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It was a bit strange to see Baldelli turn to Jhoan Duran for the eighth inning Monday night against the Seattle Mariners. The Twins did have a narrow lead, and he'd already used Griffin Jax for the seventh, as the Mariners had sent up the heart of their lineup. Because Jax had an uneven game and had to face six batters to escape that frame, the eighth and ninth hitters were due up for Seattle.
Normally, if the Twins are going to turn to Duran before the ninth inning, you'd expect it to be because the meat of the opposing lineup is coming up. Dylan Moore and Josh Rojas don't exactly constitute a threat, and on one level, bringing in a pitcher as good as Duran just to get out Julio Rodríguez at the end of that sequence seems like overkill.
Again, though, Jax had already been used, and bringing him back for a second inning of work didn't seem like a viable option--particularly given how his one inning of work had gone. With Brock Stewart on the injured list, the relief pitcher Baldelli trusts most (beyond Jax and Duran) is Caleb Thielbar. Rojas is a left-handed batter, but Moore and Rodríguez are both righties. It's easy to understand why Baldelli didn't want to have Thielbar face that particular set of hitters, at a point when any run allowed would make the ninth inning harder for whichever pitcher came in thereafter.
It feels as though this move was primarily determined by the three-batter minimum rule. Baldelli knew that if he brought in Thielbar, he would not be able to remove him until after Rodríguez's plate appearance. Rodríguez might be off to a tough start, but on talent, he's a one-man heart of the lineup. In a tight game, the margin for error was too small to be locked into a bad matchup with him.
In effect, Baldelli was trying to put out a fire before it could start, and the best way to do so was to turn to his flamethrowing relief ace. The situations in which the three-batter minimum alters the order in which a skipper calls upon their high-leverage relievers figure to be few, but when they come up, they're interesting. It's also fun to think along with Baldelli in this way. He wasn't waiting for trouble to start, but nor was he managing unduly nervously. Given that Jax wasn't going to come back for the eighth, Baldelli only had that one moment, going into the inning, to select the right matchup for Rodríguez. That meant using his closer an inning early, but so be it.
My guess is that, if the Twins bullpen is ever at full strength (that is to say, if they have Stewart back; Jax and Duran intact; and Thielbar, Justin Topa, and the rest of their best available), this kind of decision would look different. To preserve and protect Duran, it makes sense to keep using him as a closer in many situations. Given Stewart's health history, Thielbar's age, and more, though, it's not all that likely that the pen will be so robust at any time this year. This situation, with its combination of constraints and opportunity, might not come up again, but we might keep seeing scenarios in which using Duran earlier in games is either necessary or expedient. It was good enough for a clean and relatively easy win Monday night, at least.
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