Minnesota Twins 2025 Season Preview: Good or Great?

The Minnesota Twins experienced a historic and catastrophic collapse in the final six weeks of last season, coming up severely short of their potential, and they still finished with a winning record. That's an important fact to keep in mind as we start to analyze the outlook for this year's roster, which—for better or worse—is largely unchanged. 

This is a good team. Vegas knows it. Projection models substantiate it. Many Twins fans don't seem to recognize it, or care. That's understandable. The pall of a tumultuous ownership situation and lifeless offseason hang over this franchise and won't clear until they can go on the field, start winning, and catalyze the community. Good won't cut it; they need to be great. And they are plenty capable.

As we set the stage for the 2025 season here on Opening Day, here's a breakdown of everything you need to know about the Twins and their outlook.

Still looking for somewhere to watch this afternoon's season opener against the Cardinals? Join us at BlackStack Brewing in St. Paul! It's free to attend, and you can claim a free beer by RSVP-ing here.

Projections and Over-Unders
Statistical projections and Vegas odds stop mattering once the games start being played. But as we look ahead one final time, probabilistic models and betting benchmarks can provide helpful outside context in evaluating the season-opening state of affairs.

According to FanGraphs’ probabilistic Playoff Odds model—which runs 20,000 simulations using team projections from its Depth Charts system—the Twins are forecast to win 84 games with a 55% chance of reaching the postseason. They lead the AL Central division in both regards, despite coming off a fourth-place finish. In fact, the Twins are the third-most likely team in the American League to clinch a bye, trailing only the Yankees and Mariners. It's a good team.

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Vegas agrees. There's basically a consensus across betting markets that the Twins are slight AL Central favorites. FanDuel Sportsbook, as one example, has Minnesota (+220) narrowly edging the Tigers (+230), with a healthier distance in front of Cleveland and Kansas City. These specifics vary by the source; the Twins usually have the shortest odds, but no one is viewing them as anything close a heavy favorite. And anyway, that doesn't really matter, because the preseason favorite has rarely ended up on top of the Central in recent years.

The moneyline numbers do tell us something about widespread perception of this team. Everyone is aware of what happened to the Twins at the end of last year. Everyone is aware they finished fourth, and did next to nothing in the offseason. Still, there's a relatively strong level of confidence among invested onlookers. Because it's a good team.

Position-by-Position Overviews
Over the past few weeks, I went through each area of the Twins' roster, position by position, to break down the outlook, depth and future. You can catch up on all of these position previews below.

Catcher

• Ryan Jeffers and Christian Vazquez have been the league's most durable backstop duo, but that hasn't translated to outstanding overall performance. Jeffers's bat holds the key to elevating the Twins at catcher.

First Base

• In 2024 it was the team's only position of stability. Now, the Twins aim to replace Carlos Santana with a long-shot reclamation flier on Ty France. They need to hope it pays off because the depth behind him is sparse. 

Second Base

• Brooks Lee was contending for the starting job but will open on the injured list due to another back injury. That leaves Edouard Julien in the driver's seat, with Willi Castro and potentially Mickey Gasper set to mix in.

Third Base

• With both Lee and Royce Lewis down to start the year, Jose Miranda steps up as primary 3B, while Castro also factors in. The Twins now badly need Miranda to stay healthy and find consistency.

Shortstop

• Carlos Correa staying on the field and productive coming off two injury-ravaged seasons is perhaps the single biggest key to Minnesota's success. With Lee down, there aren't really any trusted contingencies at short.

Left Field

• Trevor Larnach is expected to split time between here and designated hitter, with Harrison Bader seeing a sizable share of time as well—especially against left-handers. A solid pairing of offensive and defensive strength.

Center Field

• Byron Buxton is in a good place physically, which has been rare over the course of his career. As long as that remains true, CF is well covered. Bader gives them a high-caliber backup plan.

Right Field

• The Max Kepler era has ended and now the Matt Wallner era begins. He has the potential to establish himself as one of the league's top sluggers at the position, if he can keep the prolonged slumps at bay.

Designated Hitter

• Expect to see a medley of players rotating through DH, with the switch-hitting Gasper potentially serving as a regular early on until Lewis and Lee return to reduce the dependency on Miranda and Julien at 2B/3B.

Starting Pitcher

• The three-headed monster of Pablo López, Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober leads the way for a deep rotation that shapes up as one of the team's biggest and most encouraging strengths heading into the season. 

Relief Pitcher

• The Twins bullpen projects as the best in MLB, but relievers are notoriously fickle and tough to predict. The ability of this unit to achieve it's potential seems to really hinge on how good Jhoan Durán can be.

State of the AL Central
Heading into the past offseason, the Twins faced an imposing landscape in this evolving division. The Guardians reclaimed the Central crown, reaching the ALCS, while both Detroit and Kansas City leapfrogged Minnesota en route to postseason berths of their own. It looked as though the long-dormant Tigers and Royals were on the rise, poised to potentially invest and keep pushing this offseason while the Twins sat still.

But then ... everyone sat still. The AL Central as a whole barely made any noise during hot stove season, helping explain why no team has been able to elevate themselves above the idling Twins in projections or oddsmaking lines. In fact, the American League as a whole is wide open heading into this season, with the Astros down and the presumptive favorite Yankees besieged by devastating injuries. Compared to the East and West, teams in the Central will have the advantage of more matchups against the inept White Sox.

