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The Minnesota Twins finished 12-27 from August 28, 2024 through the end of the season. The best news to follow was that the Pohlad family may cease to exist, at least in the baseball sense. The team was put up for sale and hope for the future was renewed.
Fast forward a year and that same family gutted the major league roster. The Minnesota Twins are again disappointing, and this time around they’re keeping the franchise.
Credit: Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images
Years ago Jim Pohlad, formerly the ownership face of the franchise, called the 2016 result a “total system failure.” That probably fits for the state of things right now. The only person shouldering any of the load is manager Rocco Baldelli.
MN Twins have unwavering support of Rocco Baldelli
Listen, it’s not shocking that Rocco Baldelli would stick out his neck for a general manager that has since extended him, or an ownership group that cuts his checks. The unfortunate part is he shouldn’t be the only one. That’s exactly where the problem with his quote to The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman lies.
“Frankly, we just have to play better. That’s really the only way I can look at it. I look in the mirror every day and always will take full responsibility for our team, even more so when we don’t play well. And we just frankly have not performed the way that we have to perform.”
Nothing Baldelli said in those four sentences is incorrect. The team needs to play better, and he manages the team. That said, he is not on the field and as much as he’d like to, he can’t reincarnate the former top prospect and promising big leaguer that he was on in someone else.
The goal of a manager is to create a level of synchrony between the front office and those between the lines. For that he has been exceptional. It’s why he remains around, and why he was tabbed to take over for Paul Molitor despite his predecessor having recently won a Manager of the Year award.
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What Baldelli is incapable of doing is making roster decisions that represent sweeping changes to the 26-man group he is afforded, or the organization as a whole. That’s where the problem lies.
When does anyone else take responsibility?
Just like Baldelli did from the dugout, Derek Falvey watched the team he constructed collapse last season. How did he respond? He did nothing. That has become a common reality for the president of baseball operations. Now he has been elevated to president of baseball operations as well. He is quite literally the most powerful front office executive in the sport.
In recent seasons, his power has resulted in missing the playoffs four of the past five seasons. He has done nothing to supplement quality teams at the trade deadline. The 2023 squad that ended the postseason drought got literally nothing. Last season Falvey swung a trade for Trevor Richards, who had more wild pitches (7) than runs allowed (6) in his 13 innings of work.
Still, without a track record of success since initially cleaning up the antiquated organization that Terry Ryan had allowed it to become, Falvey remains. His consistent uttering of meaningless gobbledegook has grown tiresome, and the accountability has not once been present.
Let’s talk about the MN Twins’ PROPAGANDA President… pic.twitter.com/axDLbbqeJk
— Minnesota Sports Fan (@realmnsportsfan) August 7, 2025
You can’t expect Falvey to come down harshly on an aloof family tying one hand behind his back either, but he has turned to the coaching staff as scapegoats already. At some point, understanding that processes should change may be a good place to start. Suggesting that he has come up short with what resources are available to him would be welcomed.
“We have some areas where we’ve come up short relative to what we’ve projected. There have been a few position players that, if you ask them, they’d say, ‘I’m not performing quite to my abilities.’”
It’d be interesting to consider who built those teams, and then doubled down when it was clear the performance wasn’t up to par. Of course Falvey enjoyed the 2019 Bomba Squad that blasted a bouncy baseball to smithereens. That hasn’t stopped him from building around slugging while the outside factors have indicated that being a poor course of action.
The Twins are 18th in slugging this season and their 144 homers rank just 14th. The collective being slow (24th in stolen bases and 25th in baserunning above average) while also largely being bad defenders is a self-inflicted choice.
Only the Pohlad’s trump Falvey’s culpability for MN Twins
The Pohlad family will never get it. Worse than Falvey, the level of accountability they posses would require more than the robotic drivel uttered to the media.
“And I would say to those fans: It’s my job and this new ownership group’s new job to do everything we can to set this organization up for success, hopefully in the short- and long-term both. I look forward to it.”
“I don’t think we could have imagined a better outcome than where we landed.”
“Our fans are passionate. Our fans want to win. We have that in common — we want to win, too.”
Those are all real quotes from the Twins chairman to the Star Tribune in his first public interview since failing to sell the team while it profiled as an ugly asset with considerable debt. If you’re trying to find a level of accountability in there, it would require rubbing more than the two neurons together that it took to generate that quote.
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Until those above the manager want to hold themselves accountable, it doesn’t matter what the play on the field looks like. Yes, the Twins have a core that flopped and needed to be pieced out. The man responsible for putting it together earned a promotion. The guy given a golden ticket who pays him hasn’t ever shown a representative amount of responsibility either.
At the end of the day it will always be the manager that gets fired. Someone has to take the fall. While he’s being criticized, and even sometimes rightly for moves on a nightly basis, it would be great for something to befall those actually speaking into his role.
Mentioned in this article: Derek Falvey Jim Pohlad joe pohlad Rocco Baldelli Team Sale
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