The search for five

The number from Monday's Blue Jays-Twins tilt that matters was five, and not just because the Jays scored five runs to win it. It's because the game from the Twins viewpoint was about the No. 5 starter and a fifth bullpen arm.

The starter

Martin Perez's line in his first start of 2019 was good. One run in six innings? Yeah, we'll take that. Two walks and five strikeouts is certainly acceptable. The velocity was good, and he even hit 97 in his final innings. He threw 86 pitches, less than one might wish for from a starter, but he's been trapped by the sporadic schedule for the first three weeks of the season in the bullpen with limited pitches.

On the bad side, there were a lot of hard-hit balls, not only among the seven hits but several of the outs. And the Jays helped him with a pair of base-running gaffes.

The reliever

Left-hander Aldaberto Mejia was handed a genuine test: A 3-1 eighth-inning lead to protect against a lineup heavy with right-handed hitters. He failed.

The thing is, he was ahead of all the hitters leading up to the Teoscar Hernandez three-run homer that put Toronto up for good. He couldn't put any of them away.

Mejia's background is as a starter, and as such he should have weapons to use against right-handers. He didn't get them out on Monday, at least not before giving up the lead. It was not an outing that encourages manager Rocco Baldelli to increase his role.

The Twins bullpen has four guys Baldelli trusts (Trevor Hildenberger, Trevor May, Blake Parker, Taylor Rogers) and three he's tried to avoid using in winnable games (Ryne Harper, Andrew Vasquez and Mejia).

Four trustworthy relievers are not enough if the starters are going to go six innings max. And I've never believed that the Twins were going to avoid going to an eight-man bullpen for long.

Baldelli used his big four pretty heavily against the Tigers Saturday and Sunday. He was clearly trying Monday to stay away from them in the seventh and eighth innings. What he would have done with the ninth and a lead, I don't know.

Harper made his first appearance in almost a week Monday, and he sliced through the 8-9-1 hitters in the Toronto order with two strikeouts in the seventh. He certainly brings a different approach than the rest of the righties in the Minnesota bullpen, and he's easy to root for. But no manager is going to be eager to lean on a 30-year-old rookie without velocity. If Harper is going to get a role, he'll have to earn it with more outings like Monday's.

Of note: Gabriel Moya and Matt Magill, two mainstays of the 2018 bullpen, are starting rehab assignments. Moya's probably the crucial one, as the Twins could really use a second reliable lefty in relief and neither Mejia nor Vasquez have been that so far.

My guess is that Vasquez and a position player are gone when Moya and Magill are ready to be activated.

The road forward

Every other Thursday I do a half-hour segment on KMSU, a public radio station affiliated with Minnesota State University, Mankato, talking Twins with station director Jim Gullickson and, most weeks, Mark Halverson, a local attorney, KMSU host and Twins ticket holder.

I was, I fear, more incoherent than usual during Thursday's segment, and never more so than when Gully asked if we were going to see a bunch of "fresh faces" the rest of the season. So I'll try again, this time with the ability to rewrite a sentence before exposing it to the public.

It depends on what is a "fresh" face. The Twins -- and pretty much every other team -- have a lot of roster churn, particularly among the pitchers. Is Gabriel Moya -- who had two brief stints in the Twins bullpen earlier and was recalled to take Zach Duke's spot in the bullpen -- a fresh face? Is veteran infielder Logan Forsythe, who has as of this morning one at-bat in a Twins uniform, a fresh face?

In essense, the Twins have replaced:

• Eduardo Escobar at third base with Miguel Sano
• Brian Dozier at second base with Forsythe
• Lance Lynn in the starting rotation with Aldaberto Mejia
• Zach Duke as a lefty reliever with Moya
• Ryan Pressly as a righty reliever with Trevor May

Forsythe is merely a placeholder. I'll probably write something about the Twins' second base options soon -- it may even be the Monday print column next week -- but I'm not giving anything away here by dismissing Forsythe as a contender for the job in 2019.

May is rehabbing from Tommy John; these next two months give the Twins a chance to evaluate his future role if any. Mejia is out of options next season; he is auditioning for a role in the back of the 2019 rotation. Moya -- the hope is that he can be a younger version of Duke, a reliable LOOGY out of the bullpen.

And of course, Sano. He's supposed to be a franchise cornerstone. He has been anything but in 2018. The Twins desperately need to get him right. Sano is not a fresh face, but the Twins hope these final two months are a fresh start.

Notes from the Weekend

Well, that series in Kansas City should definitely put the Twins in seller mode. From Sunday morning's Twitter feed:

The Indians' chances to win the AL Central assessed at 99.6%: https://t.co/aW7oAjgFzc

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 22, 2018

All together now: So you're telling me there's a chance.

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Let us not dwell on a weekend in which the Twins received few breaks and deserved fewer. Let us move on to a process item rather than results. The Twins are beginning to experiment with Tampa Bay's "opener" tactic in the minor leagues. On Sunday, for example, Trevor May -- remember him? -- pitched the first inning for Rochester, and Zach Littell followed with 5.6 innings.

