Some MLB teams make trades. This one dealt nearly half its roster

The Minnesota Twins took full advantage of Thursday's MLB trade deadline by dealing 11 different players.

A month and a half into this season, the hottest team in Major League Baseball played in Minnesota.

When the standings closed on May 17, the Twins had won 13 consecutive games to sit second in their division. It was the franchise’s longest winning streak in 34 years, and the longest in all of MLB since 2022. Minnesota had one of baseball’s best staff of relief pitchers and an All-Star outfielder in Byron Buxton. Suddenly, a spring training declaration by the team’s top baseball executive, Derek Falvey, that reaching the World Series “has to be the mission from Day One,” sounded more like a possibility.

By this week’s trade deadline, that mission had changed dramatically.

No longer ascending in the standings, the Twins had moved from a buyer looking to bolster its lineup ahead of a playoff run into a seller trying to extract some value from a lost season — the kind of shift in thinking that happens to numerous teams across all professional sports.

Yet the scope of the Twins sell-off Thursday, in the final hours before the deadline, was anything but typical. Many teams out of playoff contention sell off key parts; the Twins, however, took it to an extreme. Over nine trades, they dealt away 11 players from a 26-man roster.