Twins Place Mick Abel On Injured List
The Twins announced this morning that they’ve placed rookie right-hander Mick Abel on the 15-day injured list due to inflammation in his right elbow. A corresponding move wasn’t announced, though it’s already been reported that prospect Kendry Rojas is joining the major league roster tomorrow and that top prospect Connor Prielipp has been added to the major league taxi squad. Abel’s IL placement is surely related to those forthcoming moves (which the team has yet to formally announce). The Twins will take advantage of today’s off-day by moving up right-hander Simeon Woods Richardson, who’d been slated to start Wednesday, to start in place of Abel tomorrow, per Betsy Helfand of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Selected by the Phillies with the No. 15 overall draft pick back in 2020, Abel has long been hailed as a quality pitching prospect. He went from Philadelphia to Minnesota alongside top catching prospect Eduardo Tait at last year’s trade deadline in the deal sending star closer Jhoan Duran (also currently on the injured list) back to Philly.
Now 24 years old, Abel has seen his stock rise and fall over the years. He slipped off most top-100 rankings prior to the 2025 season but enjoyed a resurgent year that saw him both make his major league debut in Philadelphia and pitch well enough to be included as a key component in one of the deadline’s most notable trades.
Abel has gotten out to a nice start in 2026. He entered camp without a rotation spot assured to him but won a job with a dominant performance in the Grapefruit League: 22 innings, 2.05 ERA, 32.9% strikeout rate, 4.9% walk rate. The right-hander was hit hard in his first two appearances with the Twins this season but bounced back with 13 shutout innings and a 16-to-3 K/BB ratio across his last two starts (against the Tigers and Red Sox, respectively). He’s currently sitting on a 3.98 ERA, a 24.7% strikeout rate and a 10% walk rate in 20 1/3 frames. Metrics like FIP (2.79) and SIERA (3.93) agree, to varying extents, that he’s been a quality arm.
With Abel on the shelf, the Twins will have four starters locked into spots: Joe Ryan, Taj Bradley, Bailey Ober and Woods Richardson. Candidates to take Abel’s spot on the staff include Rojas, Prielipp and Zebby Matthews — the latter of whom Abel beat for a spot on the Opening Day staff. Matthews, however, has pitched to a 7.71 ERA in his first four turns through the Triple-A rotation. The former top-100 prospect is still only 25, but he’s slid down the depth chart a bit with a rough spring and even rockier start with Triple-A St. Paul. Minnesota also recently recalled 24-year-old starting pitching prospect Andrew Morris and plugged him into the major league bullpen. He’s still stretched out enough to make a start, follow an opener or work in some hybrid/piggyback role if the team sees fit.
It’s not yet clear how long the Twins expect Abel to be sidelined. His IL placement is retroactive to April 17. If it’s indeed just a minor bout of inflammation — and the Twins have yet to indicate the potential that anything more serious is at play — he’d be eligible to return as early as May 2. Presumably, the team will provide more information on Abel’s status in the near future, although with an off-day on the calendar today, a formal update may not happen until tomorrow, when skipper Derek Shelton addresses reporters prior to Tuesday’s series opener against the Mets in Queens.
Twins Place Royce Lewis, Cody Laweryson On Injured List
TODAY: The Twins officially announced the IL placements, with Laweryson retroactive to April 9 and Lewis to April 10. Kreidler and right-hander Andrew Morris were called up to take Lewis and Laweryson’s places on the active roster, and the 24-year-old Morris will be making his big league debut whenever he appears in his first game for Minnesota.
Morris was a fourth-round pick for the Twins in the 2022 draft, and he has a 3.78 ERA, 21.45% strikeout rate, and 7.27% walk rate over 135 2/3 innings at Triple-A. Morris started 28 of his 30 Triple-A appearances, though the scouting reports at both MLB Pipeline and Baseball America view Morris perhaps more as a swingman or multi-inning at the Major League level. Pipeline and BA each rank Morris as the 13th-best prospect in Minnesota’s system, and he has a five-pitch arsenal highlighted by a 55-grade slider and a fastball that can reach 99mph but usually sits in the 95-96mph range.
APRIL 10: The Twins will make a couple roster moves before tomorrow’s game at Rogers Centre. Manager Derek Shelton said tonight (relayed by Twins TV’s Audra Martin) that third baseman Royce Lewis and reliever Cody Laweryson are each headed to the injured list. Lewis has a left knee sprain, while Laweryson suffered a right forearm strain. Shelton didn’t specify return timelines for either player.
Lewis suffered his injury during Thursday’s win over Detroit. He came up limping after a swinging strike in his final at-bat of that game. Lewis was able to gut out the plate appearance and hit an infield single. He finished the contest but felt more discomfort today. Bobby Nightengale of The Minnesota Star-Tribune writes that Lewis went for imaging this evening that revealed the sprain.
