A Chance Worth Taking: The Twins Are Still in This, Somehow

By no means have the 2026 Twins gotten lucky. In fact, they can't catch a break. Their run differential (230 runs scored, 231 allowed) implies a 25-25 record, but they're 23-27. They lost their ace to season-ending elbow surgery on the first day of full-squad workouts in the spring, and their in loco Pablosis ace, Joe Ryan, has had multiple disruptions to his preparation and performance. Their star center fielder went off to international duty and found himself benched, slowing his start to the season. They had two strong breakout candidates in their rotation for the first month, but both are currently on the injured list. Now, their primary catcher is shelved for weeks by a broken bone in his hand. Their top two prospects got hurt in Triple-A.

Given all that (and especially given the aforementioned 23-27 record), though, things feel oddly hopeful. The Twins are 5.5 games behind the Guardians for first place in the AL Central, but they've already proved they can hang with that team, beating them twice in three games at Progressive Field earlier this month. They're only 1.5 games out of playoff position. According to FanGraphs, they have a 23.8% chance to make the playoffs—down from their highest point during their early-season hot streak, but right in the same range they've been in for the last four weeks or so.

While neither Matt Wallner nor Royce Lewis left the team much choice but to demote them to Triple-A, this situation made that decision both easier and more urgent. Ditto for their replacement of Simeon Woods Richardson in the starting rotation. Because of what now seem to be real problems—and not just slow starts—for the Royals, Tigers, Red Sox, Orioles, Mariners, Astros and Blue Jays, the door to the playoffs remains open to this team. To give themselves a chance to push through it, the team needed to make changes.

Here's a position-by-position breakdown of all 30 teams' wins above average, courtesy of Baseball Reference. The Twins' totals are highlighted.

Coming into this season, any hopes for this club to contend were anchored to their starting rotation being good. That hasn't happened in the way fans or the front office hoped and expected, in that Pablo López is out for the year and both Mick Abel and Taj Bradley have been sidelined, but lo, the unit has been a strength, after all. Bailey Ober is settling in as an obviously usable (though, just as obviously, vulnerable) keep-you-in-the-game guy. Woods Richardson was a disaster, but Zebby Matthews has looked just as good as Woods Richardson did bad.

Bradley is on the cusp of returning to a rotation that now includes Connor Prielipp as a full and semi-permanent member, with fellow hard-throwing lefty Kendry Rojas as a more provisional piece. With Woods Richardson out of that picture, the team has come round to enjoying both ample upside and enviable depth in their starting corps, by however circuitous a route. Ryan, Ober, Bradley, Prielipp, Matthews, and whichever of Abel and Rojas is the right mix of available and effective can be the starting pitching depth chart of a playoff team.

The (relatively) proactive fix of swapping Woods Richardson out for Matthews is echoed throughout the roster, where the team is (as expected) playing an even harder game of Whack-a-Mole. They entered the season with an utterly underpowered bullpen, and that unit still hasn't been good, so far. However, they're starting to cobble together a group that can be good, in the medium term. Already, they've churned through several external additions (Garrett Acton, Luis García, and Yoendrys Gómez), but more telling is what they've done with their internal options. Gone is Justin Topa, a roster casualty whom the team also couldn't trust anymore. Into the mix are Woods Richardson (who has a real chance to be useful in a long relief role, if deployed correctly) and Andrew Morris, who has unceremoniously claimed the mantle of relief ace. Rojas might yet spend some time in the pen, too, as the rotation gets healthier and stabilizes.

No team has gotten worse performances from its right fielders than the Twins, thanks to Wallner's all-around atrociousness, but he's now out of the frame. Minnesota is 26th in wins above average from third basemen, but now, Lewis is out of the way, too. The replacements for those players won't put the team in the top echelon at either spot, but they have a real chance to be better than Lewis and Wallner. The outline of a decent team is coming into focus.

That invites the question: What's next? What does the team need to do to keep improving, so they can take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to stay relevant all summer? Firstly, as the chart shows, things still aren't good at shortstop. Brooks Lee has responded better to the influence of new hitting coach Keith Beauregard than his fellow last-wave top prospects, Wallner and Lewis, but he's still only batting .248/.299/.388. He's doing a slightly better job of making contact against breaking and offspeed stuff, but that's the only notable change in his profile. Nor has he become a viable defensive shortstop. 

Lee almost certainly could play a solid third base, and his bat is playable. In the medium term, then, the move is obvious: call up Kaelen Culpepper, test him at short, and slide Lee over. That will be risky at any point this year, though, and Culpepper isn't quite ready for it yet. Right now, the team will stick with Lee at that position, and the first change we're likely to see will be a slow shift toward more matchup play.

Tristan Gray, Orlando Arcia and Ryan Kreidler form an underwhelming but extremely intriguing collection of role players on the infield. Gray brings a left-handed bat, with enough bat speed to be dangerous. Kreidler looked like he would never hit in the big leagues, but in a tiny sample this year, he's hitting in the big leagues. Arcia brings the most experience defensively, and while he'd be no more than a minor upgrade on Lee's glove at short, he would be a big step up from Luke Keaschall's glove work at second.

That brings us to Keaschall, who has belatedly pulled his OPS to the right side of .600. He's just not going to work as a defensive second baseman, though any real move to another position has to wait, right now. He can hit enough to outpace his defensive woes, though, and the team now has several guys on the roster whom Derek Shelton can use to mitigate the damage Keaschall can do in the field. 

It won't be easy for the team to sustain the momentum they've built by winning three of their last four series. Ryan Jeffers's absence looms large. There are guys on this roster overperforming, and guys already coming back to Earth after hot starts. (Witness Trevor Larnach's .217/.280/.326 batting line in May.) They have a 10-game road trip to survive, beginning Friday, in which they'll play the Red Sox, White Sox and Pirates. Don't forget, either, that this team is just 23-27. They haven't exactly surged. They've just maintained a decent pace longer than expected. 

However, the chance before them is real. By staying afloat into (at least) the final third of May, they've checked the box Tom Pohlad put on their to-do list over the winter, when he made the then-improbable claim that the team would contend this year. Pohlad said last month that he would supplement the roster via trade this summer, if new top executive Jeremy Zoll came to him with a chance to do so. Now, that feels less like a pipe dream and more like a possibility. By winning just enough to stay alive, Zoll, Shelton and the team have bought themselves enough time to fix some of their most glaring flaws.