There's a version of Byron Buxton that ranks among the most electric players in baseball, and the Twins have spent years trying to keep him on the field long enough to see it. On Friday they got the answer they've been dodging: Buxton will undergo arthroscopic surgery on his right hip, scheduled for Sept. 18, and his season is over.
The procedure, to be performed by Dr. Christopher Larson, sums up a season that already told the whole story. This was Buxton's third trip to the injured list this year, all stemming from a right hip impingement that first flared in May, when he missed five games. He went back on the IL on July 7 and had to sit out the All-Star Game he'd been voted to start. He was activated July 20, then landed back on the IL July 29, and that third stint is the one that finally required surgery.
He saw it coming, and he said so. "Yeah, unfortunately, I know I'm going to have to get [surgery] done at some point," Buxton told the Star Tribune before this last IL trip. "I'm going to go until it sparks me up again. Then I'll know, 'All right, it's time, bro.' Until then, I'm just going to keep fighting." And on the years of managing it: "We've been battling this for years. It's probably had enough of the shots and treatments. That's more wear and tear. That's something we can't control."
That's a player telling you plainly that the shots and treatment have an expiration date. The Twins should listen, because the pattern predates this season by a long way. Buxton's hip pain traces back to 2021, when he first went on the IL with a hip strain, and the injury also cost him the final month of 2022.
Look at the whole career: Buxton has played fewer than 100 games in nine of his 12 seasons. He's cleared 100 games only three times, a career-high 140 back in 2017, then 126 in 2025 and 102 in 2024. That's a decade-long pattern the organization has been reluctant to accept, not bad luck.
The Twins need to stop building around the idea that Buxton will one day just be healthy. Hoping isn't a plan, and they've been running on hope since they handed him a seven-year, $100 million extension in 2021. The player they signed and the player who actually shows up are two different men, and the second one has been out since late August.
None of this means he's finished or that he can't help a good team. When he's on the field, he still produces: he hit .254 with 25 home runs and 46 RBIs across 93 games this season, and made the American League All-Star team for the second straight year and third time overall. That's genuine, top-shelf offense. The problem was never his ceiling. It's how many days a year he's available to reach it.
What reimagining his role actually looks like is a fair debate. Maybe it's leaning harder into designated-hitter days to spare the pounding of center field. Maybe it's building a roster on the assumption that Buxton gives you two-thirds of a season, with a real center-field succession plan behind him instead of an emergency scramble every July. Buxton turns 33 in December, and the honest planning number for his availability shouldn't be 150 games. It should be closer to what he's actually delivered.
The temptation after a surgery like this is to reset the clock and tell yourself next year is the year the body finally cooperates. The Twins have told themselves that story more than once. The smarter read on Buxton is to stop treating his health as a coin flip that keeps landing wrong and start treating it as the known variable it plainly is. Build for the player he is. The alternative is watching another season disappear into the training room while everyone insists the real Buxton is just around the corner.
