If you’ve been listening to Twins games started by Connor Prielipp, you’ve probably heard the same idea come up again and again: that Minnesota is carefully rationing the left-hander’s innings.
It’s an easy assumption to make. Prielipp is 25, came out of the University of Alabama, and his path to this point has been anything but normal.
He threw just seven innings in his 2021 college season before Tommy John surgery, then had internal brace surgery in 2023. That pushed back his first real stretch as a starter in Minnesota’s minor-league system until 2025.
But the actual workload tells a different story.
Prielipp split this season between Double-A and Triple-A, where he logged 82 2/3 innings over 23 starts. That earned him a call to the Twins on April 22, and he has stayed in the rotation ever since.
He did spend 15 days on the injured list in mid-July, though that looked more like maintenance than a major setback. Minnesota also pushed back two of his starts by a day, which slightly stretched out the rotation, but those were modest precautions rather than signs of a hard cap.
Since joining the big-league club, Prielipp has worked like a regular starter. Across 19 starts, or functionally 20 if you count Andrew Morris opening Prielipp’s last appearance, he’s averaged about 5 1/3 innings per outing. That’s the kind of number teams expect from a pitcher with a full workload.
The inning totals back that up, too. Since April 22, Prielipp ranks third among Twins pitchers with 104 innings, behind Zebby Matthews at 112 and Taj Bradley at 126 2/3. He’s thrown more innings than Joe Ryan, who has 98 1/3, and Bailey Ober, who sits at 87 1/3, though both of those pitchers have spent more time on the shelf.
Compared with the rest of the league, Prielipp doesn’t look like a pitcher being handled with extreme caution either. Among American League starters, he ranks 34th in innings pitched, tied with New York’s Gerrit Cole and just ahead of Chicago’s Erick Fedde. When National League starters are included, he drops to 63rd, tied with Cole and Milwaukee’s Dustin May.
That’s why the “innings limit” talk doesn’t really fit. Sure, Minnesota has reason to keep an eye on him.
He has only one season in the past three minor-league years that resembled a full workload, and the club is almost certainly paying close attention to how his arm feels. But saying he has been limited this season doesn’t match what’s actually happened.
If anything, Prielipp has looked more like one of the Twins’ workhorses than a pitcher being protected by one.
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