When Will the Twins First Need a Fifth Starter?

25 minutes ago, High heat said:

You still have a month before he is needed. I think they will be going with 4 in the rotation and a long man.  DeSclafani on IL to start the year getting 2 starts in St. Paul. 

It becomes a discussion if by next week he hasn’t taken the mound or has a set back.  Did we by damaged goods and we have to talk about Varland taking his spot out of the gate.

I would say the Twins bought damaged goods.  Varland goes north with the Twins not St Paul.

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors.  I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start.  This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins.  Don't rush the young guy.

Just the mention of the name Matt Canterino gives me goosebumps.. LOL, I'm ready!

I remember Mahle saying he was 100 percent...

First of all, this is all speculation. I guess it is a sign that not much else is happening. Secondly, if DeSclafani is just a bit behind, that isn't the same thing as preparing for TJ surgery. Finally, the carefully laid out schedule that Nick provided depends on good weather. We've had an historically warm low-precipitation winter, what are the odds things even up in the spring? 

DeSclafani's issue is health. The Twins gambled that he would be able to give them innings and IMHO he has the potential (if healthy) to be a lot better than an innings-eating fifth starter. I will make no predictions here. He may never throw a pitch for the Twins or he might be a valued member of the rotation for the entire year. His health history would lower the chances for a positive result. 

I do find the alternatives to be interesting. Rocco really seems to want multiple inning guys in his bullpen and there would be an opportunity for someone if Disco was temporarily on the shelf. Running Varland out there would indicate to me that the team has no faith that DeSclafani will ever make it back. 

1 minute ago, John Belinski said:

It doesn't appear the Twins need a starting pitcher to pitch 200+ inning since with Rocco as manager no pitcher will ever get that chance. The bullpen will decide if the Twins have a winning season or losing season since Rocco uses 3 or 4 RP every game.  Jack Morris would never have had a chance to win game 7 of World Series if Rocco was manager. Twins fans need to hope bullpen pitches well in 2024 since it appears Rocco will never change on how he manages starting pitchers. 

The tone here is that Baldelli is on an island with his usage of starting pitchers. That is not true. Twins' starters logged something like the second or third most innings in 2023. 90%+ of managers limit their starters and few get a chance to pitch 200 innings. 150 is the new 200. 

I think it's widely accepted the Twins took Desclafani in the Polanco trade because the Mariners didn't want him and didn't want to absorb Polanco's entire price, and it was known at that time that Desclafani may not be ready for the start of the season because of the flexor tendon strain, even if he was optimistic.

The Mariners acquired Desclafani as part of their trade with the Giants as San Francisco wanted to shed his contract, and the Mariners were not intending on adding the pitcher to the rotation, instead using him as a long reliever, but when the opportunity arose to shed a little of their cost for what would be a long reliever for them, they found a way to exchange some numbers with the Twins.

A lot of fans wanted Varland to get the job in the rotation from the get-go, and moving Desclafani to the 'pen like the Mariners were intending is probably not the end of the world.

2 hours ago, jorgenswest said:

I jump in to remind everyone of the run scoring context of the international league in 2023. This is a league where an average of 11 runs were scored per game. Varland had 15 starts and a 3.97 ERA. Only three other starters in the league with at least 15 starts had a better ERA. Of those 4 pitchers only Varland had an ERA, FIP and xFIP all below 4.00. He was arguably the best and most dominant pitcher in the IL last year. 

This is the kind of deeper dive I totally support, and I agree that just quoting an ERA without the context doesn't give the whole story.  I was offering shorthand but 2023 was an outlier.

I'll go a little deeper still and suggest that the OPS he put up in AAA of around .760 doesn't support the 3.98 ERA he accrued there. I feel that OPS-against is a more stable way to gauge a pitcher than his ERA, but ERA is the more familiar number so it's worth converting back and forth for best understanding.  Doing equivalencies is a bit of guesswork based on larger samples that may not hold up well for an individual season; a year or two ago I drew up a table of league OPS and league ERA, for a sampling of seasons over the decades, and I use that table when thinking about such stuff. 

So, in my experience, a .760 OPS could be expected to lead to an ERA around 4.40, not the 3.97 he wound up with.  ERA fluctuates more than the underlying factors that go into it.

As you point out, because of the context of AAA this past season, Varland's OPS-against might be a bit inflated.  Overall, the International League had an OPS of .794 in 2023.  In 2022 that figure had been .750.  Let's use round numbers and suppose everyone's OPS should have .050 deducted to be meaningful.  For Louie that's .710 at AAA, and that might correspond to a AAA ERA more like 3.90, coincidentally close to his actual ERA - luck giveth, luck taketh away. 

But the majors are harder than AAA.  My rule of thumb, again not something "official" but just what I use, is that you can expect a batter's OPS to go down .100 when moving up a level; a pitcher's goes up .100 likewise.  That's not supported by published research, I've just found it useful (it's helped me identify prospects like Polanco and Kepler in their first years in the minors as better than their numbers indicate, using age as a factor).  If Louie's "adjusted OPS-against" of .710 is bumped up to .810 for the majors, that's darn close to the actual .791 he put up while in the majors.  Greater precision isn't possible from rules of thumb, but for me, his 2023 stats in both the majors and minors hold together to paint a consistent picture.

Your comparative stats for other pitchers in the IL are well taken, but I want to point out that no one is sent to AAA to be dominant for a full season.  Without checking, I'm inclined to expect that many dominant performers came and went, either being promoted to AAA from AA because of good performance, or being promoted to the majors from AAA, who failed to reach the 15-start threshold precisely because they were performing well and didn't hang around.  That leaves us with a greater problem of "small sample size" than usual, and I don't have any solutions to offer except to advise caution.

Basically, no, I think saying Louie "dominated" at AAA is a mild stretch. Unadjusted, the league OPS was .794 and his was .760.  Pitchers who don't dominate at AAA may not be great candidates for the rigors of being a rotation mainstay in the majors.  That's not to say that Varland can't take that next step.  But I'd rather have him do that in a few starts, say 5, at AAA, and if he dominates, then he too can be one of the pitchers who fail to reach the 15-start threshold because he performed well and didn't hang around.

Meanwhile, others have pointed out that my preference to have Louie start at AAA would be more supportable if the FO had succeeded in landing a more solid "#2 type" starter instead of DeSclafani.  I don't disagree with that either.  I do believe that Desclafani is not a mediocrity, but a quality starter who's been beset by injury causing his numbers to suffer.  The gamble the FO is taking is 1) that he's over the injuries enough to be ready, and 2) the past injuries haven't robbed him of the abilities that make him a quality starter.  I don't especially like the FO's gamble.  But until Disco turns out to be a no-go, I really prefer to ride him and stash Varland at AAA for his final bit of development and seasoning.

Sorry for all the verbiage, but the short version apparently didn't suffice. 😀