If there’s one thing this season has taught us, it’s that you can never have too many arms.
The 35-year-old reliever, designated for assignment and later released by the Twins last month, has been assigned to Triple-A Buffalo and was activated ahead of Wednesday’s contest versus the Worcester Red Sox — Boston’s affiliate. He last pitched for Minnesota on May 18 and has topped out at 1.2 innings this season.
Topa has split time with three major league teams since debuting in 2020, appearing with the Milwaukee Brewers, Seattle Mariners and Twins before joining the Blue Jays organization. The results have been pretty rough in 2026 thus far, sporting an inflated 8.05 ERA and 6.46 FIP, with nearly as many walks (11) as strikeouts (12) through 19 innings, resulting in a career-worst minus-0.5 fWAR.
Toronto’s brass appears to be betting on last season’s success, though, as Topa enjoyed one of the top performances of his career, pitching to a 3.90 ERA and 3.04 FIP with a respectable 11.6 per cent strikeout-minus-walk rate (K-BB%) and a 47.7 per cent ground-ball rate — which placed in the 76th percentile of the majors — across 60 innings, worth 0.9 fWAR.
The biggest difference between this year and last has been the effectiveness of Topa’s sweeper, which has lost 1.3 m.p.h. from its career-high average velocity of 82.9 in 2025, and has seen its whiff rate plummet from 33 per cent to just 5.9 per cent this season. As a result, the veteran righty had only been throwing his best pitch 16.7 per cent of the time with the Twins — its lowest usage of his career after using it almost one-third of the time in each of his previous five seasons.