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In an alternate universe, the Twins could have emerged from their five-game series against the Guardians with an 11-game lead over Cleveland in the American League Central. Instead, after blowing five leads over the Guardians in the eighth inning or later in the last week and a half, the Twins’ lead sat at only one game heading into Friday’s series opener against the Orioles.

What is there to be done about that? Let’s discuss:

How to fix a bullpen
First, let’s take the lay of the land. Entering Friday, Twins relievers ranked 29th out of 30 MLB teams with a collective 0.1 WAR, per FanGraphs, sandwiched between the bullpens of the D-backs and Reds -- not exactly ideal company. The 3.89 bullpen ERA ranked exactly in the middle of the pack, as did the 0.36 Win Probability Added -- a measure of how much they’ve affected the team’s likelihood of winning each game, taken in aggregate.

The essence of the issue is that the Twins currently have a severe dearth of reliable middle relief and back-end options, with Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax having been the club’s only consistently effective relievers throughout the campaign.

Tyler Duffey has alternated between seemingly finding new life and suffering through recurring dips in performance. Emilio Pagán was an important late-inning option, but he’s been in the middle of four of these five recent meltdowns. Caleb Thielbar had a tough start to the season, and Joe Smith was struggling before hitting the IL with trap tightness.

So, where do they go from here? There’s no magical solution.

1) Trade ... when the time is right
With the Trade Deadline now exactly a month away on Aug. 2, it’s natural to think of that as an easy solution -- but the problem is that it takes two sides to get a deal done, and president of baseball operations Derek Falvey has noted that the sellers’ market has not yet established itself.

And even beyond that, the Twins aren’t going to let the emotions of a week and a half of bullpen struggles accelerate their process, with Falvey noting that their trade identification and evaluation process will largely remain the same as in any other year.

“You can’t really accelerate that part of the conversation,” Falvey said. “Sometimes it’s, ‘All right, we’ll wait and see, we’ll put you down as interested in Player X and we’ll circle back if we’re moving in that direction.’ So, despite maybe what some people think from the outside, that we just start throwing names at teams in order to acquire them, that’s typically not a way to accelerate those conversations.”

Relievers are inherently volatile, which is part of why the Twins haven’t traditionally been aggressive in addressing their bullpen during the offseasons under this regime. It’s extremely difficult to project bullpen performance given the small sample sizes involved, and even when the Twins did dive in for one of the most consistent relievers in recent history last season with the signing of Alex Colomé, it didn’t work out well, needless to say.

That also applies to midseason trades. Falvey noted that even after making reliever rankings at their deadline, they’ll often find someone lower down the list outperforming the arms who appeared to be head-and-shoulders above others. That’s part of why they won’t jump early -- and again, they’ll need the supply to become available, too.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of teams,” Falvey said. “I don’t anticipate anything that active here in the short term, and that’s just common. There are a lot of teams trying to flush out the market. There’s an extra wild card in both leagues now. Are teams in it, are teams not in it? Have they had the chance to really talk through that?

“When you’re on the buy side of that, sometimes you have to wait for the sellers to make their final determination about whether they’re ready to go. So, it’s picked up some, but I wouldn’t say significantly at this time.”

2) Get healthy
It should also be noted that the course of this season likely looks considerably different if a healthy Jorge Alcala could have been a factor in the late innings, especially after the hard-throwing young right-hander looked posed for a breakout year following a fantastic finish to the 2021 season. Instead, he’s been sidelined with arm issues since April and hasn’t yet resumed throwing after a setback in his recovery in June.

It also doesn’t help that Smith, Trevor Megill and Danny Coulombe all remain on the IL and could have been meaningful middle relief arms in this recent stretch. Once that depth starts filling back out as arms get healthy, it’ll help some -- but not in the needle-moving way that Alcala’s return could provide.

And here’s a dark-horse candidate in the health department: Kenta Maeda is working out with the team at Target Field as he enters the final months of his recovery from Tommy John surgery. He has been a successful reliever in the playoffs for the Dodgers in the past. If he recovers in time to pitch this season -- to which neither he nor the Twins have committed -- it could make sense for him to ease back into action and make a big difference as a high-leverage bullpen arm.

3) Help from within
On Sept. 1, 2019, the Twins called up then-top pitching prospect Brusdar Graterol after a midseason conversion from starting -- and they counted on his raw stuff as a meaningful bullpen arm in the playoffs. Could that sort of promotion happen again this time around?

Absolutely, Falvey says. There’s no shortage of quality raw stuff in the high Minors with this team, and he said they could identify within the next month or so if any of those pitchers could impact the big leagues. Prospects like Jordan Balazovic, Ronny Henriquez and Matt Canterino could play into that.

“We’re definitely not ruling that out,” Falvey said. “When you get to a position you’re in like this, and you’re in a competitive spot, and you look at young players who you think have a chance to impact your Major League team, well, sometimes they have to impact your Major League team in a role that’s different than what they’re in now.”