The Twins wish they had a bullpen problem

I've been putting my sports opinions online since I had a Geocities site with my friend Steve. That means over 20 years of this. Suffice to say, some things have changed. Opinionated young writers were early adopters to advanced statistics, which made us feel smart, certainly smarter than old fashioned writers, and often smarter than the teams we loved/derided.

Baseball is a numbers driven sports, and eventually, those advanced stats made their way into front offices, along with some of those same writers that proved they actually WERE as smart as they insisted. Now with everyone mostly on the same page statistically, teams have started ingesting more data and putting it to good analytical use. Maybe it is the loss of my youthful hubris, or if it is the teams stepping thing up in brainpower, but I am happy to admit that teams are generally smarter than I am.

But one thing hasn't changed, and I am equally happy to note that the Twins seem to ascribe to my philosophy on this: bullpens aren't particularly important. 

Good bullpens are made great by pitching staffs that go deep into games, and the Twins bad bullpen is mediocre - literally middle of the pack so far - thanks to a rotation that has given innings. Simeon Woods-Richardson and Taj Bradley, in particular, have stepped up to give that length. 

But the bullpen wasn't what did the team in last year, and it hasn't been the problem in 2026. The Twins failed to score enough runs. They never seemed to come through when runners were in scoring position. I've commented on this before, that the Twins just have a historical trend of being much worse in leverage situations. Towards the end of the year, they just stopped hitting in any situation.

The Twins had a tortured offseason, thanks to ownership intrigue and front office turnover, but they did have a throughline. Before Derek Falvey left, Minnesota added Josh Bell and Alex Jackson. Immediately after he left, the first move was for Victor Caratini. When the team broke camp, of all the utility infielder options, they opted for Tristan Gray, the bat first option. They kept Trevor Larnach. They did almost nothing until the very end to address the bullpen.

The Twins knew that the one thing that would hold them back was an inability to score runs. Their starting pitching would cover for their bullpen. Even if it didn't, the ability of the bullpen won't matter if they don't score runs. So far, the Twins aren't scoring. Take the Easter game against Tampa. Minnesota got 9 solid innings from Woods-Richardson, Kody Funderburk and Cole Sands. By all accounts, that should have been enough. In the 10th, things went sideways, but it was a problem because the Twins couldn't score more than one run.

Byron Buxton and Luke Keaschall are the carry over engine of the team, and they need to get going, certainly. They should expect more from Royce Lewis and Brooks Lee. Larnach, Bell and Gray have been effective. But they haven't hit much at all yet, and the bullpen continues to be a non-issue.