Twins Looking to Avoid the Liam Hendriks Mistake With Louis Varland

[Rosterman]

Liam also had one really good season elsewhere  (after a bad season split between two teams) and then three okay to bad seasons before becoming the top-flight bullpen arm.

 

[Rod Carews Birthday]

I hope Varland has a lights out future ahead of him as a reliever, however, calling him a potential Liam Hendriks (who wasn't good at all when he was a Twin, plus a bunch of other teams) is probably misplaced.  Give him time.  He will be what he will be.  The bullpens all over the league are littered with players who weren't good starting pitchers -- some are successful, some are stars, some wash out.  Let's let the guy pitch.

[JD-TWINS]

4 hours ago, Fatbat said:

He pitched 49 innings for the twins last year. He wasn’t very effective and it turned into a lot of garbage time as a SP.  I do agree they should have moved him to the bullpen sooner but HE insisted at trying to be a SP. If that had been more successful, we would’ve not seen SWR as much and certainly less of Festa and Matthews. 
Now that he has accepted his bullpen roll, he understands that max effort is how he gets people out. His stuff will always play and the bullpen will be better with him in it. If he can got 2 innings per outing, he could become a legendary stopper. 
 

Starting an inning and shutting the opposition down for 3 outs would be a great compliment to Alcala & Sands and company! Team isn’t desperate for multiple inning guy……..15-18 pitches per outing (3 outs) would be a nice habit for him to get into in middle innings. I agree - he could be a guy that evolves into a stopper role pretty quickly……get an out or two to get out of a pinch and then a follow-up inning. He’ll have some rough spots but I don’t see him not being effective out of the Pen in general.

[bean5302]

On 3/23/2025 at 8:22 AM, JD-TWINS said:

I don’t have a bunch of stats but he did seem to be effective in a few relief appearances at end of ‘23 - at least a couple in prime time situations.

Note from above calls out 12 relief innings late in ‘24 with 17-1 strikeout to walk ratio.

Seems to me there should be a bit of optimism with Varland throwing to guys that only get to see him once in an outing. He comes off as a touch wild occasionally & he looks like he’s on speed in most of his outings - can’t make hitters very comfortable!

I think his attention span plays better in one inning outings as well - his personality just seems to thrive in the one inning, let it fly, situations.

If the focus on the 12 innings he pitched in relief in 2023, and everything else gets ignored, I can see why people would have high ceiling optimism.

That said, if you're going to create a narrative like the "one inning, let it fly" and "attention span" ideas, at least check his game logs. Only 3 of his 7 relief appearances in 2023 were limited to 1.0 innings or less, and Varland had similar success in the 1.2+ inning appearances. In 2024 only 3 of his 9 relief appearances were 1.0 inning without some sort of boost in performance from what I see.

Varland's results out of the 'pen were bad in 2024, but his metrics and pitch qualities suggest he could be a 3.50-4.00 ERA reliever to me.