You, sobbing: You can’t just call every good pitcher with plus stuff and a deep arsenal a starter! It doesn’t wor that way!

Me, pointing at Cole Sands: Starter

The transformation of Cole Sands might, in a crowded field of contenders, be the most impressive thing an already-impressive Twins pitching development group did last year.

He began the season as a fringe guy and ended it as, arguably, the second-most reliable reliever on the team.

A big boost in velocity made a big difference, and so did a rejiggered pitch mix.

Sands, 27, has four years of team control remaining and can still be optioned to the minor leagues this coming season, but by the second half of 2024, sending him to St. Paul felt out of the question.

In his first two partial seasons in the majors, he’d posted DRA- figures of 106 and 109, respectively.

DRA- is Baseball Prospectus’s league-indexed holistic pitching metric, where 100 is average and lower is better. In 2024, Sands’s went from the wrong side of average all the way to 82. He struck out 29.1% of opposing batters and walked just 4.1% of them.

I say it’s the perfect time to shake things up for him.

Earlier this winter, I was among the chorus calling for the team to consider making this conversion with Griffin Jax.

By the reckoning of most fans I encountered, though, the risks of that move—of disrupting or even forfeiting what Jax has found in short-burst relief, of thinning the bullpen—outweighed the benefits, which basically boil down to:

Creating extra total value within the roster;

Insulating the team better against the eventuality of an injury to Joe Ryan or one of the Twins’ other starters; and
Rolling the dice on the chance of creating an ace.

Ultimately, it seems, the team and Jax agreed. There are no current plans to move him to the rotation, and when former Twins play-by-play announcer Dick Bremer asked Jax which role he would prefer at last week’s annual Diamond Awards, Jax’s answer only very slightly hedged.

He sounded emotionally and mentally committed to being the high-adrenaline relief guy, and indeed, that matches what we’ve heard in the past about how he approaches his outings and why he doesn’t like to go back out for second innings from the pen, fearing the loss of that raw edge.

Maybe, though, there’s still a starter conversion to consider.

The chances that Sands could emerge from the pen and become an ace starter are not as high as the same chances were with Jax.

However, trying this with him would be less obviously dangerous than moving Jax, because he has been a starter more recently (16 starts in 2022) and is not as essential to the structure of the bullpen.

It would also have a chance to create value in an interesting way, for a team still operating with artificially stringent limits on their spending and ability to acquire value from without.

Sands is a year further from free agency than Jax, so if a conversion were successful, it would make him either a longer-term valuable piece or a more valuable trade chip.

Those are reasons why it makes sense to try it. What reasons do we have to think it would actually work?