Minnesota Twins Walk Off Twice, Climb Back to .500 and Turn Deadline Buyers

The Minnesota Twins picked a good week to remember how to win ugly. A homestand that opened with the bats in witness protection ended with two of the wildest finishes of the season at Target Field — Royce Lewis’s two-out walk-off triple on Tuesday and Kody Clemens’s walk-off grand slam on Thursday — and when the dust settled, Minnesota sat at 55-55, three games out of first place in the AL Central, with the front office openly declaring itself a buyer ahead of Monday’s trade deadline. For a franchise that spent last July tearing the roster down for parts, that is a genuinely different mood around Twins baseball. The week wasn’t always pretty. It was rarely pretty, honestly. But 4-2 on the homestand is 4-2, and the arrow finally points up.

The Week That Was for the Minnesota Twins

Minnesota came home from Cleveland having salvaged a four-game split — two lopsided losses followed by 10-6 and 3-1 wins — and the homestand picked up right where the queasy part of that trip left off. Friday night set the tone for the offensive conversation, and not in a good way. Athletics left-hander Jacob Lopez and four relievers combined on a two-hit shutout in a 2-0 loss, wasting a perfectly serviceable start from Zebby Matthews and stretching a scoring drought that was starting to feel less like a slump and more like a lifestyle choice.

Saturday brought chaos before first pitch even arrived. Scheduled starter Mike Paredes strained his left oblique warming up in the bullpen, and rookie left-hander Kendry Rojas got the ball on essentially zero notice. All he did was throw four innings of one-hit baseball with five strikeouts. Alan Roden’s two-run single in the sixth — Minnesota’s first runs in 14 2/3 innings — held up in a 2-0 win, with Taylor Rogers taking the victory in relief and Yoendrys Gomez locking down his 13th save. Nick Kurtz, back from a thumb injury for the Athletics, struck out four times as the designated hitter, a small act of charity toward a Twins staff that needed one.

Sunday’s finale was that rare 2026 Twins game with actual run production: an 11-8 win in which Ryan Jeffers drove in three runs and Connor Prielipp picked up the victory in his first appearance back from the injured list. Minnesota built a big lead, let the Athletics make the late innings uncomfortable, and hung on for the series win, two games to one.

Walk-Off Magic at Target Field

After a Monday off day, the Royals came to town, and that series became a three-day showcase of everything this team is and isn’t. On Tuesday, Taj Bradley handed the Twins six solid innings, Kody Clemens doubled and scored on a Josh Bell single, and Kansas City clawed in front anyway — Josh Rojas straight-up stole home on a double steal, and Salvador Perez added an RBI single. Trailing 2-1 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Royce Lewis ripped a two-run triple to end it, 3-2. That made it three straight wins and five of six.

Wednesday, the bats went back into hibernation in a 4-0 blanking. Thursday afternoon they nearly slept through the whole game: Kansas City’s Noah Cameron, who walked in carrying a 4.93 ERA, no-hit Minnesota through six innings and finished with eight scoreless. The Twins entered the ninth down 3-0 with every excuse to fold quietly. Instead: two-out traffic, a big assist from Lucas Erceg’s wildness, and the bases loaded for Clemens against Matt Strahm. Walk-off grand slam — by one count just the 34th in big-league history hit by a team trailing by three — and a 4-3 final that sealed another series win.

An Offense Running on Fumes

Now the uncomfortable part, because two happy endings shouldn’t obscure how those games looked for the first eight innings. Since the All-Star break the Twins have averaged roughly two runs per game outside their occasional blowup nights, and the underlying numbers over that stretch are grim: 30th in the majors in barrel rate, 29th in home runs, 28th in slugging. They were shut out twice in six games this week and got no-hit into the seventh by a pitcher with an ERA pushing five. Jeffers has been the loud exception — general manager Jeremy Zoll flatly called his season “awesome,” and the rest of the league has noticed, more on that in a minute — but the supporting cast is thin enough that the loudest argument around the fan base is why consensus top-five prospect Walker Jenkins is still taking his at-bats in Triple-A while journeyman fill-ins take them in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Twins and the AL Central Race

Here’s why any of this matters: the division is absolutely winnable. The Chicago White Sox — yes, that’s still strange to type — lead the Central at 57-51 after spending the back half of the week winning consecutive extra-inning walk-offs against the Yankees. Cleveland sits between Chicago and Minnesota, and at 55-55 the Twins are three games out of first with two full months to play. Nobody in this division is running away from anybody. First-year manager Derek Shelton is working with a flawed roster, but he’s also holding a live ticket in a division race, which is more than most .500 teams in baseball can say. Kansas City, eleven games out and fading, spent the week playing the role of generous host at Target Field. The wild-card picture is murkier and more crowded, which makes the Central the cleanest path to October.

Injury Report and Roster Notes

• Byron Buxton left Tuesday’s game in the fifth inning with right hip soreness after running out a ground ball — the same hip that kept him out of the All-Star Game. His status is the thing to watch this weekend.
• Mike Paredes strained his left oblique during Saturday’s pregame warmups, forcing the emergency Rojas start. Obliques rarely resolve quickly.
• Connor Prielipp came off the injured list Sunday and earned the win against the Athletics in his return.

Buyers, With a Jeffers-Sized Asterisk

Zoll spent the week making the club’s deadline direction plain: “We’re going to use this next stretch … to find ways to improve the club.” After last summer’s sell-off — still a sore subject in these parts — the Twins head into the August 3 deadline shopping for bullpen help rather than holding another clearance sale. The complication is that contenders keep calling about the catcher. The Yankees have been repeatedly connected to Jeffers, ESPN’s Jeff Passan floated the possibility of a big-league-for-big-league swap, and Zoll’s answer when pressed — “He’s had an awesome year … looking forward to doing everything we can to keep the group together” — was warm without technically being a no. Names like Joe Ryan and Trevor Larnach have rattled around the rumor columns as well. Buying relievers while trading a catcher in the middle of a career year would be a strange two-step, but deadlines make teams do strange things.

Next up, the Twins open a weekend series in Seattle on Friday night — the last look at this roster as currently built, and a legitimate measuring-stick set against a quality opponent on the road. Win a couple in Seattle and the buy-side case writes itself; get swept and those Jeffers conversations get a lot more interesting. Either way, this was the most entertaining week of Minnesota Twins baseball in a long while, and for the first time in about a calendar year, the news around this team is about adding, not subtracting.