Twins Earn National Spotlight For Work Away From The Diamond

Baseball's offseason usually starts with roster talk, but one of the first big Minnesota stories this October has nothing to do with trades.

Major League Baseball named the Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Twins Community Fund's Girls Belong in Baseball initiative a finalist for the Allan H. Selig Award for Philanthropic Excellence, the league's highest team honor, and fans can vote online at mlbtogether.com/selig through Friday, Oct. 16.

The award began in 2010 as the Commissioner's Award for Philanthropic Excellence to recognize charity work by MLB clubs, and this is the third time the Twins have made the final group after doing it in 2023 and 2024 as well.

This year's nod goes back to the first Twins Girls Baseball Camp in 2019, which has since grown into a year-round program with camps and tournament play each summer, a free clinic series in the fall and free activities through the offseason.

In 2025, Minnesota became the first MLB club to field its own team at Baseball For All Nationals, the largest girls baseball tournament in the world, and that 14U team had an all-female coaching staff for the first time in the event's 10-year history.

The Twins sent two teams this year, with one at 14U and another at 16U.

Senior vice president of community engagement Nancy O'Brien talked about the honor in the club's announcement, saying "We are honored to be a finalist for this award, and grateful for the partners who support and elevate our work."

Minnesota finished 77-85, third in the American League Central and eight games behind Cleveland, so most of the talk around the team right now is about what went wrong.

I think this news deserves more attention for that exact reason, since the girls baseball program took seven years to build and was never a one-time push for headlines.

The club's Diamond Awards for 2026 last week pointed the same way.

Emma Charlesworth-Seiler, who founded the Minnesota Girls Baseball Association in 2014 and has coached the club's girls teams, won the Terry Ryan Award, while manager Derek Shelton took home the Carl R. Pohlad Outstanding Community Service Award for using his Shelty's Shirts effort to support a different nonprofit each month.

Voting closes Friday, and the Twins will be hoping their third trip as a finalist ends with the award this time.

I like their case, because this program was built carefully from the ground up over several years instead of being thrown together.

On the field, there is still plenty to fix.

At the year-end news conference, chairman Tom Pohlad said he expects payroll to go up in 2027, and the club is replacing pitching coach Pete Maki and assistant Luis Ramirez.

Outfielder Byron Buxton is working back from right hip surgery as well, and since the team expects him ready for the start of next season, some believe Buxton could be due for a big year.

Community work will never replace wins, but if the front office spends the way Pohlad says it will, I could see the Twins pairing a strong reputation off the field with a real playoff push in 2027.