This will be the ninth injured list stint of Lewis’ four-year MLB career. He has twice torn the ACL in his right knee, once before his big league debut, and battled various left leg injuries. That included a pair of hamstring strains last year. Lewis narrowly topped 100 games for the first time in his career.
The former first overall pick had been out to a nice start. Although he’s only hitting .222, he has taken eight walks and collected four extra-base hits (two doubles and homers apiece). Lewis was at the hot corner for 12 of Minnesota’s first 14 games. Utilityman Tristan Gray has gotten the other two starts and projects as the regular there for the time being. Gray has a homer and a double in the early going but is a .220/.279/.394 hitter over 53 career contests.
Laweryson made his first Opening Day roster this year. The 27-year-old righty made five appearances last season as a September call-up. He has worked 6 1/3 frames of four-run ball (three earned) with eight strikeouts in five outings this year. Laweryson has a save and a hold as part of a wide open Minnesota bullpen.
Minnesota will announce their corresponding call-ups tomorrow. Ryan Kreidler and Eric Wagaman are on the 40-man roster as depth infielders. Kreidler offers more defensive value and is hitting better in Triple-A to begin the season. Zak Kent, who was optioned earlier in the week, seems likeliest to take the bullpen spot if the Twins don’t want to designate anyone for assignment.
Twins Add Six Players To 40-Man Roster
The Twins have selected the contracts of left-handers Kendry Rojas and Connor Prielipp, righties Andrew Morris and John Klein, and outfielders Gabriel Gonzalez and Hendry Mendez, the team announced. They’re all protected from next month’s Rule 5 Draft.
Rojas, who came to the Twins alongside outfielder Alan Roden in the trade sending reliever Louis Varland to Toronto, is a 22-year-old southpaw (23 next week) who climbed three minor league levels in 2025, topping out with his first taste of Triple-A work. The Cuban-born lefty breezed through High-A and Double-A before running into some trouble in his first 32 1/3 innings at the top minor league level. He yielded 26 runs in that time (7.34 ERA) and walked 14.7% of his opponents.
Those struggles came in a small sample of nine Triple-A appearances at a time when most of the opponents he was facing were much older and further along in their development. Walks haven’t been a major issue for Rojas to this point in his pro career, however, and most scouting reports project that he’ll eventually have average command with the potential for three average or better pitches. Rojas could be in line to make his MLB debut next summer, so there was no chance the Twins were going to leave him unprotected.
Prielipp, 24, was a second-round pick in 2022 and might’ve been a first-rounder had he not been coming off Tommy John surgery at the time of the draft. Elbow troubles have further plagued the Alabama product since being drafted. He underwent an internal brace procedure in 2023 and, entering the 2025 season, had all of 30 professional innings under his belt.
Prielipp looked plenty healthy this past season, however, appearing in 24 games (23 of them starts) and missing plenty of bats with an above-average ground-ball rate. He posted a 3.65 ERA, 27% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate in 61 2/3 Double-A frames before showing some fatigue late in the season with a 5.14 ERA in five Triple-A games (four starts). He’s already drawn top-100 fanfare at FanGraphs and ESPN, and he’ll likely draw further consideration for such lists in the offseason. As with Rojas, there was never a doubt he’d be added to the 40-man today.
Morris, 24, doesn’t have the same ceiling as Rojas and Prielipp but is arguably the most MLB-ready of the bunch. He started 19 games (plus two long relief outings) in Triple-A this season and worked to a 4.09 ERA with a 22.4% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate. The 2022 fourth-rounder averaged 95.5 mph on his four-seamer in Triple-A this past season — up 1.6 mph from the prior year — and draws praise for plus command and a five-pitch arsenal that includes at least average grades on his heater, slider and cutter.
A Twin Cities native, Klein was an undrafted free agent who signed with his hometown club in 2022. He pitched 106 1/3 innings between Double-A and Triple-A, logging a combined 3.98 ERA. Klein, who’ll turn 24 in April, fanned 27.6% of his opponents against an 8% walk rate. He sits 94-96 mph with his sinker and four-seamer, complementing those fastballs with a cutter, curveball and changeup.
Gonzalez came to the Twins from the Mariners as part of the 2023 Jorge Polanco trade. He was a top-100 prospect at the time who struggled in his first season with the organization but bounced back to the tune of a .329/.395/.513 batting line as a 21-year-old between Double-A and Triple-A this season. He could get an MLB look in 2026.
Mendez was one of the team’s many deadline pickups, coming over in the trade that sent Harrison Bader to Philadelphia. He hit a combined .299/.399/.439 with more walks than strikeouts (13.6% to 13.2%) in 491 turns at the plate between High-A and Double-A. He’s a bat-first, hit-over-power outfield prospect who is generally considered to rank within the top 20 of a deep Minnesota farm system.
Francys Romero of BeisbolFR.com first reported that Rojas had been selected.