The day the Twins signed Carlos Correa to the biggest contract in team history was a momentous one for the franchise. But it was nothing compared with the day they changed their mind.
The Twins executed their biggest midseason roster strip-down ever on Thursday, sending away Correa and seven of his teammates in a fire sale that gutted their bullpen and sapped their bench. Including Chris Paddack and Jhoan Duran, dealt away earlier in the week, the Twins lopped off 10 players — nearly 40% of the 26-man roster that started the week.
In doing so, the Twins also trimmed $26 million from this season’s payroll, minus two months of presumably minimum-salary players to play out the schedule. But team President Derek Falvey insisted after it was over that saving money was a byproduct, not the objective, of the deal-making.
Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, left, and Derek Falvey, Twins president of baseball operations, speak on stage during the Twins’s 20th Annual Diamonds Awards event on January 23, 2025. (Jeff Wheeler/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
“By and large across the board, [these] were baseball trades, and trades that we felt like we got real talent back, and were not geared toward the financial flexibility component to it,” Falvey said Thursday night. “The decisions that we [made] over the last few days were to try to continually explore ways that we could evolve this roster, to pump some health into it in different ways, not just for the short term, but for the long term. And we feel like we were able to do that.”
Falvey cited previous trades of Nelson Cruz in 2021, which brought then-little-known Joe Ryan from Tampa Bay to Minnesota, and Eduardo Escobar, dealt to Arizona for Duran in 2018, as parallels to what he and General Manager Jeremy Zoll were trying to accomplish this time.
Time will tell, but the remainder of the 2025 season figures to be a real challenge. The Twins, owners of the 12th-best record in the American League at 51-57, will take the field Friday in Cleveland without position players Harrison Bader, Willi Castro, Ty France and Correa, and relief pitchers Danny Coulombe, Brock Stewart, Griffin Jax and Louie Varland.
• Bader, a former Gold Glove outfielder who signed a one-year deal for $4.75 million in February, was sent to Philadelphia on Thursday morning in exchange for Class AA outfielder Hendry Mendez and 16-year-old Venezuelan righthander Geremy Villoria, a day after the Phillies sent two top prospects to the Twins for Duran.
• Stewart, a righthanded reliever with a long injury history, was sent back to the Dodgers, for whom he pitched during the early days of his career from 2016 to ’19. That was a one-for-one deal for Dodgers center fielder James Outman, who enjoyed a strong rookie season in 2023 — including a grand slam off then-Twins reliever Emilio Pagán — but has batted only .137 in 75 big-league games since then. Outman was assigned to Class AAA St. Paul for now.
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