17 games and still no runs? Stingy Staumont sets bar high?

This story was excerpted from the Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Josh Staumont has been around the league long enough to know the drill when it comes to being a reliever, and he said as much recently: It’s often difficult to get attention in that role unless you’re the closer -- or you’re the reason the team lost the game.

Well, it’s long overdue that the right-hander is recognized for the start he’s having to his first season with the Twins.

Staumont’s ERA still reads 0.00, and it can’t be considered an early-season aberration considering it’s July and he’s been on the big league roster for two months. He has yet to allow an earned run through 18 innings across 17 appearances.

And Staumont is doing that despite not only coming off Thoracic Outlet Syndrome surgery -- often extremely tricky for pitchers in particular -- but also completely revamping his usage to rely mostly on his slider, a pitch he’d thrown less than 90 times in his career before this season.

“I'm always going to try something new or do whatever and understand that, obviously, the coaching staff and everybody is going towards a common goal of success,” Staumont said. “Having an ego with a lot of that stuff is kind of futile. So if they believe in it and they believe I can do it, a lot of times, it's more of a mental thing than anything.”

Most consecutive appearances to start a season without an earned run in Twins history
17 -- Staumont, 2024
17 -- Caleb Thielbar, 2013
17 -- Jesse Crain, 2005
16 -- Joe Smith, 2022
16 -- Dennys Reyes, 2008

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise with this organization anymore, considering the Twins have had plenty of recent success leaning heavily into the pitch with noted slider savant like Sergio Romo, Matt Wisler and now, most significantly, Griffin Jax, who remade his career around the pitch and has become one of the game’s dominant setup relievers.

But this is a different case from those three, because instead of Staumont’s new-ish slider having unique characteristics that allow it to work when thrown over and over again, the Twins like it for a much more fundamental reason: He can throw strikes with it.

“It stems from, 'What's his biggest crack?' 'What's his Achilles' heel?'” said pitching coach Pete Maki. “Walk rate too high. All right, so then, we say, ‘What pitches are in the zone? And what pitches aren't?’”

The key is that Staumont isn’t throwing something like the slower, more movement-oriented sweeper that took baseball by storm last year; it’s a hard slider -- almost like a cutter -- that other Twins pitchers like Bailey Ober and Chris Paddack also added and discussed in Spring Training.

It’s not about movement or shape; it’s just about throwing it really hard and getting it to move a bit to the glove side.

This isn’t a novel concept. As both Staumont and Maki pointed out, the Royals had Staumont add the quicker, tighter slider last year before he underwent the surgery and, later, was designated for assignment, allowing him to sign an offseason free-agent deal with the Twins. Maki said Minnesota talked about this plan with Staumont as early as January.

But Staumont only threw the slider 22.5% of the time last year; now, he’s throwing it on a whopping 64.9% of his pitches, with the hard fastball that used to be the core of his arsenal -- down a few ticks after the surgery -- used less than a quarter as often as any season in the past (10.5% this season, while 44.1% in 2021 was his previous career low).

That’s mostly because, as Maki said, once Staumont started throwing the slider, they really liked what they saw -- so why not lean into it?

“I mean, yeah,” Maki said. “He's throwing a hard slider for strikes. … The hitters are telling us that it's a good pitch.”

What makes Staumont such a good fit for this type of reinvention is that he doesn’t see it as a reinvention.

“It's not something to go and completely reinvent the wheel,” Staumont said. “It's just kind of like a, 'Let's make the adjustment and see how this goes.' You kind of just fine-tune all that. We're so good at this level that all the success kind of comes down to menial stuff at a certain point, and it's kind of just going out and doing it.”

Staumont doesn’t care about his 0.00 ERA, nor does he purport to take any credit for it, even after making these adjustments -- but the results certainly speak for themselves.