The theme of the 2017 season was obviously The Season of the Next Generation of Young Guys Hitting the Crap Out of the Ball. But just how successful was this group of homegrown batters in comparison to the Twins teams in years past? Were they as good statistically as they looked on the field? Could we look at pitchers, too, and feel sad about things? Yes! Very! And Yes, we can you sadistic bastards!
I went back to 2004, the first year Mauer blessed us with his presence on the major league team, tallied up the number of homegrown players on the team, and added up their bWAR. I only had to make a couple judgement calls. Like, I didn't include Torii Hunter's or Jason Kubel's second stints with the team since anything they learned or developed after leaving the team voids their homegrown-ness, in my opinion.
Anyways, here's the batters chart.
This year juuuuust barely had the highest combined WAR for homegrown batters in the last 14 seasons. The 2017 season also tied for the third most homegrown players. The best "WAR value per player" was the 2009 season where the six homegrown batters averaged a 3.7 WAR. The worst was the 2011 team with an average WAR of 0.4 per homegrown batter.
All in all, the Twins have been pretty successful developing hitters over the last decade and a half. In only four seasons did the team average less than 1 WAR per player. There doesn’t really seem to be a trend of "successful homegrown batters leads to successful team record" though. The 2010 team went 94-68 with 11 homegrown batters that combined for a 13.6 WAR. Two seasons later the 2012 team went 66-96 with 9 homegrown batters combining for a 13.5 WAR.
Alright let's get this over with and look at the pitching graph.
Lol Google Docs wouldn't even let me make the chart go higher than 12 to make it easier to compare to the batting graph. It was like "Nah bro, if your graph is going into the negative numbers, I'm gonna have to limit your positive numbers."
Soooo yeah. The team hasn't had a group of homegrown pitchers average over 1.0 WAR per player since 2009. The pitchers combined to be lower than replacement level twice in the last five years. That is not ideal. Also, interestingly, the team has used ten or more homegrown batters eight times in the last 14 seasons, but has only used ten or more homegrown pitchers three times.
The best WAR Value was way back in 2004, with an 1.9 WAR per homegrown pitcher. The worst was 2016 with a –0.3 WAR per homegrown pitcher. Gross.
In summary, the Twins have developed good hitters, they haven’t developed good pitchers—but neither of these necessarily are guaranteed to lead to a successful team anyways, which was kind of common knowledge already I guess, so maybe I just wasted all of your time. Sorry about that everyone.