There is one question in modern sports that is frequently asked after a coach or manager is introduced by a team: Did (fill in the blank) win the press conference?
It’s rare the answer is no — Brad Childress’ introduction as Vikings coach in 2006 was a clunker — so it comes as no surprise that Derek Shelton won his press conference on Tuesday afternoon after being introduced as the Twins’ 15th manager. Heck, Shelton dominated at the dais.
Of course, this means nothing other than Shelton made a favorable impression on the media and few members of the fan base who haven’t checked out on this team. His real work begins now in getting substantially more out of the Twins than his predecessor, Rocco Baldelli, did during a miserable 2025 season in which the team finished 70-92 and dumped 10 players from their big-league roster at the trade deadline.
Pessimism about Shelton’s hire is justified for a few reasons.
Let’s start with the fact he was hired by the Twins to serve as Paul Molitor’s bench coach in 2018 and stuck around when Baldelli arrived in 2019. The Twins won the AL Central with a 101-61 record in Baldelli’s first season, leading to Shelton being hired as manager of the penny-pinching Pittsburgh Pirates. Shelton went 306-440 in five-plus seasons before being fired with the Pirates sitting at 12-26 in May.
Shelton’s previous association with the Twins and team president Derek Falvey will raise questions about whether the club hired a familiar face because they expect him to be a yes-man, and his lack of success in Pittsburgh will have many asking why things will be any different with the penny-pinching Twins?
All of this is fair and only time will tell if replacing Baldelli with Shelton is going to make a difference — especially since the franchise’s problems go far deeper than the managerial position. Shelton, 55, did point to a couple of areas on which he will focus in spring training.
“The attention to detail and the fundamentals are extremely important to me,” He said. “The first year I came here as a bench coach, I was able to be around (Molitor). We kind of ran a spring training that was a little bit different. I think we’ll get back to some similarities to that.
“There will be more attention to details, more to fundamentals. That’s not talking about anything that happened before. It’s just talking about the lessons I learned. I think we saw in the World Series this year that three little plays determined who was going to win a World Series game, or who was going to win the World Series. So the focus of that is going to be very important to me. I think that’s something I’ve learned over the course of years. There is no detail that is too small.”
This sounds good, but the Twins also overhauled their approach in spring training for this year after a late-season collapse took them out of the playoff picture in 2024. Shelton is right in that attention to detail and fundamentals will be huge for a team that is sure to be on the young side when 2026 opens, but he also is taking over a club that has little idea of who will be in its bullpen.