When Will the Twins First Need a Fifth Starter?

[Nick Nelson]

Minnesota's fifth starter has been hurt in camp and is behind schedule. With Anthony DeSclafani's status for the start of the season in doubt, it's worth mapping out the team's early schedule to get a read on how they might handle the rotation and delay a decision.

Image courtesy of Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

Anthony DeSclafani missed almost the entire second half last year with a flexor strain, which is often – but not always – a precursor to a more serious elbow injury or surgery. He received a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and stem cell injections in August to boost healing, rehabbed during the offseason, and showed up to Twins camp reporting that he was 100 percent. 

However, the 33-year-old has been slowed this spring by renewed soreness in his elbow, putting him behind schedule in his build-up. It's natural for this development to set off alarms but DeSclafani downplayed the severity of the issue, and no imaging was done, which is telling. Hopefully just a hiccup. He threw a bullpen on Friday and told reporters he felt good. We should learn more on Monday or Tuesday.

Even in a best-case scenario, DeSclafani might have a tough time building up adequately to be prepped for a normal start on April 2nd, when the Twins play their fifth game. Opening Day is suddenly only 18 days – or about three rotation turns – away, and DeSclafani has still seen zero game action this spring. 

If there are any setbacks or something more serious comes to light, the Twins will need to figure out another plan for the fifth starter role to start the season. (Hello, Louie Varland – having a great spring so far, for what it's worth.) If indeed this was a bump in the road, and DeSclafani is able to start getting into games and ramping up, the Twins will take whatever time they can buy before they need to call upon him in the regular season. 

Luckily, the early schedule is set up to accommodate them, at least for a bit. Here's a mapping of the first eight games of the season, and which pitchers I would expect to start them:

• March 28, @ KC: Pablo López
• March 29: Day off
• March 30, @ KC: Joe Ryan
• March 31, @ KC: Bailey Ober
• April 1: Day off
• April 2, @ MIL: Chris Paddack
• April 3, @ MIL: Pablo López (+1 day rest)
• April 4, vs CLE: Joe Ryan (standard rest)
• April 5: Day off
• April 6, vs CLE: Bailey Ober (+1 day rest)
• April 7, vs CLE: Chris Paddack (standard rest)
• April 8, vs LAD: ???

This is where things get interesting. Thanks to three days off mixed into the first two weeks, the Twins were able to easily skip the fifth starter the first time through the rotation. They could do so again here, because López is available on standard rest, as Ryan would be the following day. But at that point they'd need to make a call. After getting a break following the home opener, they play 12 straight days.

One way or another, someone outside of the top four is going to be needed against Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers. If it's DeSclafani, the Twins had better be confident he's primed for the task, having seen zero game action since last July. If it's Varland, we'd better hope his adjustments to cut down on homers prove to be effectual, because that's a lineup that will feast on mistakes.

Another possibility, I suppose, is that the Twins could open the season with DeSclafani on the 15-day injured list, carry a long reliever (e.g. Brent Headrick or Matt Canterino) in his place, and then use that pitcher as the bulk guy in a bullpen game against Los Angeles. This would give Rocco Baldelli a very deep bullpen for the first stretch of games, and would give DeSclafani a full month from now to get himself up to game speed. He'd be eligible to be activated from the IL on April 12th, in time for his next turn in the rotation after skipping the first two.

We'll know more soon about the plan for DeSclafani. If things are going to get back on track with him, as he indicated, then the Twins will be facing a timing crunch with the start of the season less than three weeks away. But there are strings they can pull to accommodate his delayed timeline and try to get him in a good place for his first start with the new club.

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How would you handle the opening stretch of the schedule? Would you show patience to stick with DeSclafani or go another direction? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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[The Mad King]

I liked the way you laid that out. Throw SWR into the mix too 

[High heat]

You still have a month before he is needed. I think they will be going with 4 in the rotation and a long man.  DeSclafani on IL to start the year getting 2 starts in St. Paul. 

It becomes a discussion if by next week he hasn’t taken the mound or has a set back.  Did we by damaged goods and we have to talk about Varland taking his spot out of the gate.

[Parfigliano]

25 minutes ago, High heat said:

You still have a month before he is needed. I think they will be going with 4 in the rotation and a long man.  DeSclafani on IL to start the year getting 2 starts in St. Paul. 

It becomes a discussion if by next week he hasn’t taken the mound or has a set back.  Did we by damaged goods and we have to talk about Varland taking his spot out of the gate.

