Pitching priority for Twins as Deadline nears

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Twins’ pitching staff is limping across the finish line of the first half. And as the baseball calendar inches closer to the Aug. 2 Trade Deadline, the club’s need for reinforcements on the mound continues to flare up against its most significant opponents.

Staff ace Sonny Gray allowed the White Sox to bust the game open in Thursday’s blowout loss to open this four-game series, and the Twins followed that on Friday night with struggles from two of their more meaningful first-half contributors -- Devin Smeltzer and Griffin Jax -- in a 6-2 loss to their American League Central rivals at Target Field.

Minnesota’s clearest need at the Deadline has long been relief help, as evidenced by the club losing five leads in the eighth inning or later in the span of eight games against the Guardians in June, and by the Twins’ most recent game against the White Sox entering this series, in which the pitching staff coughed up five separate leads in one contest.

That wasn’t as clearly the issue on Friday, when Smeltzer was pulled after throwing 67 pitches in three innings, including a long first inning in which he faced seven batters, walked two and allowed a two-run single to Andrew Vaughn. But pushed into early action in the fourth inning, Emilio Pagán allowed a solo blast to Tim Anderson before Jax coughed up a three-run homer to Adam Engel in the seventh that opened up the final margin.

“Our [bullpen] guys were lined up to get outs today,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We had chances to get through these innings, too. The innings that we didn’t get through, a couple home runs, they don’t help.”

Joe Smith, Tyler Duffey, Pagán, Caleb Thielbar, Cody Stashak and Jorge Alcala were arms the Twins hoped to rely on in the middle and late innings, but the first three have gone through bouts of inconsistency. Alcala has been sidelined with elbow inflammation for the majority of the season and Stashak is done for the year after undergoing a tenodesis surgery.

It further doesn’t help when matchup considerations, short starts and workload management in the rotation have led to additional stress on that depleted bullpen, which has thrown the second-most innings in the AL.

All that casts additional pressure on the two most consistent relievers in the bullpen, Jax and Jhoan Duran, whose mistakes are then magnified. Engel’s shot off Jax on a fastball that caught too much of the plate was the first homer the second-year right-hander had yielded since June 19, while Duran has allowed runs in three of his past five appearances.

Also factoring in recent struggles from Gray and Joe Ryan, the club’s top two starters, the Twins’ pitching staff had posted a 4.63 ERA in July entering Friday, third-highest in the AL.

And while Baldelli said the Twins allow the performance of their relievers to factor into their usage decisions, they still will need to turn to those arms when the big picture and matchup considerations fall that way, as they did on Friday.

“That didn’t cause me to hesitate to do that today,” Baldelli said. “We have guys that can go maybe three games in a row right now if we needed them to do so, and we might. We’ll see what happens tomorrow, but we’ll have some guys back and we’ll have Duran ready to go for whatever we need, too. So we have the ability to use our bullpen right now and not have to worry about what’s coming next week.”

Finding middle and late-innings relief help to bolster the existing group would help take some of the pressure off Jax and Duran, who entered Friday having thrown the fourth-most and 13th-most innings, respectively, among AL relievers. That’s a particularly significant consideration when it comes to Duran, a converted starter who only threw 16 innings for Triple-A St. Paul last year due to an elbow strain.

And while the bidding will likely be fierce for top-line starters like Frankie Montas and Luis Castillo, another way to mitigate the pressure on the bullpen could be to find help to slide in alongside Gray and Ryan at the top of the rotation, which ranked second-to-last in the AL in innings per start.

The trade market for arms has yet to pick up, especially with the expanded playoff field in 2022 possibly leading to later decision points and a smaller group of sellers. But it should pick up following the All-Star break -- and there could be help there for the Twins.