Expectations were high for the Minnesota Twins heading into the 2026 season after a fire sale last summer that resulted in seven players coming off the 26-man roster, including Carlos Correa and half of the bullpen. To defy expectations this year, the Twins need to disrupt the performance as much as they can to bring out the remaining talent. Early on, Ryan Jeffers more than lived up to his expectations, hitting .295/.408/.541 with a team-leading 165 wRC+. At 1.7 WAR in just under two months, he was close to his career-best 2.3 WAR from 2023. Now, a broken hamate bone will likely sideline him for four to six weeks, which will result in Victor Caratini more on the roster than anyone wants to see.
The Twins also picked up third baseman Royce Lewis last summer. Part of that was because he was affordable and under team control for the 2028 season, but it was also because he took a big step back last year and wouldn’t have cost them much in a trade. The often-injured Lewis was a key part of the last Minnesota team to make it through the 2023 season, and the hope was that he would return this season. Instead, a .539 OPS and some extreme contact difficulty earned him a trip to Triple-A St. Paul.
Neither player’s stat line in 2026 looks like a fluke. Jeffers has shown steady improvement in his approach to the plate over the past few years, and his walk rate was higher than ever in 2026. After a deduction with a contact rate hovering around the 70% mark in 2020-2021 and making a 77.0% rate between 2022-2024, Jeffers increased his contact rate to 5% last year in 80. 2026 before his injury. While he won’t completely destroy baseballs like Giancarlo Stanton or Oneil Cruz, Jeffers makes enough contact to do damage, especially to the catcher.
Caratini is a serviceable enough backup, but he’s underrated as a starter, and his six weeks on the roster compared to Jeffers limited his chances of playing in Minnesota a bit. With Jeffers uninjured, ZiPS revealed that the Twins will have a 23.1% chance of making the playoffs this year. With injuries, however, their chances drop to 20.5%. That’s not a crazy big gap, but it’s a big blow to just lose one player for a quarter of the season.
Lewis hasn’t been completely healthy in 2026, but the loose knee that sent him to the injured list last month isn’t a satisfactory explanation for what’s wrong with him. He was a mess offensively, striking out 31.1% of his plate appearances, a nearly 50 percent increase from his career strikeout rate. His contact rates are down, suggesting his increased strikeout percentage is legitimate. His contact rate is down to 65.6%, a dangerous spot, and he’s making contact just 78.3% of the time when he swings at pitches in the zone, nearly five percent below his career mark. Meanwhile, his out-of-zone contact rate is a career-worst 44.0%, and he is turning in 32.8% of the pitches he sees out of the zone. With all of this in mind, pitchers threw 38.3% of their pitches to Lewis in the chase/waste zone compared to 29.8% last year. These numbers are very concerning, especially because they tend to be meaningful in small sample sizes, which is enough to raise serious questions about Lewis’ future. Going into 2026, ZiPS saw him as a .730ish OPS guy over the next few years. Not anymore:
ZiPS Projection – Royce Lewis
| A year | BA | OBP | SLG | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | The RBI | BB | SO | SB | OPS+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | .234 | .296 | .411 | 367 | 45 | 86 | 17 | 0 | 16 | 54 | 32 | 93 | 9 | 94 | 1.1 |
| 2028 | .235 | .298 | .406 | 362 | 44 | 85 | 17 | 0 | 15 | 53 | 32 | 90 | 8 | 93 | 1.0 |
| 2029 | .231 | .295 | .394 | 355 | 42 | 82 | 16 | 0 | 14 | 51 | 32 | 88 | 7 | 89 | 0.7 |
To replace him, Minnesota is likely to go with some combination of Tristan Gray, Orlando Arcia, and Ryan Kreidler. With those three, the Twins are projected to rank 30th out of the 30 major league teams produced from their third baseman. If they’re going to have any hope at the hot corner, they’re going to need Lewis to see things in the minors and head straight for the majors. Otherwise, ZiPS thinks their best option at third base is signing 36-year-old free agent Jon Berti. That’s a blur.
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Adding insult (and… injury) to injury, the Twins lost yet another bat this week when 23-year-old Emmanuel Rodriguez suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb, which will require surgery to repair. Rodriguez’s strength and ability to play in the center of the field is amazing, but this is another obstacle for him in his professional career that he has not been able to enter the field for 100 games in a season. ZiPS pegs him as a 110 wRC+ hitter in the majors, but his various injuries have prevented him from getting a chance to really try to do that in the big leagues.
Neither team in the AL Central is a juggernaut, and hanging on to the playoff race until the summer would do much to improve the sentiment of Twins fans, who entered this season with little to no payroll. According to Baseball Prospectus/Cot’s Contracts, Minnesota’s payroll this season is the lowest since 2014 (except for the 2020 payroll, which is only lower because of a 60-game season). Adjusted for inflation, this is the team’s lowest salary since 2009.
The 2026 Twins aren’t dead and buried, even with Jeffers’ injury and Lewis’ offensive news. After all, nobody in the AL Central knows how to dig a very deep grave. But their margin for error is greatly reduced, and unless they can find a quick answer or two soon, the Twins could end up extending their fire sale for another summer.