I would say the Twins bought damaged goods.  Varland goes north with the Twins not St Paul.

[Fatbat]

Is there any reason to not rest the guys an extra day or two in April? How about Desclafanti on il and Varland in the rotation from the get go. Or slot Varland in for the last game vs. Cleveland and give Paddack an extra day rest and give him the Dodgers game 1? 

[ashbury]

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors.  I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start.  This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins.  Don't rush the young guy.

[FlyingFinn]

7 hours ago, ashbury said:

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year,

That's one of the better ERA's in that league last year as it was very much a hitters league, possibly due to having the robo ump at times.

[CRF]

I think probably sooner, rather than later. I'd be surprised if Desclafani doesn't go on the IL. 

[mikelink45]

It is amazing to me that we continue to buy damaged goods, Peneda, Mahle, Paddock, DeSclafani.  Considering the salaries we pay for not productive years is it really a financial savings?

[JD-TWINS]

8 hours ago, ashbury said:

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors.  I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start.  This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins.  Don't rush the young guy.

Somebody’s gotta pitch….., Varland was up in ‘22 for 5 starts and had a sub 4.00 ERA. 60 plus innings in ‘23 and too many HR - higher ERA. He was pretty dominant in relief. If he continues to improve his command through reps he’ll be fine at some point. Seems he’ll be the 5th guy through April the way DeScla. is progressing. DeScla. may be toast as well - sore elbows, one season to the next, are not a good thing!!

Varland could be up to start the year and stay for months…….SWR’s 2nd half of ‘23 and work so far in ‘24 is encouraging as well.

[saviking]

Just the mention of the name Matt Canterino gives me goosebumps.. LOL, I'm ready!

[old nurse]

The season is long. Too any pitches who probably can’t pitch 200 innings. So, if you do not want gassed pitchers in the playoffs, they need the 5th starter to open the season. There is always the bullpen game if you have more quality bullpen arms 

[nicksaviking]

12 hours ago, ashbury said:

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors.  I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start.  This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins.  Don't rush the young guy.

Minor league ERA doesn't really do much for me, seems strikeout rates and walk rates tend to be more indicative if the player's stuff will translate. Still not sure that it will.

Either way, I'm less concerned with when this team will need a 5th starter than when they'll need a 2nd starter, which they're still lacking from my perspective.

[roger]

Always find what you write, Nick,

As interesting.  Thanks for picking topics that are of interest when written.  Add that you write so well makes your articles a pleasure to read.

As usual, you are to the point in presenting the situation and addressing the options.  All I will say is that we will see how he ramps up and what the Twins will do if he isn't ready come April whatever. 

[Steve Montbriand]

I remember Mahle saying he was 100 percent...

[Doctor Gast]

Nick, you mentioned Canterino as a long-relief candidate. Do you believe he's ready to come up on the opening roster? Maybe bring 2 long relief pitchers to start with. After a couple of short starts at AAA bring up Varland to fill the #5 spot to start Apr.8.

[Linus]

I would wait on DeSclafini for about 2 seconds. Start the season with Varland and deal with DeSclafani when he is healthy and pitching effectively. 

[John Belinski]

It doesn't appear the Twins need a starting pitcher to pitch 200+ inning since with Rocco as manager no pitcher will ever get that chance. The bullpen will decide if the Twins have a winning season or losing season since Rocco uses 3 or 4 RP every game.  Jack Morris would never have had a chance to win game 7 of World Series if Rocco was manager. Twins fans need to hope bullpen pitches well in 2024 since it appears Rocco will never change on how he manages starting pitchers. 

[stringer bell]

First of all, this is all speculation. I guess it is a sign that not much else is happening. Secondly, if DeSclafani is just a bit behind, that isn't the same thing as preparing for TJ surgery. Finally, the carefully laid out schedule that Nick provided depends on good weather. We've had an historically warm low-precipitation winter, what are the odds things even up in the spring? 

DeSclafani's issue is health. The Twins gambled that he would be able to give them innings and IMHO he has the potential (if healthy) to be a lot better than an innings-eating fifth starter. I will make no predictions here. He may never throw a pitch for the Twins or he might be a valued member of the rotation for the entire year. His health history would lower the chances for a positive result. 

I do find the alternatives to be interesting. Rocco really seems to want multiple inning guys in his bullpen and there would be an opportunity for someone if Disco was temporarily on the shelf. Running Varland out there would indicate to me that the team has no faith that DeSclafani will ever make it back. 

