We're two weeks from Opening Day, and in the leadup to the Minnesota Twins opening in St. Louis against the Cardinals, we're putting out some of our favorite bold predictions for the 2025 season.
Will the Twins get back to the top of the division as they were in 2019, '20 and '23? Will they yet again play uninspiring, insipid baseball on the way to 83 wins. Do they even have another gear other than those two?
Only time will tell.
But for now, we've got some #hot #baseball #takes for your perusal:
Matt Wallner holds the leadoff spot all season, and hits lefties capably enough to start against them regularly
The Twins don't really have a prototypical leadoff-type hitter. They don't have one that fits the contemporary ideals of a speed guy at the top, nor do they have a hitter like Jonathan India, who just joined the Royals and takes walks like they're going out of style.
But when everyone else zigs, what do you do? That's right...you zag. Ron Gardenhire did it back in the early years of his tenure, including batting Jacque Jones leadoff repeatedly despite his ceiling being an on-base percentage of about .325.
Wallner takes walks (or gets hit by pitches) and sees more pitches than the average bear (moose?). Sure, he strikes out a lot, but he gets on base, moves on the bases pretty well and what's better than starting a game up 1-0 with a leadoff homer?
MLB teams won at a .685 clip last season when scoring first, which comes out to roughly an 111-win pace. The only team to finish below .500 when scoring first was the White Sox, by the way (32-46).
Getting more plate appearances for one of the better hitters on the team is also one of the most simple ways to put it, and even if it's just a function of him facing mostly righties, he crushed them at a .275/.387/.566 clip in 2024.
If you chop that down to just after he returned from Triple-A, he slashed an obscene .304/.405/.614 against righties.
As far as hitting lefties, that might be where this really goes bold. Wallner is a career .144/.232/.278 hitter against them in 108 plate appearances, but at Triple-A in 2023 he slashed .239/.326/.522 against them.
Could it be a case of it just being a slow burn as he adjusts to the level?
I'm not saying it's likely; these are bold predictions after all. But if Wallner can hold his own against lefties (and hit say, seventh in the lineup on those days) and do his usual damage to righties, he's going to be a big breakout star this season.
The best starting pitcher to miss the Opening Day rotation but contribute in 2025 is not Zebby Matthews or David Festa
The writing appears to be on the wall that both Matthews and Festa are ticketed for St. Paul to start the season, though not by any of their own doing.
Matthews has wowed with his pinpoint control, high-90s heat and spotless spring training ERA, while Festa looked exceptional at times down the stretch last season.
But while both of those fellas seem to have the inside tracks on depth roles in this rotation, one can't sleep on Andrew Morris.
Morris, a compactly-built righty born in New York City 10 days before 9/11, has been nearly as brilliant this spring as Matthews.
The pitch I keep coming back to is the 95 mph fastball that froze Anthony Santander for strike three earlier this week (the day he was sent out, if memory serves) after he'd been 91-92 earlier in the plate appearance.
If not for Matthews' meteoric rise, Morris might have gotten more love for sprinting through three levels (High-A up to Triple-A) last season, culminating in a seven-game stretch with the Saints where he more than held his own (3.48 ERA, 7.2 K/9, 1.13 WHIP).
The full damage for the season was immense: 26 games (24 starts) spanning 133.0 innings with a 2.37 ERA, 133 strikeouts, 32 walks and just six homers allowed.
Matthews and Festa have graduated from farm system rankings, but there appears to be some differing opinions on Morris. MLB Pipeline has him as the No. 9 prospect in the system, while Baseball America has him 10th (but still has Matthews listed).
Baseball Prospectus might be the highest on him at No. 5, but ultimately what I see is a solid prospect who took massive leaps forward in 2024 and has done nothing to dampen his stock this spring (zero earned runs in 7.0 innings).
Kody Funderburk is the next Twins reliever to take a big leap forward
Funderburk is a big, beefy lefty with a pretty good sinker/slider mix that has induced grounders by the bucketload in his professional career.
Stuff+, a statistic housed on Fangraphs, looks quite favorably on Funderburk's sinker (117 last season) and slider (117 last season, 136 in 2023) and less so on his cutter (99), which he throws the most often.
My personal opinion would be to scrap the cutter altogether or drop the usage way back, and just be a sinker/slider guy because with better command, his stuff is good enough to not just get lefties out, but righties as well.
The sinker/slider mix works because it's two pitches with opposite(ish) trajectories. Having a cutter doesn't hurt — for many pitchers it's just a shorter, harder slider — but I'd be very curious if those stuff+ numbers bear out over a larger sample.
If so, Fundy could be the team's best lefty this season.
Walker Jenkins makes his MLB debut before the All-Star break
Truly elite prospects often don't spend a day in Triple-A. The list of Twins who skipped the level initially or altogether, or even just barely played there, is a who's who of former Twins prospects like Kirby Puckett, Chuck Knoblauch and Joe Mauer.
Jenkins is that level of prospect. He's hit everywhere he's been. There aren't questions about if he can play defense in the major leagues, at least in the corner outfield.
The ZiPS projection system has him capable of posting a 99 wRC+ with the Twins right now heading into his age-20 season.
Prospects like this don't come around too often. No, the Twins won't rush him, but it's not as though the team's corner outfield is going to be impossible to break through this season.
Jenkins has drawn comparisons to Kyle Tucker (for a recent example) and Larry Walker; if he hits the ground running at Double-A to start the season, there seems to be no reason why he can't make the meteoric rise to the big leagues in short order.
More conservative estimates seem to have him debuting in 2026 or maybe late 2025.
Mickey Gasper has more big-league plate appearances for the Twins in 2025 than Edouard Julien
Julien's last two seasons showed the duality of man. In 2023, he slashed .263/.381/.458 in 109 games and looked to be the leadoff hitter of the future for the Twins.
In 2024, Julien slashed .199/.292/.323 and appeared to glitch out on called third strikes at an alarming rate.
But perhaps this is the most alarming: Julien hit .253 with a .433 slugging percentage on fastballs last season. On breaking balls, he hit .120 with a .160 slugging percentage. On offspeed pitches, .146 and .220, respectively.
If teams don't need to respect him with fastballs — to be clear, .433 is fine but not great for a slugging percentage against heaters — or at all with secondary pitches, what's left here?
He's not a defensive fit anywhere, and will drastically need to rebuild his image in the organization while now swimming upstream against Brooks Lee and Luke Keaschall.
Gasper, on the other hand, has hit everywhere he's been in the minors. He has more positional versatility than Julien. He's shown a nice, compact swing from both sides, with his switch-hitting and multi-positional versatility feeling like a really nice chess piece for Rocco Baldelli late in games.
I still hold out hope for Julien. He was so good in 2023 that I just can't quit him. But if he can't beat out Gasper for playing time in 2025, I'm afraid he's toast in Minnesota.