FORT MYERS, Fla. —  For a brief period of time, as teammate after teammate got shipped away on trade deadline day last July, Joe Ryan was convinced he had been traded, too, the result of an erroneous post on social media that suggested he was headed to the Boston Red Sox.

Minutes later, Ryan found out that that trade didn’t happen. He was still a Twin.

But as the Twins reached the offseason, there were questions about how they might proceed from there, and there some thought they might continue tearing down their roster by trading away some of their most-valuable players, Ryan included.

“I think it was just so unknown,” Ryan said.

The Twins hung on to veterans Ryan, who is under team control through next season, Pablo López and Byron Buxton, and tried to build a roster around the talented trio. But it wasn’t until December that the Twins signaled publicly that they planned to keep that group rather than trade from it.

Out in California, there wasn’t all that much time for Ryan to think about trade rumors anyway. In November, Ryan and his fiancée, Clare, welcomed their first child, a baby boy whom they named Rowan.

“Obviously, having the baby, it was a very nice focus to just not think about baseball and really separate there,” Ryan said. “Just think about the baby boy, Clare, and make sure everyone is happy and healthy. … Anything else was just noise. I wasn’t really putting any stock into anything I was hearing or reading or whatever.”

While Ryan remained in place, things at the upper level of the organization changed, and team leaders made it a point to communicate with him along the way.

New manager Derek Shelton was planning on heading west to visit with Ryan, though those plans were dashed after the birth of Ryan’s son. Months later, new executive chair Tom Pohlad paid Ryan a visit in January and the two shared a conversation over a meal.

“I really appreciated that. I thought it was a nice gesture,” Ryan said. “I got to talk to him and see where his vision was. I think the organization is in a good spot with him at the helm. We’ll see how that goes.”

Ryan, who narrowly avoided arbitration with the Twins — agreeing to a one-year, $6.2 million deal on the day he was supposed to fly out for his hearing — is coming off his first all-star season, one in which in which he registered 30 starts for the first time in his career and posted a 3.42 earned-run average.

In the middle of that career year, he spoke with Team USA manager Mark DeRosa about the possibility of competing in the World Baseball Classic when the Twins were in New York to play the Yankees in August. As he did at the 2020 Summer Olympics, the starter has committed to play for Team USA at the upcoming tournament.

In order to prepare for the tournament, which starts in early March, Ryan got off the mound earlier this year, something he said he had wanted to do anyway. But unlike some of the offseasons early in his career, there wasn’t much to tinker with or overhaul.

“More just mechanical, physical things that I just want to hone in on, get better at and improve in those areas,” Ryan said. “I think that takes care of a lot of the problems.”

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