Did the Twins Exceed Expectations This Year?

The Minnesota Twins were flying high coming off the 2023 season, but a demoralizing collapse in 2024 followed by a roundly disappointing 2025 erased their momentum and tanked fan morale. Attendance reached its lowest point in 25 years. 

When Tom Pohlad took over last offseason as the new face of ownership, he acknowledged the state of affairs and the core imperative: they needed to win back confidence. They needed to put a better and more inspiring product on the field.

"It’s undeniable," Pohlad said, "that we haven’t won enough baseball games, the financial health of the club has been put in jeopardy, and we’ve got a fan base that has lost trust in us as owners — and, as a result, this organization and the direction it’s headed."

No one was suggesting a 90-win campaign. The reality of this team's situation coming off a historic deadline firesale was plain to see. Pohlad, to his credit, was measured in his level-setting for the 2026 season.

"We really like our team," he shared at the start of spring training. "We think we’ve got a good mix of veterans and really talented young people that want to make a statement. I think we’re going to exceed expectations.”

That was a low bar. General expectations for the Twins were tempered to say the least, coming off 90 losses and carrying one of the league's skimpiest payrolls. The over/under in Vegas coming into this season was 72 to 73 wins (which Pohlad called "ridiculous"), whereas projection systems like FanGraphs viewed the team's outlook somewhat more favorably, pegging them in the 77-win range. 

With one game left, the Twins sit at 76 wins. They've already won money for the over bettors and it looks like they are going to nail their projection forecasts to a tee. I guess that's something to celebrate?

It calls to mind a classic Calvin and Hobbes comic panel from the great Bill Watterson. Conversing with Calvin over the construction of a snowman, Hobbes ponders: “So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met?” 

“Right,” Calvin responds. “We should take pride in our mediocrity.”

Taking pride in mediocrity feels like a good way to synopsize any good vibes that this losing season might elicit. There's no better way to describe this 2026 Twins team than mediocre: okay, passable, neither very good nor very bad. They avoided elimination until the last week of September, but were above .500 for 13 days all season, and hung around on the fringe of contention only due to the sorry state of the American League at large. 

But hey, perception matters. This year's Twins team played almost in lockstep with last year's in the first half, hovering just below .500 for most of July before taking very different paths at the trade deadline. The contrast was twofold:

• In 2025, Detroit was running away with the Central, and being five games below .500 was not enough to put you in the Wild Card conversation.
• In 2025, the Twins were playing this mediocre brand of baseball with a roster that was at least co-favored to win the division, and with Carlos Correa being paid $35 million.

Some view the latter as a bad thing. I get it. It's more frustrating to watch a good team lose. And it leads to more rancor: players grumbling, media melting down, "sell the team" chants erupting. Relatively speaking, there's been very little of that this year, because people know the deal. 

For me, I like to have some skin in the game. I like to feel the sweat, to revel in the dramatics. My sweat was never beading up in this 2026 season, even as the AL field did its best to keep things interesting. I was convinced from the outset this was going to be a bad team and it was indeed a bad team, albeit somewhat less bad than I feared. 

So, did the Twins surpass expectations? In my view yes, at least in terms of wins and losses, but only because mine were so low to begin with. And that very fact is why I struggled to ever feel truly engaged with this season. 

I never believed in the capability and potential of this team like I did in 2024 before the collapse, or in 2025's first half to a lesser degree. This team never won 12 or 13 straight games; it never won more than four straight. Not a single player had a truly star-caliber season. 

In that regard, the Twins didn't surpass my expectations at all. They were exactly what I expected. But at least they are giving me reason to expect more next year. Because, everything else aside, this team did finish on a much different note than the last two.

Instead of watching a collection of disgruntled veterans play out the string, Twins fans got a September introduction to players who might actually be central to where this thing goes next. Walker Jenkins, Kaelen Culpepper and Emmanuel Rodriguez weren't just prospects looming somewhere off in the distance anymore. They were here, getting meaningful exposure to the majors and giving us a glimpse of what a younger, more dynamic Twins lineup could look like.

On the pitching side, Taj Bradley and Connor Prielipp put the finishing touches on breakthrough seasons that established them as legitimate rotation fixtures. There are plenty of holes left to fill and questions left to answer, but the Twins will enter this offseason with a clearer picture of their young core than they had a year ago.

Maybe that's the most meaningful way this team exceeded expectations. The 2026 Twins weren't particularly good, and they never gave us much reason to believe they would become good. But by the end, they gave us a few more reasons to believe what comes next might (finally) be different.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Did this team exceed your expectations? And where does this finish leave your expectations looking ahead to 2027?

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