There’s one word that accurately describes the Minnesota Twins over the last two seasons.
It’s complicated.
Since winning a playoff series in 2023, the Twins have been entangled in multiple situations that have made it difficult for the club to find its footing in the 2024 and 2025 seasons. In November 2023, the club announced it would be cutting its payroll. Limited financial resources impacted the team’s ability to bolster its playoff roster and partially contributed to its 133-135 record since the start of 2024.
Another reason for the team’s frustrating results has been the production of Byron Buxton, Carlos Correa, and Royce Lewis. Health complications have been the biggest issue. All three have played in 29 games together so far in 2025, an improvement on just 22 games played together in 2024.
It’s a small victory that’s still difficult to translate into wins because two of the three haven’t contributed as much as the team likely projected. Buxton is having an All-Star season with a .282/.343/.561 slashline and 23 home runs through 85 games this season. However, Lewis and Correa have been struggling with a combined 1.8 fWAR while neither hitter is above a 100 wRC+ clip this year.
Throw in the bad public relations battle of cutting payroll, dealing with Bally Sports, the linear rollout of TwinsTV, and slow starts in each of the last two seasons. As a result, fans have become less interested in the club. Minnesota has been 23rd in average attendance in 2024 and now 25th this year. Twins fan malaise reached a new level when the Pohlad family announced their intention to sell the team in November 2024, and there has still been no significant movement on an owner since then.
Those issues have all compounded, leaving the team stuck in a state of limbo. So the Twins sit at the week of the trade deadline with a 50-55 record and 5.5 games out of the final Wild Card spot. Any hope of buying at the trade deadline in some form has faded away.
Even if the team was in a better playoff position, Minnesota is going to sell off players at the deadline. The extent to which the team should do so is still in question. Still, it seems the franchise is backed into a corner and must shed its only impending free agents at the deadline.
It starts with the ownership uncertainty. Initial reports last winter suggested the Twins would announce a new owner by Opening Day. A search for the next owner of the franchise has gone relatively cold since frontrunner Justin Ishbia backed out.
Now Twins ownership has continued to look for their successors with little to show publicly. A sale has been complicated because the Twins are carrying $425 million in debt. However, the Tampa Bay Rays sold for $1.7 billion, which sets a precedent. It’s a number the Twins were set on before the sale and almost certainly won’t back away from now that the precedent is set.
The Pohlads likely won’t move on from Falvey, mainly to ensure stability for the new ownership group to enter. It would also be unwise to hire someone who a potential new owner wouldn’t want there and would have to clean the front office again, giving Twins president Derek Falvey and general manager Jeremy Zoll some job security in the short term.
However, Minnesota’s fluid ownership situation comes with a catch. Falvey’s job being theoretically safe for now also affects the roster structure. The team isn’t on a playoff trajectory this season and will miss the postseason in all but one year since 2021.
However, Twins executives have an incentive to avoid a deeper teardown.
If a new owner wants to tear things down, they would probably want their own front office to rebuild the roster. Therefore, Falvey and Zoll would likely want to keep the team in a position next season that gives them a chance to compete and present a case to new ownership that they should give their core more time to develop.
There likely isn’t pressure on the front office to panic and buy at the deadline to preserve their jobs for next season. It keeps the farm system stocked, but it also means the Twins will likely avoid selling off any players with team control, such as Joe Ryan, Jhoan Duran, and Griffin Jax. All three of those players have garnered high interest from the rest of the league. A transaction could land Minnesota additional high-value players and prospects to help reload a team that could benefit from a shock to the system.
The most likely course of action will be for the team to unload impending free agents. That was jump-started on Monday when the team dealt Chris Paddack and Randy Dobnak to the Detroit Tigers. Willi Castro, Harrison Bader, and Danny Coulombe are the three other players on expiring contracts who have value. Still, Minnesota won’t get much in return, somewhere in the range of a team’s top-20 prospect at best. However, it’s hard to see a team netting a top-100 global prospect in any transaction of the roster’s impending free agents.
Maybe that’s the way the Twins would have approached the deadline anyway. Falvey has been known to be a shrewd negotiator who’s hard to move off of his lofty asking prices in deals. It has also been a front office that’s willing to go year to year, allowing itself flexibility by avoiding going all-in or conducting a fire sale at the deadline.
Offering one-year contracts to Bader and Coulombe helps the team if they win, while also allowing them to move them in a trade if the season goes sideways. Still, the issues within the organization in the short term, particularly the team’s uncompetitive performance for most of the year, have the potential to impact the organization’s long-term success.
The path the Twins are taking feels more like the team was backed into this corner, rather than deciding it was the best option out of a list of alternatives.
Back-to-back disappointing seasons for the Twins have put them in a unique position at the trade deadline. There are multiple intriguing options the franchise can go down in the coming days. However, these complications mean the team is unable to make meaningful improvements.
It likely means that the Twins will have a modest trade deadline, selling off impending free agents while retaining team-controlled pieces for another season. Their trade deadline direction, for better or worse, will likely be influenced by the complex factors surrounding a franchise stuck in limbo with its roster, management, and ownership.