[stringer bell]

1 minute ago, John Belinski said:

It doesn't appear the Twins need a starting pitcher to pitch 200+ inning since with Rocco as manager no pitcher will ever get that chance. The bullpen will decide if the Twins have a winning season or losing season since Rocco uses 3 or 4 RP every game.  Jack Morris would never have had a chance to win game 7 of World Series if Rocco was manager. Twins fans need to hope bullpen pitches well in 2024 since it appears Rocco will never change on how he manages starting pitchers. 

The tone here is that Baldelli is on an island with his usage of starting pitchers. That is not true. Twins' starters logged something like the second or third most innings in 2023. 90%+ of managers limit their starters and few get a chance to pitch 200 innings. 150 is the new 200. 

[Richie the Rally Goat]

2 hours ago, old nurse said:

The season is long. Too any pitches who probably can’t pitch 200 innings. So, if you do not want gassed pitchers in the playoffs, they need the 5th starter to open the season. There is always the bullpen game if you have more quality bullpen arms 

To calibrate a bit

in 2023 the Twins were 4th in mlb in starting pitcher innings pitched at 895 innings.
 

There were 5 pitchers who broke the 200 inning threshold in ‘23, none of which were Twins. Pablo came in 9th in the league with 194 innings, Sonny came in 22nd at 184. Ryan 44th at 162 innings, Ober 64th at 144, Maeda 117th at 101 innings.

The quest to 1400ish innings requires starting rotation depth through 7-10 at a reasonably high quality, plus a significant reliever work load.

[jorgenswest]

13 hours ago, ashbury said:

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors.  I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start.  This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins.  Don't rush the young guy.

I don’t disagree about a plan to have him start the season as the 6th starter as Ober did. That plan should have included a mid rotation starter to push him to AAA rather than a veteran back end starter that isn’t clearly better.

I jump in to remind everyone of the run scoring context of the international league in 2023. This is a league where an average of 11 runs were scored per game. Varland had 15 starts and a 3.97 ERA. Only three other starters in the league with at least 15 starts had a better ERA. Of those 4 pitchers only Varland had an ERA, FIP and xFIP all below 4.00. He was arguably the best and most dominant pitcher in the IL last year. 

[bean5302]

I think it's widely accepted the Twins took Desclafani in the Polanco trade because the Mariners didn't want him and didn't want to absorb Polanco's entire price, and it was known at that time that Desclafani may not be ready for the start of the season because of the flexor tendon strain, even if he was optimistic.

The Mariners acquired Desclafani as part of their trade with the Giants as San Francisco wanted to shed his contract, and the Mariners were not intending on adding the pitcher to the rotation, instead using him as a long reliever, but when the opportunity arose to shed a little of their cost for what would be a long reliever for them, they found a way to exchange some numbers with the Twins.

A lot of fans wanted Varland to get the job in the rotation from the get-go, and moving Desclafani to the 'pen like the Mariners were intending is probably not the end of the world.

[DocBauer]

Not going to speculate on how good or bad DeSclafini is going to be this season. The question is his readiness for 2024. His sore elbow was apparently just that, sore, as the  Twins didn't feel it was anything  warranting imaging. He threw a 35 pitch bullpen on Saturday the 9th  with normal effort, as he did a smaller session,  also with full effort, on Monday the 4th. I read somewhere that as long he was fine after the 9th, he was probably getting a start, which should mean this sometime this week. If that holds true, he should get in 3 starts before the season begins. After that, he can work with the team,  or stay in Ft Myers and get in a 4th start against minor leaguers to continue his ramp up.

Should the Twins skip him the first 10 days, the other 4 starters will all perform on either normal or extra rest.  So unless Disco has a setback of some sort, I don't see any issue.  The only question would be whether it's better to have DeSclafini work with the team, or keep him in Florida for a few more days and run with an extra pen arm for those few days. 

IF there's any health setback, THEN we have more to talk about.

[ashbury]

2 hours ago, jorgenswest said:

I jump in to remind everyone of the run scoring context of the international league in 2023. This is a league where an average of 11 runs were scored per game. Varland had 15 starts and a 3.97 ERA. Only three other starters in the league with at least 15 starts had a better ERA. Of those 4 pitchers only Varland had an ERA, FIP and xFIP all below 4.00. He was arguably the best and most dominant pitcher in the IL last year. 

