The Twins’ injury-riddled bullpen has lost another pitcher, as right-hander Justin Topa will start the season on the 15-day injured list due to left knee tendinitis.
President of baseball operations Derek Falvey told reporters (including Betsy Helfand of the St. Paul Pioneer Press) that Topa suffered the injury by jamming his foot while backing up home plate in a spring training game over a week ago.
Topa has already started a shutdown period of seven to 10 days, and the Twins will evaluate the situation and start to get Topa ramped back up to game readiness if he emerges from that shutdown feeling better. Falvey didn’t estimate any timeline on when Topa might be back in action, though since Topa wanted to pitch through the discomfort, it might hint that the issue isn’t overly serious.
“We don’t want tendinitis to track through the year if we can knock it out ahead of time, so we’re going to knock it out now, give him some time down and ultimately build back up. Hopefully he’s not tracking foo far behind,” Falvey said.
Topa will therefore have to wait a bit longer before making his official debut in a Minnesota uniform, though the 33-year-old has unfortunately gotten used to being patient with injuries. A pair of Tommy John surgeries sidelined Topa for big chunks of his minor league career and delayed his MLB debut until 2020 when he was already 29 years old.
He was limited to only 18 1/3 innings in the bigs from 2020-22 due to first a flexor tendon strain, and then surgery to address that same issue.
The Brewers dealt Topa to the Mariners last offseason, but the righty finally broke out as a big contributor to Seattle’s bullpen. Topa posted a 2.61 ERA over 69 innings, powered by an outstanding 57.4% grounder rate and a strong 6.5% walk rate, even if he didn’t miss many bats.
Minnesota was intrigued enough to want Topa included in the four-player package the Twins received from the Mariners in the Jorge Polanco trade.
Between Topa and Anthony DeSclafani’s more serious matter of a forearm strain, the two non-prospect components of the Polanco trade are now headed for Minnesota’s injured list. Beyond Topa, the Twins’ bullpen is also missing closer Jhoan Duran to an oblique strain and Caleb Thielbar to a hamstring strain.
While none of the relievers seem like they’ll miss too much time, naturally losing multiple members of the relief corps is a problem for the Twins.
Falvey and manager Rocco Baldelli said the team is weighing its internal options and also considering bringing a new arm or two into the organization as a matter of due diligence.
“We are monitoring the opt-outs and guys who are around and available and having conversations with different people,” Falvey said. “More just as we continue to build up depth, we have guys in camp who we think can do some of this, certainly fill some of these roles. It never hurts when you’re down a few to keep an eye on how to add to that depth. We’d be doing that even if we weren’t dealing with some injuries.”
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