The 10 games that defined the 2025 Minnesota Twins season

What is the best way to describe the 2025 Twins season in one word:

Embarrassing? Disappointing? Chaotic?

It was at least eventful. The Twins were rarely boring. They started out poorly, ripped off a 13-game winning streak in May, watched their pitching fall apart in June and traded more than a third of the roster in July.

As we reach the final days of 2025, here are the 10 games that defined the Twins season:

The Twins, after vowing to put their ugly six-week collapse at the end of the 2024 season behind them, sputtered to start the year. They lost 15 of their first 22 games, and it looked as if they might bury themselves in the standings before May.

With a three-run lead in the ninth inning, the Twins flirted with disaster. The White Sox loaded the bases, including two walks, with no outs against Twins closer Jhoan Duran. Duran escaped with a save because Byron Buxton laid out to catch a line drive from Andrew Benintendi for a game-ending grab. It was the start of a stretch in which the Twins won 19 of 24 games.

The Twins won 70 games, a lot fewer than they hoped, but this was one of the most improbable. Kody Clemens delivered one of the best individual games in Twins history, bashing three home runs and a double. His 14 total bases matched Kirby Puckett’s 6-for-6 game at Milwaukee on Aug. 30, 1987.

The lasting image from this game was the final out: Brooks Lee whiffed on a pitch in the dirt, a dropped third strike, and the ball kicked away from Brewers catcher William Contreras toward the Twins dugout. Lee walked around home plate as Contreras chased after the ball and declined to run to first base, drawing boos from the Target Field crowd when he was tagged.

The shutout loss, filled with several defensive lapses, was the fifth time the Twins lost by at least seven runs in a 12-day span — their pitching was horrendous throughout June — giving regular work to position player Jonah Bride as a mop-up pitcher.

“You want to sum it up in one word, it’s embarrassing,” catcher Ryan Jeffers said. “We’re big-league ballplayers, and we’re not playing like a big-league ballclub.”

Dominant pitching carried the Twins during their 13-game winning streak in May, which briefly resuscitated their season, but completing a doubleheader sweep over the Orioles showed what the team could have been.

A lot was stacked against them in the nightcap. Simeon Woods Richardson gave up a six-run third inning. Their top relievers already pitched in the first game. Harrison Bader left with an injury, and manager Rocco Baldelli departed midgame with an illness.

As the Twins front office weighed whether to sell or stand pat at the trade deadline, this gut punch at Dodger Stadium helped tip the scales toward a roster teardown. The Twins rallied to take a one-run lead in the eighth inning against a troubled Dodgers bullpen.

In the ninth inning, Griffin Jax was an inch from a save and the third out when Mookie Betts’ two-strike check swing was controversially called a non-swing. Betts reached on an infield single, Baldelli intentionally walked Shohei Ohtani, and Jax followed with a five-pitch walk to the light-hitting Esteury Ruiz. It set up Freddie Freeman, in another two-strike count, for a walk-off hit.

“I just feel like that’s kind of a representation of my season so far,” Jax said. “It’s so close, but I’m just not putting all the pieces together to get that consistency.”

This was the high point of the Twins season. Two outs in the ninth inning, trailing by three runs and facing a closer who hadn’t allowed an earned run all season. All the Twins did after that was score nine runs.

Willi Castro hit a two-run homer. Buxton, who singled, scored the tying run on a single from Trevor Larnach. Then, in the 10th inning, Carlos Correa hit a leadoff, two-run homer on the first pitch with the automatic runner on second base.

It was a special season for Buxton, who completed a 20-20 season, and no game was more memorable. On Buxton’s bobblehead day, right before he traveled to Atlanta for the All-Star Game and Home Run Derby, he hit for the cycle.

Buxton hit a single, triple and double in the first three innings, then crushed a 427-foot homer to center in the seventh inning to become the 12th player in Twins history to achieve the feat (and the first at Target Field).

At the beginning of the season, the Twins just kept throwing away games — literally. With the score tied in the eighth inning, Jax fielded a comebacker from Bobby Witt Jr. and airmailed a throw to first base. Witt advanced to third on an error, and he scored the go-ahead run on an infield grounder.

If that wasn’t enough pain, the Twins lost Pablo López to an injury, a mild hamstring strain, during the fifth inning. López, the ace of the staff, was limited to 75 innings because of injuries.

Playing the worst team in baseball out of the All-Star break, in a crucial stretch before the trade deadline, the Twins came out flat. The first four batters Chris Paddack faced went double, double, triple, homer. Ouch.

Hello, rock bottom. With trade rumors swirling, the Twins completely crumbled. First was the blowout loss, which took a backseat to all the drama at the end of the game. Baldelli tried to orchestrate a curtain call for Castro, pulling him off the field for a defensive replacement, but Castro had no idea what was going on.

Jax was inserted into a game they were trailing 8-1 in the ninth inning because teams need to be down at least eight runs to have a position player as a pitcher. Jax allowed the first three batters to reach base, and he was immediately pulled once a run scored. Jax, furious he was taken out of the game so abruptly, yelled at Baldelli in the dugout as the runners he left on base scored.