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The Minnesota Twins aren't actually good, right now. They have the potential to be, if they get more from their latent talent in 2026 than they have gotten from many of the same players over the last two years, but they're not currently a competitive team. As they embark on their offseason work, they have to hope they can spend some money to support the roster and take it to the next level. Unfortunately, the opposite course might be their required path.
Let's imagine that the Twins' budget is as tight as we've all worried it would be. In that case, they're not only unlikely to make a significant investment to improve at first base or DH or to shore up their thin bullpen, but in danger of having to trade one or more of their expensive (though stellar) veterans: Byron Buxton, Ryan Jeffers, Pablo López and Joe Ryan. They would, therefore, have virtually no chance of surging back into contention. They'd also start feeling both time and personal pressure to move Buxton (who wants to play for a winner) and Jeffers (a free agent after 2026), in particular. Meanwhile, another lost year would mean launching the clock forward on López and Ryan, each of whom can be free agents at the end of the 2027 season.
In such a situation, there's a case to be made that the Twins would be best served by hitting the big red button and blowing up the current roster, in a more profound way than they did at the 2025 trade deadline. That's particularly true because of the young talent they've already amassed, and the influx they're likely to see next July.
MLB Pipeline ranked the Twins as the second-best farm system in baseball after the deadline. bolstered by the haul from their July fire sale. FanGraphs is much less bullish, ranking them just 12th, but even that is above-average. The truth likely lies somewhere in between, for the moment, with Walker Jenkins, Kaelen Culpepper, Emmanuel Rodriguez and Eduardo Tait as the big four in a very deep group. They also have some good young players in the majors already, under long-term team and cost control. Luke Keaschall is the face of that cohort, but it also includes several intriguing pitchers. So far, the team hasn't gotten the big-league production for which they might have hoped from Zebby Matthews or David Festa, and it's still not clear what Mick Abel, Taj Bradley, Simeon Woods Richardson, Andrew Morris, Connor Prielipp and Marco Raya will become, but there's a good deal of young talent clustered around the big-league roster already.
That group will be supplemented, if the Twins have gotten their recent reorganization in Latin America right, by new waves of teenage talent from that part of the world. They have Eduardo Beltre, a 2026 breakout candidate, and added some exciting players from the low minors in July—though they then fired several of the scouts who helped find them. Much more quickly and tangibly, they should get help from a high pick in the first round of next summer's MLB Draft. They won't know exactly where they pick in July until the MLB Draft Lottery at next week's Winter Meetings, but they have roughly a 50/50 shot of nabbing a top-three selection. They also officially received a competitive-balance pick this week, though it won't come until the tail end of the second round.
It's not an easy needle to thread, but the Twins could end up with a once-in-a-generation farm system by the 2026 trade deadline. If they trade players as good and valuable as Buxton, López or the others, theirs will become the best farm system anyone has had in the 2020s. That's not the same as having the best farm system in the game at a given moment; it's a much bigger thing.
When people talk about teams who plunge into rebuilding with gusto (or even glee), they often cite the 2010s Cubs and Astros. Those clubs are sometimes held responsible, in public circles, for the culture of tanking and aggressive boom-bust team-building that took over the game in their wake. In truth, though, those teams were merely responding to the rules and incentives the game foisted on them when the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement altered the nature of draft spending and the competitive-balance tax. They were also scrambling to make up for unintentional multi-year downturns. They had to take their medicine for almost a half-decade before emerging as powerhouses, but they each succeeded in doing so, to some degree.
There was also an exemplar who came before those two teams. The late-2000s Royals were a bad team, but not on purpose. Frustrated by what he saw as a stagnating roster around him, ace Zack Greinke demanded a trade, and they accommodated him by shipping him to Milwaukee. In the wake of that deal, Kansas City was semi-voluntarily bad for another few years—but between some good draft picks, a couple of huge hits on Latin American talent, and the accelerant that was the Greinke trade, they also built the best farm system anyone had had in a decade or so.
As was true with the Cubs and Astros, that eventually paid dividends. The Royals contended in 2013, though they missed the postseason with an 86-76 record. The next year, they snuck into the playoffs, but then reeled off an improbable run to Game 7 of the World Series. In 2015, they won a second straight pennant, and this time, they finished the job, winning their first championship since 1985 by beating the Mets in five games.
With an aggressive set of rebuilding moves this winter and during the summer of 2026, the Twins could be an even faster-moving version of those Royals. They have Jenkins as one prospective cornerstone of the next great team. If the lottery breaks right, they should have a chance to add another player of that caliber. The rest comes down to continued successes in scouting and (especially) player development, because Keaschall, Culpepper, and many young arms already in the system have that kind of upside—but it must be realized to become important.
Unlike the Royals, the Twins play in a market with average-plus ceiling, if they can dig out of the hole they find themselves in now. They have a higher initial baseline in their favor, and the rules won't drag on their attempts to sustain success the way they did with the Cubs and Astros. It only works if they raise the stakes and win their gamble, but the Twins might be better off trading some of their stars to go from a great farm system to a truly transcendent, change-your-fortunes kind of corps.
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