Matt Canterino hadn't thrown live in months, and he could hardly contain his excitement when he turned up at the Twins' facility in Fort Myers, Fla., for a mini-camp in January.
"I had butterflies in my stomach," Canterino said Friday in a video call. "… It was super fun to be out there again, even if it just means throwing 16 simulated pitches to guys. It was a lot of fun. I definitely had to settle myself down after a little bit."
The 24-year-old pitching prospect has been getting as much out of this offseason as possible, with training camp set to officially start Monday, albeit without the 40-man roster because of the ongoing lockout. The Texas native missed out on most of last season, appearing in just six games while a lingering right elbow injury — his pitching arm — hampered him.
He initially hurt his arm in May and made a brief return in August before re-injuring it and sitting out the rest of the year. He took some time off to rest, had another MRI to confirm he didn't need surgery and then started the slow buildup for this year, having a fairly normal offseason.
"It was super relieving," Canterino said of finding out his injury wasn't serious. "My injury was just kind of nagging this entire time, and I never really had a feeling that anything was wrong, just in general."
Through his 23 innings pitched last season for High-A Cedar Rapids, Canterino managed a 0.78 ERA in his six starts, and he felt good about improvements made to his changeup. Now that he feels totally healed, he's hoping to reproduce those results throughout an entire season.
Since the Twins' took Canterino in the second round of the 2019 draft, he's had a stop-and-go start to his professional career. The pandemic canceled all minor-league ball in 2020, and his injuries sidelined him for much of last year. That has Twins player development director Alex Hassan and others thinking about the best way to manage their developing starters' workloads, as seen last season with Bailey Ober, who averaged around 70 pitches per outing.
"We've tried to move their report date up … to have a longer buildup," Hassan said. "… We're trying to take as responsible an approach as we can to those guys, but ultimately, we want to get them healthy and on the mound and recoup some of that work that they missed. It is a balance there, listening to the player and trying to monitor them in every way you can, from an assessment standpoint, from a strength standpoint, from a mobility standpoint, where they're at."