This is the kind of deeper dive I totally support, and I agree that just quoting an ERA without the context doesn't give the whole story.  I was offering shorthand but 2023 was an outlier.

I'll go a little deeper still and suggest that the OPS he put up in AAA of around .760 doesn't support the 3.98 ERA he accrued there. I feel that OPS-against is a more stable way to gauge a pitcher than his ERA, but ERA is the more familiar number so it's worth converting back and forth for best understanding.  Doing equivalencies is a bit of guesswork based on larger samples that may not hold up well for an individual season; a year or two ago I drew up a table of league OPS and league ERA, for a sampling of seasons over the decades, and I use that table when thinking about such stuff. 

So, in my experience, a .760 OPS could be expected to lead to an ERA around 4.40, not the 3.97 he wound up with.  ERA fluctuates more than the underlying factors that go into it.

As you point out, because of the context of AAA this past season, Varland's OPS-against might be a bit inflated.  Overall, the International League had an OPS of .794 in 2023.  In 2022 that figure had been .750.  Let's use round numbers and suppose everyone's OPS should have .050 deducted to be meaningful.  For Louie that's .710 at AAA, and that might correspond to a AAA ERA more like 3.90, coincidentally close to his actual ERA - luck giveth, luck taketh away. 

But the majors are harder than AAA.  My rule of thumb, again not something "official" but just what I use, is that you can expect a batter's OPS to go down .100 when moving up a level; a pitcher's goes up .100 likewise.  That's not supported by published research, I've just found it useful (it's helped me identify prospects like Polanco and Kepler in their first years in the minors as better than their numbers indicate, using age as a factor).  If Louie's "adjusted OPS-against" of .710 is bumped up to .810 for the majors, that's darn close to the actual .791 he put up while in the majors.  Greater precision isn't possible from rules of thumb, but for me, his 2023 stats in both the majors and minors hold together to paint a consistent picture.

Your comparative stats for other pitchers in the IL are well taken, but I want to point out that no one is sent to AAA to be dominant for a full season.  Without checking, I'm inclined to expect that many dominant performers came and went, either being promoted to AAA from AA because of good performance, or being promoted to the majors from AAA, who failed to reach the 15-start threshold precisely because they were performing well and didn't hang around.  That leaves us with a greater problem of "small sample size" than usual, and I don't have any solutions to offer except to advise caution.

Basically, no, I think saying Louie "dominated" at AAA is a mild stretch. Unadjusted, the league OPS was .794 and his was .760.  Pitchers who don't dominate at AAA may not be great candidates for the rigors of being a rotation mainstay in the majors.  That's not to say that Varland can't take that next step.  But I'd rather have him do that in a few starts, say 5, at AAA, and if he dominates, then he too can be one of the pitchers who fail to reach the 15-start threshold because he performed well and didn't hang around.

Meanwhile, others have pointed out that my preference to have Louie start at AAA would be more supportable if the FO had succeeded in landing a more solid "#2 type" starter instead of DeSclafani.  I don't disagree with that either.  I do believe that Desclafani is not a mediocrity, but a quality starter who's been beset by injury causing his numbers to suffer.  The gamble the FO is taking is 1) that he's over the injuries enough to be ready, and 2) the past injuries haven't robbed him of the abilities that make him a quality starter.  I don't especially like the FO's gamble.  But until Disco turns out to be a no-go, I really prefer to ride him and stash Varland at AAA for his final bit of development and seasoning.

Sorry for all the verbiage, but the short version apparently didn't suffice. 😀

[old nurse]

4 hours ago, Richie the Rally Goat said:

To calibrate a bit

in 2023 the Twins were 4th in mlb in starting pitcher innings pitched at 895 innings.
 

There were 5 pitchers who broke the 200 inning threshold in ‘23, none of which were Twins. Pablo came in 9th in the league with 194 innings, Sonny came in 22nd at 184. Ryan 44th at 162 innings, Ober 64th at 144, Maeda 117th at 101 innings.

The quest to 1400ish innings requires starting rotation depth through 7-10 at a reasonably high quality, plus a significant reliever work load.

To calibrate a bit you need to include the playoff pitching in your plans You also should be including that in your season totals 

[mrcharlie]

20 hours ago, Parfigliano said:

I would say the Twins bought damaged goods.  Varland goes north with the Twins not St Paul.

Is it just me or do the Twins have a history of buying damaged goods?