If the Twins can get things to click this year, capturing the No. 1 seed in the AL is not out of the question. For that to happen, they'll need several of the key storylines below to play out favorably.

Key Storylines for the 2025 Minnesota Twins
These are the pivotal narratives that will determine the fate of this this year's Twins team. 

Healthy skepticism
It's a cliché, especially for this team, but once again injuries are a central crux. Numerous players are looking to rebound from physically tumultuous seasons. There was an air of optimism throughout camp surrounding the team's health outlook, but then the setbacks started to mount in the final 10 days or so: Lewis's hamstring, Lee's back, Brock Stewart's hamstring and Michael Tonkin's shoulder will push all four players to the injured list to start the campaign.

An early blip or a sign of things to come? We'll see. The Twins have a reasonable amount of depth, especially on the pitching side, but as we've learned: when the attrition keeps on coming you're eventually going to run out of capable options. 

Read more: Next Man Up: Silver Linings of Some Bad End-of-Camp Injury News for the Twins

The Big Three
There aren't many teams around baseball that have three genuinely MVP-caliber players in their prime, poised to propel the lineup. The Twins have that in Correa, Buxton and Lewis, but keeping these three on the field at the same time has proven to be an extraordinary challenge. Bucking this trend will be critical if Minnesota is to fulfill its true potential as a championship contender.

We're already off to a bad start on the Lewis front, but Correa and Buxton had very encouraging camps from a physical standpoint, and that's big given how hobbled they both were at the end of 2024. If Lewis can come back relatively quickly and join a healthy Correa and Buxton, there's really no limit to where this team can go. 

Best-in-class bullpen?
A truly elite, shutdown bullpen can make up for a lot of flaws elsewhere on a roster. It can elevate an otherwise mediocre team to greatness. Just ask the 2024 Cleveland Guardians, who won the Central and reached the ALCS despite a rotation and offense that both rated as pretty pedestrian. 

This Twins bullpen has that type of potential. It really does. Their formidable stable of late-inning arms includes Durán, Griffin Jax, Cole Sands, Jorge Alcala, Danny Coulombe, Louie Varland and hopefully Stewart once healthy. With good health, this unit has a chance to shorten games and tilt many close contests in Minnesota's favor.

Then again, with bullpens, you just never know...

Read more: 5 Reasons to Trust Jhoan Durán as Minnesota Twins Closer in 2025

Relying on offensive rebounds
So many key players on this team have outlooks that are riddled with variance. Julien, Miranda, Jeffers, Austin Martin and the currently-injured Lee and Lewis are all among the youngish hitters looking to rebound from bad seasons, or bad second halves at least. That also goes for both of the newcomers, Bader and France. 

All of these guys have the potential to be really good. They've shown that. But they also all have the potential to be really unproductive drains on the lineup, and unfortunately in all cases, we've seen that side more recently. It's a precarious situation for a team to be so dependent on this quantity of players bouncing back from failure, but that's where we are at.

If things don't break the right way more often than not within this group, and especially if the Big Three can't hold up, it's all too easy to see things really going south for this offense. 

Pulling for the underdogs
Among the players who will open the season on the Twins' active roster, you have the following:

• Gasper, who is still searching for his first major-league hit at age 29 after finally breaking through with the Red Sox late last year, following 1,600 plate appearances in the minors. He survived a nasty collision that required six stitches at the end of spring, but he made it. 
• DaShawn Keirsey Jr., a 28-year-old outfielder who also has barely tasted the big leagues. It looked like his chance may never come, but he got called up last September out of necessity and made enough of an impression to stick around for a more extended look here in 2025.
• Randy Dobnak, who was the OG underdog tale six years ago when he first arrived in the majors as an undrafted former independent-league pitcher. He started a playoff game, made the Opening Day roster in consecutive seasons, and even earned himself a nice contract extension. Then, in 2021, it all fell apart for Dobnak, who's mostly been out of sight since then. Now he gets one final opportunity to find redemption, starting out as a long reliever in the bullpen.

Read more: Have the Twins Found Their Next Cult Hero in Mickey Gasper?  

Sale of the franchise looms overhead
The pending potential sale of the Twins franchise continues to cast a shadow over everything happening on the field. This talented and star-laden roster was given the short shrift for a second straight offseason thanks to an ownership that decided they no longer want to seriously invest. 

News that the franchise was being put for sale by the Pohlad family was met by relief and borderline jubilation from a frustrated fan base. Throughout much of the offseason there was optimism that a new owner could be announced by Opening Day, but Justin Ishbia's gut-punch abandonment of his bid erased all momentum and now there is no resolution in sight. 

If this team gets off to a bad start, I loathe to think about the rancor and bad vibes that will fester from a certain contingent of fans, with ownership conveying such a low level of commitment. But I guess that's preferable to the apathy that will set in more broadly among Minnesota sports fans. The Twins need to find success on the field, or find a new owner, or both. The alternative scenario is exceedingly grim.

Nick's Picks for the 2025 Season
To close out my position preview, here are my predictions for Twins MVP, best pitcher, top rookie, and comeback player of the year (so many options for that one). I'd love to hear yours in the comments. Let's get this season rolling!

• Twins MVP: Byron Buxton
• Best Pitcher: Griffin Jax
• Top Rookie: Luke Keaschall
• Comeback Player: Edouard Julien