After first 90-loss season in nine years, will Twins make any changes?

For the first time in nine years, the Minnesota Twins are a 90-loss baseball team. They reached that mark with four games to spare on Wednesday night.

Aided by a 13-game winning streak, the Twins were firmly in the playoff mix in early June at 34-27. Since then, they've gone a nightmarish 34-63. Only the 115-loss Rockies have a worse record among all MLB teams since June 5 (31-65).

Twins fans have received multiple gut punches over the past two months. First came the stunning trade deadline fire sale, when the team dealt away 10 players, including a pure salary dump of clubhouse leader Carlos Correa and his contract. Then, a couple weeks later, the Pohlad family announced that it was pulling the team off of the market — and in doing so removed the primary remaining reason for hope and optimism among many fans.

The initial anger around that mid-August announcement quickly turned into apathy as the Twins have limped to a lifeless finish. Target Field has been mostly empty. The franchise finished with its worst home attendance in 25 years, and that number is almost certain to drop in 2026. The situation is remarkably bleak right now.

Before this year, the last time the Twins lost 90 games was in 2016, when they went 59-103. It was their fifth 90-loss campaign in a stretch of six years. The Twins fired general manager Terry Ryan that summer, then hired the Derek Falvey-Thad Levine duo after the season ended.

Will any changes occur this time around? The Twins have made the playoffs four times under Falvey, winning one series, but they've now missed the postseason in four of the last five years.

Falvey seems safe, given that he's the president of baseball operations and also recently added business operations to his plate. Jeremy Zoll just finished his first year as GM after the departure of Levine. Manager Rocco Baldelli's job appears safe despite the recent losing, as he had his 2026 club option exercised earlier this year.

Twins Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey speaking to reporters on Friday, Oct. 4, 2024. — Twins Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey | FOX 9

Really, any questions about this offseason and the Twins' future have to start with ownership. What is the Pohlads' plan? After bringing two limited partnership groups on board to help pay down the franchise's debt, will they infuse money back into the team's 2026 payroll? Or will they continue to cut spending — perhaps by trading away Pablo López and/or Joe Ryan — and enter next season with their lowest payroll in years?

Frankly, the latter scenario is a lot easier to believe. It's just hard to imagine what the plan would be if that's what ends up happening. If one or both star pitchers are traded and payroll doesn't come back up anywhere close to 2023 levels, the losses figure to keep piling up and the attendance (and revenue) figures to keep trending down. Are the Pohlads just going to run this thing into the ground and then eventually re-reverse course on selling?

There's a world where the 2026 Twins are competitive. Byron Buxton is an established superstar. Lopez and Ryan currently lead a rotation with some talented young arms. Stud prospects like Walker Jenkins, Emmanuel Rodriguez, and Gabriel Gonzalez are ready to join Luke Keaschall as the next wave of position-player talent in the big leagues. Bullpens can be rebuilt on the fly.

But any baseball analysis feels secondary to the big-picture discussion around ownership and whether or not they have any desire to spend money in order to try to put a winning team on the field.

The Twins are a 90-loss team. The path to avoiding another 90 losses next year starts with the Pohlads and how they choose to handle things this offseason.

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