Here's how Falvey can rebuild 'pen from within

This story was excerpted from Matthew Leach's Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

So … how do you rebuild a bullpen from scratch?

That’s one of the biggest questions facing the Twins’ brain trust as the offseason gets rolling. After trading away five arms from one of the game’s better relief corps in July, Minnesota watched the remaining pitchers struggle mightily down the stretch. It’s obvious to anyone who watched the Twins in the final two months of the season that reinforcements are badly needed.

Some of the fix will need to come from outside the organization. Whether that’s via trades or free agency, it’s clear that some influx of arms must occur. Now, as has been discussed in this space and elsewhere for a while now, we don’t know exactly how much the front office will have to spend this winter, but history suggests the Twins are not likely to be swimming in the Edwin Díaz/Robert Suarez end of the free-agent pool.

But some of it is also going to come from in-house. That’s a long-standing pattern with the Twins, and it’s often been an effective one. Club officials will note that the bulk of that excellent ’pen from the first part of 2025 was not acquired via free agency.

Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, Louis Varland and Cole Sands all came up as starters. Now they’re all quality relievers, although three of the four pitch elsewhere these days. So, you can be sure that’s on the minds in the front office.

And when you look at what the Twins have for starting options, it becomes obvious quickly that they can’t all pitch in the rotation. Trade speculation will continue to surround Pablo López and Joe Ryan for the foreseeable future, but as of now, they’re both on the roster. Bailey Ober, Simeon Woods Richardson, Zebby Matthews and Taj Bradley have all been effective Major League starters at some point or multiple points, and all pitched in the rotation down the stretch.

That’s six already. That’s before you get to Mick Abel and David Festa, both of whom will come to camp expecting to compete for the rotation. Then there’s Kendry Rojas, who struggled at Triple-A after being acquired from the Blue Jays but whom the organization absolutely loves and was rated as the Twins' No. 5 prospect per MLB Pipeline. That’s nine. Then you’ve got prospects like Marco Raya (No. 18) and Connor Prielipp (No. 9), both of whom pitched at Triple-A St. Paul last season and have huge arms.

If all of those guys are healthy and available, that’s 11 pitchers -- too many even to fill out the rotations at both Target Field and in St. Paul. Some of those guys are going to pitch in relief.

The challenge is, how do you know which guys to transition, and how do you know when to do it? Derek Falvey was asked about that very topic at the General Managers Meetings last week.

“It's really hard,” Falvey said. “And that's why I would say we exhaust the runway [for pitchers to succeed as starters], and sometimes maybe longer than maybe some fans and folks outside think we should -- that we should have them in the bullpen earlier. We've had versions of that, but I've just seen too many times where you think you're right on the edge of, ‘OK, we're just going to have this guy in the bullpen.’ And five starts later, all of a sudden, it's, ‘Wow, this is now interesting again as a starter.’”

Beyond the 11 potential starting candidates, the Twins have another group of pitchers who could make an impact as well. Travis Adams and Pierson Ohl both pitched on a hybrid plan where they went roughly four innings, roughly every fourth day. There’s intrigue as to how that could translate to them pitching one inning at a time.

“My expectation is there's going to be a couple guys in our system right now that might be swingmen, that might be starters, that may fit better in a one-inning role or one- to two-inning role,” Falvey said. “And we've even seen some of that already transition. We don't want to rule out their starting abilities. But, ultimately, there's already guys we’ve used. I use an example, Travis Adams, he's been a starter, been a kind of middle-inning guy that can go three, four. Could he also be a really good one-inning guy where his kind of stuff ticks up a little bit? All those things are possible. So we have to put all of that on the table.”