Twins principal owner Jim Pohlad may have passed control of the club’s day-to-day operations to his nephew Joe Pohlad in 2022, but he’s still involved with the team and often at Target Field. Pohlad was on hand Friday night to watch the nose-diving Twins officially excuse themselves from postseason contention, losing 7-2 to Baltimore to complete an epic collapse that will be Topic One around here all winter.
It’s hard to fathom how a team that played so well for 4 1/2 months could fall apart so completely the last six weeks, going 12-27 from Aug. 18 on to blow a sure wild-card berth. Even the recent returns of Carlos Correa (right foot plantar fasciitis) and Byron Buxton (right hip inflammation) from lengthy absences couldn’t save the season. Pohlad was heading out of the stadium Friday when I ran into him in a downstairs hallway, and he gave me a pained look and a shrug.
“I guess we’re not as good as we thought we were,” he said. “I don’t have any answers.”
Angry Twins fans, on the other hand, offered plenty, starting with the ownership’s decision last winter to cut roughly $25 million from the club record $156 million 2023 payroll. That offset the loss in revenue when Diamond Sports Group, which owns Bally Sports North and other regional networks, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Sure, it made business sense. And the Twins weren’t the only MLB club to cut costs. But the timing, shortly after the Twins ended a record 18-game postseason losing streak and won their first playoff series since 2002, angered fans who wanted aggressiveness, not caution. They saw Correa, Buxton, Royce Lewis and a bunch of promising kids from the farm system and, for once, thought big. They wanted the Twins to go for it.
But then the club let Sonny Gray, one of three reliable starting pitchers, depart in free agency without even making an offer. Almost every personnel and strategic decision after that went horribly wrong.
Extending the TV deal with Diamond Sports for this season backfired when a squabble between Diamond and Comcast kept Twins games off Xfinity cable for three months. The club’s one trade deadline acquisition, Toronto reliever Trevor Richards, couldn’t throw strikes and didn’t last a month before he was designated for assignment. The Twins hit .219 in September while the bullpen fell apart, spoiling any shot at a glorious fall of baseball.
“This will bother me forever,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said.
Oh, and the winning pitcher Friday night for Baltimore? Cade Povich, a former Twins farmhand traded for forgettable reliever Jorge Lopez.
“If you have anybody to blame, blame me for going down for two months and not being part of the team,” Correa said. “I think that’s one of the main reasons.
“There’s nothing to be happy about the last month. Everything went south, and we couldn’t recover. Now we’re in this spot where we have to spend the whole offseason thinking about this and looking for ways to make sure we’re moving forward.”
Thursday night’s excruciating 8-6 loss in 13 innings to the 100-loss Miami Marlins exposed every flaw that cost the Twins so dearly. Poor baserunning. Lousy fundamentals. Ghastly clutch hitting (2-for-19 with runners in scoring position). And on and on. Even Cory Provus, the Twins’ TV announcer and one of the most positive voices in the organization, offered a “C’mon, guys. Can’t happen” on the air after catcher Ryan Jeffers, one of the Twins’ best bunters, tried to sacrifice with two on and lined into a double play to stub out an extra-inning rally.
Friday afternoon before batting practice, Jeffers sat at a table in the clubhouse with a plate of food while the MLB Network, visible on two clubhouse TVs, aired a segment on the Twins. It wasn’t good. Correa walked through, looked up at the chyron — “Twins on brink of elimination after extra-inning loss to the Marlins” — and never broke stride. Veteran move – he knew what was coming.
But Jeffers watched all the awful highlights from the night before, several involving him. The botched bunt. His dropped throw at the plate on a force play. And finally the last out, by the still-hobbled Correa, who jogged to first base after bouncing to the mound. One problem: Pitcher Darren McCaughan’s off-target throw pulled first baseman Jonah Bride off the bag. Correa sped up, but Bride still beat him to the base.
Jeffers tried to take it all in stride, though the bunt still irked him. “I always get those down,” said Jeffers, who had two of the club’s four successful safety squeeze bunts in 2023. “They’re automatic for me.”
So what happens now? President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey disappointed the “Fire Rocco” crowd Sunday by confirming Baldelli will be back — no surprise, since Falvey called Baldelli “my partner in this all the way through” two years ago after the last September collapse. Joe Pohlad added that Falvey will return as well. No one else received similar guarantees.
It’s not clear what level of firing — coaches, the managers, even an executive — would placate fans primarily upset with the Pohlads. Thing is, they should be mad at the baseball operations staff.
They’re the ones who consider any player who doesn’t sign a team-friendly contract disposable. That’s how they ended up replacing former Gold Glove winner Michael A. Taylor with Manny Margot, a shaky defender who somehow went 0-for-30 as a pinch-hitter.
They’re responsible for drafting and developing one reliable starting pitcher in eight years (Bailey Ober), and turning Louis Varland from a promising starter and even more promising reliever into a guy with a 7.61 ERA who yells into his glove.
They’re also responsible for a hitting approach that favors slugging over situational hitting, leaving the club vulnerable to prolonged slumps like we just saw. The “Bomba Squad” is long gone, and Jeffers and Lewis shouldn’t be the only hitters shortening their swings with two strikes.
It’s not all about money, people. The search for answers starts elsewhere.
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