This story was excerpted from Matthew Leach’s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
DETROIT -- If it feels at times like the Twins have already crammed two or three seasons worth of baseball into 2025, it’s understandable. They’ve had good and bad streaks, injuries, spectacular plays and lengthy delays. But believe it or not, we’re just barely past the halfway mark. Thursday’s win against Seattle was game No. 81 out of 162. So here’s a look at some first-half superlatives for the Twins as the second half gets going.
MVP: This is an easy one. Few players on any team have been better in the first half of the season than Byron Buxton. He added his 19th homer and 15th steal to an already brilliant year on Saturday. Buxton leads all Major League center fielders in OPS (.927) while playing his typical outstanding defense. He didn't fare well in All-Star voting, but it’s hard to imagine that his second Midsummer Classic berth won’t be announced on July 6.
Play of the year: We have to go way back to the season’s first month for this one. On April 22, a seemingly comfortable win against the White Sox had gotten scary in the ninth. A 7-15 team was in dire need of securing a victory, but it was getting very difficult. Andrew Benintendi launched a deep drive to right-center that had a chance to tie the game. But it didn’t. Because of Buxton, who made what he said was perhaps the best play of his career. Buxton made a beeline for the ball and came up with a stunning leaping catch that secured the victory and helped the Twins get their season in gear.
Newcomer of the year: Harrison Bader was coming off three straight subpar years at the plate relative to earlier in his career. And though he retained his reputation as a sterling defender, it’s always hard to know how long a speed-based player will retain those skills into their 30s.
But Bader has not only retained his defense, and maybe even stepped it up a bit, he’s returned to the kind of offensive player he was early in his career in St. Louis. He’s already amassed 1.5 WAR, which would be his highest season total since 2021, with seven homers and seven steals.
Storyline of the year: Everybody ride the roller coaster! The Twins began the season 7-15, when they were mostly pitching well but couldn’t buy a big hit. Then they stabilized, playing more or less .500 ball for a couple of weeks. That was followed by the exhilaration of a 13-game winning streak, then another two weeks hovering around .500. Then came another skid, as Minnesota lost 15 out of 18, but this time primarily due to an inability to prevent runs, not score them. “We've played all kinds of baseball in the first half this year,” said manager Rocco Baldelli with not a little bit of understatement.