When the Twins and their fans woke up on Aug. 18, 2024, they sat in second place in the American League Central. They were just two games behind the (eventual) division-winning Guardians, with whom they had split a series the prior weekend. Minnesota had just taken three straight games from the (flailing) reigning World Series champion Texas Rangers and were looking for a four-game sweep.
It took five minutes to derail the Twins’ season. Pablo López pitched them to a comfortable four-run lead after six, but Jorge Alcala entered to pitch the seventh inning, and within five real-world minutes surrendered five runs on 19 pitches. The Rangers would walk off Jhoan Duran in the 10th inning.
At the time, it was a disappointing game, but it was just a game. In the months since, it has become understood as the beginning of the end.
The team that saved their season with 12 consecutive wins in April and May didn’t win more than two games in a row over the final seven weeks of the season, finishing on a 12-27 skid. They missed the playoffs, after projection systems gave them a better than 90% chance to make the postseason on that fateful August day.
Nothing worked down the stretch. Injuries, performance slippage, and fatigue were too much. There were rumblings of clubhouse discord. There was a lifelessness observable on the field, as the players lived the same disappointment that we watched. All they needed was a couple September wins against the Marlins to eke in anyway, but they couldn’t even do that.
Discourse about ownership reignited. After reducing payroll by tens of millions after the club’s first playoff win in nearly a decade, there was already a level of anger and vitriol among fans. But that went up another notch, becoming a go-to excuse, reason, or rationale amid the collapse. The team didn’t improve at the deadline. There were no meaningful reinforcements.
Conversely, the familiar complaints about players, coaches, and management rose again. The players had no fight, the manager was incompetent, the front office was too passive. Those complaints had waned as the team flourished at midseason. But as things got worse, the conversations became louder.
It was an important offseason, ripe for change. On the ownership side, the biggest change possible was announced—or at least, the first step of that change was. In October, the Pohlad family announced that they were exploring a sale of the team. The much-maligned billionaire family had very few defenders, and the announcement was a welcome one among Twins fans who dreamt of what the organization could look like with a more benevolent, unknown owner.
On the baseball side, that offseason ripe for change bore no fruit. Nominal change happened—Carlos Santana, Max Kepler, and Caleb Thielbar were out, Ty France, Harrison Bader, and Danny Coulombe were in. The same core that folded down the stretch in 2024 would be leading the charge in 2025. It wasn’t the worst decision ever, trusting that the team that sat at 70-53 on August 18 was more representative than the team that finished 12-27. But it was a gamble to dance with the girl that brung them. There was no great cleansing.
The front office itself was also held in place, other than promotions ,following the historic collapse. Everyone was gonna run it back.
In February, word leaked that that mysterious, benevolent owner was not just a hypothetical. Justin Ishbia—brother of Mat Ishbia, the owner of the Phoenix Suns—was strongly pursuing a purchase of the team. There was no guarantee as to how he would run the organization, but he would have been one of the richest owners in baseball; he’s a baseball fan; and his brother’s team had earned a reputation for spending to win. But as quickly as he had appeared, he disappeared, instead pursuing a purchase of the division rival White Sox, a team closer to home (and that he was already a minority owner of). And no individual or group seemed primed to fill his place.
Amid all of this uncertainty, the Twins didn’t spend. That’s part of the lack of turnover, too. It was part philosophy, it was part circumstance. But the Twins opened the season with the same team they ended the prior year with, more or less. And they opened the year with the same play, more or less, skidding through the opening weeks and requiring another two-week stretch of consecutive wins to drag themselves out of the bowels of MLB. This time, they couldn’t keep it up.
One of the most fascinating parts of the last year of Twins baseball is just how stale most of it was, and how that staleness accompanied so much change. Ownership was constantly in flux, but nothing truly changed. The team from the beginning of 2024 was more or less the same team as the beginning of 2025, but it played in a totally different way.
By July, it became clear that change was finally coming. The Twins would be sellers, at least at the deadline, though there were questions as to how much they would sell. They sold a lot. In order: Chris Paddack, Randy Dobnak, Jhoan Duran, Harrison Bader, Brock Stewart, Carlos Correa, Danny Coulombe, Willi Castro, Griffin Jax, Ty France, and Louie Varland. All shipped off to the highest bidder.
And suddenly, everything was changed. The team that spent so many months so stale was turned on its head. Eighteen players played in that August 18 game. Five are on the active roster today. After all those calls for a shakeup of the hitting core, the Twins traded… their whole bullpen. Much of that offensive core remains.
Of course, they did trade Carlos Correa—the leader of the team. He was unceremoniously shipped off to Houston, paying the Astros to take his contract off the books. The era was just… over. Only 22 of the 52 players who played a game for the Twins last season are still in the organization today, and that’s after one of the least active offseasons you could imagine.
And speaking of inaction, ownership. Just days ago, the announcement was released: The Pohlads would not be selling the team. Well, not all of it, anyway. Instead, limited partners will be buying a portion, but the family still has control. Twins fans went from being fed up with ownership, to hopeful for a new owner, to ecstatic about a real potential owner, to heartbroken, to grasping at any morsel of information, back to being fed up with ownership, or at least about three-quarters of it.
On the field, the staleness turned to rot. The cooks hope that cutting off part of the loaf makes the rest of the bread edible again.
This all started with a good team that seemed destined for the playoffs. How much different would we feel had that meltdown not happened? If, instead of being incensed, we were merely annoyed that the team could have gone a little farther with a little more investment? Instead of front office promotions following a complete self-destruction, what if they came after guiding a cheap and injury-riddled team into the playoffs? Instead of failing to fix what went wrong down the stretch, what if they merely banked on continual improvement and ran it back with a similar team?
And what if today’s ownership, after all those months of questions, wasn’t the same ownership that the club had 12 months ago, plus a couple of friends?