Ride the Bullpen: Twins Set to Embrace Tampa's Successful Pitching Strategy

The visionary pitch for Minnesota's front office, the grand formula for sustainable success, was always this: Tampa Bay North, but with more resources. The Twins' baseball ops department has been massively overhauled and built out during Derek Falvey's tenure, in an effort to keep pace with the league's best in operational excellence.

Meanwhile, Falvey has also been given the financial flexibility to take some big swings that might not be possible in Tampa, or at his former organization in Cleveland--for instance, signing Carlos Correa to nine-digit deals in consecutive offseasons. 

Even if the Twins have more budgetary freedom than Tampa and Cleveland, clearly, it's not infinite, and they are feeling the crunch this offseason. With Correa's salary now accounting for more than a quarter of available payroll (per self-imposed restrictions), the Twins are challenged to maintain their pitching edge on a tight budget. 

This means that re-signing Sonny Gray was never a viable option. Nor was shopping in free agency to replace him. With the start of camp upon us, optimism that a major rotation addition will come via trade is waning. 

Unable to meaningfully offset their losses in the starting corps, the front office has conspicuously shifted its focus to stacking up bullpen depth this offseason. The recent Nick Gordon trade, which returned 32-year-old lefty Steven Okert, is just the latest in a long line of moves adding experienced depth to Minnesota's reliever pool, both on the 40-man roster and beyond it. Trades, major-league signings, minor-league signings, waiver claims: the front office has used every avenue to compile an impressive quantity of capable arms, adding onto what was a very effective unit by year's end in 2023.

As a result, their bullpen projects as the best in the league. Preseason projections are only worth so much, but on paper, this looks like a new defining strength for the Twins. After watching relievers play such a pivotal role in the team's postseason success last October, that's not such a hard thing to believe.

The Twins appear poised to lean into this strength, embracing a "quality innings are quality innings" mindset and a bullpen-heavy strategy, not unlike the one Tampa deployed successfully last year. The Rays led the American League in pitching fWAR and won 99 games while getting fewer innings from their starters than all but two AL teams. They relied on a deep, dependable bullpen to carry the load, and it worked out brilliantly for them. 

Zach Eflin led all Rays starters in 2023 with 178 innings pitched. No one else threw more than 120. I wouldn't expect the Twins to be quite that extreme this year, but it wouldn't shock me if the distribution is similar, with Pablo López the only starter routinely given the freedom to pitch past the fifth or sixth. For varying and overlapping reasons (health and effectiveness), it makes sense to use relatively quick hooks with the likes of Chris Paddack, Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober and Anthony DeSclafani. A well-stocked bullpen makes this possible, and even advisable.

You might respond by saying, "Didn't we try this in 2022? That didn't work." Which is fair! But as I wrote at the time, it wasn't so much the premise that failed the Twins as the pieces they used to put it into practice. The team's Opening Day rotation in 2022 included Chris Archer and Dylan Bundy. The bullpen included Tyler Duffey, Emilio Pagán (bad version), Joe Smith, Jharel Cotton and Jhon Romero -- players who are all gone and mostly out of the league two years later. Perhaps the strategy wasn't bad; it's just that the players were. The Twins are much stronger in both departments from the jump this season.

In dissecting the 2022 pitching experiment, I concluded that it suffered from four fatal flaws:

• The starters weren't good enough, or healthy enough, even in shortened starts.
• You've got to have at least one starter who can be the workhorse.
• Their bullpen wasn't built adequately to handle the burden.
• Losing your pitching coach mid-season doesn't help.

As I look back at that list now, I find myself mentally checking those boxes for this year's team, with Pete Maki at the helm. It's a roster that is far more equipped to execute on the bullpen-forward strategy that helped the Rays thrive last year. 

Of course, this all depends on the relief corps actually coming together and performing like the Twins hope they will. That's a volatile proposition. I also believe they are leaving themselves too little margin for error in the rotation if they don't add another starter. But in general, as the vision for pitching success in 2024 comes into focus, I find it's one I can get behind, now that they actually have the personnel to see it through.