A Hard Reckoning: Twins Option Matt Wallner to Triple-A St. Paul Amid Shift Toward New Faces

The Twins will option struggling outfielder Matt Wallner to Triple-A St. Paul on Thursday, two sources with knowledge of the team's plans told Twins Daily, Taking Wallner's place on the roster will be utilityman Ryan Kreidler, who made his Twins debut during Royce Lewis's stint on the injured list earlier this season. Kreidler is expected to serve in the same roving backup role he filled in Lewis's absence, as the team gives Austin Martin a fuller opportunity as a regular corner outfielder. 

By now, there should be little suspense or surprise around that move. Wallner's demotion is overdue. The massive Forest Lake native is batting .167/.259/.292 on the year. His last two starts came Wednesday night against the Marlins and Saturday in Cleveland, and in each, he went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts. He's been slowly phased out of the team's plans over the last four weeks, with Martin gaining an ever greater share of the playing time in the outfield and Trevor Larnach becoming the left-handed batter manager Derek Shelton kept in the lineup even against left-handed opposing starters.

Compounding the negative value of his bat, Wallner has been the worst defensive outfielder in baseball this season. He's lost speed; takes bad routes on fly balls; is too slow to field balls that fall in and to get off throws back to the infield; and doesn't communicate well with the infielders or with Byron Buxton on balls hit between defenders. He has no business playing in the major leagues right now; the team will hope that a hard reset in the minors can fix that.

Right-hander Zebby Matthews is also coming over from St. Paul Thursday, and that promotion has portent, too. All the team is saying so far is that Matthews is making a spot start to facilitate the team bumping back Connor Prielipp's next one by a day, as they monitor and mete out the latter's workload for the year. However, Matthews looks likely to stick around and take over the starting rotation spot occupied (until now) by Simeon Woods Richardson, who was knocked out early again Wednesday and has an untenable 7.71 ERA for the year.

Wednesday night's game was also the latest indication of a more gradual change. Tristan Gray made his fourth start at third base in the last 10 games. Two of those starts came one week ago, when Shelton gave Royce Lewis back-to-back days off as a reset. So far, however, Lewis has shown little to give the team renewed hope since then, and he's only batting .167/.269/.300 for the year. His two-day benching came one week after Wallner's, and now, Wallner is heading for the other end of the Green Line. The clock is ticking on Lewis, too, with Gray threatening to take his job even before the prospects about whom he's so worried are ready to come to the big leagues.

The 2025 trade deadline amounted to a reckoning for the previous year's worth of failures—for the collapse that led the 2024 Twins to miss the playoffs and for an offseason in which they were hamstrung by the Pohlads' attempts to sell the team, preventing them from sufficiently addressing the causes of that collapse. As roster overhauls go, though, it was actually relatively small, and when a Derek Falvey-led front office once again plodded most of the way through the winter without proactively moving on from any of the players who'd dragged them down over the previous year-plus, they began this season in something eerily similar to the same place they were in before that so-called fire sale.

Falvey's conservative approach and belief in the core he'd assembled led the team to hold onto Wallner, Lewis, Larnach and Woods Richardson over the winter, when there were strong arguments for moving on from any or all four of them. In fact, those arguments were also there last July, and even the previous offseason. The team went 1-for-4 in its long-running series of gambles on those young players. Larnach might not be a long-term piece for the club, but if nothing else, he's boosted his trade value substantially this spring. The other three are now being proactively replaced by a front office that still bears Falvey's fingerprints but has departed from his plans in some key aspects, and at the behest of a manager who isn't inclined to be especially patient with players at this phase of their careers.

Shelton lost half a decade of his life in Pittsburgh, making no progress toward winning because he was handed a parade of players on whom the organization was placing doomed bets a year after they should have stopped. He's been quick to try new things and shake up the way he deploys his roster, and slow to trust anyone. He and Jeremy Zoll are reshaping the big-league roster relatively early in the season, both because the utter ineptitude of the AL Central has allowed them to hold onto a dream of competing this year and because they agree that it's no longer reasonable to keep expecting Lewis, Wallner and Woods Richardson to turn things around.

Thursday marks the dawn of an interesting interstitial period. Martin, 27, will continue to get regular playing time, something he just achieved for the first time after last year's deadline. He's batting an extraordinary .327/.448/.416 in 125 plate appearances so far, though that's still distorted by platoon effects. Martin has faced left-handed pitchers in 49% of his plate appearances, almost twice as much as a full-time right-handed batter can expect to see them over a full season. As his role expands, he'll be tested, and could be exposed. Gray has been less impressive at the plate since his hot start, and looks like an inconsistent, Kody Clemens-style offensive contributor. However, he plays plus defense at third base, separating him from Lewis.

Both players will get a real chance to earn an even longer look, but each is also holding down a spot that could soon pass into the hands of one of the team's top prospects. Kaelen Culpepper needs a bit more time at St. Paul, but were Emmanuel Rodríguez healthy, he would already be in the majors, according to one team source. Culpepper's arrival could move Brooks Lee off shortstop and over to the hot corner. This shakeup could also result in Lee moving to second, if Gray shows enough to merit sustained playing time, with Luke Keaschall sliding to the outfield to soak up some of the playing time vacated by Wallner's demotion.

For now, Lewis remains on the big-league roster, so he'll play third base at least as often as Gray. The timeline of the Wallner phaseout is a reminder, though, that time is short. The Twins' new chairman, Tom Pohlad, expects the team to win and is evaluating the front office and manager on that criterion. Neither Zoll nor Shelton is as invested in Wallner, Lewis, Woods Richardson or several other players on this roster as Falvey was, even if Zoll has been around for several years and was part of bringing in and developing much of the team. Change is afoot, and while the only unequivocal handoff of playing time marked by Thursday's moves is from Wallner to Martin, the writing is on the wall for several pieces of a core that was once the team's future—but is now being tossed onto the junkheap of the past.