When Taj Bradley arrived in St. Paul last summer, the starting pitcher had recently been demoted to Triple-A by the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays wanted him to work on his splitter. They wanted him to become more consistent. It wasn’t about his raw stuff — it was about being able to put it all together.
Taj Bradley #26 of the Minnesota Twins (C) celebrates with teammates in the seventh inning at Target Field on April 07, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Twins defeated the Tigers 4-2. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images)
It’s easy to forget, as he begins his fourth season in the majors, that Bradley is just 25 years old. He’s still young, just months older than rotation mate Mick Abel, who has thrown about 350 fewer innings than Bradley.
And so as Bradley, in the very early going of the season, has been the Twins’ biggest bright spot, it’s not uncommon to hear words like “growth,” and “maturity,” thrown around when coaches and teammates are talking about Bradley, who has a 1.08 earned-run average through his first three starts.
He uses those words when he’s talking about himself, too.
“Look at the physique. I’m swole now,” he joked about his growth. “I think mentally I’ve grown and matured into a better picture than what I was last year, and I want to keep evolving.”
The decision to forgo competing in last month’s World Baseball Classic for Team Mexico was, he said, the most mature decision he has made. He wanted to compete, but knowing that he had an important season coming up, he decided it was for the best to stay back at spring training and continue working with Twins staff and teammates.
The maturity has shown up on the field, too.
In the past, Bradley noted that one inning would blow up and take him out of the game. But he has done a good job this season not letting situations spiral.
That showed in the first inning of his first start when the Baltimore Orioles loaded the bases with two outs against him before he blew strike three past Dylan Beavers. And again on Tuesday night against Detroit when he recovered from a rocky second inning and ended up throwing 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball, outdueling reigning two-time American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal.
“(I’m) just getting out of my own way,” Bradley said. “I think I was hard-headed in sticking to what I thought was best for me. Kind of being scared of change, thinking it’s going to take me out of the progression I want to go. But I feel like I was hindering myself. So just being open to change, open to try new things, different mentalities, different coaching philosophies, stuff like that.”
That’s been evident to those around him.
There was no doubt, catcher Ryan Jeffers said, “that he was an ace-caliber pitcher,” when the Twins acquired him from the Rays for reliever Griffin Jax last summer. But now he has gotten more comfortable with the information that the Twins are giving him and how to utilize it, and it seems to be paying dividends.
“By him buying into the stuff that goes on before his start, the game planning and the off-the-mound stuff, by him buying into that more, I think it gives him more of a comfortable feeling to trust me and then go out there and just be the version of Taj,” Jeffers said.
That version has touched 100 miles per hour this season, has been working very effectively with the splitter that he worked hard through the winter on and has gotten promising early results.
“We are seeing him continuing to mature right in front of our eyes,” manager Derek Shelton said.