Nick Gordon has been in the majors for much of this season, playing 57 games for the Twins since his initial call-up in mid-May. Yet it took until Saturday for the Twins to give Gordon his first major-league start as a shortstop, where he’d played almost 5,000 innings in the minors. Gordon had an uneventful night in the field and homered at the plate. And he was back on the bench Sunday.
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It became clear over the past couple of months that the Twins simply didn’t view Gordon as a viable big-league shortstop. Before Saturday’s start, he’d logged a grand total of just eight innings at shortstop, all of them after a midgame move that left the Twins with limited other options. Meanwhile, he’s started 25 games in the outfield, where he’d never played in his career before this season.
Even with the Twins well out of contention and impending free agency for Andrelton Simmons, they chose to stick with the underperforming veteran rather than hand the shortstop job to Gordon in the second half. Jorge Polanco, not Gordon, usually starts at shortstop when Simmons doesn’t play. On several occasions, Gordon has pinch hit for Simmons, only to then play second base.
But that all changed Saturday. Simmons wasn’t in the lineup, a standard day off after he started 33 of the previous 38 games since not being moved at the July 30 trade deadline. Rather than start Polanco at shortstop, as they’ve done 24 times this season, the Twins kept Polanco at second base and finally gave Gordon his first big-league start at his career-long position.
What was different Saturday?
“We’ve been kind of working through when we might get (Gordon) out there for some work at shortstop,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He started playing a lot of outfield at one point this season. No matter how much work you try to put in, that does take you away from your infield work. So before we made the decision to send him out there (to start at shortstop) we wanted to make sure we were all comfortable, as a staff, as a group and especially the player.”
Gordon, of course, has been a shortstop for his whole baseball-playing life. He was a 17-year-old high school shortstop when the Twins’ previous front office regime drafted him fifth overall in 2014, and he’s played primarily shortstop in the minors every season since, making 525 starts there before, as Baldelli noted, spending the past few months getting a crash course in the outfield at age 25.
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Gordon still refers to shortstop as “my position” and said after the game Saturday that he was “pretty excited” to get a chance there in the majors seven years after the Twins drafted him as a shortstop.
“I got my first groundball in warmups and I looked at the fans and thought, oh man, this is definitely what I dreamed of,” Gordon said. “As a kid, I dreamed of being a shortstop in the big leagues. My dad (two-time All-Star pitcher Tom Gordon) has always told me that shortstop is the toughest position on the field. If you can play there, you can play anywhere.”
It’s the “play anywhere” part the Twins still seem most interested in.
“We’re going to see him out there at times throughout the rest of this season, just like we’re going to see him at some other positions,” Baldelli said. “But his ability to move around the field, and especially play up the middle, is going to be very important to him as a player. That versatility is going to matter.”
Nick Gordon looked like a natural in center field last night. pic.twitter.com/JYcXMSVufM
— Matthew Taylor (@MatthewTaylorMN) June 11, 2021
Being a starting shortstop for a half-decade in the minor leagues, and even the high minors, hardly guarantees big-league competency there. In fact, the vast majority of shortstop prospects, even those who have been first-round picks and top-100 prospects, don’t end up being starting shortstops in the majors. And there are several prominent examples in recent Twins history.
Trevor Plouffe, like Gordon, was a high school shortstop drafted by the Twins in the first round. Plouffe played even more shortstop than Gordon while coming up through the minors, logging 5,400 innings there, including multiple seasons as a starting Triple-A shortstop. Called up by the Twins, he played shortstop for a couple of months, looked completely overmatched and was moved to third base.
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Brian Dozier played shortstop in college and logged 2,500 innings there in the minors, including lengthy Double-A and Triple-A stretches. Called up by the Twins, he lasted all of three months there before being moved to second base, never appearing at shortstop even once after his rookie year. And let’s not even talk about Tsuyoshi Nishioka.
Playing shortstop in the majors is really hard.
Polanco was a shortstop prospect in the minors until he reached Triple A and the Twins moved him to second base full time, only to call him up in 2016 and move him back to shortstop. He was the starting shortstop the past five seasons despite pretty clearly lacking high-end range and arm strength, and he is now back at second base, where the Twins would prefer to keep him in 2022 and beyond.
Back in 2016, when Polanco took over as the Twins’ starting shortstop, Gordon was their top shortstop prospect. That label has since been passed off to Royce Lewis, but even his status as a long-term shortstop is in question after he suffered a season-ending knee injury just before reporting to spring training. There’s no surefire MLB shortstop for 2022 in the Twins’ entire organization.
Simmons was back at shortstop Sunday, so it seems unlikely that the Twins will change course and hand the position to Gordon for the final few weeks of a lost season. It’s still safe to assume they don’t view his defense there as palatable on an everyday basis, which matches most scouting reports on Gordon throughout his minor-league career. It’s part of why his prospect stock has dimmed.
However, if the Twins’ view of Gordon at shortstop warms enough to see him as a viable emergency option, or perhaps even a backup capable of holding the position down once or twice a week, that would dramatically improve his odds of carving out a niche with the Twins (or elsewhere) now that he’s added center field and left field to a positional bag that already included second base.
⚡ FLASH LEAVES THE YARD ⚡@FlashGThe3rd | #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/1BZDNwGEJH
— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) September 11, 2021
Lost in the ongoing debates about his defensive ability is that Gordon will also need to hit better or risk making the fielding details a moot point. He’s thrived in clutch situations with the Twins in a small sample, batting .324 with runners in scoring position and .385 in high-leverage spots, but overall Gordon has hit just .236/.294/.338 for a .632 OPS that’s 100 points below the league average.
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That below-average mark is in line with what he did in the minors, including hitting .252/.301/.366 in 166 total Triple-A games. He’s never shown patience at the plate and strikes out a lot for a singles hitter, although Saturday’s blast to center field hinted that Gordon might have a bit more power than his minor-league resume and rail-thin frame suggest.
One thing working in Gordon’s favor is that the offensive bar to clear for utilitymen and backup shortstops is extremely low. American League shortstops, as a group, have hit .258/.322/.410 this season, 20 points below the league-average OPS. And that includes starters and backups mixed together. Realistically, the bar for a decent-hitting backup shortstop is a .675 or .700 OPS.
Even that might be asking too much from Gordon considering his .667 OPS at Triple A and .632 OPS for the Twins, but it’s at least reasonable to believe he can reach the level of hitting usually required of a bench infielder — assuming that bench infielder plays shortstops regularly. In other words, it all comes back to Gordon’s glove anyway. If he’s a shortstop, it works. If he’s not, it may not.
“He was prepared and went out there and did a nice job (Saturday),” Baldelli said of Gordon’s first career start at shortstop in the majors.
Now we’ll see how many more shortstop reps Gordon gets down the stretch.
(Photo: Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)
