The future in the big leagues is not too far away for a few Minnesota Twins pitching prospects.
On Monday, the Twins moved right-handed pitchers Cory Lewis and Marco Raya from Double-A Wichita to Triple-A St. Paul, giving them an extra week to finish their 2024 seasons. A month earlier, they called up starter Andrew Morris to fill Zebby Matthews’s spot. Matthews began the season with him at High-A Cedar Rapids and made his MLB debut on Aug. 13.
Minnesota’s major-league pitching staff has collapsed down the stretch as the Twins have gone from 70-53 on Aug. 17 to jeopardizing their playoff spot. However, the Twins have had success with the young pitchers they’ve drafted recently, many of whom are on the verge of making their MLB debuts in 2025.
“It’s good for them to get up here at the end to finish the year at a new level,” said Saints manager Toby Gardenhire. “It gives you more confidence going into the next year. So all of those guys, hopefully by next year, will roll right into it and be ready to go.”
Morris, Lewis, and Raya followed each other in the Saints rotation on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night. Their fellow teammates, Travis Adams and Jaylen Nowlin, also joined them in the last two weeks with the Saints.
Morris knew he’d be on the hill as the Saints returned from Columbus. However, the call-ups for Lewis and Raya were a surprise after Wichita played their final game of the season.
“It’s great to see these guys they’ve all had really good years,” said Morris on his Wichita teammates joining him for the last week of the year. “I’m excited to see them throw up here. It’s nice to get that little taste before next year.”
“It was a little shocking just because there’s one week left up here as well,” said Raya on his call-up. “But I’m definitely grateful to come up here and experience this Triple-A ball for a week and get used to being in the clubhouse around some other guys.”
“It was a little shocking just because it was the last week, so everyone was kind of excited to go home,” said Lewis. “But once I got the news, I was pretty excited to get my chance and experience a full week of Triple-A ball.”
Lewis has gained notoriety around baseball for how hard he throws his knuckleball. Most pitchers throw their knuckleball at 72 to 73 MPH for velocity. However, Lewis averages 85 MPH and has topped out at 88 MPH.
“He has something that no one else has,” said D.J. Engle, Minnesota’s Double-A pitching coach. “Honestly, as a coach, it was the first time I coached a guy with a knuckleball, so trying to explain to him, ‘I don’t know when you should throw it. You’re going to be your best coach in that instance.’”
Lewis had to battle through a shoulder injury to start the season. Still, once he was up with the team on June 12, everything fell right into place as he made 13 starts, posted a 2.59 ERA, a .227 opponents batting average, and struck out 80 batters in 66 innings. He practically picked everything up on the mound as he left it in 2023 when he won the Twins Minor League Pitcher of the Year.
“I think going through that injury ended up helping me and finishing the season strong as I ended up learning a lot about my body,” Lewis said. “What it takes for myself to be ready for each game and each day, and what do I have to do recovery-wise, whether that be new exercises or whatever it may be. And I think it would be more sustainable for me throughout the season.”
Raya has had his healthiest season since the Twins drafted him in 2020. His injuries over the previous three seasons kept him from pitching more than 65 innings a season. He has secured 92 ⅔ innings with Wichita this season and has the chance to get as high as 98 if all goes well with his Saints debut.
“Over the last two months, I’ve been able to go at least five innings most starts,” said Raya. “I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to throw more, deeper into games because I know the year prior I would only go three innings, four innings, and things like that. So now I’m definitely excited to continue that rhythm that I caught and just keep going as deep as I can into games.”
“Ultimately, the long-term development is the most important thing,” Engle added. “So trying to find a way to safely do that, and obviously, throughout the year, we kept him pretty short early and started to build him up in July, we got him to five for the first time. He obviously, at times, didn’t love it, but understood it, the grand scheme, the big picture we were all looking for. He handled it like a pro.”
With Morris’s 2024 season complete, he’ll be heading into the off-season, taking veteran teammates’ advice over the last five weeks to build on his command.
“It’s just learning,” Morris said. “This is the finishing school, as Pete [Larson] called it, and this is where you learn the stuff that’s going to help you in the big leagues.”
Engle hasn’t watched Morris on the mound since Aug. 7. Still, his meteoric rise through the minors on the heels of Matthews makes Morris a suitable candidate for this year’s Twins Minor League Pitcher of the Year. Morris has a collective 2.37 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 133 strikeouts, and just 32 walks in 133 innings between High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A this season. Even if he didn’t work with him for too long during the regular season, Engle is happy he was able to contribute to Morris’s success along the way.
“We basically took his cutter from last year and made it a slider,” said Engle. “Got it a little depthier, got it in the same boat as Travis [Adams] and Zebby, and also gave him an on-plane cutter. Once we got there, it was pretty much over.”
All three of these young arms are consensus top 10 prospects in the Twins system going into the off-season. With them finishing the season at Triple-A, their MLB debuts will be more a matter of when, not if, in 2025.
They’ll all work on strength, conditioning, and adding velocity to their fastballs this off-season. Lewis might unexpectedly reach a historic goal in baseball while balancing his main focus this off-season.
“Hopefully adding a couple of ticks to velo, don’t know what it does to the knuckleball,” said Lewis, “Maybe it hits 90. That would be cool.”