The Minnesota Twins are heading toward the end of the 2026 season with the kind of injury pileup that can make a team start thinking small. Apparently, very small.
With another year of rehab work, nagging soreness and players popping in and out of the lineup at the worst possible times, the Twins may be looking ahead to the 2027 collective bargaining fight and seeing something most teams would dread: a possible break in the schedule.
Maybe fewer games is the answer.
“We've been studying the data,” one anonymous Twins executive said. “Every time we play a baseball game, theres a chance someone gets hurt.
Therefore, fewer baseball games means fewer opportunities for injuries. We're really excited about this innovative strategy.”
That logic, at least in the source material, is hard to poke holes in.
Byron Buxton’s 2026 season is ending the way so many of his seasons have ended: injured. The Twins’ longtime star has spent his career dealing with health issues, and this latest abbreviated year has only deepened the familiar question around Minnesota - how much can the club really count on him over a full season? One answer, apparently, is to stop asking him to play a full season.
“If Byron only had to play 100 games, we'd expect him to play 100 games,” the anonymous executive said. “If he had to play 80, we'd expect him to play 80. We're currently exploring whether baseball would allow us to schedule him for approximately 47 games and call that a season.”
The same thinking has apparently reached Joe Ryan, whose year-to-year story keeps coming back to the same split. When he’s on, he looks like a front-line starter.
The problem is that the back half has not always matched the front half, and this season is no different. So the Twins, in this very specific line of reasoning, have come up with a solution: remove the second half.
“Joe has demonstrated that he can be extremely effective for half a season,” a Twins pitching coach said. “We've decided to stop asking him to pitch the other half. It's really more of a workload-management decision than anything else.”
Ryan’s first-half line, as given in the source, was a 3.17 ERA. The pitch is simple enough: let him keep rolling, let the calendar stop after one half, and call it a day before the usual September issues show up.
The source also says Minnesota previously considered not telling Ryan about the All-Star break and hoping he wouldn’t realize it was happening, but that became impossible once he was selected to pitch in the exhibition. A season without an All-Star Game would fix that problem, too.
The Twins’ logic extends beyond their veterans. Their young players have been hit hard as well, especially Walker Jenkins and Emmanuel Rodriguez, two of the organization’s key offensive prospects. Both have dealt with major injuries during development, and that has naturally raised concerns about how they’d hold up over a full major-league schedule.
A shorter season would, in theory, cut down those chances. Rodriguez would have fewer chances to hurt his thumb. Jenkins would have fewer chances to run into an outfield wall.
“There's a lot of strategy involved,” another anonymous executive said. “If Walker plays 100 games, there are 62 fewer games in which he can collide with something.”
The source even imagines the Twins taking things a step further.
“We've discussed removing the outfield walls entirely,” the executive said. “But MLB has some concerns.”
Of course, there’s a catch: Minnesota doesn’t actually control whether any of this happens. The collective bargaining agreement runs out after the 2026 season, so the size of the 2027 schedule will be determined by labor talks, not by a Twins front office wish list. A lockout could shorten the year, but that’s not something the club can make happen on its own.
Still, the thinking clearly runs deep enough that the Twins have run through the possibilities. A 162-game season is the worst-case scenario.
A 154-game schedule would be tolerable. At 140, things start looking better.
At 120, the team sees a real opening.
“At 100 games, the Twins reportedly believe their injury situation could become ‘elite.’ At 81 games, Minnesota would only have to survive one half of baseball. At 60 games, Buxton might actually be available for most of them.”
And if it dropped all the way to 30 games?
“Thirty games sounds fantastic,” the executive said. “We'd probably still have six starting pitchers.”
The source is blunt about the downside for the sport as a whole. A shorter 2027 season would mean fewer games for players, fewer paychecks, and a badly distorted competitive landscape.
“We're not saying we want a lockout,” the anonymous executive said. “We're simply saying that if baseball happened to lose a few months, we'd be prepared to make the most of the situation.”
And if the Twins ever decide even that isn’t short enough, there’s one final answer left.
Just don’t play.
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