One year after Minnesota's teardown, Joe Ryan and the Twins are again at a crossroad

CLEVELAND — On Aug. 1, 2025, Cleveland Twins right-hander Joe Ryan strolled into the visitors’ clubhouse at Progressive Field attempting to treat it like a normal day.

Ryan was the scheduled starting pitcher that evening, but about 20 hours earlier, his chances of taking the mound for Minnesota had become uncertain. Over the preceding week, 10 of his teammates on the Twins’ major-league roster had been dealt away in various trades leading up to the MLB trade deadline in one of the most dramatic midseason roster teardowns in recent memory.

The tide had started to turn the previous Sunday, when the Twins dropped a series at home to the Washington Nationals, the team with the second-worst record in MLB. The next day, starter Chris Paddack was shipped to the Detroit Tigers. On Wednesday, the Twins played a matinee against the Boston Red Sox and lost 13-1 to fall to 51-57. At that point, they were 5.5 games out of the wild-card mix, with five teams ahead of them in the standings, and their playoff odds, according to FanGraphs, had sunk below 5%. A few hours after the final out, star closer Jhoan Duran was sent to Philadelphia — a serious indicator that more deals were on deck.

The team then traveled to Cleveland, where small groups of Twins players spent the Thursday deadline day huddled in hotel rooms awaiting their fates. Early in the afternoon, it was reported that outfielder Harrison Bader was off to Philadelphia to join Duran. Another reliever subtraction followed, with Brock Stewart headed to the Dodgers. Around 4 p.m. came the biggest bombshell: Shortstop Carlos Correa had waived his no-trade clause to return to the Houston Astros.

At that point, everything and anything seemed to be on the table.

"Every single deadline brings a lot of uncertainty around the league,” Twins right-hander Pablo Lopez said. “[That] was, like, uncertainty times 10. Especially once you see a couple things unfold. …”

Lopez was not with the team in Cleveland on deadline day, having stayed back to rehab a shoulder injury.

“Even myself,” Lopez recalled, “I was on the IL, and I'm like, am I getting traded, too?”

Ultimately, Lopez was not traded. But the Twins were far from finished. With Correa’s complicated tenure in Minnesota over, there was more offloading to be done. Lefty Danny Coulombe was traded to the Rangers. Popular utilityman Willi Castro was headed to the Cubs. Reliever Louis Varland and first baseman Ty France were off to Toronto. And for a brief, chaotic period just before the 6 p.m. ET cut-off, it seemed like Ryan would have a new home. 

As time ticked down, Ryan was at the team hotel watching trade deadline coverage on TV with fellow pitcher Griffin Jax. At 5:32 p.m., MLB Network’s Jon Morosi reported that the Red Sox were making a late push to acquire Ryan, setting off a chaotic final half-hour of confusion.

“I'd gotten calls, and they're like, ‘Have the Red Sox called you yet?’” Ryan recalled. “And I'm like, ‘What do you mean?’”

Just before the deadline, a call came — but not for him. The Rays had swung a buzzer-beater deal to acquire Jax. Ryan was staying put. 

“Then he gets moved, and I don’t,” he said. “It was crazy.”

And so, once he arrived at the ballpark in Cleveland the next day, Ryan went about his business preparing for his start while the assembled media floated around the room asking the veteran holdovers how they were processing their team’s drastic overhaul. Between platitudes about staying confident and somber admissions about the uneasy post-deadline mood, Twins players and staff engaged in quiet reconnections (or outright introductions) with the influx of teammates who had arrived from Triple-A. That evening, Ryan pitched well, but the Twins were walked off in the 10th inning — a fitting punctuation to a dispiriting few days.

The Twins’ season petered out from there, ultimately concluding with 92 losses, the most for the franchise since 2016. While Ryan trade rumors persisted into the offseason, the Twins made minimal notable transactions over the winter, though they remained in the news. Manager Rocco Baldelli was dismissed and replaced with Derek Shelton, who was Minnesota’s bench coach for two seasons before his six-year stint as skipper for the Pittsburgh Pirates. 

In December, the Twins announced a change in ownership structure, most notably that Tom Pohlad would succeed his brother, Joe, in day-to-day oversight of the organization. This came just months after the family retracted their ambitions to sell the team. Then in January, the team announced it had “mutually agreed to part ways” with president of baseball operations Derek Falvey, who had held that post since 2017, with assistant general manager Jeremy Zoll assuming the top front office responsibilities.

The strange and significant shake-up atop the org chart and the limited upgrades made to the major-league roster did not inspire much confidence in Minnesota entering the 2026 season. As such, it felt like a near certainty that Ryan trade rumors would eventually resurface along with the Twins’ struggles on the field. 

Instead, in a weak American League, Minnesota has played just well enough thus far to avoid being cast aside as an obvious seller. Entering play Monday, the Twins are 53-54, 3.5 games behind the White Sox in the AL Central and just one game out of the third wild-card spot. FanGraphs sets their odds of qualifying for the postseason at 33% and their odds of winning the division at 19%.

Last week, the Twins were back in Cleveland, with the trade deadline looming large once again. Just like last summer, Ryan was the scheduled starter for the series opener against the Guardians, this time with a chance to help Minnesota push for a playoff spot. But it wasn’t Ryan’s night. Making his first start for the Twins since he threw a scoreless fourth inning in the All-Star Game, he was bombarded by Cleveland’s light-hitting lineup. With scouts from at least four different teams in the seats evaluating the right-hander (and some of his teammates), Ryan surrendered eight runs across four innings, including six home runs, tying a major-league record.

It was an untimely disaster in every sense, but it was also quite the outlier amid yet another stellar campaign from Minnesota’s most dependable frontline arm. This is Ryan’s fifth full season as a member of the Twins’ rotation, having arrived from Tampa Bay in the 2021 trade for Nelson Cruz. (The circumstances of that deal — Ryan had just arrived in Tokyo to compete in the Olympics with Team USA when he found out he’d been traded — are a reminder that he’s no stranger to unusual deadline sequences.) With exceptional command of an elite fastball thrown with plus extension from an unusually low release height, Ryan has evolved from a rock-solid midrotation arm to a two-time All-Star. Among 43 hurlers with at least 400 innings pitched the past three seasons, Ryan ranks 15th in ERA (3.47), seventh in WHIP (1.04) and sixth in strikeout-minus-walk percentage (22.7%).

Before his poor showing last week at Progressive Field, Ryan ranked fifth in fWAR among MLB starters in 2026, behind only Jacob Misiorowski, Cristopher Sánchez, Dylan Cease and Cam Schlittler. While his high-whiff heater and strong strike-throwing remain the bedrock of his profile, Ryan has made some notable tweaks to his arsenal this season, which have helped him level up. With his four-seam usage at a career-low 46% (but still rather high for a starter), he has introduced a knuckle-curve (11%) to complement his splitter (12%) and sweeper (15%), two secondary weapons that are performing better than ever with his repertoire’s enhanced diversity.