There wasn’t a clean, obvious answer for Twins team MVP in 2026. This was a 77-win club without a player who put together a fully dominant season from start to finish. But when Twins Daily voters weighed the options, Luke Keaschall separated himself anyway, taking the award by a fairly comfortable margin.
The final vote told the story of a team with a lot of different kinds of value, but no perfect package. Keaschall finished with 31 points, ahead of Byron Buxton at 22, Taj Bradley at 18, Kody Clemens at 17 and Brooks Lee at 8. Joe Ryan and Ryan Jeffers each got 4 points, while Josh Bell picked up 1.
That spread reflects how the roster split into two groups. Bell, Lee and Clemens were among the steadiest run producers on the team, finishing first, second and third in RBIs and landing in the top four in home runs.
But none of them reached an OPS+ better than 110, and none got to even three Wins Above Replacement. On the other side were the players who were more dazzling, but only in bursts.
Ryan and Jeffers were strong enough early to look like All-Stars, but injuries and late slumps pulled them back.
Buxton fit that second bucket too, only more dramatically. He made his second straight All-Star team and was playing at a borderline MVP level before a hip injury knocked him out in late July.
The finish was rough: .179/.304/.231 with no homers and one RBI in 46 plate appearances in August, then no September at-bats at all. Even so, the work he had already banked kept him in the runner-up spot.
The strongest challenger, though, was Bradley. He was the top choice on my ballot for a simple reason: he was there, he took the ball, and he mattered.
Bradley made 31 starts, logged 178.1 innings, posted a 3.82 FIP and struck out 205 hitters. He led the team with 4.4 bWAR, and the Twins went 18-13 in his starts.
The counterargument is easy enough to understand, too. A 3.73 ERA doesn’t scream elite, and plenty of voters are never going to put a pitcher over everyday position players in an MVP race when pitchers have their own award.
That’s fair.
Once you work through all of that, Keaschall ends up on top almost by process of elimination. But that doesn’t mean the choice is hollow. His season was good enough to stand on its own, especially after a slow start that could have sent things in a different direction.
Keaschall, 23, scuffled through April and closed the month with a .217/.267/.275 line. Derek Shelton didn’t sound especially worried at the time.
“The least of my concerns right now is Luke Keaschall,” he said in the early going. Smart man.
From there, Keaschall flipped the script. Starting in May, he hit .301/.402/.446 with 24 doubles, four triples, nine homers and 13 steals in 489 plate appearances after the end of April. He was especially dangerous in the second half, and from July 1 through the end of the season he ranked sixth in baseball with a .406 wOBA, trailing only Yordan Alvarez and Pete Alonso among American League hitters.
That surge shaped his final numbers. His 120 OPS+ was the best on the Twins among hitters with at least 450 plate appearances, and his 3.0 fWAR led the club.
The biggest change for the team came when Keaschall took over the leadoff role and never really gave it back. He started the season hitting third, then slid down the order when the early results weren’t there. Shelton kept backing him, but it took a long run of strong play before the manager moved him back near the top.
On August 17, Keaschall made his first career start in the leadoff spot. After that, he stayed there. There was one exception late in the year, when he started in the two-hole behind Walker Jenkins, but otherwise he hit leadoff in every game after mid-August.
That fit makes sense. Keaschall looks built for the job: solid at-bats, average, patience, and enough speed to pressure defenses. He also set a new franchise record by getting hit by 23 pitches, and his on-base percentage from May 1 on - .402 - ranked second only to Alvarez among AL hitters.
The other major piece was defense, and that part of the season changed almost as dramatically. For most of the year, Keaschall’s glove worked against him.
He played second base for the first half and was among the worst defenders in the league there. The Twins then tried him in center in July, and that experiment did not go well.
But in mid-August, right as he settled into leadoff, he moved permanently to right field and looked much more stable.
It wasn’t flawless. There were still awkward reads and the occasional bad throw.
But even with that, he was at least a workable right fielder. Defensive Runs Saved had him at plus-1 in 450 innings there, after he had been minus-4 in 630 innings at second.
That first-half damage matters, and in a deeper MVP race it might have knocked him out of the top spot. But this wasn’t a team with a true no-doubt star season anywhere on the roster. Down the stretch, Keaschall played like one.
From August 17 through the end of the year, he ranked among the top 20 players in baseball in fWAR. The power came, too.
In August and September, he hit six homers with 22 extra-base hits and a .524 slugging percentage. Through the end of July, he had four homers and a .344 slugging percentage.
Put it all together and the shape of the case becomes clear: a hitter with elite on-base skills, real power, enough defense to hold up, and the kind of all-around impact that can change a lineup. That version of Keaschall wasn’t there in April, but it was there when it mattered most, and it’s why he finished as Twins Daily’s 2026 MVP.
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