Recent acquisitions could fill in starting pitching roles vs. White Sox

Zebby Matthews will open this weekend’s three-game series with the White Sox on Friday night, but the Twins have yet to announce their starting pitchers for Saturday and Sunday.

It’s possible they could fill those spots with bullpen games, as they have done seven times already this month. Thomas Hatch, who gave up one run in five innings on Sunday, is a possibility.

But it’s also worth noting that Taj Bradley and Mick Abel, the two starting pitchers they acquired in trade-deadline deals, are rested and could make their Twins debuts this weekend.

Abel, whom the Twins received from Philadelphia in the deal for Jhoan Duran, has pitched three times for Class AAA St. Paul, and has allowed only three runs in 15⅓ total innings, a 1.76 ERA. He last pitched on Saturday.

Bradley, who has spent most of the last three seasons with Tampa Bay and came to Minnesota in a one-for-one swap for Griffin Jax, has also made three starts for the Saints, though not as effectively. He owns a 7.53 ERA with St. Paul, having allowed 12 runs in 14⅓ innings, including four home runs.

Speaking of the Saints and starting pitching, Pablo López and Simeon Woods Richardson both pitched on rehab assignments in St. Paul on Thursday. López, averaging his usual 94 mph on his fastball, allowed four hits, one walk and one run in 1⅔ innings. He added two strikeouts before reaching his pitch count (45). Woods Richardson yielded five hits and four runs (three earned) across 3⅓ innings while striking out four.

Ryan Fitzgerald took ground balls as usual before Thursday’s game. It’s where he was standing that was unusual.

“If you can play short, you can pretty much play anywhere,” Fitzgerald said.

Still, the sudden assignment, after playing the first six innings at third base, took him by surprise. “A little bit, yeah, just because I had no heads-up beforehand,” the rookie said. “About a week ago, they said, ‘Get some reps there.’ Then it just happened in the middle of a game.”

The journey wasn’t over, either. When Brooks Lee was removed for a pinch runner in the eighth inning, Fitzgerald moved to shortstop for the ninth and tenth.

By doing so, he became the tenth Twins player ever to play three infield positions in a single game — Cèsar Tovar, who played all nine positions during the Twins’ final home game in 1968, is the only one to play every infield position in a game — and the third ever to play first, third and shortstop, joining Tovar and Terry Jorgensen (1993).

Fitzgerald said the Red Sox played him at first base 10 times at Class AAA in 2022 when Triston Casas was injured, “so it wasn’t completely foreign to me.”

“There are some players that you’re just not going to hesitate to move around the field, even if they haven’t played there in a lot of games,” Baldelli said. “I would put Fitzy almost anywhere in the field and feel fine about it. He prepares in a lot of different spots in the field. He’s a very good, instinctive baseball player.”

Michael Tonkin entered his first Twins game last month in the fourth inning, then got a couple of ninth-inning assignments. He was used in the seventh and eighth innings three times earlier this month, and Thursday’s game was the second time in a row that he has been summoned in the sixth.

Get used to it, Baldelli said.

“[Justin] Topa and [Cole] Sands were told, right after the deadline, that they’re going to be pitching in the late innings [of close games] and be prepared to come into those types of ballgames. So they have an idea of when they’re pitching,” Baldelli said. “The rest of the group will have to step into different roles and be versatile. That’s the way it’s broken up.”

The exceptions to that any-time-any-inning existence are the left-handers, Kody Funderburk and Génesis Cabrera.