Image courtesy of D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
David Festa has awesome stuff. That’s easy to see, and it has translated into results. In his MLB career, he has struck out 77 hitters in 64 ⅓ innings with a 13% swing-and-miss rate. These are excellent numbers, especially for a young pitcher still finding his way in the big leagues. On top of that, Festa has overcome his greatest perceived weakness by walking just 8% of the hitters he has faced.
Pair that with what Festa has done in the minors – 2.83 ERA, 34-to-4 K/BB ratio in six starts at Triple-A this year – and you’ve got an ideal contingency plan for a team that just lost its No. 1 starter and much-hyped top pitching prospect to shoulder injuries. Festa oozes frontline potential. But up to this point, he hasn’t been able to convincingly seize that potential.
Last year, the right-hander gave up 12 earned runs over 10 innings in his first two starts for the Twins. This made it nearly impossible for his overall numbers to recover, so he finished the season with an underwhelming 4.90 ERA despite pitching very well thereafter. But what is noteworthy about those first two starts is that – despite getting lit up – Festa completed five innings in both. In fact, he did so seven times in his first 10 major-league starts. Since then, he has completed five innings only once in eight starts, including zero of his four outings with the Twins this year.
Festa was allowed to face 23 batters in his first MLB start last year, and 24 in his second. He has since made 16 starts for the Twins, and never been allowed to face more than 21 hitters. In his four starts this year, the team has been very regimented in removing him at a certain threshold: he faced 19 batters in three, and 18 in the other. Under no circumstances have the Twins even flirted with the idea of letting Festa embark on a third time through the order.
That was working pretty well, up until he got ambushed by the Athletics on Thursday for eight earned runs in 3 ⅔ innings. He’ll look to rebound when he faces off against Jack Leiter and the Texas Rangers on Wednesday at Target Field – an interesting matchup between two 25-year-olds who were born about a month apart in the year 2000. (In the year two thousAAANNNDDDD.)
Leiter was more or less destined to be a major-league starting pitcher from the moment he was born. His father (Al Leiter) was a two-decade big-leaguer and an All-Star. Jack was a standout pitcher as a youth, in high school, in college, in the minors. He was a second overall draft pick, and now he’s a fixture in the Rangers rotation, despite a record of performance that has been rocky through his first 87 innings as a big-leaguer (5.87 ERA, 4.80 FIP).
Nothing has ever come quite so easy for Festa, who had a solid but unremarkable run at Seton Hall University before the Twins drafted him in the 13th round – 399th overall – in 2021. From there, the Derek Falvey Pitching Machine got to work turning Festa into the “Slim Reaper.” With amped up velocity and stuff, he averaged 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings in the minors in his way to the big leagues, where he is now firmly entrenched so long as he can stay healthy.
Are the Twins ready to loosen the reins? Do they have a choice?
The “staying healthy” thing is no small caveat. It never is with pitchers, but Festa already this year has taken a break due to arm fatigue, and we’re not even at the halfway point. This factor no doubt plays a role in the team’s conservative handling of Festa, who has yet to throw even 85 pitches in an outing this season, minors or majors. But if he’s going to be a full-time member of the Twins rotation going forward, the standard needs to change. I mean, I would think so.
Pablo López had completed five or more innings in all but one of his 11 starts for the Twins this year. Those reliable innings cannot be absorbed entirely by a bullpen that already has been ridden hard, with Jhoan Durán and Griffin Jax on pace for career-high workloads, and Louis Varland seeing one of the highest usage rates in franchise history. It already feels kinda miraculous that Brock Stewart has stayed as healthy as he has, and Danny Coulombe is dealing with elbow pain at age 35.
For his part, Festa sounded at the end of last year like he was ready for the challenge of extending his outings.
“When the stakes were super-high, I really enjoyed it,” he said in a November 2024 Star Tribune article from the great Bobby Nightengale. “Would I have liked to go longer in some outings? Yeah, but a lot of that is situational, which I totally understand. Some outings I felt good and I was dying to get the team through six innings, but I only went 4 ⅔ or whatever the case may be. Learning to navigate the lineup and being able to face guys the third time around in most of my outings, I thought I did a good job of learning how to do that.”
The Twins, up until now, haven’t been willing to see if those lessons actually took. But with López and Matthews down, and the kid-glove treatment essentially off the table, we’re likely about to find out.