Minnesota Twins fans and the team itself had such high expectations going into 2021 and yet as we approach the midway point in the season we find the team floundering badly at 31-42. The season opened on April 1 and the team reached their high-water mark for the season on April 8 when they were three games over .500 with a 5-2 record. Since then it has been one step forward and two steps back.
So how do you explain this? How does a team that everyone expected to be a serious contender and pretty much a playoff lock in 2021 play such terrible baseball that it is basically unwatchable? Where do you start? Like in most businesses you have to start at the top.
In the case of our Minnesota Twins the top is President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey and Senior Vice President and General Manager Thad Levine who both joined the organization in November 2016. They didn’t get to pick their own manager as ownership made it pretty clear that that skipper Paul Molitor was still their guy. However; after the team finished seven games worse in 2018 then they did in 2017, the Falvey and Levine quickly axed the 2017 American League Manager of the Year Paul Molitor and Falvey and Levine brought in their guy, Rocco Baldelli.
In 2019 the Twins Bomba squad managed by rookie skipper Rocco Baldelli won the Central Division title finishing with 101 wins and things looked rosy in Twins Territory even though the Twins once again were swept in three games by the New York Yankees in the ALDS. Midway through spring training in 2020 COVID-19 reared its ugly head and training camps were shut down in mid March and MLB was on the back burner as players and ownership could not agree on how and when to return to playing ball. An agreement was finally reached and a 60 game season was agreed to along with a multitude of rule changes and MLB played ball with no fans in the stands. The Twins finished with a 36-24 record and won the Central Division again but some things never seem to change as the Twins were again swept in the ALWC series 2-0 by the Houston Astros who sneaked into the playoffs with a 29-31 record.
In spite of their 18 consecutive playoff losses, the Twins had high hopes again in 2021. After all, players and staff reminded us, they weren’t responsible for that long playoff losing streak. Plus this year they hoped to have some of their injured stars like Byron Buxton, Josh Donaldson and Mitch Garver play a full schedule of games.
You can blame it on the injuries as after 73 games Buxton has played in 27 games, Garver has played in 41 games, Max Kepler has played in 42 games, Luis Arraez has played in 47 games and various other players have also missed games. But it isn’t all about the injuries as every team has injuries and the Twins are actually pretty low on the list of games missed due to players on the IL.
More and more fans are calling for manager Rocco Baldelli’s head questioning how he uses his pitchers, his constant “resting” of ballplayers, his game strategy and the fact that he seems to run the club house like a country club with nap rooms and allowing certain players to skip batting practice with the rest of the team. Then there are all the players mental mistakes that seem to indicate that the team is weak on fundamentals. I think that one of the biggest problems with Baldelli is that he is too much of a players manager and that he is not experienced enough to be managing a big league ballclub much less a supposed contender. In the past he has had bench coaches like Derek Shelton and Mike Bell in his ear sharing their wisdom and now he has no one like that on his staff and it shows. Baldelli should be the second former AL manager of the year that the Twins send packing.
Falvey and Levine and the Twins FO certainly own a huge share of the blame for this dismal season and should be taken to the woodshed and probably shown to the exit door for their contributions or lack of this past off-season. Their free agent signings of J.A. Happ and Matt Shoemaker to man the four and five spots in the Twins starting rotation have proven to be disasters. Just a year earlier this dynamic duo signed Homer Bailey and Rich Hill to fill the four and five spots in the starting rotation and they got a total of ten starts and 47 innings out of them all season. Their extension of Randy Dobnak doesn’t seem wise at this point but to be fair, the Twins field staff has jerked Dobnak around so much this year the poor guy doesn’t know which way he is going. The management of the 40 man roster has been questionable. The Twins bullpen is in shambles and there is no where else to look except at Falvey and Levine. Falvey and Levine seem to be bottom-feeders in the free agent market and the one time they did spend $92 million of the Pohlad family money they gave it to a often injured 34-year old third baseman who had played in 52 games the year before and 113 game a year earlier.
So where do the Twins go from here? The trading deadline is just around the corner and everyone is wondering if the Twins should be sellers or should they be buyers. Falvey himself has been quoted in the past as saying that when the trading deadline rolls around you should do one or the other. The way this Twins team has played that would normally be an easy decision, SELL! But it is not that easy a decision with this team at this time.
This team has a nucleus of good young players that most MLB teams would be glad to have on their rosters but they do have holes to be sure. The starting pitching staff needs help and the bullpen needs some serious attention too. Fixing the bullpen should not cost that much money but getting some good starting pitching will be costly, either financially through free agency or by having to give up some of their highly rated minor league talent.
So what do you do? This has to be an ownership decision because the team is coming off a 2020 season where they had no butts in the seats and their revenue was way down. Do you just write-off the 2021 season as a crazy one-off and rely on your current players to bounce back in 2022 and spend even more money trying to acquire some pitching help or do you just sell and start a long term rebuild in which case the fan base dwindles even more and the financial losses deepen?
The Twins are are at crossroads here, the decisions they make in the next month or so will determine the Twins future for years to come. If I am Mr. Pohlad I would say to Falvey that I want to see a hybrid rebuild by you trading/selling off players like Nelson Cruz, Josh Donaldson, Miguel Sano, Andrelton Simmons, J.A. Happ, Matt Shoemaker, Hansel Robles, Alex Colome and others. Some will bring you a decent return and others will be addition through subtraction. I would mention that none of the other players on the roster should be deemed untouchable, if the return is right we willing to trade anyone. That does not mean I am shopping them to everyone, it just means that if you bring me a deal that I am confident that I can win, we can do business.
There are a couple of elephants in the room and they are Jose Berrios and Byron Buxton as both become free agents after 2022. There are obviously other free agents but these two are unique. I would make a fair a reasonable offer, probably to the point of over-paying to Berrios in the next week or two and get him signed to a long term deal. Berrios is just 27 and has shown he takes the rubber every five days, there are not many of these kinds of guys around. A signing like this would also go a long way towards sending Twins fans a message that they are in it to win. If he says no to a long term deal, you still keep him, you can still trade him down the line.
Byron Buxton is an enigma, it is almost a situation where you can’t win no matter which way you go. The man can go down in history as the best player the Twins have ever had or he can be the biggest and maybe the most expensive number one pick bust the team has ever seen and put a team like the Twins in a hole for the next decade. So with him you do nothing right now, just wait. I expect that past history will make him harder to sign so I would just leave him alone and see what if anything he and his agent bring to the table between now and the off-season. If nothing develops you listen to offers for Buxton this off-season and if none are deemed worthy than you just wait and see if Byron Buxton can stay healthy and what he can do on the field in 2022. At that point the pressure is on Buxton to stay healthy and put up good numbers to get a big deal after the 2022 season be it with Minnesota or someone else. Buxton is such a crap shoot with his injury history you just can’t give him that huge sum of money and expect to get value in return but there are always probably going to be teams that can afford to take a hit like that financially in hopes of striking gold.
Mr. Pohlad should wrap things up with Derek Falvey by telling him that Rocco Baldelli should be relieved of his managing duties at the end of the season and an experienced manager should be hired. Derek Falvey and Thad Levine might stay in their current rolls for the 2022 season but another fiasco like 2021 will have them searching for employment elsewhere as free agents.