I have followed the Minnesota Twins since 1961 (with the exception of my Navy years 1965-1968) but very few Twins teams have frustrated me as much as this season has. I have never been one to sugar-coat the Twins performance and I think I have done my share of ripping the Twins organization over the years. My site, Twinstrivia.com is intended to be a Minnesota Twins historical website so I try to not spend a lot of time writing about my personal feeling regarding the Twins although I do not hide the fact I am a huge Twins fan and watch them when ever I can, more so on TV now days than in person. But this 2023 Twins team is getting to me.
The Minnesota Twins coming off a three-game series in which they went 0 for 23 with RISP and were outscored 13 to 3 and swept by the high flying Atlanta Braves. After the series-sweeping 3-0 loss manager Rocco Baldelli had another closed-door meeting with his team in which he told them that they were playing was unsatisfactory baseball. I would have paid good money to sit in on that meeting.
The Twins have been in first place for the majority of the 2023 season but have played uninspiring baseball for most of the year. The starting pitching has been good but the bullpen has been less than stellar and the hitting has been abysmal, particularly situational hitting.
So who is to blame for this fiasco? To me the problem starts at the very top and that is the offices of Derek Falvey and Thad Levine. The buck always stops at the top, right? The overall plan they seem to have is to get some good starting pitching and that is great. To be fair they have made some progress there. The cost for doing so can be debated. The problem I have is that their hitting strategy seems to be “wait for the home run”. That is not the kind of baseball that I enjoy nor is it the way to be the last team standing in my humble opinion.
My biggest frustration with the Dynamic Duo of Falvey & Levine is that they seem to think that they have the right to do it all. Making all the decisions that you would normally expect from the FO but they also want to make all the “manager decisions” based on what the computer data shows them. They put Rocco Baldelli in place as their manager and he has been nothing more than a puppet or a messenger boy putting together the line-ups. Analytics have their place in baseball but not to the point that the Twins organization seems to be using them. As far as I know baseball has always been played by humans, not computers. The Twins leadership seems to have forgotten that.
I have a number of issues of how Baldelli manages the team but the one thing that really drives me batty is how he is always resting his players so that they are strong going down the stretch. What good does it do you to be strong at the end of the season if you are out of the running? In my opinion the best players should be playing day in and day out unless they can’t go to the starting line. This isn’t little league where everyone gets to play, this is a serious business and some times player have to suck it up and play even if they are tired. If the utility players don’t like it, tough, play better and you can be a starter too.
I have not seen any of the previous Twins managers run such a lax country club atmosphere as Rocco does. He claims the players are working theirs butts off but they must be doing it in secret because I have never seen it. For sure their spring training camp is the most loosely run laissez-faire approach I have ever seen. This past Spring it was usually about 11AM before all/most of the players were on the field. I guess Baldelli’s players need to make sure they don’t get up too early and get a good nights rest. Maybe they should go to bed earlier?
I can’t say for sure because I have never set foot in the Twins clubhouse but IMHO it appears that Baldelli and the Twins FO have their favorite players on this team and these players get preferential treatment. But that is my perception.
The Twins have beaten the Baltimore Orioles twice since their big players-only meeting, once by a 8-1 score and then they won the next game 1-0 and have retaken first place. Bottom line is that this team simply needs to hit better than what it has shown this year. You can’t keep putting all that pressure on your pitching staff to keep putting up zeroes on the board day in and day out.
So where do things go from here? Well, the All-Star break is just around the corner and changes might take place then. The MLB trade deadline this year is August 1. Based on the FO philosophy that they have previously shared we can expect that the Twins will be either sellers or buyers as their opinion is that doing nothing, is not an option. You either improve your current team by buying or you sell and improve your future teams. Seems like a reasonable approach to take.
If this team doesn’t show signs of life soon and hits more consistently it doesn’t look good, but we won’t go down that road just yet.