Twins bullpen needs help again: 12 free agent fits

Same offseason, same problem. The Twins' late innings are a construction site again, and Gleeman has written up the shopping list.

Aaron Gleeman

@AaronGleeman

Twins free agent targets: 12 reliever fits for a bullpen that needs significant help (again) t.co/wIINS5obIG

The word doing the work there is "again." According to a Twins Daily roundup of the piece, Gleeman points out that Minnesota's bullpen ERA ranks 22nd in baseball over the last 6 seasons. That is not one bad year. That is a front office that kept trying to build a pen out of low-cost arms, waiver claims and bounce-back guys, and kept getting the results you get from that.

His argument is basically to stop doing that. Spend real money on relievers who are actually good. In a lot of past winters that would have been a fantasy column, but this winter the owner is saying the same thing. At the Twins' year-end press conference, chairman Tom Pohlad said "a $100 million payroll or anything close to that is not sufficient to be consistently competitive," and added that the club intends to "meaningfully invest" and will "be aggressive when free agency starts."

Minnesota needs it. The Twins went 77-85 in 2026. That was 7 games better than 2025, and they were above.500 through late July, but then they went 21-30 over the last 2 months and the season fell apart. When a team fades like that, the bullpen is usually where it shows up first, and a pen with no clear shutdown arm is a big reason the Twins couldn't hold on.

The money is there too. Only 5 players are under contract for 2027: Byron Buxton, Pablo Lopez, Joe Ryan, Victor Caratini and Jeff Hoffman. FanGraphs' RosterResource puts the early 2027 payroll at about $111 million before arbitration raises. Lopez ($21.75 million), Buxton (about $15.14 million), Hoffman (about $12.67 million) and Caratini ($6.5 million) add up to about $56.1 million of that. So the commitments are light, Pohlad has said publicly that $100 million isn't enough, and the weakest unit on the team is the one where a couple of free agent signings change things fastest.

That's what makes Gleeman's list worth paying attention to. He's not just naming the best relievers on the market, he's naming fits, the ones a team in Minnesota's spot could realistically sign. New baseball ops head Jeremy Zoll, who took over after Derek Falvey left in January, and manager Derek Shelton are both coming back for 2027. Zoll's first real winter in charge will be judged largely on whether the 9th inning still looks like a coin flip in April.

What to watch: free agency opens after the World Series, and the relief market tends to move early. The best arms sign quickly and the bargain bin is what's left by January. If the Twins mean what Pohlad said, at least 1 or 2 names from that list should be wearing a Twins hat before the holidays. If they're still only shopping for minor league deals in February, "again" turns into "forever."