Minneapolis – The start of the 2025 season hasn’t gone the way the Minnesota Twins clubhouse wanted, but things are turning around. They took five of six against the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels in their latest homestand.
They’re also starting to turn around for Griffin Jax, the reigning Twins pitcher of the year, who appeared in three games over the homestand. Over his last two outings, Jax looked more like the pitcher he was when he joined Minnesota’s rotation in 2021, allowing six hits and seven earned runs in only 1 ⅓ innings of work.
Jax allowed only two hits in his last three and struck out seven. He said it wasn’t a matter of his pitches not working as intended. Instead, they weren’t landing in the locations inside and outside the strike zone to get hitters to chase. Now that Jax has identified the issues and implemented the changes in games, Jax feels things click into place.
“It was super simple. It was a feeling, you know,” Jax said. “Any athlete that’s aware of their body knows what the feeling is. It’s different for everybody, but the minute you find it, you’ve got to drill it down and make sure it doesn’t go anywhere. But it’s a long season, so it’s going to happen over time.”
Jax is starting to command his pitches again, a sign he’s found that feeling again. He’s managed 14 swings and misses on his sweeper, changeup, and four-seamer while racking up those seven strikeouts over the last three outings.
The swings and misses may not feel important if it doesn’t result in a punchout. Still, every swing and miss Jax had this series helped put him back in the 100th percentile of Baseball Savant’s Chase Rate. Jax said the bad outings never were a matter of losing confidence on the mound, and now they’re landing where they need to, getting him back in the top percentile of baseball.
“It wasn’t so much stuff wasn’t there, it was just the ability to locate,” said Jax. “But again, these are big league hitters, and if you’re not locating, it doesn’t matter how good your stuff is; they might hit you. It was more so the feeling of putting that I could put the ball where I want, that’s what’s going to push me, gonna push me through the inning right there.”
“He’s missing a lot of bats right now,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said regarding Jax’s results this last week. “He’s using all of his pitches, he’s throwing pitches in the zone for strikes and getting ahead, he’s throwing pitches for swing and miss. Just the way he comes into the dugout after these outings, I think he feels pretty damn good about how he’s going right now.”
Baldelli used Jax in the seventh inning for each of his outings this week to alleviate his game leverage index. In his Atlanta outing, Jax struck out Austin Riley to start the inning, and the Twins held a 94.6% win expectancy. That decreased to 25.4% after he exited the game after allowing two hits and two walks, and the game-tying runs allowed by Cole Sands, who replaced him.
Jax has typically been seen in the eighth or ninth innings over the last couple of seasons for the Twins, but it’s not uncommon for him to pitch whenever the heart of an opposing team’s lineup is expected to bat in the later innings.
“I think we’re going to work him back into those eighth-inning outings,” said Baldelli. “I normally don’t make too big a deal of which inning guys are pitching, but I think to get him rolling, the goal was to get him rolling just by getting him out there again and into some games earlier, and I think it’s worked pretty well for him.”
“If the top of the order is coming up, I knew it was going to be me,” said Jax. “I’m pretty much moving around fourth and fifth inning, anticipating to throw, and generally I have a pretty decent idea of when I’m going to be used, so I’ll ramp up movement and prep of that window when I think it’s going to be me.”
Jax finding his command again has helped bolster Minnesota’s bullpen depth, which FanGraphs projected as the best in baseball going into 2025. However, the Twins’ bullpen hasn’t looked like the best in baseball to start the season. Their collective WAR is best for ninth in baseball at 1.3 and 12th in ERA at 3.50.
There’s still plenty of time for Minnesota’s bullpen to become among the best in baseball. If Jax and the rest of the Twins bullpen can keep pace with how they pitched this last homestand, they can turn things around.
“We have guys with really good stuff, guys who have some unique looks to them,” said Baldelli. “But really, it’s a full bullpen, it’s a deep group, and that’s what you’re looking for. It’s one thing to have guys you go to when you have a lead. It’s another thing to have an entire bullpen that you can lean on when you have a lead.”
