When longtime Twins president Dave St. Peter announced his retirement, ownership made a surprising choice. Instead of replacing him with another member of his own department or conducting a talent search in other industries or organizations, they promoted Derek Falvey into a dual role as president of both baseball and business operations. It was an unusual move—one that only a handful of executives across Major League Baseball have attempted—and one that comes with enormous responsibility. Each job is a full-time challenge on its own. Expecting one man to juggle both is unrealistic, and 2025 made clear just how unsustainable the arrangement has become. The Twins stumbled to 90-plus losses for the first time since 2016, and Target Field posted its worst attendance numbers in history. That’s failure on both fronts.
Falvey’s own comments at his end-of-season press conference only underscored how shaky the structure is.
“Dave St. Peter is still around a lot, a tremendous advisor, not just to the Pohlads but to me and the whole organization. He’s played a really nice role during that transition,” Falvey said Tuesday, in response to a question about his business-side role. “I haven’t been told anything else in going forward and how I operate.”
That first note, that St. Peter remains very much in the mix, sounds far less like a short-term advisor and far more like someone still running the show. It’s a recipe for internal confusion. Who is actually in charge? If employees don’t know whether Falvey or St. Peter is calling the shots, accountability vanishes and messaging fractures. The supposed transition looks more like a muddled overlap, with no clear leadership on the business side at all.
On the baseball side, the expectation was that new GM Jeremy Zoll would handle more of the heavy lifting. Instead, Falvey continues to dominate every decision, every media session, every big-picture answer about roster construction, coaching hires, and trades. Zoll is essentially invisible in the public eye, and there’s no evidence Falvey has truly delegated responsibility. Even behind the scenes, his was the ubiquitous face in postgame huddles in Rocco Baldelli‘s office at Target Field all season. For a man tasked with leading all areas of the organization, it doesn’t work if he’s still doing everything himself. The result has been questionable roster management, strange deadline moves, and a team that collapsed beyond a previous collapse.
“I’m ultimately responsible for it all,” Falvey admitted. “He didn’t perform, and I feel like I’ve let down the staff, the coaches, the fans, and everybody in here when that happens.”
Responsibility is one thing, but accountability without change just keeps the cycle spinning. Falvey paid lip service to a change that needs to be much more far-reaching and (perhaps) much less talked-about.
Meanwhile, fans have turned away. Attendance numbers cratered, and when pressed about how to win people back, Falvey fell back on a blunt truth—but a convenient one.
“We’ve got to go perform. We’ve got to go be a team that wins more games,” he opined. “You can’t separate the business and the baseball side. This is a baseball team. You want the baseball team to go perform.”
He’s not wrong, but he is missing the point. The baseball side isn’t winning, and the business side hasn’t found a way to keep fans engaged while they wait. Both engines are stalling, and the man in charge has spread himself too thin to fix either one—not least, perhaps, because he sees them as so dependent on each other. His background has taught him that his spending power as the baseball operations chief determines how hard he can push to contend, and it’s the business side’s job to deliver money that can be spent. On the other hand, he knows that that job is almost impossible to perform without a baseline of goodwill created by fielding a competitive team. The two halves of him are each waiting for the other to give them a green light. Meanwhile, the car he’s supposed to be driving is idling at an empty intersection.
The Twins need clarity. Either Falvey empowers Zoll to run the baseball operation or ownership finds a new leader on the business side. Right now, Falvey is in over his head. He holds too much responsibility and delivers too little in either arena. For the sake of the franchise’s future, the Twins need more than one overstretched executive. They need leaders who can devote their full energy to building a winning team and rebuilding trust with a dwindling fan base.
The call is simple: Twins ownership must decide if Derek Falvey is going to run baseball or business, but not both. Until they split the roles again and bring in focused leadership, the team will remain stuck in neutral, drifting away from both success on the field and support in the stands.
What do you think? Should the Twins keep this dual-role structure, or is it time to make a change? Leave a comment below and start the conversation!