He’ll get the conversation, said Derek Falvey, the Twins president of baseball operations. But he can’t guarantee he’ll get the conversion.
“We’re not ruling it out this offseason, and we shouldn’t. We want to have that conversation with him, to talk about what the upsides and downsides are, what the risks and benefits to it are for him and the team,” Falvey said Sunday. “We’ve got to be open-minded. We can’t rule out any potential path.”
Jax’s case for starting, he said, is that he’s not close to the same pitcher he was in 2021. Because his minor league experience was limited by his commitment to the Air Force, he was still learning when he reached the majors. And he hadn’t yet devoted himself to the year-round training regimen he has now.
“I reintroduced the curveball, and I saw how effective it was,” Jax said of a pitch that opponents turned into hits only twice all season. The fact that he had very little platoon split, holding righthanders to a .169 average and lefties to .200, encourages him, too.
“My stuff played to both, so I wasn’t a one-side-of-the-plate guy. I got both out at a really good clip,” Jax said. They were also mostly the opponents’ best hitters; 63% of the hitters he faced were Nos. 2-5 in the lineup, “and I was getting the heart of the order out the majority of the year, which reinforces to me maybe I could do that two or three times through the order.”
Either way, Jax said he’s happy in Minnesota and wants to stay. He and his wife, Savannah, who have an 18-month-old daughter, Avery, are expecting their second child in February, “so my family has grown up in Minnesota. I would love to be here for the rest of my career,” said Jax, who is eligible for arbitration this winter for the first time.