MINNEAPOLIS – In six of their twelve games since the All-Star break, the Minnesota Twins scored two runs or fewer. That stretch of offensive failure arrived even when Byron Buxton was in the lineup, which makes the news from Wednesday considerably harder to absorb. The Twins placed their center fielder on the 10-day injured list with right hip impingement, the second time in less than three weeks the same diagnosis has shelved him, and the question of how a 54-55 franchise navigates through the trade deadline and into October became considerably harder to answer.
The sequence that produced this IL placement is specific enough to sting. Buxton had missed 15 days in early July with the same right hip, returned on July 20, and lasted nine games before the injury resurfaced. On Tuesday night against the Kansas City Royals, he was removed from the game with renewed soreness. The Twins lost 4-0 that night, Joe Ryan working effectively on the mound in his own return from injury and receiving nothing from the offense. The official IL designation came Wednesday, confirming what Tuesday’s early exit had already implied.
For a franchise sitting three games under .500 in the American League Central, with the July 31 trade deadline hours away and an outfield that has been stretched thin all summer, that recurrence forces a recalibration of every calculation Minnesota was making about the second half. Buxton has been the Twins’ best hitter this season, posting a .903 on-base plus slugging percentage across 335 plate appearances with 25 home runs and 45 RBIs. He is the offensive engine the lineup is built around. Without him, the Twins are demonstrating exactly what their ceiling looks like, and it is not a pennant-race ceiling.
Hip impingement, clinically called femoroacetabular impingement, is a friction condition in which bony abnormalities cause the femoral head and the hip socket to make contact they should not make under the loads athletes place on the joint. In baseball, the movements that aggravate it are unavoidable: the rotational force of a swing, the push-off from the bases, the lateral changes of direction a center fielder absorbs across a full season. Conservative management generally involves rest and anti-inflammatory treatment, and the condition can respond well to that approach without surgery. The recurrence nine games after Buxton’s return from his first IL stint suggests the underlying issue did not fully resolve, which introduces genuine uncertainty about how much of him the Twins will see before the season ends.
Staying healthy has been the defining challenge of Buxton’s career, and not for lack of care or attention from the organization. He was the second overall pick in the 2012 draft and established quickly as one of baseball’s most physically gifted center fielders, combining elite speed, plus defense, and above-average power in a profile the Twins built organizational expectations around for more than a decade. The availability has never matched the talent. Buxton has been limited to fewer than 100 games in multiple seasons, managing injuries across virtually every part of his body throughout his career. In 2022, he played 92 games. This season, when healthy, he has been the best individual performer on the Minnesota roster. The hip is now, for the second time this month, deciding how much of that performer the Twins actually get.
Manager Rocco Baldelli will lean on Luke Keaschall and Alan Roden to cover center field in Buxton’s absence, as Fox Sports reported. Neither brings the offensive threat Buxton provides in the order, and both will be asked to absorb playing time that the lineup needs to find runs from somewhere. The Twins have also promoted Tristan Gray from Triple-A St. Paul to add bench flexibility, extending the Twins’ ongoing roster management operations this summer. The lineup behind Buxton has struggled to sustain offensive production even with him healthy. Without him, the margin for error in every game narrows in ways a club with a losing record cannot afford.
The trade deadline arrives Thursday, and Minnesota’s front office is navigating one of the more uncomfortable positions in the league, not clearly built to contend at full strength and not clearly ready to dismantle. The injury-defined uncertainty that has characterized this trade deadline landscape placed the Twins in a difficult spot even before Wednesday’s news. Buxton’s second IL stint now sharpens the question the front office cannot avoid: whether adding outfield help makes sense for a club missing its best player, or whether this injury changes the calculus about what kind of deadline those numbers justify.
What has not been established in three weeks of managing this hip condition is the answer that matters most. Whether the impingement is a rest-and-recovery problem, manageable with the minimum 10-day break and targeted treatment, or a structural issue that will keep resurfacing regardless of how carefully the training staff handles it has not been addressed publicly by the Twins. The 10-day minimum is the floor. Whether it becomes three weeks or longer is the variable that will actually define Minnesota’s second half. The Twins built their offensive identity around a player who plays like an All-Star when available and misses time like a part-time starter. That has always been the arrangement. How the hip responds over the coming weeks will determine whether this season still has somewhere meaningful left to go.
