Improved Sano vital to Twins’ turnaround

The longer you watch baseball at the Major League level, the more you appreciate how truly difficult the game is.

Here’s an example of the difficulty, the unforgiving nature of the game: the 2016 Minnesota Twins.

The Twins in 2015 were a young team on the rise, a winning team, a second-place team in the American League Central, a team that narrowly missed capturing a Wild Card berth.

The 2016 Twins, with a roster not all that different from last season, are 12-34, tied with the Atlanta Braves for the worst record in the big leagues.

This performance has required many aspects of the Twins’ game to go wrong. 

One of the most noticeable individual declines has been that of Miguel Sano. That is true mainly because so much was expected of him. He came up in the second half of last season and performed like the slugger the Twins hoped he would be. The thought was with his tremendous power he would continue his inevitable push toward stardom this season.

But the game is rarely as simple as that. In 2015, Sano produced a slash line of .269/.385/ .530, with 18 home runs in 80 games. In 2016, Sano’s slash line is .221/.325/.411. And he has struck out a league-high-tying 67 times in 163 at-bats.

There have been misadventures in right field as well, as the Twins attempt to make Sano a plausible outfielder. For a man, who is listed at 6-foot-4 and 260 pounds, he is remarkably athletic. Given …

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