Coming into this offseason, one of the Minnesota Twins’ main objectives was to bolster the team’s starting pitching. It’s been an area of focus for the Twins every offseason in recent memory.
Trading for Pablo López might not be as notable as adding a Justin Verlander or Carlos Rodón, but he still brings a quality starter into the fold. Something Twins fans have been begging for. It allows the team to get a quality starting pitcher to potentially be the staff ace. Another big hope for Twins fans is that all of these quality starting pitchers can allow management to trust their starters deeper in games.
In 2022, Minnesota built a narrative on their injury luck. Fans couldn’t stop talking about how quickly manager Rocco Baldelli would pull a starter from the game. Last season, Minnesota starters averaged 4.8 innings with 78 pitchers per start. Those numbers stack up to the second-lowest in all of baseball. Sonny Gray voiced his frustration about not pitching deeper into games; Baldelli took Joe Ryan out of a game in the middle of a no-hit bid. Ultimately, players and fans didn’t seem too fond of the shorter hooks.
Watching bad starting pitching isn’t great, but it’s not like the Twins could turn it over to a great bullpen. Their 3.84 bullpen ERA last year ranked 15th in baseball. It wasn’t promising, especially when it was stretched too far. In Minnesota’s defense, they aren’t the only squad giving their starting pitchers less of a leash in games.
Teams across baseball are throwing their starters an average of 5.2 innings per game. Last year’s starters like Chris Archer and Dylan Bundy struggled to get past the third inning down the stretch. If they couldn’t pitch well in the early innings, the data confirms conventional wisdom. They won’t get stronger as the game progresses because hitters are more comfortable against a certain arm. Twins pitching wasn’t good enough to allow the starters to go deep into games.
Luckily the 2023 Twins seemed to have distanced themselves from the Bundy, Archer, and Matt Shoemaker-type pitchers. The starting rotation will likely be López, Ryan, Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Kenta Maeda to begin the season. With a handful of young arms waiting in the minors, it seems like the days of relying on guys of the Bundy or Archer caliber will be a thing of the past.
The Twins probably won’t start sending their starters deep into games right away. Most teams have a short hook now. But as the season progresses, the front office and manager Rocco Baldelli need to lean more on their starters. From a fan’s perspective, watching a guy deal for over half the game adds more excitement. On the practical side, most Twins pitchers are good enough to get past the fifth inning or through the order a third time. Also, the playoff teams last season were filled with starters good enough to warrant more innings from their managers.
The Tampa Bay Rays are the only team that pitched fewer innings per start than the Twins last year, and they made the playoffs. Outside of the Rays, all but one playoff team last season was not above league average in that stat. That threshold should be easy to clear, considering the depth Minnesota has in the rotation. It’s only four more outs per start than the Twins had last year, but an extra inning-plus can go a long way towards confidence in the staff and easing stress off of a bullpen they overstretched in 2022.
López is coming off a season where he made all of his starts and pitched 180 innings. Ryan should get a longer leash with a full 147 innings last season under his belt and prove he can handle an entire season’s workload. Gray will come into the campaign fully healthy after dealing with nagging hamstring and pectoral injuries last season. Mahle will come into the season fully healthy after dealing with shoulder fatigue last August. Maeda will have a full year and a half to return from Tommy John Surgery. Even starting pitchers like Bailey Ober, Louie Varland, Josh Winder, and others will make big league starts with some level of experience against that type of hitting that they didn’t have the year before.
Not every starter will have the same magic number when it comes to a pitch or innings limit. That’s where the trust factor kicks in. There has been a concerted effort from the front office over the past two seasons to stockpile depth in the starting rotation. The team has done that. Conversely, the bullpen seems to still be shaky. Jorge López, Jhoan Durán, Caleb Thielbar, and Griffin Jax project to be important players in the bullpen coming off great seasons in 2022. All of that production still amounted to a middle-of-the-pack bullpen.
Leaning on those bullpen arms was fine early in the 2022 season, but they overexposed their high-end bullpen arms as the season went on. Outside of those relievers, they pressed Emilio Pagán and other low-level pitchers into high-leverage situations. The shorter starts meant a bullpen that wasn’t all that deep needed to be stretched further than the unit was capable of. The Twins bullpen doesn’t have enough weapons to win like the 2015 Kansas City Royals or the 2002 Los Angeles Angels had.
The Twins might not have a true ace on their starting rotation, and the days of assuming starters will pitch into the seventh inning or later may be falling out of popularity. However, there still is plenty of talent in the starting pitching department to be trusted to go deep into ball games once the season gets into gear. Starters will have to earn the right to pitch deeper into games, but that trust seems much easier to earn with the projected 2023 starting staff.
