Tag Archives: Derek Falvey

Minnesota Twins

Rocco’s Modern Baseball

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The news finally emerged early this morning: Rocco Baldelli will be the 14th manager since the Twins franchise moved to Minnesota. For the first time since Ray Miller in 1985, the Twins have hired a manager from outside the organization.  Baldelli will be just the 4th manager employed by the Twins in the last three decades.

By bringing in Baldelli, the Twins have finally jumped into the modern era. With Derek Falvey (35), Thad Levine (45), & Baldelli (37), management of the club is the youngest it’s been since Andy MacPhail (then 33) & Tom Kelly (then 36) started running the team together in 1986. Twins fans don’t need to be reminded of the accomplishments of that tandem of baseball minds.

At the same time, youth alone is not a guarantee of success. Youth can serve as a proxy for fresh thinking, which the Twins certainly needed when Falvey & Levine were brought in to run the organization’s baseball operations. The early results have been uneven. In some ways, the team is still recovering from Bill Smith’s disastrous tenure as GM, which was compounded by Terry Ryan’s return to the helm and refusal to consider other possibilities.

Falvey & Levine inherited Paul Molitor, an incumbent manager with strong ties to the club going back to his playing days, and by every indication, Molitor embraced a new approach to the game he knows in his marrow. To some, Molitor might seem fated to have been a transitional manager. His coaching career did not include lengthy service in the minor leagues or coaching apprenticeships under managers with a track record of developing future managers. He served under one of the last old-school GMs, and one of the youngest new-school Chief Baseball Officers. Molitor was something of the insider’s outsider, a Hall of Fame player & hometown guy without a long track record for the gig he held. He was open to new ideas, but they weren’t ideas that were organic to his understanding of the game.

Baldelli will be notable for his youth — he is now the youngest manager in the major leagues. What is more important, however, is what Baldelli brings with him. Baldelli was the sixth overall pick in the draft class immediately preceding Joe Mauer’s, the one in which the Twins drafted Adam Johnson second overall. He was a dynamic young outfielder whose career was derailed by injuries, ultimately forced into retirement by mitochondrial channelopathy. Along the way, Baldelli received the Tony Conigliaro Award and played for two organizations — the Rays and Red Sox — known for fresh thinking. His ability to translate his experience into effective support struggling players  will be vital to the futures of Byron Buxton and Miguel Sanó. Baldelli’s coaching work in Tampa Bay, particularly his last two years as field coordinator, will give data-driven baseball decisions an organic voice in the clubhouse. Should Derek Shelton remain on Baldelli’s coaching staff, the Twins will double-down on Rays coaching alumni, while Shelton can help his former colleague get familiar with the terrain of the clubhouse.

After years of ossified thinking, which produced mediocre results that were excruciating to watch, the Twins are completing a turn into the future. Welcome, Rocco’s Modern Baseball.

Cup of Coffee

08 August 2017: Goin Fishin’

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This weekend I learned Derek Falvey & Thad Levine fired Jack Goin, the director of baseball research they inherited from Terry Ryan. The two of them will run the department until a new director is hired. I might've missed it being mentioned, but thought it was noteworthy enough to include here.

My first thought on reading the news surprised me a bit: would they hire Craig Breslow?

Minnesota Twins

Falvey, Philosophy, & the Future

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"Good pitching beats good hitting," the saying goes. "TINSTAAPP," might be the rejoinder.

Derek Falvey no longer works for the reigning American League Champions. As of today Falvey is in charge of the worst team in baseball. The newly-installed Executive Vice President & Chief Baseball Officer of the Minnesota Twins, Falvey has been credited with a substantial role in the development of the pitching program that provided the bedrock of his former team's success. He announced his first hire, Thad Levine, who will be the Twins' General Manager and Senior Vice President. Levine's previous duties in Texas included international scouting, player acquisition, roster composition, contract negotiations, and statistical/financial analysis. Rob Antony, the now-former interim GM, was considered the contracts expert in former GM Terry Ryan's cadre of longtime assistants and former GMs. Antony's new duties have not yet been defined. The continued involvement of Terry Ryan, Bill Smith, Wayne Krivsky, Mike Radcliff, Deron Johnson, Brad Steil, and even Jack Goin appear to be open questions.

As I contemplated the rosters of Cubs and their opponent last night, I felt the first major question of this new era of Twins baseball hit my mind with full force:

Will the Twins follow the pattern of Falvey's old team and stress the development of a raft young pitchers as the prime motivator of a run at contention. The Twins' ballpark might be well-suited to this approach, but the volatility of young arms suggests a substantial amount of assumed risk in that strategy.

Or will Falvey shift gears and attempt to fix a player development program that has left talented young position players spinning their wheels in a constant revolving door between Minnesota and the minor leagues? Said another way, will Falvey's plan be to develop a core of talented young position players like the Cubs, and then buttress it with a pitching staff assembled through smart acquisitions and signings?

Of course, it's simply too early to know. What we'll learn about Falvey's roster construction approach first will be informed by the more mundane, familiar offseason questions: Which veterans are tendered a contract? How does the club approach and weather arbitration? What does the front office say about the 2017 roster?

But it seems worth discussing, in the (small?) window we have before things begin to take shape under Falvey's guidance, the merits and pitfalls of each approach, or how – and to what degree – we might like to see them applied to the organization. This is a pivotal moment in the existence of our favorite franchise. It's the first gust of truly fresh air through a front office that has been intellectually stagnant & compositionally fetid for over a decade, a front office that was working off a plan that traced its origin back to the mid-1980s and its conventions back to pre-integration baseball. The twenty-first century, it seems, may have finally arrived for the Minnesota Twins.

The clubs that concluded the World Series last night offer two compelling patterns. For the first time in a long while, there is an exciting amount of uncertainty around the Twins.