Could Griffin Jax be in the Twins starting rotation?

By just about any measure, Griffin Jax’s 2024 season was one of the best ever turned in by a Twins reliever.

Yep, Jax has probably blown his chance now.

“Are you asking if I pitched too well?” Jax said with a bemused smile. “I might have pitched myself out of the conversation, yeah. But you know, that’s not a bad thing.”

See, the righthander was drafted out of the Air Force Academy as a starting pitcher and reached the majors as a starter. But when it didn’t go well — he made 14 starts in the final three months of the 2021 season and posted a 6.10 ERA in them — the Twins moved him to the bullpen. He has improved in each of the past three seasons, by adding muscle, adding nearly 5 mph of fastball velocity and adding a curveball.

The 2024 season was no fluke, in other words.

“It’s definitely something I’ve worked my entire life for, and now that I’m here, I’m incredibly proud of it,” Jax said. “It’s not something I take lightly, this role. I’m serious about it.”

Yet he admits he would like another shot at starting games, at pitching 171 innings instead of 71.

“I’m starter-curious, that’s a good way to put it,” the 29-year-old Jax said. “I’m still looking at it as maybe an option down the road. It’s a conversation we’re going to have to have at some point. I have no idea where the team’s head is at. I know in their minds, it probably would be kind of hard to replace what I’m doing. I understand that.”

He’ll get the conversation, said Derek Falvey, the Twins president of baseball operations. But he can’t guarantee he’ll get the conversion.

“We’re not ruling it out this offseason, and we shouldn’t. We want to have that conversation with him, to talk about what the upsides and downsides are, what the risks and benefits to it are for him and the team,” Falvey said Sunday. “We’ve got to be open-minded. We can’t rule out any potential path.”

Jax’s case for starting, he said, is that he’s not close to the same pitcher he was in 2021. Because his minor league experience was limited by his commitment to the Air Force, he was still learning when he reached the majors. And he hadn’t yet devoted himself to the year-round training regimen he has now.

“I reintroduced the curveball, and I saw how effective it was,” Jax said of a pitch that opponents turned into hits only twice all season. The fact that he had very little platoon split, holding righthanders to a .169 average and lefties to .200, encourages him, too.

“My stuff played to both, so I wasn’t a one-side-of-the-plate guy. I got both out at a really good clip,” Jax said. They were also mostly the opponents’ best hitters; 63% of the hitters he faced were Nos. 2-5 in the lineup, “and I was getting the heart of the order out the majority of the year, which reinforces to me maybe I could do that two or three times through the order.”

Either way, Jax said he’s happy in Minnesota and wants to stay. He and his wife, Savannah, who have an 18-month-old daughter, Avery, are expecting their second child in February, “so my family has grown up in Minnesota. I would love to be here for the rest of my career,” said Jax, who is eligible for arbitration this winter for the first time.

“This is the team that drafted me, that gave me my first shot and then gave me a second shot when I thought they might let me go. I owe almost everything I have to the Minnesota Twins.”