The 2025 trade deadline has passed. Here's who hit it out of the park -- and who swung and missed.
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What a sad, brutal day to be a Twins fan. Gone this deadline period:
Carlos Correa,
Jhoan Duran,
Griffin Jax,
Louis Varland,
Danny Coulombe,
Harrison Bader,
Willi Castro,
Brock Stewart and
Chris Paddack. That's nine players off the 26-man roster, including the back end of a championship-caliber bullpen. At least they kept
Joe Ryan and
Byron Buxton.
Sure, some of those guys -- Bader and Castro in particular -- were heading to free agency. It's more the messaging here: We're cheap and don't care about winning. Was that likely this season? Probably not, as the Twins are 5½ games out of the wild-card race. But it wasn't an impossible idea. One hot streak and they're right back in it. Is it likely next year? Probably not now. The Twins will need to build an entire bullpen from scratch, for starters. They have one legitimate star position player in Buxton, and he has trouble staying healthy.
Did they do well in the trades? Time will tell, but it's not like they loaded up on top-100 prospects or anything like that. Catcher Eduardo Tait is the most interesting prospect they got, but he's an 18-year-old in High-A and likely years away from making an impact. It's possible the Twins -- if they spend some of the savings on trading Correa's contract -- can reallocate their resources to build a more competitive, well-rounded team. It's also possible, with the team for sale, that the Twins are entering a Rays- or Pirates-like era of frugality, pocketing more profits while the losses pile up.
This Twins era began with a 101-win team in 2019. They signed Correa in 2022, but the Correa era will have produced just one playoff season in four years. It might be a few years before the Twins are even thinking of the playoffs again. Twins fans can only hope that assessment is wrong.