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When ownership told Derek Falvey that he had limited funds to work with this offseason, Minnesota’s president of baseball operations had to get creative. To hit his budget number and keep the team where it was in 2023, the front office had to trade Jorge Polanco. Targeting Justin Topa alongside prospect Gabriel González, the Twins added immediately to their bullpen--or at least, thought they did.
Topa went through a normal spring training, but a nagging knee issue sidelined him to start the year. Instead of pitching at the big-league level, he spent months working his way to a diagnosis (torn patellar tendon, it turned out) and then rehabbing.
The Twins have been working Topa back through a process that kicked off on Jul. 23 in Fort Myers. He has since made four appearances for the St. Paul Saints, and he's looked great, with four scoreless innings and five strikeouts. Of course, it’s a small sample, but staying healthy after having been shut down during his first rehab assignment, it looks as though the reliever has turned the corner.
It’s fair to call Topa a late bloomer. He had pitched just 18 1/3 big-league innings before the 2023 season. For the Mariners, though, he worked 69 innings and posted a 2.61 ERA with a 3.15 FIP. Topa isn’t a massive strikeout guy, but his 21.9% strikeout rate is certainly workable.
Last season, Topa limited hard contact extremely well, and that’s big for a guy who also owned nearly a 60% ground ball rate. Batters weren’t able to square up his pitches, and that often allowed for his fielders to make relatively routine plays. Although Carlos Correa isn’t yet playing shortstop for Minnesota, an infield of Royce Lewis, Brooks Lee, Willi Castro, and Carlos Santana will like working behind the former Mariners reliever.
Now, a word of caution. Topa's extreme ground-ball rate is the product of very heavy action on his sinker, which he has sustained in his rehab assignments this year. However, the overall effectiveness of his arsenal also relies on his velocity, which ticked up to an average of 95 MPH last year. This season, in the minors, he's sat at 93, and hasn't even scraped 95.0 yet. That's a bad sign. So, too, is the strange change in the shape of his slider.
With an essentially sidearm slot, Topa has always had the unusual trait of a slider that actually defies gravity more than his sinker does, and about as much as his cutter does. Here's the scatterplot of his pitch movement for last season.
This year, though, that's going to an extreme, and with some unwelcome costs. His slider is now up over 5 inches of induced vertical break, on average, and it's lost some of the sweep it has had in the past.
Coming from the arm angle Topa uses, a slider that rises a bit more and sweeps a bit less is not a good thing at all. Hopefully, he's still merely feeling his way back. If he does return with a few ticks less heat on the sinker and this diminished version of the slider, he won't be any kind of relief ace, but he might well rediscover those missing ingredients. Even if he doesn't, he can be a useful depth arm, just as Richards and Randy Dobnak are.
Minnesota has the rotation chugging along. Pablo López, Joe Ryan, and Bailey Ober all look reasonably reliable right now. Simeon Woods Richardson has continued to get it done all year. David Festa might be shoring up the final spot. If the bullpen can do their part, then the pitching staff as a whole doesn’t have to be held back just because the deadline came and went without doing anything of substance.
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