In the final days of the 2024 season, the Minnesota Twins clubhouse had to feel like the moments after a bar closed. The Twins were eliminated from playoff contention, and like when the patrons have had a few too many drinks at the establishment, the action spilled out into public view.
Roughly six weeks before, the Twins held a double-digit lead in the AL Wild Card race. When they were eliminated on the final weekend of the season, people pointed fingers and started blaming one another.
It started when Carlos Correa hinted that some of the younger players on the roster had no sense of urgency. Then, it escalated when Royce Lewis suggested it was on the “cheap” guys to help the team succeed. It sounded like a group that needed to head home for the winter, but it also needed to answer just how big of a role Minnesota’s young players played in their collapse.
Everything starts with the team’s infrastructure. The Twins have a group of veterans led by Correa, Byron Buxton, and others and a group of young players led by Lewis and Brooks Lee. The mix of young and old players is a typical combination for contending teams in Major League Baseball, but it normally doesn’t turn into the Jets and the Sharks.
In an ideal world, the veterans would guide the young players along. However, the Twins also relied on those young players as key components in 2024.
That isn’t surprising, considering what Minnesota’s young core did in 2023. Lewis, Matt Wallner, and Edouard Julien became the first trio of rookie teammates in MLB history to post a .877 OPS. All three were locks to make the Opening Day roster heading into Spring Training.
With Lee working his way through the minors, the Twins were forming a young nucleus to mesh with their group of veterans. It looked like a great idea for a team slashing $30 million in payroll. However, once the season began, it turned out to be a bad one.
Wallner struggled in Spring Training but made the Opening Day roster. After going 2-for-25 with 17 strikeouts in his first 13 games, the Twins sent Wallner down to Triple-A St. Paul, and he didn’t return until July 7. Although he hit .282/.386/.559 with 12 homers and 33 RBI in his final 62 games, it still left the Twins without one of its most potent left-handed bats for nearly two months while he re-calibrated in St. Paul.
While Wallner figured it out, Julien wasn’t as fortunate. Julien was a top-of-the-lineup fixture throughout the 2023 season but couldn’t figure it out in 2024. In his first 58 games, Julien hit .207/.309/.367 with seven homers and 17 RBI. Most importantly, he had just 24 walks to 66 strikeouts, punching a ticket to St. Paul on June 2.
Julien returned to the Twins twice, but he never got going. His second stint just about coincided with Minnesota’s collapse on August 16. He hit .188/.250/.259 with one homer, six walks, and 28 strikeouts over his final 31 games.
Both were pretty big blows to Minnesota’s postseason hopes, but they weren’t as harmful as Lewis’s sophomore slump.
Coming off a year where he hit .309/.372/.548 with 15 homers and 52 RBI, Lewis was considered just as important to the Twins lineup as Buxton and Correa. A severe quad strain forced him to miss the first two months of the season, and a groin injury forced him to miss another three weeks before returning on July 26.
Lewis hit .287/.351/.678 with 10 homers in his first 23 games. However, he hit .201/.272/.356 with six homers over his final 59 games. His struggles also worsened over the Twins free-fall in the standings, hitting .186/.225/.250 with one homer over his final 39 games.
Lewis, Julien, and Wallner weren’t the only young players that fell short of expectations. Lee dealt with a back injury for the first two months of the season and hit .221/.265/.320 with three homers and 27 RBI in 50 games. Zebby Matthews, David Festa, and Simeon Woods Richardson folded as their innings soared in the middle of a pennant race, and a slew of young bullpen arms couldn’t save the Twins from one of the worst meltdowns in franchise history.
But it wasn’t just the young players who fell short on the field. Correa and Buxton missed extended time due to injuries, and other veterans, such as Max Kepler, Ryan Jeffers, and Willi Castro, fell off the planet as the Twins began to collapse.
The entire team deserves some of the blame for on-field performance. But Correa’s comments weren’t about how the young players were playing as much as about their preparation before the game.
“Some of us hit extra today and tried to figure something out,” Correa said after the Twins lost to the Miami Marlins on Sept. 24. “We didn’t get the win, but we’ve got to do more of that and eventually find something right away so we can go out there and put up more runs.”
Once the Twins were eliminated from playoff contention a few days later, Lewis fired his rebuttal.
“It kind of falls on, obviously, the players. But I didn’t realize it was just on us,” Lewis told the Star Tribune’s Bobby Nightengale. “Now I know that we’re going to carry a lot of the load, especially the young guys – the cheap guys is the best way to put it.”
Lewis’s comments were veiled in frustration. He didn’t have the season he wanted to, and the other events that led to Minnesota’s collapse — such as the lack of action at the trade deadline, an ill-fated experiment at second base, and Correa’s two-month stint on the injured list with plantar fasciitis — left the normally optimistic third baseman with a pessimistic view.
However, while this could be viewed as a fracture of the clubhouse, it may be a process that many teams need to take to become legitimate contenders.
In 2014, the Kansas City Royals had a coming-of-age moment after realizing the smartphone video game “Clash of the Clans” was taking away from their performance on the field. When manager Ned Yost called a team meeting in July, he told players they needed to show more energy on the field, and they put their phones down and focused on baseball. The Royals made it to the World Series that October and returned to win the whole thing in 2015.
Current Twins first baseman Carlos Santana was involved in a “Come-to-Jesus” moment with young players in the Philadelphia Phillies in 2018. When a group of young players was getting in a game of Fortnite during an 80-82 season, Santana smashed a television with a baseball bat to send the message.
“I see a couple players – I don’t want to say names – they play video games during the game,” Santana told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “We come and lose too many games, and I feel like they weren’t worried about it. Weren’t respecting their teammates or coaches or the staff or the front office. It’s not my personality. But I’m angry because I want to make it good.”
It took a few years and a few different additions, like adding Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto, for the Phillies to return to contention. However, Rhys Hoskins and Aaron Nola were part of the 2018 team that stuck around for Philadelphia’s run to the World Series in 2022.
There are no signs of a player firing up the PlayStation between at-bats, but the previous examples might say something about Minnesota’s situation. Young players come up and prepare a certain way, and sometimes, an adjustment is needed to win at the major league level.
While it says one thing about the players, it could also say something about the clubhouse’s leadership structure, as nothing was said about any potential problem until it was too late.
Perhaps the Twins can fix this with a chat over the winter or even in the opening weeks of Spring Training. But with many of the young players returning and expected to have big roles in 2025, it appears everyone needs to look at themselves and figure out the best approach to prevent what happened this year from happening again.
