MINNEAPOLIS — Before he and owner Joe Pohlad addressed the Minnesota Twins’ future, Derek Falvey made an emotional 3 1/2-minute opening statement Sunday about his team’s six weeks of failure.
The president of baseball operations for a squad that spent more than three-quarters of the season seemingly bound for a postseason berth, Falvey broke down as he described the shortcomings of a team that lost 12 of its final 39 games to fall short of making a second straight playoff appearance.
Falvey would later announce the return of manager Rocco Baldelli in 2025 — and a team source confirmed no further payroll cuts are planned after $30 million was slashed off this year’s budget — but not before he took accountability for his role in the team’s late-season collapse. Struggling at times to speak in a media session, Falvey paused for 39 seconds to collect himself before completing his statement.
“I’ve never experienced the frustration, the anger, the disappointment and the embarrassment that I have over the last five to six weeks,” Falvey said. “To go through what we just went through and to leave everyone disappointed the way we have, I take personal accountability for. It’s been the hardest stretch of my professional career because I know this team is better than that. We let our fans down. We let ourselves down. … We need to be better than this. There’s no other way to put it. And we will be better than this and the group we go forward with will be better than this. That’s the message I have for the players, the staff and for everybody associated with this team. This is not acceptable baseball.”
Like Baldelli, Falvey won’t be the fall guy for the team’s fall from grace. After describing the final six weeks of the season as watching a “train wreck,” Pohlad confirmed Falvey would remain in his role leading the team’s baseball operations department and that he and Baldelli would assess how to move forward from the dismal finish.
“He’s busting his ass,” Pohlad said of Falvey. “He’s the right guy.”
Falvey declined to answer questions about personnel, including one directly about the status of general manager Thad Levine.
Though Pohlad didn’t address questions regarding the team’s 2025 broadcast home or payroll, a team source later confirmed there are no plans to further reduce payroll, which wound up in the $130 million range this year. The TV broadcast home for next season is still to be determined while the Twins are closing in on renewing their radio deal with 830 AM-WCCO.
Even with the $30 million payroll reduction, Falvey and Pohlad said they felt the Twins had enough resources in place to reach the postseason. Falvey did offer the caveat that additional resources could always be useful. But Pohlad defended the decision as a long-term measure to keep the organization viable.
Though the Twins never would have re-signed free agent Sonny Gray, who received a $75 million payday last offseason, additional funds could have been used to secure another starting pitcher. Instead the Twins went into spring training with a thin starting rotation in place, one that included an oft-injured pitcher (Anthony DeSclafani) and another coming off his second Tommy John surgery (Chris Paddack), backed by inexperienced options.
“Everybody owns this a little bit and I played a role in that,” Pohlad said. “It’s been well-documented this payroll decision and as I kind of reflect on my role in all of this, we were at an all-time high (in payroll) last year, right? Fans were all in. Players were all in. We were headed down a great direction and I had to make a very difficult business decision, but that’s just the reality of my world. I have a business to run and it comes with tough decisions and that’s what I had to do. I wouldn’t make any other decision because that’s the position that we were in.”
The decision to slash payroll was the first of several moves that irked fans who should have been riding a high after the team finally ended its long postseason victory drought last October.
Whether it was payroll, the dismissal of longtime play-by-play man Dick Bremer, a three-month cable blackout on local airwaves, Pohlad’s spring interview in which he said the team was trying to “right-size” payroll and the slow offseason, or the lack of a direct-to-consumer streaming option, the 2024 Twins struggled to resonate with their fan base.
With the 26,041 attending Sunday’s season finale against the Baltimore Orioles, the Twins drew 1.95 million fans, roughly 23,000 fewer than in 2023 and nearly 300,000 shy of their January projections. Those figures are eye-opening because most clubs coming off postseason success expect a boost in attendance, and because this team was in playoff contention for all but the final two days of the season.
Now the Twins must figure out a way to win back fans while also determining how to clean up their self-made mess on the diamond. Falvey made it clear that Baldelli, who will enter his seventh season as the club’s manager, is the person to help him figure out how to proceed.
Said Falvey: “Rocco and I, through this time, we do a decent job most days, or at least I try, to keep a steadiness in the way we go about our business. But behind the scenes, we’ve been gutted during this process trying to figure out how we fix it. That’s led to sleepless nights and challenging conversations and one-on-one conversations between he and I that will stay one-on-one, but have been at times really digging deep and trying to figure out how to fix it. I believe in his process, I believe in him, I believe in the partnership I have with him. That is how I feel and ultimately, that’s the way we’re going to go forward.”
Questions about Baldelli’s status began to arise as the Twins fell apart over the final six weeks of the season, going from almost a sure thing of reaching the playoffs to flaming out and falling behind the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers. After reaching a season-high 17 games over .500 on Aug. 17, the Twins wound up 82-80 after Baltimore won 6-2 on Sunday.
Baldelli owns a 457-413 record, good for a .525 career winning percentage. The Twins have won the American League Central three times in his six seasons while also suffering collapses both this season and in 2022.
Baldelli and Falvey’s first order of business is to determine what changes they might make with the current coaching staff. The pair is expected to spend the next day or two assessing coaching roles.
“I don’t take that vote of confidence lightly,” Baldelli said. “It means an immense amount to me. I want to make the organization and our owners and our fans proud. I want to do my job well and I want to bring glory to this area, to the people that care about this organization. I want to bring that happiness to this fan base. We all have personal reasons for doing what we do, we love doing what we do, we have passion for doing what we do. But baseball is about bringing people together and bringing a fan base together for a common goal. I want to get back to that. That’s what I want for this team. We have our work cut out for us, we have a lot of work ahead of us, but I’m up for it.”
(Top photo of Rocco Baldelli: Adam Bettcher / Getty Images)
