2025 AL Central preview: Top storylines to watch for Guardians, Tigers, Twins, Royals

The 2025 American League Central is shaping up to be, potentially, one of the closest four-team races in recent memory.

Most sportsbooks have the Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Minnesota Twins and Kansas City Royals all separated by a grand total of two wins, all between 82.5 and 84.5. The Chicago White Sox are just hoping to be slightly less stomach-churning in 2025.

The 2024 AL Central featured three young playoff teams who all beat expectations. The Twins just missed out on playoff baseball after a September collapse. All four return in 2025 as division contenders, separated by next to nothing and all with questions to answer after a winter mostly devoid of free agent spending across the board.

Here are the top storylines to watch in the American League Central as Opening Day approaches.

Minnesota Twins 2025 storyline: Can they finally stay healthy?

The Twins have become the broken-down-car of the baseball world, constantly spinning their tires and struggling through a series of setbacks (which could be termed as recalls) while other, even smaller-budget teams steam past them into the postseason.

This was supposed to be a great Twins run in Minnesota with stars like Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa and Royce Lewis and Alex Kirilloff and several others. They could have ruled the American League Central for years while the other clubs rebuilt or at the very least struggled to keep up.

Instead, injuries have robbed them of a real contention window.

There was hope in October 2023. The Twins ended a 19-year playoff win drought and entered that offseason with some actual momentum. The division looked to be Minnesota's for the taking. Instead, ownership rewarded Twins fans with a $30 million payroll cut.

That was never felt more than last September, when a total collapse in Minnesota led to jubilee in Detroit, and the Tigers stealing a wild card spot right out from under the Twins, who ran out of steam.

The Tigers had sold at the trade deadline, but Twins ownership had sold out the previous offseason.

Buxton actually hit the milestone of 100 games played in 2024, which he hadn't since 2017, but it still meant he missed more than 60 games. Correa missed more than two months. Lewis will begin the 2025 season on the injured list. And Kirilloff, frustrated with constant rehab schedules and the pain of a multitude of injuries, retired altogether at the age of 26.

If that Twins lineup can ever stay healthy, it remains dangerous on paper. Injuries, and ownership spending, have kept Minnesota from the type of success it envisioned was almost inevitable seven or eight years ago.

Detroit Tigers 2025 storyline: Can they ride 'chaos' into the playoffs again?

If any ream resembled a chaotic underdog, it was the 2024 Tigers.

On Aug. 2, the Tigers were seven games below .500, 16 games behind the Guardians for the division and had just traded away Jack Flaherty and others as sellers at the deadline. They'd try again in 2025. The season was over.

And then it just — wasn't. Behind Tarik Skubal's awakening as the AL's Cy Young award winner, one of the game's best bullpens and a gritty lineup, the Tigers went on a 34-17 run. It was if they were in last place in a marathon but were suddenly allowed to use a Corvette, and they crossed the finish line, tires squealing and spinning out of control, at 100 mph. The "pitching chaos" worked.

The Tigers, with Skubal and a number of young players all ascending to perform their roles just as needed, took down the Houston Astros and were one game away from the ALCS until Lane Thomas landed a haymaker grand slam against Detroit's ace in Game 5. If not for heroics by Thomas and David Fry a few days before in Game 4, the Tigers would have gone from midseason obscurity to four wins away from the World Series.

Now the question becomes: how much magic can carry over to this season? Or perhaps it is better asked: how much chaos is needed this time?

The Tigers have virtually all of the same chaos-makers back along with a few veteran additions — Gleyber Torres, Alex Cobb — to help round out a still-young, still-improving roster. And then there's Skubal, a darkness-bringing terror no team in baseball ever wants to see on the mound.

They just have to prove that the miracle run to end the year was for real.

Kansas City Royals 2025 storyline: Do they have enough offense to help Bobby Witt Jr?

The Royals were one of the biggest surprises of 2024, a team under manager Matt Quatraro that pushed its way past some meager expectations and into the playoffs.

The Royals boasted one of the only rotations in baseball with four pitchers to finish the season with a 4.00 ERA or better and at least 150 innings. The consistency of that rotation and the emergence of superstardom from shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. was enough to make the Royals one of the three AL Central playoff teams, aside from the collapsing Twins and the now-infamously bad Chicago White Sox.

