Thirty-four years after he bet on himself, Dave St. Peter is at long last stepping down.
The Minnesota Twins’ club president since 2002 informed employees Tuesday morning that he’s transitioning into an advisory role early next year, a decision that creates a personnel carousel in which president of baseball operations Derek Falvey is elevated to St. Peter’s role and Jeremy Zoll takes over as the team’s general manager.
St. Peter originally joined the Twins as a game-day intern in 1990 and several months later reluctantly accepted a full-time retail job managing the club’s pro shop in Richfield, Minn.
Named president in November 2002, St. Peter played a key role in the approval, design, creation and opening of Target Field. The ballpark’s debut in 2010 was the centerpiece of a transformation that saw the Twins go from also-rans that were nearly contracted out of baseball into a club that won the American League Central nine times and made 10 postseason appearances.
More than 2 1/2 years after he began considering succession planning with ownership, St. Peter said a combination of needing to better prioritize his time, the team’s impending sale, and Falvey’s development made it the appropriate time to step away. Though St. Peter will officially hand over duties in early 2025, he intends to maintain a presence at Target Field as an advisor to Falvey.
“This has been my life,” St. Peter said. “This has been my journey. I’ve given everything I have to this organization and have been proud to do it. It’s been a privilege. But we felt like now was the right time for a number of reasons. Clearly, I think the opportunity to work with the family and see through the sale exploration process is important. And there’s a role for me to play on that. Secondly, I feel truly convinced that Derek Falvey is the right successor and want to support him in every way and set him up for success, hopefully, over the long haul. … I feel really blessed to have had the run I’ve had here in this chair, and I’m very much at peace with this decision.”
This has been a whirlwind offseason for the Twins, who after failing to make the playoffs mutually parted ways with GM Thad Levine, fired multiple coaches and announced the Pohlad family was exploring selling the club after 40 years and three generations of ownership.
Though the succession plan was already in place, St. Peter said that ownership’s Oct. 10 sale announcement sped up the timeline to place Falvey into a hybrid role in which he’ll oversee the team’s baseball and business operations. Both Falvey and St. Peter suggested several department heads in business and baseball operations would take on expanded roles to reduce the number of tasks Falvey handles.
But it was the development of Falvey, whom St. Peter hired in September 2016, that made the decision to step away easier.
Though his main task was overhauling and modernizing the club’s baseball operations, Falvey also worked closely with St. Peter in recent years on the business side. With St. Peter’s permission, Falvey attended meetings about the team’s broadcast situation and other business areas. St. Peter teared up Monday afternoon as Falvey described a close relationship that makes him confident he can assume a role few of his major-league counterparts have held.
“This only works because this is something that Dave wants,” Falvey said. “I feel incredibly honored to take on a role. Not Dave’s role exactly, because no one can be Dave’s role exactly. No one can be Dave St. Peter. I’m not even going to try. But I will take on a different role with different leaders underneath, with different structure, that ultimately will hopefully lead this team into the next phase.”
Falvey sees Zoll, who joined the Twins in October 2017 to run the farm system, as equally capable of handling his new role.
Zoll spent two seasons as the team’s director before he and Daniel Adler were promoted to assistant GM in November 2019. One of Zoll’s main tasks when operating the farm system was daily interactions with player agents about any issues that arose. His later duties included identifying and acquiring minor-league free agents.
Following his promotion to assistant GM, Zoll joined a sizable decision-making group that makes player recommendations to Falvey. He did the bulk of negotiating on the Sonny Gray and Jorge Polanco trades and maintains a constant presence in the Twins’ clubhouse, working closely with manager Rocco Baldelli.
“Jeremy is more than ready to lead aspects of our baseball operation,” Falvey said. “His role, his experiences, what he’s done, they speak for themselves. He’s been a tremendous leader in our player development space, around our major-league team. Rocco, the staff, everyone, JZ is the person they go to. … He’s naturally already connected to a lot of areas of oversight and has been doing that job of oversight in a lot of those spaces. This (is the) next step in this journey.”
