Inconsistent hitting, solid pitching: This is just what the Twins are

In most games this season, the Twins figure to have a better starting pitcher than their opponent.

Unless, of course, it happens to be one of those games where the best starting pitcher in baseball is simply named "whomever is facing the Twins' lineup."

That's a polite way of saying the Twins have really good starting pitching this year, and what could also be described as streaky hitting.

Maybe that hitting description sounds overly polite, too, but it's accurate. On Monday's Daily Delivery podcast with Patrick Reusse, I dusted off some old math terms from the distant past for an explanation: mean, median and mode.

The mean is the average of all numbers in a group. Through 35 games, the Twins have scored 4.34 runs per game. Going into the weekend, it was a little higher — almost exactly at league average, as La Velle E. Neal III pointed out.

The median is the middle number in a group when they are listed in order. That number for the Twins is four runs — roughly half of their games they have scored more than that, and half of them they have scored fewer. Again, that's fine.

Ah, but the mode. That's the most common number in a set. And the most common number of runs the Twins have scored in a game this season? Two. They've scored that paltry total seven times. Two other times they've been held to one, and three times — like Sunday — they have been shut out.

As great as the pitching has been — No. 3 in MLB in overall team ERA (3.33) and No. 2 in starter ERA (3.19) — you can't win when you don't score. And it's hard to win when you only score once or twice.

They're always a threat to hit the ball out of the park, as evidenced by a franchise-record 18 consecutive games with a home run streak that was snapped Sunday.

But their MLB-worst batting average has dipped all the way to .220, just 200 points below Luis Arraez. When you live and die by the long ball, your offense is set up to be feast or famine. That figures to be the theme for much of the season.

It should still be good enough to win a bad AL Central. If that happens, we'll see if it's good enough to snap another streak of 18: consecutive losses in postseason games.

Here are four more things to know today:

*Reusse is almost always good for a post-recording text, and at 7:18 a.m. Monday this one rolled in: "Vida Blue was the topic I forgot. Check out his 1971 season when he turned 22 in July."

Being a longtime baseball fan — and someone who went through all my uncles' old baseball cards in my grandparents' basement many years ago — I already knew the year Reusse had in mind when recalling Blue, who died over the weekend at age 73. But here it is just the same: 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA and 301 strikeouts in 312 innings. That included 24 complete games and eight shutouts, culminating in not just the Cy Young Award but the AL MVP for the Oakland A's.

*Emanuel Reynoso is back in Minnesota at least. But the mystery of why he was gone so long, and just when he will make his 2023 debut for Minnesota United, remains unsolved.

*Lakeville's Jake Oettinger has now allowed 12 goals in three games against Seattle — five of them on just 17 shots in just two periods Sunday before getting pulled as the Kraken took a 2-1 series lead on Dallas. Oettinger gave up just 13 in the entire six-game series with the Wild.

*The Phoenix vs. Denver series is shaping up to be a classic, but then again you can say that about almost the entire NBA playoffs this year.