A week of housekeeping wraps up on Friday when teams across baseball need to decide which arbitration-eligible players to tender ahead of the 5pm CT deadline. For the Minnesota Twins the decisions should be pretty easy, as almost every single player up for arbitration this year is essential to the roster.
There's no world in which Royce Lewis is non-tendered, and the same goes for guys like Griffin Jax, Joe Ryan, and Bailey Ober. In total the Twins have 11 players to make a ruling on before the end of the day and only two of them seem to be potentially on the chopping block.
For the most part it's going to be an easy day, but the hard part comes after players are tendered and sorting out how much everyone deserves to get paid takes focus.
Minnesota Twins non-tender tracker 2025 (Updated)
Just because a player is tendered doesn't mean the work is done. The next step is figuring out what next year's salary should be, and there's two ways of sorting that all out. Both sides can agree to a settlement that would amount to less than that total, or negotiations go to a hearing where an arbitrator rules on what the salary will be.
The latter is potentially less ideal as it takes control out of the hands of the player and team and locks in whatever a third party rules. Settling ahead of time is much cleaner, and it's largely what the Twins managed to do last season. That might be easier said than done this time around.
Here's every Twins player who is up for arbitration this year and what the team decided to do:
Player | Position | Projected Arbitration | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|
Willi Castro | UT | $6.2M | Tendered |
Ryan Jeffers | C | $4.7M | Tendered |
Bailey Ober | P | $4.3M | Tendered |
Joe Ryan | P | $3.8M | Tendered |
Jhoan Duran | P | $3.7M | Tendered |
Griffin Jax | P | $2.6M | Tendered |
Royce Lewis | 3B | $2.3M | Tendered |
Trevor Larnach | OF | $2.1M | Tendered |
Michael Tonkin | P | $1.5M | Settled at $1M |
Justin Topa | P | $1.3M | Tendered |
Brock Stewart | P | $800k | Settled at $870k |
Note - This list will be updated as official decisions are made on each player.
Everyone else is a no-brainer decision. Michael Tonkin is out of options which made him an easy non-tender, but the Twins ended up settling with him for $500,000 less that what he was projected to make. The rest of the list is full of essential player the Twins will work harder on deciding what to pay rather than deciding to bring back.
The only tough decision might be what happens with Justin Topa. He was injured for almost the entire season after coming over from the Mariners as part of the Jorge Polanco salary dump trade. In what little action Topa saw he seemed decent, but the sample size wasn't big enough to get a true feeling for how much he might add as a late-innings arm out of the bullpen.
He came to Minnesota with a decent amount of hype but the quesiton is whether $1.3 million is too expensive for what amounts to a lottery ticket. Last offseason the Twins signed Josh Staumont for just under $1 million, and there's a chance that given how little Topa played the team can get him to settle for around that amount.
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