Thad Levine, the Twins' No. 2 in baseball ops, said on the radio pregame show that the front office has been following the Tampa Bay experiment and sees the advantage of having a "reliever" deal with the top of the opposing order in the first inning, allowing the pitcher who is expected to work the bulk of the game to get more outs before seeing the opposition's best bats a third time. (Levine also said Littell profiles as the type of pitcher the opener would probably benefit.)

I now take the risk of parsing Levine's comments too closely. Levine said the tactic has been discussed with manager Paul Molitor and pitching coach Gavin Alston. I infer that Molitor and Alston are cool to the idea of employing the opener in the majors.

Today's game would really be a good opportunity for it. Aldaberto Mejia, today's scheduled starter, is not an innings eater. (He appears to eat pretty much everything else, but that's another matter.) The hefty lefty made 21 starts last year for the Twins and got more than 15 outs (five innings) six times. He can use the help in getting deep into games.

Plus Toronto -- at least off a spot check of recent box scores -- load the top of the their lineup against lefty starters with righties and switch hitters.

It would make sense to have someone like Alan Busenitz pitch the first inning, then give way to Mejia for the middle and bottom of the order. Say Busenitz faces four batters, than Mejia faces the fifth man to start the second. That would also be the first guy to face him a third time, and he's got a better chance to work another inning than if he were facing the top of the order for the third time.

Of course, if Molitor and Alston were interested in trying the opener today, it wouldn't be Busenitz; he got sent back to Triple A after his inning Sunday to make room for Mejia. I really do not understand the organizational fascination with keeping Matt Belisle around to be a mopup man, but that's another problem.

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Ex-Twin watch: The Twins drafted Dereck Rodriguez, the son of Hall of Fame catcher Ivan Rodriguez, in the sixth round of the 2011 draft. He was an outfielder, but he didn't hit, and the Twins converted him to pitching in 2014.

He had his ups and downs on the mound in the Twins organization, and never made it on the 40-man roster. He left as a minor-league free agent after last season and signed with the San Francisco Giants.

And he's now in their major league rotation with a 5-1, 2.72 ERA after 10 appearances, eight starts.

San Francisco and the National League are a different environment than Minnesota and the American League, but I'd sure take that.

From the Handbook: Starting pitcher rankings

Another new item in the Handbook this winter (and it suddenly feels like winter in southern Minnesota) is a system of ranking starting pitchers.

By their methodology -- complex enough that the book refers readers to the subscription Bill James Online site for a complete explaination -- Ervin Santana is currently the 14th best starter in baseball. (The Top 5: Corey Kluber, Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale and Justin Verlander, a perfectly acceptable quintent and ranking.)

Santana is squeezed between Jose Quintana and Robbie Ray, two lefties considerably younger than Santana.

Kyle Gibson is 63rd (the system heavily favor the most recent starts, and he had a very strong September). Jose Berrios is 88th and Bartolo Colon is 99th. Aldaberto Mejia comes in at 129.

Those would be the five-most used starters of the 2017 Twins. I'm confident that most of us would rank Berrios higher than Gibson, and I would put Mejia above Colon but we're anticipating the future when we do that.

More parallels with the 1987 Twins

A few weeks ago I milked a Monday print column out of the notion that there are parallels between this year's Twins team and the World Series champs of 30 years ago.

As the survivors of the 1987 Twins were feted at Target Field last weekend I thought of a few more pitching parallels. Realizing that we can take this comparison too far:

Adalberto Mejia is this year's Les Straker, only left-handed. Rookie who emerged as the team's third-best starter, not enough innings to qualify for the ERA title (Straker threw 154 in '87, Mejia is one out shy of 75 innings right now). Straker posted an ERA+ of 104 in '87; Mejia's is currently 109.

Kyle Gibson equates to Mike Smithson. Tall right-hander who relies on a sinking fastball. Gibson led the 2015 Twins, who were in the playoff chase until the final weekend, in innings pitched, and Smithson threw more than 250 innings for the 1984 Twins, who were in the playoff chase until the final weekend. Smithson opened the '87 season as the third starter but was in and out of the rotation; the same has been true of Gibson this year.

Bartolo Colon is ... well, there are actually two realistic possibilities. Joe Niekro was, in 1987, a 42-year-old one-pitch pitcher in his 21st year in the majors; the Twins, his seventh club, acquired him in June. Niekro won 221 games in his career, five of them for Minnesota (four in '87, one in '1988). Colon is a 44-year-old one-pitch guy on his 10th club in 20 years and is credited with 235 wins.

The other possible comp is Steve Carlton, more for his status as a legend. Carlton was in 1987 already a 300-game winner. Like Niekro, he was 42; the Twins were his sixth team. Like Colon, he arrived in Minnesota in July. He didn't pitch a lot.

Carlton was a no-doubter Hall of Famer; Niekro, despite a distinguished career, never had a shot at the Hall. Colon is somewhere in the middle, and Niekro is the better 1987 comp if Colon remains in the rotation for the rest of the year, or even through August.