The Twins have spent years preaching versatility, but this season their final roster spot has often looked like dead weight.
That’s the strange tension at the heart of Minnesota’s 2026 roster construction. The club wants players who can move around the diamond and give the manager options in different game states, and on paper that approach makes sense. In practice, though, the Twins have spent much of the year functioning like they’re carrying a 25-man roster, with one player parked on the bench and barely used.
The first version of that experiment was James Outman.
Minnesota acquired Outman from the Dodgers last July, and when spring training opened he had no minor-league options left. That put the Twins in a bind, so they kept him on the Opening Day roster and hoped he could tap back into the talent that once made him such a fascinating young outfielder.
It never happened. Outman appeared in 49 games but started only 17 of them, and most of his work came as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch-runner rather than in real offensive situations.
He also didn’t do much with the chances he got, hitting .156/.229/.250 with five extra-base hits in 70 plate appearances and posting -0.3 rWAR. Minnesota designated him for assignment in mid-June, and the Detroit Tigers claimed him off waivers.
Once Outman was gone, Kyler Fedko got the call.
Fedko, a 12th-round pick out of the University of Connecticut in the 2021 MLB Draft, had forced the issue with his bat at Triple-A St. Paul.
Through 58 games with the Saints this season, he hit .286/.372/.578 with a .950 OPS, along with 15 home runs, 45 RBIs, 44 runs scored, and nine stolen bases. He had already shown plenty of pop and athleticism last season, too, stealing 38 bases across Double-A and Triple-A.
But his first run in the majors followed the same pattern as Outman’s. Fedko started only four of the 14 games he played in, and the Twins had good reason to be cautious after he went hitless in 19 plate appearances.
Even so, the way those opportunities were distributed told the bigger story. Just three of his appearances gave him more than two plate appearances in a game.
In seven games, he entered only as a pinch-runner or defensive replacement and never got to hit. That’s a brutal setup for any player trying to prove he belongs.
The issue isn’t that Fedko should have been handed everyday at-bats. Byron Buxton, Luke Keaschall, Trevor Larnach, and other outfield options sit ahead of him, and a club trying to win every night isn’t going to make playing time easy to find. The larger question is whether carrying him in the first place made sense if the Twins didn’t see enough of a path to use him.
As I wrote about earlier this season, the answer is likely that the front office doesn’t believe in Fedko.
He’s back in St. Paul now, where regular at-bats should help more than sitting at the end of a big-league bench. For the final series before the All-Star break, that roster spot was taken by a third catcher after Ryan Jeffers returned from the injured list, which only reinforced the same low-utility approach.
And this isn’t just about Outman or Fedko. Minnesota has used the same kind of setup before with players like DaShawn Keirsey Jr. and Carson McCusker. Whether the goal is to preserve depth, evaluate players, or avoid exposing someone to waivers, the result has been consistent: one roster spot goes mostly unused.
That’s a harder choice to defend when the American League Wild Card race is expected to stay tight all summer. Injuries will pile up.
Rosters will get stretched. Bench pieces can swing close games.
If the last man on the roster isn’t getting meaningful chances, it’s fair to ask whether that spot could be helping the Twins in a different way.
Minnesota has built its roster around flexibility. The irony is that the final bench spot has been anything but flexible.
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