Zoll appreciates how the front office operates together under Falvey’s stewardship. Because of his familiarity with the group, he feels comfortable in assuming the title formerly held by Levine, who was the club’s GM from November 2016 until last month.
“The way that it has always functioned since I’ve been here has felt like a team approach,” Zoll said. “Our goal is to have that continue with partnerships between Derek and myself and with all the leaders across the group. There will be ebbs and flows of roles and responsibilities for all of us, but I think that’s probably always happened from year to year, maybe without some of those formal title changes for various people along the way.
Zoll’s day-to-day duties are expected to increase, but the specifics are still being worked out as Falvey promises he’s “not going anywhere” on the baseball decision-making front. The Twins also plan to fill the assistant GM role vacated by Zoll, and others in the department will be elevated to help fill some of the gaps created by Falvey’s ascension.
After meeting Falvey in 2016, St. Peter knew the Twins were hiring someone special.
“When we concluded the interview process and made the decision to offer Derek the job, there was a subgroup of us that looked at each other and said, ‘This guy might be my successor,’” St. Peter said.
Falvey’s hire is one of many successes that occurred during St. Peter’s tenure.
When St. Peter originally was named president, the Twins had about 65 to 70 employees, a number that’s increased to 400.
Following years of threats to move out of Minneapolis, and Major League Baseball’s contraction threat, St. Peter played a critical role in working with the Minnesota Legislature to get construction of Target Field approved in November 2006. He also helped design and open the team’s minor-league player dormitory in Fort Myers, Fla., and its facility in the Dominican Republic.
Early in St. Peter’s tenure, a franchise that struggled to barely draw 1 million fans in 2000 fared well at the gates. With a talented young core featuring Torii Hunter, Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and Johan Santana, the Twins drew between 2 million and 2.4 million fans to the Metrodome from 2005-09. Though the Twins have recently struggled at the gate, the club drew a franchise-record 3.2 million fans in 2010, the first season at Target Field.
St. Peter may be proudest of how the team operated during the COVID-19-impacted 2020 season as he and the Pohlad family made the decision to keep all Twins employees on the payroll and pay minor-league players at a time when other organizations did not.
“It made me a better leader,” St. Peter said. “When you combine COVID with what happened in our community around George Floyd and racial justice, it was a really chaotic, uneven time. So maybe it sparked for me what I wanted to do longer-term.”
St. Peter said his toughest decision was firing Terry Ryan as the head of baseball operations in August 2016.
He also described the team’s postseason failures as his biggest disappointment.
Dealing with the team’s tenuous broadcast situation the past two years, which included a three-month blackout for the majority of viewers in Twins Territory last summer, didn’t play a role in his decision, St. Peter said. He remains interested in the team’s developing broadcast and plans to advise in that area as the Twins become one of six teams under MLB’s broadcast umbrella in the 2025 season.
Overall, St. Peter thinks he’s leaving the Twins in a good place as they prepare to be sold.
“This is a gem of a franchise and I’m very bullish on the future of baseball in the Twin Cities,” he said.
None of this might have been possible if St. Peter didn’t take a risk 34 years ago.
He began as a game-day intern in 1990 and worked at the Metrodome. Several months later, the Twins offered him a full-time job as the general manager at the Twins Pro Shop in Richfield, Minn. Though St. Peter wasn’t sure if he wanted the position because of the retail element, he accepted.
One of his favorite memories was attending Game 7 of the 1991 World Series and realizing in the aftermath of Kirby Puckett’s walk-off homer he needed to be back at the shop before dawn to restock Twins merchandise.
After 18 months running the store, St. Peter rejoined the front office in a business communications role and began to work his way up the organization.
“The beauty in that story is one of opportunity,” St. Peter said. “I didn’t know anybody. People saw something in me, thankfully. … I told myself early on ‘I’m coming out of Bismarck in North Dakota.’ I think I have an insecurity complex around that and I said, ‘Nobody was going to outwork me.’ Over time, I think it’s served me well. … It’s the right time. I’d rather go out a year or two too early than a year or two too late.”
(Top photo of Derek Falvey: Matt York / Associated Press)