If you were to ask any baseball executive who they'd pick to start their own major league franchise, Witt would be remarkably high on that list. But perhaps the biggest question for the Royals is if they have enough run production around him to make it all count.

They tried to address that issue by dealing Brady Singer, the fourth-best starter in that quartet, to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for second baseman Jonathan India with the hope of giving Witt a few more base runners to knock in.

But like their AL Central counterparts in general, there wasn't much spending over the winter to do much else. Starting pitchers Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans and Michael Waga make for a dynamic one-two-three in the rotation, and Witt is about as valuable as any other player in the league not named Shohei Ohtani, but the Royals might have to hope that some others step up to provide some support. Otherwise, that rotation and a star shortstop might have to do all the heavy lifting.

Cleveland Guardians 2025 storyline: Can the bullpen repeat its history-setting performance?

Baseball's postseason is known as a crapshoot. It takes a sport that demands a large sample size and grinds it down to a few games. It's difficult to find reliable aspects of playoff baseball, aside from knowing it'll always be one of the most electric atmospheres in sports.

The Guardians of 2024 relied on the crapshootiest of baseball roster elements — the bullpen. It led them to within three wins of the World Series, but it also, finally, bit them back.

There's almost no other way describe the Guardians 2024 bullpen as anything but otherworldly. They repeatedly put up numbers no group of relievers had before, or they did things that hadn't been done since before Y2K or one of the World Wars.

Emmanuel Clase, Cade Smith, Hunter Gaddis and Tim Herrin all had sub-2.00 ERAs and all appeared in at least 74 games. They formed the core of the best bullpen in the major leagues in 25 years and one of the best units of all time.

Clase finished with 47 saves and five earned runs allowed — for the entire regular season. He earned Cy Young votes. Smith, Gaddis and Herrin all had cases to be ranked among the game's best setup relievers. Eli Morgan had a 1.93 ERA in 42 innings and barely gets mentioned above the fold. Scott Barlow had a 4.25 ERA, and the Guardians couldn't keep him on the roster once Andrew Walters and Erik Sabrowski forced their way into the mix.

But in the postseason, the engine that powered the Guardians to the AL Central title in manager Stephen Vogt's first season — in which he seemed to push every correct button at exactly the right time while trying to give the credit to everyone else around him — eventually faltered. Clase suddenly looked human, and Gaddis was beaten up by the New York Yankees, who went on to the World Series.

Entering 2025, the Guardians — with their brand of "Guards Ball" — are again wondering if the lineup has enough power (Josh Naylor is gone) to support star third baseman Jose Ramirez, who has a chance to finish top-six in MVP voting for the seventh time since 2017. They're wondering if they can see some better starting pitching luck after Shane Bieber and Gavin Williams went down with injuries and Triston McKenzie lost the strike zone.

But, most of all, they're wondering if their military-grade bullpen can again be as lethal in 2025. It is perhaps baseball's best weapon in the postseason, but they can't ride their relievers too hard during the regular season, or they won't get there. Bullpens are notoriously finicky year-over-year. The 2025 Guardians might have to buck that trend to repeat as division champs.

Chicago White Sox 2025 storyline: When will the misery end?

They say that hope springs eternal but, like in "The Lion King," that light of optimism doesn't reach certain lands — in this case, that means the South Side of Chicago.

Ah, Rate Field, where your hot dog might cost more than your ticket.

Losing 100 games in a season is bad. In fact, it's really bad. Losing 120 games in a season is unheard of. It's so bad that it's almost entertaining, in a dark sort of way. The 2024 White Sox lost 121 games.

Surely, they'll fare better in 2025, right? Right?

Left-hander Garrett Crochet was finally traded in December, swapping his White Sox for Red. Luis Robert Jr. is still there, though he probably just serves as a painful reminder for the optimism White Sox fans had four years ago, when the 2020-2021 teams looked like they'd be the launching pad for a strong run in the division.

Now, the South Side is shrouded in darkness. One must not go there. It isn't clear when it's going to get much better. Losing 100 games would be, somewhat laughably, a massive improvement. At least the hot dogs are good.