Losses aside, Twins rookie reliever Jhoan Duran finding his way with the fastballs

ARLINGTON, TEXAS – The first time Jhoan Duran stepped onto a baseball field in his native Dominican Republic, he was 9 years old.

And he almost never went back to it.

"To be honest, I didn't like baseball back then," Duran said in Spanish through an interpreter. "All I did was ride bikes and play with mechanics."

It was always Duran's older brother who loved the sport. Duran would rather take apart all his toys and piece them back together again than play catch. So much so that Duran said he could see himself as an engineer if he hadn't taken up pitching.

That's hard to believe just looking at Duran on the mound. The 24-year-old is an imposing 6-4, 230-pound reliever who can throw fastballs at 103 mph. Through 38 innings in 30 games this season, he has a 2.37 ERA with 48 strikeouts and has worked his way into late-game, high leverage situations. He is even in the conversation for making this year's All-Star Game, with the roster announcement coming Sunday.

But he is also still a rookie who transitioned from starter to bullpen arm just this past spring, and his outings haven't always been perfect. He has an 0-3 record, including Saturday's 9-7 loss in which he allowed the winning run and one other in the bottom of the eighth.

Even with that, though, his talent is clear.

"It's hard to be more effective than he's been," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "… You can't pitch much better than what he's doing out there."

Duran comes off as stoic, serious and quiet. Assistant pitching coach Luis Ramirez has been working with him ever since he came to the Twins from the Diamondbacks in a July 2018 trade for Eduardo Escobar and said Duran is perfectly happy off on his own, watching Netflix on his phone. But ask the right questions, and Duran lights up and displays a sense of humor.

Ramirez said what makes Duran so capable at such a young age is his knack for not being intimidated. Whether he's facing a 15-year major league veteran or a fellow rookie, he approaches every hitter the same. He takes away the name on the back of the jersey, the season's statistics, the winning history and distills the moment down to its simplest form: Find a way to get the batter out.

Duran said he first broke 100 mph with a pitch when he was 19 and surprised himself when he kept reaching even higher velocities. But he isn't looking to just throw as fast as humanly possible. He wants to do that while being pristinely accurate.

"It's just like, if I'm going to play in some shoes, I'm going to make sure that the shoes are clean at the end. I'm not going to leave it halfway. So my work ethic is the same," Duran said. "If I want to throw 103, I know I can throw 103. But I need to control that pitch, throw strikes. Not just throw hard."

Duran added that the speed is in some ways innate, a natural ability. So he instead focuses on always hitting the target, and the radar gun readings are just a very impressive byproduct.

That is symbolic of Duran's career so far. He said when he was growing up in the Dominican Republic, there were basically two paths to follow for those hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families: go to school or play baseball. He eventually picked baseball because he figured he might be OK at it.

He didn't start practicing in earnest until he was 13, and he was briefly an outfielder because he could field and throw. But he couldn't hit, so pitching it was. He realized how far the sport could take him only once he signed a professional contract with Arizona in 2014. Though that, too, sort of happened by chance.

Duran recalled how just before he signed, he was injured with elbow inflammation. He had plans with a Twins scout to pick him up and take him for a tryout, but the scout never showed. So his manager at the time made a call to a Diamondbacks scout he knew who then brought Duran for a tryout with Arizona. He signed with the Diamondbacks that day. If the Twins scout hadn't bailed, Duran said he would have signed with the Twins.

When fate brought him into the Twins system years later, he ended up meeting his future wife in 2019 while playing with the Class A Fort Myers Mighty Mussels. Both had one child from a previous relationship, and they have since added a 10-month-old son together.

"That's why I'm always grateful and thankful," Duran said. "… I ended up where I wanted, where I was supposed to be from the beginning. But I never thought I was going to get to this level where I am.

"I didn't even like baseball when I was little. And now I'm here. And I'm making the best out of it."