A month and a half into this season, the hottest team in Major League Baseball played in Minnesota.
When the standings closed on May 17, the Twins had won 13 consecutive games to sit second in their division. It was the franchise’s longest winning streak in 34 years, and the longest in all of MLB since 2022. Minnesota had one of baseball’s best staff of relief pitchers and an All-Star outfielder in Byron Buxton. Suddenly, a spring training declaration by the team’s top baseball executive, Derek Falvey, that reaching the World Series “has to be the mission from Day One,” sounded more like a possibility.
By this week’s trade deadline, that mission had changed dramatically.
No longer ascending in the standings, the Twins had moved from a buyer looking to bolster its lineup ahead of a playoff run into a seller trying to extract some value from a lost season — the kind of shift in thinking that happens to numerous teams across all professional sports.
Yet the scope of the Twins sell-off Thursday, in the final hours before the deadline, was anything but typical. Many teams out of playoff contention sell off key parts; the Twins, however, took it to an extreme. Over nine trades, they dealt away 11 players from a 26-man roster.
When Falvey sent a signed message to fans late Thursday, he wrote that “this wasn’t about patchwork or small adjustments.”
That was an understatement.
“We had been hovering around or under .500 for a period of time and just couldn’t quite get things going in the right direction, and we’ve got to find a new way to do it,” Falvey told reporters.
Falvey framed the roster reset as a baseball decision for the future of a team that had gone from six games above .500 on May 17 to six games under. But along with bringing back a collection of prospects, the trade also accomplished slashing its payroll, and making it less expensive to operate. The trade of the highest-paid Twin, shortstop Carlos Correa, was effectively to ensure that another team, Houston, would foot the bill for more than $70 million of his remaining salary.
The Twins have historically never been among the top-spending teams, and their decline since May had only further disincentivized adding costs to a team whose ownership has been publicly looking to get out of the baseball business since late last year, when the Pohlad family — which has owned the franchise since 1984 — announced it was looking sell the team.
“The sale process continues to be an ongoing reality for our organization and something that we will work through at the right time,” Falvey said.
The intention to sale was announced at a time when labor peace between players and the league, and the attractiveness of owning a franchise in a smaller market, have come under question. Six teams last season had a payroll of $102 million or less, according to Spotrac, less than the amount the Los Angeles Dodgers reportedly paid in taxes alone.
The average MLB team valuation at the season’s start was $2.62 billion, per CNBC. Minnesota’s $1.6 billion valuation ranked 22nd out of 30 teams.
The few remaining holdovers include pitcher Joe Ryan and Buxton, who only two weeks earlier had noted the security provided by his no-trade clause.
“I’m a Minnesota Twin for the rest of my life,” Buxton said at the All-Star game. “So, that’s the best feeling in the world.”
The Twins woke up to a different feeling Friday. To fill out their roster for their first game after the deadline, the Twins were forced to call up eight players from the minor leagues. Gone are five relievers from a bullpen that had shined during the team’s winning streak, including top closer Jhoan Duran. Players on longer contracts, such as Correa, and others expiring at the end of the season were dealt with equal measure.
On Reddit, one user noted that the roster upheaval had turned the Twins’ official Instagram account into a series of graphics announcing either a “trade alert” or a “thank you” to a departed player.
The extreme teardown took place less than two years after Minnesota won its division and made the postseason for the first time in three years.
“I had some conversations with the front office in Minnesota and we were not moving in the direction that I thought we were after [making] the playoffs [in 2023], and they agreed with me that it was time to move me,” Correa told MLB.com.
And 10 others, too.
