September 29, 2026
September 29, 2026
Minnesota Twins’ 2025 Season
The Twins’ 2025 season began with a franchise-caliber winning streak. It ended with a purge. Minnesota tore through May with the second-longest streak of its Minnesota era. Then, four months later, the front office tore the roster apart at the trade deadline. Out went a franchise infielder, a shutdown closer, and eight other players in one furious week. What started as a team chasing October finished as a 92-loss cautionary tale. It cost a manager his job. It left a fan base staring at an emptying ballpark. Few teams swung from streak to sell-off as violently as the Twins’ 2025 season did.
Coming off an 82-80 finish in 2024, Minnesota entered spring training believing it belonged in an unsettled AL Central race. Rocco Baldelli returned for a seventh season as manager. His roster still leaned on Byron Buxton, Joe Ryan, and a bullpen anchored by closer Jhoan Durán. The front office made no major offseason splash. It banked instead on internal continuity to close the gap on Cleveland and Kansas City. That bet looked shaky almost immediately. The Twins stumbled to a 13-18 record through the season’s first six weeks, undone by inconsistent offense and a rotation searching for its footing. Doubts crept in fast. Cleveland and Kansas City both looked sturdier out of the gate, and Minnesota’s margin for error kept shrinking by the week. Nobody in the clubhouse yet knew how much worse the summer ahead would get.
Then Minnesota ripped off thirteen straight. From May 3 through May 17, the Twins reeled off the second-longest winning streak in the franchise’s Minnesota era. The early deficit vanished. Playoff contention arrived almost overnight. Pitching steadied, the lineup found its timing, and a team that looked lost in April suddenly looked like a contender. The high point of that surge arrived on July 12, when Byron Buxton delivered the first cycle in Target Field history on his own bobblehead giveaway day. It felt like an exclamation point on a resurgent summer. Buxton called himself “a Twin for life” that year, a declaration that would carry far more weight once the roster around him started emptying out. For a few months, the Minnesota Twins looked like a team building toward October. The collapse was still waiting ahead of them.
July 31 landed like a gut punch nobody had braced for entering the season. In a matter of hours, the front office dismantled a roster that had been fighting for a playoff spot only weeks earlier. Eleven players went out the door. Minnesota conceded the season in the most public way a franchise can. This was not a modest sell-off. It was a teardown, one that gutted the bullpen, thinned the rotation, and sent the face of the infield back to the team that drafted him.
Carlos Correa’s homecoming carried more weight than any prospect return could measure. Minnesota shipped him back to the Astros, the organization that made him the first overall pick over a decade earlier. Houston was also where he won a World Series before ever signing with the Twins in free agency. Minnesota paid $33 million of his remaining contract just to make the reunion happen. In return, the Twins absorbed that cost for little more than a minor league left-hander. Correa left the only other organization he had ever known. Minnesota’s clubhouse lost the veteran presence that had steadied it through several difficult seasons.
Jhoan Durán went next, sent to the Phillies along with Harrison Bader. The two trades stripped away a 2.01 ERA closer and a steady defensive outfielder in one stroke. Pitching prospect Mick Abel and catching prospect Eduardo Tait headed back to Minnesota in the Durán deal. Griffin Jax followed him out the door, traded to the Rays for right-hander Taj Bradley in a deal that came together right at the deadline buzzer. Louie Varland departed for Toronto alongside Ty France. Danny Coulombe and Willi Castro rounded out the exodus. The front office cleared out anyone who might still fetch value on the trade market. ESPN covered the sell-off as one of the most aggressive of the entire trade deadline. The returning haul of young arms and unproven bats did little to soften the blow. Inside the clubhouse, players had believed right up until that week that they still had a season worth playing for. What did the front office actually believe about this roster’s future? The trades answered that question louder than any statement ever could.
Byron Buxton refused to go anywhere, and his production made that restraint look wise. He finished the year with 35 home runs, 24 stolen bases, 97 runs scored, and a .551 slugging percentage across 126 games. Those numbers made him the lone consistent offensive force on a roster stripped of its supporting cast. Six teams reportedly inquired about his availability. A full no-trade clause let Buxton say no to every one of them. He stayed even as the roster around him emptied out. Buxton had spent years fighting through injuries just to stay on the field, and this was the healthiest, most productive version of him the Twin Cities had seen in a long time. His loyalty gave a lost year at least one thread worth following. Buxton’s Baseball-Reference page tells the story of a player performing at an All-Star level. The team around him had already stopped competing for anything beyond pride.
Someone had to anchor a rotation that had just lost multiple pitchers in a week. That job fell to Joe Ryan. He finished 13-10 with a 3.42 ERA across 30 starts. Those numbers stood out even more starkly once the trade deadline stripped away the depth around him. Ryan took the ball every fifth day regardless of the growing gap in the standings. His consistency became one of the few reliable elements of a second half defined by uncertainty everywhere else on the roster. The Twins’ 2025 season needed a stabilizing presence on the mound. Ryan gave them exactly that, start after start, even as the games in front of him stopped mattering in the standings.
Minnesota’s elimination from playoff contention arrived on September 13, a formality by then given how the summer had gone. The Twins finished 70-92, fourth in the AL Central and eighteen games behind a Cleveland team that authored one of the division’s most dramatic turnarounds in the same season Minnesota fell apart. Attendance sank to its lowest mark since 2021. It was a visible sign of a fan base that had checked out well before the final out. Rocco Baldelli paid for the collapse with his job, dismissed after seven seasons at the helm once the year mercifully ended. Ownership’s own turmoil compounded the frustration. The Pohlad family explored selling the franchise before reversing course in August, committing instead to bring in new investors. Whatever Minnesota builds next, it will be built from the wreckage the Star Tribune chronicled so thoroughly. A roster gutted by its own hand. A fan base pushed to the brink. A franchise searching for direction after a season that unraveled by design. The Twins’ 2025 season will be remembered less for the ballgames it produced than for the choice made in one week at the end of July, a choice that changed the shape of the roster for years beyond it.
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