This is crazy, even by the watered-down standards of the wild-card era. As the calendar turned from June to July, only six of the American League’s 15 teams were playing .500 ball. (The Twins, unsurprisingly, were not one of them.) And in the AL wild-card race, five teams, including the Twins, were within 4 1/2 games of the third and final berth, although none of the five had a winning record.

Nothing says “pennant race” less than a bunch of mediocre teams chasing postseason, and it didn’t take a seam-headed savant to predict the lack of excitement around this flawed, uninspiring Twins team. Last year’s trade deadline selloff essentially told Twins fans to forget about 2026, and none of the staff and front office changes that followed — new manager, new head of baseball operations, new Pohlad at the top of the organization — altered many opinions or stirred a run on the box office.

Even after drawing more than 105,000 for three games with the Dodgers in late June, including a sellout of nearly 40,000 the night superstar Shohei Ohtani pitched, Twins attendance is still running about 30,000 total behind last season at this time, per baseball-reference.com. The fans who do show up appear to enjoy the weekend happy hours, live pregame music, assorted giveaways and in-game entertainment. 

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But as Twins chairman and CEO Tom Pohlad has said — repeatedly — the club still has to win. That’s hard to do with a lousy bullpen and infielders who struggle to catch the ball. Things have gotten so bad that three of the four starting infielders on Opening Day in Baltimore — third baseman Royce Lewis, shortstop Brooks Lee and second baseman Luke Keaschall — are now playing different positions. (Technically, so is the fourth, first baseman Victor Caratini, but he’s primarily a catcher.)

Injuries to top pitcher Pablo Lopez (Tommy John surgery, out for the season), No. 3 starter Bailey Ober (right elbow inflammation) and catcher Ryan Jeffers (fractured hamate bone in left hand) haven’t helped. Plus, like so many other teams in MLB, the Twins trusted key positions to youngsters or utility players to save on payroll. Other than Kody Clemens, a versatile defender in the truest old-school sense, it’s been a disaster. 

Going into July the Twins ranked dead last in MLB in defensive runs saved, with negative numbers at every position except center field, per Sports Info Solutions. They were the worst team in baseball at turning ground balls into outs (69.9%), well below the MLB average (73.4%).

SIS produces a plus/minus system for defense, with zero assigned to an average fielder. At shortstop alone, the Twins were minus-15; no other team was worse than minus-8. Tristan Gray and Lee were each minus-7, tied for last among 112 ranked shortstops. (That’s why Ryan Kreidler, another utilityman with limited big-league experience, plays a lot of short these days.) At second base, Keaschall was minus-6, tied for 134th out of 136 players. 

Some of those numbers improved slightly after last weekend’s series with the Yankees, who have fielding issues of their own. But it still squares with what a lot of us see. Too many nights when the Twins need an above-average play on the infield to get out of a jam, it doesn’t happen. 

“Very few players in the game today, unless you’re a superstar, play only one position,” Twins manager Derek Shelton said before a game in June. The Twins only have one of those, All-Star center fielder Byron Buxton (who unfortunately will miss the game due to a nagging hip injury.) Shelton later added an old baseball truism: “If you can play in the middle of the diamond, you can play anywhere.”

While that may be accurate, it doesn’t mean you can play anywhere tomorrow. 

Clubs used to give players an off-season plus spring training to make the transition from, say, short to second base, or the infield to the outfield. That’s no longer the case. 

You may remember the Twins moving second baseman Jorge Polanco to third in July 2023, a position Polanco played sparingly in the minors (he came up as a shortstop) to accommodate hot-hitting rookie Edouard Julien. It didn’t last long, and Polanco moved back to second after the Twins traded him to Seattle that winter. This spring the Mets, Polanco’s newest team, tried to make him a first baseman. And on it goes. This new-age thinking is why you have Keaschall in right field, Lewis at first base and Lee at third, with each learning on the fly.

The rearranging hasn’t done much to improve the club’s chances of making the postseason; the Twins entered Wednesday three games back of Cleveland in the AL Central and a game-and-half behind Texas in the wild card. With the Aug. 3 trade deadline approaching, the Twins still need help in the infield and the bullpen. 

The former is easy — call up shortstop Kaelen Culpepper, a rising star for Class AAA St. Paul who might have been up already if not for a left hip strain. Fixing the bullpen won’t be that simple; everyone needs pitching. 

It’s still unclear whether the Twins will be buyers or sellers at the deadline, though there’s only one right answer no matter what the standings presume to tell us. 

With Buxton saying, adamantly and repeatedly, he has no interest in revoking his no-trade clause, the Twins have two players drawing interest from contending clubs — Jeffers, who’s 29, and starting pitcher Joe Ryan, 30. Jeffers will be a free agent; Ryan and the Twins hold mutual options for 2027.

Thirty is that magic age when many players start to decline. But given the club’s recent sordid history with their fans — cutting payroll after the 2023 playoff run, the aforementioned selloff, and the lingering resentment over the Pohlads reversing course on selling the club — the Twins need to go for it, no matter how July shakes out.

That starts with keeping Ryan and Jeffers and — better sit down for this one — extending their contracts. For once, the Twins should reward two of their better players instead of presuming, as they usually do, they can find replacements on the free agent market. Almost every club does this now, cycling through veterans like batting gloves, annoying fans who dare not grow attached to their favorites.

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Quality starting pitchers are even rarer now than they used to be, and even more costly to replace. That may be why the free-thinking Ryan is still here after criticizing the club last year for letting Sonny Gray walk in free agency in 2023. (For what it’s worth: He was right.) Ryan is now a seasoned veteran and two-time All-Star who knows how to pitch. 

Jeffers, a Twins farm system product, is the club’s second-longest tenured player after Buxton. There’s intangible value in that as well. 

In every winning clubhouse, veteran leaders show newbies the way, passing on knowledge they can’t get from coaches who never played a day in the majors. Jeffers and Ryan are those kind of vets, along with Buxton and Lopez. With more young players on the cusp of the majors (Culpepper, Walker Jenkins, etc.), the Twins need more voices who’ve been here awhile, not fewer.

Keeping Ryan and Jeffers probably won’t stop the “Sell the Team” chants at Target Field. But it would be an important step forward for a club that still relies heavily on gate receipts and desperately needs to win back more of its fans. Are things really different under Tom Pohlad, or is it the same act under a different name? Time to find out.

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