In the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, the main protagonist (played by Paul Newman) wagers with his fellow inmates at a Florida prison farm. He bets them he can eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in under an hour without a shadow of a doubt. The other prisoners gladly take him up on the bet and watch with giddy excitement as he attempts this painful challenge.
Luke starts out steady, taking in each egg as it comes to him with ease.
“He’s gonna lose a finger eatin’ like that,” says one of the onlookers.
Bite by bite, he keeps cruising. Before he knows it, he’s through two dozen.
“Slow down a little,” directs another peer.
He takes an extra moment to chew, wincing from fatigue as he keeps scarfing.
I think this may be the moment Danny Coulombe finds himself in his 2025 campaign. He’s eaten every challenge that’s come his way in the early going, twirling just under 17 innings of nearly-perfect baseball. Coulombe has yet to give up an earned run. He’s only allowed two of 12 inherited runners to score, and he’s a major factor in the bullpen’s revitalization over the last month.
However, the Twins placed Coulombe on the 15-day injured list, citing a left forearm strain that has reportedly hampered him recently. Still, you wouldn’t know he was hurt if you looked at the box scores over the last three weeks. In that span, which coincided with Minnesota’s 13-game winning streak that ended on Sunday, Coulombe pitched in six games and only allowed four hits and one walk while striking out nine.
I’m not suggesting that this is some sort of fake injury. Coulombe missed significant time last year due to various ailments, and he has been working pretty hard as the team’s lone lefty for most of this season. It’s not unreasonable that a 35-year-old in his position might need a couple of weeks on the shelf for necessary maintenance.
So what comes next? How can the Twins get through his current absence, whether it lasts a week or a month?
A quick look at the depth chart shows a bullpen group that largely hasn’t changed for the last month or so. It remains to be seen if they cycle in some fresh names at some point soon. Jhoan Durán’s role will likely remain unchanged as the bulk closer, where he has thrived for virtually the entire season.
Griffin Jax is the primary setup reliever, even while managing some turbulence in the early games. It’s plausible he could find himself getting some of those opportunities the Twins gave Coulombe. For example, a jam in the fifth or sixth inning, where the starting pitcher departs as the lineup turns over for a third time.
Those situations can still hold a good amount of leverage in tight games, and Coulombe has done a fantastic job of managing those exact situations with near-perfect results. While they’ll give Kody Funderburk a fair share of matchups against lefties, are we sure the team will trust him in some of those critical points where Coulombe thrived?
The 28-year-old is off to a nice start in his small, four-game sample. Funderburk is pitching to the tune of a 2.84 ERA while cutting his walk rate down from 9.3% to 4.1%. Still, it’s hard to forget last season, where the lofty lefty struggled with a brutal 6.49 ERA across 34 ⅔ innings.
Ultimately, how many eggs are we expecting Funderburk to eat while Coulombe steps away from the challenge? And if the young gun can’t keep them down, who comes in after him to start scarfing?
If you really think about it, Coulombe’s 50-egg challenge was to replace Caleb Thielbar as the veteran southpaw in Minnesota’s relief corps. But maybe more like the Thielbar of 2022, who was a buzzsaw that struck out a third of the batters he faced while cruising to a 3.49 ERA across 59 innings pitched. The lefty from Randolph accumulated 1.6 fWAR that year.
Now that Cool Hand Danny Coulombe has already eclipsed the halfway mark of that goal (0.8 fWAR in just 16 ⅔ innings), maybe this is the Twins leaning in and telling him to slow down a little, anticipating the need for that extra effort down the line.
