Arm-ageddon: Twins Announce Injuries to Jhoan Durán, Anthony DeSclafani, Caleb Thielbar, Others

The big, joyous storyline of spring training for the 2024 Minnesota Twins was the good health of many key pieces of the team, including some for whom injury has been a constant problem. Ten days shy of Opening Day, that narrative is cracking.

In a flurry of updates Monday afternoon, the Twins announced a couple of things that had already grown apparent to attentive fans--but there were an extra couple of scoops on the tsuris sundae. Anthony DeSclafani, who was pretty clearly not in line to start the season on the active roster, has a forearm strain and will see Dr. Keith Meister to determine the next steps in his treatment. That's bad news. So is the fact that Caleb Thielbar and his balky 37-year-old hamstring will be on the shelf to open the season.

Those were expected blows, though. Neither DeSclafani nor Thielbar has seemed to be on track for Opening Day since they arrived at camp. DeSclafani's update portends ill for his whole season; I think "Tommy John" is one of the autocomplete options when you start Googling "pitcher forearm strain". Still, both developments are what we anticipated they would be. Jhoan Durán's status, though, comes as a nasty shock. He suffered a moderate oblique strain, and will also begin the season on the injured list.

An oblique strain (especially for a flamethrower like Durán) is often a 4-6 week injury, so Durán might be out for all of April. Setbacks with those injuries aren't as uncommon as we'd all like, either. The Twins' relief ace will be absent on Opening Day, and their overall relief depth is thinning fast.

Both Zack Weiss (still recovering from a teres major strain) and Matt Canterino (sub-scapula strain) have injuries in the upper back/shoulder structural complex and will also be sidelined to begin the year, with Weiss on the MLB injured list and Canterino on the Triple-A version. There are a bunch of new opportunities for other relievers who had been on the roster bubble, but this is a very unfortunate quintet of updates.

The one silver lining is the bullet the team seems to have dodged, for now. Byron Buxton was scratched from Monday's lineup with tightness in his lower back, but the team says that issue is very minor. That can always change, and with Buxton, it's always cause for alarm when he's pushed off the field by any malady, but this isn't one of the areas of his body have cost him considerable time recently, and all parties seem hopeful that he'll be back in action very soon.

Overall, this was a miserable day for injury updates. The Twins' bullpen, especially, is in a state of newly clarified pandemonium. Hopefully, this is the big bite from the injury bug, and the rest of spring goes fairly smoothly, but some damage is already done for the short term.

Which of these injuries concerns you most? What moves or in-house options are you eyeing now? Join the discussion as we try to figure out how the Twins will rejigger their bullpen.

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