Starter or reliever? What Twins pitchers want usually doesn’t matter.

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Jhoan Duran finished the 2023 season as one of the most feared closers in baseball, his 101.8-mph average fastball velocity the fastest ever recorded in Statcast’s nine years of data, his curveball producing swings and misses nearly half the time he threw it.

But what’s almost as intriguing is how the righthander’s season began.

“When I came to camp, I asked the Twins if I could go back to starting,” Duran said. “They said no.”

After a 27-save season in which he became one of the most popular players among the team’s fans, and the object of a dramatic lights-out, flames-up, cameras-on entrance spectacle, Duran said he has embraced his ninth-inning role and intends to flourish in it. But “it was hard to give up starting. I always planned to be a starter. If I throw good, I can play seven innings,” the 26-year-old Duran said. “Now I only play one inning and get out. I like being more in the game. But that’s OK.”

It’s a crossroads that the vast majority of major league relievers have had to face at some point, the realization that their role model needs to be Mariano Rivera, not Greg Maddux. Most pitchers good enough to be drafted have been highly successful multi-inning starting pitchers throughout their amateur career, and that’s how they picture their professional careers playing out, too.

That is, until they walk into the manager’s office one day and learn the team has other plans.

“Most guys don’t have a choice. ‘If you want to be on the team, here’s your role’ — it’s not like they’re asking,” said Griffin Jax, who attended one of those meetings a couple of weeks before Duran in early 2022. “I thought, well, I can either wallow in feeling sorry for myself or being [angry] at them, or I can work hard to make the team this way. When Rocco [Twins manager Rocco Baldelli] is looking at me saying ‘I need you to be in my bullpen,’ I’m not going to fight it.”

The decisionmakers who deliver that news are conscious and respectful of the difficulty that some players may have in accepting that sudden change in career path, said Derek Falvey, who has taken part in dozens of similar meetings in his years in Cleveland and Minnesota. So the team tries to emphasize how positive the shift could be.

“You never start with ‘It’s not working out.’ You never frame someone as a ‘failed starter,’ especially since in a lot of cases, it’s not true,” said Falvey, the Twins’ president of baseball operations. “Take Duran — when he came up, he was dealing with some [elbow] injuries, and the conversation was about how we believed he could be a dominant back-end guy and keep him healthy. It’s exciting, it’s an important role, and we explained why it was a good fit.”

(Whether it’s due to his new role or not, Duran’s arm has indeed remained healthy, though a strained quadriceps will keep him out for the first month or so of the 2024 season.)

Still, Falvey acknowledged, “if a pitcher has a 2.20 ERA and has been dominant, we’re not having the conversation, and he knows that. More likely, he’s coming off a series of rough starts.”

That condition isn’t permanent, though, which is why the Twins generally don’t label the move permanent, either. Duran was urged to try the bullpen for a year, and then they’d reassess. Same for Jax, after a rough finish to his rookie 2021 season, in which he allowed three runs or more in nine of his last 10 starts.

“Honestly, when I got to camp in ‘22, I was a little surprised I was still on the roster, based on my performance in ‘21. There were a couple of good moments, but the majority of them were not what I expected of myself, and probably not what the team expected,” Jax said. “So when Roc called me in, he told me they thought this would help me, but if it doesn’t work, we could reconsider. I didn’t care — I was like, OK, I’m getting a second chance, and I’m not going to waste it.”

Not everyone hears the news so eagerly, understandably so. When Louie Varland was called up from St. Paul last September but told that he would be pitching out of the bullpen for the rest of the season, the rookie righthander feared that the move wasn’t temporary.

“He just didn’t process it right away. We didn’t shut that door, we were just trying to put together the best possible staff for the playoffs,” Falvey said. “And then he reflected on it, and a period of time later he came back sort of apologetically and said, ‘OK, now I understand.’ "

Varland was sensational in the role, allowing only two runs in 12⅔ innings, holding batters to a .150 average and posting an incredible 18-to-1 strikeout/walk ratio. But despite his success there, he’ll open the 2024 season in the Twins’ starting rotation.

Several of his teammates, however, have made the more traditional move. Kody Funderburk, for instance, has started 48 minor league games, and Brent Headrick 52. Cole Sands had pitched in relief only once before he joined the Twins’ pen in 2022, and the same is true of Josh Winder.

“Starting pitching is the rarest commodity in the game, consistently effective starting,” Baldelli said. “It’s rare that we give up on the path to starting if a guy has shown enough of the attributes that we’re looking for. We exhaust that opportunity if we think there’s really a path there.”

Varland’s were unusual circumstances, because while teams say they are willing to consider reversing course, it’s rare for it to actually happen. If a pitcher becomes a weapon in the pen, why move him? (Duran can attest to that reality.) And if he doesn’t, usually teams are ready to move on.

Falvey said he can recall a few exceptions. When he was in Cleveland, for instance, Carlos Carrasco moved to a relief role, but eventually convinced manager Terry Francona to restore him to the rotation.

That gives Jax hope, too. Just as the Twins predicted when he transitioned to a setup role, his fastball gained significant velocity, four additional mph in the last two years. His home run rate has plummeted, his strikeout rate risen to better than one per inning.

But it’s not all due to pitching an inning at a time, Jax believes.

“The biggest reason, I believe, is that I missed so much time to military service [while] in the minors, I was behind, and my body had to catch up. I added some weight and some strength, that definitely has a part in it,” the 29-year-old Air Force captain said. “Plus, my wife and I moved to Phoenix, so I was able finally to train full-time year-round for baseball, to work on my spin rate and breaking pitches. It’s multi-factorial.”

So would Jax like to return to the rotation?

“I would like the opportunity to, especially considering where I am now as a pitcher. I would like to know how well the stuff I have now would play as a starter,” he said. “I would love the chance, but at the same time, I feel very comfortable and happy in the bullpen. If they ever expressed interest in exploring the opportunity one offseason, though, I would give it everything I’ve got.”