MLB changes Twins’ schedule; team now set to host games Fourth of July weekend
Major League Baseball announced tweaks to the schedule for the upcoming season on Monday, one of which involves the Twins and now leaves them hosting home games over the Fourth of July weekend.
The locations for the series that the Twins and Tampa Bay Rays will play against each other have been flipped with the Twins now hosting the Rays from July 4-6. Games will begin at 3:10 p.m. on the holiday and 1:10 p.m. the next two days. They will travel to Florida to play the Rays from May 26-28, during the dates in which they were originally supposed to host the Rays.
The changes to the schedule were made after Hurricane Milton battered Tropicana Field, the Rays’ home, last month and tore off much of the roof, rendering the field unplayable next season. The Rays will play their home games next season at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, the spring training home of the New York Yankees.
In a release, the league said the schedule changes were made “to optimize the number of games played in the best weather conditions given the Rays’ transition to an outdoor ballpark.”
So now the Twins, who were supposed to have a nine-game homestand in late May, will have a six-game homestand followed by a 10-game road trip in which they must travel from Tampa to Seattle. They will play in two minor league parks on that trip, as they also head to Sacramento, Calif., to take on the Athletics, who have relocated from Oakland.
That extended road trip replaces the one they were scheduled to have in late June and early July, in which they were originally scheduled to play in Detroit, Miami and Tampa Bay. With the three new home games that month, they will now have a nine-game homestand leading into the all-star break.