One Last Shot for Lewis Thorpe

I just don't feel he is going to have enough time to establish himself as a reliable bullpen arm coming out of spring training.  I would imagine he will get released after his second poor outing........

I hope he does well.  But I just don't see it.  The fact that they are already giving him a spot in the bullpen is troubling.  Surely they must have some better candidates.  The pitching staff is still a mess and keeping Thorpe doesn't make the staff any better, just desperate.

I hope he responds, but I fear I am skeptical.  If Wes Johnson hasn't been able to crank up his velocity, I am not sure moving to the bullpen will help.  But, that is the beauty of the sport--you never know what's going to happen and players can rebound.

The Twins hang on to under-performers way too long. Thorpe is one of them. Instead of giving the next player on the depth chart a chance they'll go with Thorpe, He'll perform average at best and the guy who should have gotten a chance to pitch in his spot will spend the year in AAA ball racking up good numbers. At some point all AAA players who don't get the call have to wonder why they aren't considered good enough to get the call, especially when the player they could replace isn't performing well.

Are they hoping for another Liam Hendriks?  Maybe Aussies develop late and bloom into great RP.  Since we have not exactly filled the pen with new and exciting arms it is worth a try.  But I prefer using Duran there for this year. 

The weird thing not mentioned is when the season started in 2020 Thorpe was hitting 94, as in the above video clip, and it appeared we might have something. Then the velo dropped, he said he had a dead arm, then was shut down. Maybe Wes got him growing harder, but his body couldn't take it. The mystery of Lewis Thorpe may be solved this year.

Began following this kid during his 16/17 year old winter when he was one of the best pitchers in the Australian Winter League.  Kid was fantastic.

Since then he has missed so much time, including a couple years ago when everyone was thinking he was part of the team's solution and ended up taking time away during spring training.  The result, as you said, is that he is on his last chance with the Twins.

If this is to be a Cinderella year for the Twins, they need a couple pitchers to step up and be wonderful surprises.  No one could end up being that more so than Thorpe.  I don't know if anyone is expecting it to happen, but it would be wonderful if it did.  And yes, it will begin with his fastball getting up to 92 or better.

That you Cody for bringing up this subject. In the past pitchers pools were much smaller and simpler. A lot of stress was put on arm strength, if a pither couldn't give you 8 good innings, you were gone and velo wasn't as important.

Now we have a lot more teams and it's hard to find those strong arms. Pitching has become much more technical and velo is everything. It's very hard to find a pitcher that can pitch 8 good innings and have high velo and even those will have arm problems.

In near past when the Twins gave importance to long relief the Twins and those pitchers did very well. Recently we've put a lot of stress on short relief, pitchers that come in to pitch 1 inning and completely ignore long relief. For this you need a lot pitchers available and on their game. Unfortunately this is impossible to maintain throughout the season. Therefore you over-use those that are on their game and they get burned out. Combined with the fact that nobody in your rotation can give you 5 quality innings on a regular basis, except Berrios. Then you over extend the rotation and they burn out. As you can see this is a recipe for disaster. There is no wonder that when we do get to post season games we lose because all our arms are dead, not able to give their premium effort.

Solution that I've long advocated is focus on a large strong rotating long relief corp. Especially now that we don't have Berrios and have young unseasoned arms and Bundy that can't be expected to pitch very many innings. That'll help take the burden off the short relief and rotation and can give much needed experience to young pitching prospects, where we can do better job develping and evaluating. Then if we can even get to the the post season, our arms should be fresh not dead. Then maybe we can win a post season game.

I think Thorp and many more can flurish under this concept.

I was for Thorpe staying a SP last year but then he just never got his velocity back. He couldn’t get above 90 for one inning as a starter so I basically have no faith that he’s a major league pitcher anymore. This isn’t the usual case of a slow pitcher moving to the bullpen and ramping up to faster. This is a case of a guy who used to have the stuff to pitch and has lost it all completely. Hope I’m wrong  

I don't have much confidence in him panning out. The loss of velocity is definately a huge concern. But lefties seem to get longer leashes when it comes to development.