Sunday Will Be Biggest Game of Twins' Season and David Festa's Life—So Far

Baseball's many layers sometimes swirl and stack in their chaotic drifts until they look like a thoughtfully constructed painting. Even if the Twins and Guardians wanted to do so, they couldn't have consciously set a finer or more dramatic stage for the final game of this four-game weekender. Everything that has happened over the last week has set this game up to be one of the most important and hard-fought of the season to date, anywhere in MLB.

Monday night in Chicago, David Festa mowed down the Cubs, striking out nine in five scoreless innings. He allowed just two hits and two walks in that outing, setting up what became a 3-0 win. Two days later, though, the Twins were in a rubber match against the sub-.500 Cubs, and Joe Ryan snapped under the tension. A strained teres major muscle will almost surely end his season, though he and the team are holding out some measure of hope for now. Losing that game meant the Twins would come home having lost two of their last three series, but losing Ryan was much more ominous.

Meanwhile, though, the Guardians stumbled badly in their path to this series. They had a seven-game homestand against two very tough opponents, and after starting it with two wins over the Orioles, they lost the final two against them, then three straight against the Diamondbacks. Meanwhile, their ace, Tanner Bibee, missed a start due to shoulder soreness--almost as ominous as Ryan's departure from his start Wednesday.

Then, the teams perfectly divided these last three games to maximize the drama of Sunday's. The Twins swept Friday's doubleheader, and the crowd was loud and the mood was jubilant. Cleveland flexed its impressive run-prevention muscles and hit a couple of solo home runs Saturday, though, not only clawing back half the ground the Twins gained the previous day, but making Sunday feel like a crucial test of the legitimacy of the Twins' threat. Friday ensured that they wouldn't lose ground to the Guardians during the series, on the whole, but now, there's a risk that they'll have lost half of their remaining head-to-head games with the leaders and four precious games off the remaining schedule without gaining any ground.

To avoid that, poetically enough, the Twins turn to Festa, who became very much a vital cog in the rotation the moment Ryan went down. While Pablo López and Bailey Ober are a stout top two in a potential playoff starting hierarchy, Simeon Woods Richardson is the type of hurler you're only comfortable turning to in Game 4 of a series. It's Festa who can be more, and has shown that ability recently. Sunday is a chance for him to show just how high that ceiling is.

Don't underestimate Festa, merely because he's a rookie with modest but non-premium prospect pedigree. The data says he belongs in a class with two aces who were traded over the offseason and are leading their teams toward the playoffs while racking up punchouts: Tyler Glasnow and Dylan Cease.

Here's a scatter plot showing the horizontal and vertical movement of the four-seam fastballs of all 207 right-handed pitchers who have thrown at least 100 such pitches at 94 miles per hour or more. That might sound like an overwrought set of parameters, but it's important. When looking at movement, it's important to control for handedness and for velocity.

Among hard-throwing pitchers, the most comparable to Festa in terms of movement are Cease and Glasnow. All the other points adjacent to them (guys like Jeremiah Estrada, Nick Mears, Pete Fairbanks, Ryan Pressly, and José Léclerc) are relievers. Festa, Cease, and Glasnow have the best cocktail of speed, ride, and cut on their heaters among right-handed starters.

But wait, there's more! Here's a similar plot for all the right-handed pitchers who have thrown at least 100 sliders this season.

These three are even more tightly clustered in this regard. Glasnow and Festa are almost perfect matches to each other. All three have tight sliders, with roughly average vertical movement that plays way up because of their high-rise heaters and considerably less sweep than most righty sliders--only further increasing the difficulty for hitters, because their fastballs already work in the same horizontal lane as those sliders.

Now, each of the other two has something that separates them from Festa by a bit. Cease throws almost 2 miles per hour harder. Glasnow throws his slider at 90 miles per hour, which gives it some extra filth factor relative to Festa's, which hums in at 87. Glasnow also has a curveball and a sinker, and Cease has a curveball and a sweeper (plus show-me changeup and cutter offerings), so each is a four-pitch pitcher. Festa only has three.

On the other hand, though, Festa's third pitch is a weapon Cease and Glasnow really can't match. The Twins rookie has a changeup with only a modest amount of drop, but lots of run to the arm side--particularly relative to that cut-ride heater. Against lefties, he uses the high fastball heavily, and once they're looking up and in, he throws them the changeup fading off the outside corner. The pitch is inducing whiffs on over 38% of swings by lefties so far in MLB.

Even more impressively, the polished and intuitive Festa (along with his catchers and the Twins' pitching instruction team) has figured out how to effectively deploy the changeup against same-handed batters, too. With the slider featuring more heavily in those matchups, Festa really gets righty hitters looking away, away, away. That's the direction they perceive his fastball and slider to move, and where he locates them best. Then, when he throws the changeup and it skids in under their hands and under their bat speed, they're befuddled. Righties are actually whiffing even more than lefties do, in the small sample so far, when Festa uses his changeup on them.

On Sunday, he'll take all this talent to the mound, in a showdown with Bibee. After a bullpen session Thursday, Cleveland cleared him to retake the bump, so presumably, his shoulder is ok. That will make Sunday something really special: one team trying to get out of town with the split they needed, turning to their ace in a triumphant return, against a pursuer needing to finish a series win and turning to a dynamo of a rookie whose upside might be very high and not far away from being realized.

Festa's readiness for this role and this moment just gained a whole lot of import. It's only mid-August, but this game will inform everything that happens between now and these two teams' matchup in Cleveland in mid-September. It should also be a joy to watch, for fans of good pitching and urgent baseball.