There's no secret formula locked away in a Target Field safe somewhere, Derek Falvey joked amid the joy of a division championship last week, no proprietary eyes-only blueprint laying out exactly how to transform the Twins from bottom-feeders to perennial title contenders.
"We know where we're trying to get to," the Twins' chief baseball officer said, "but you have to stay agile and nimble about how you get there."
Still, Falvey and his fellow team-builder, General Manager Thad Levine, have been devising a smart, well-researched plan to produce 100-win seasons, record-shattering offenses, and AL Central titles since they arrived in the Twin Cities three years ago.
And here's the ironic thing about the 2019 Twins, who fulfilled all those lofty ambitions: This wasn't the plan.
"Surprised? Yeah, you're always surprised when you achieve dramatic results like this team has. Nobody ever goes into a season predicting outcomes like we've achieved this year," Falvey said. "In any given season, you have a range of outcomes that you project for your team. You look at the 50th percentile outcome, an average expectation for whatever your roster is, and you plan for that. But in some players and in some years, you're going to have a 70th, 80th, 90th percentile outcomes. And sometimes you might have a 10th percentile outcome."
Last year's moves backfired
The 2018 season must have ranked on that low end, because nearly every move that Falvey and Levine tried — Lance Lynn, Logan Morrison, Addison Reed, a handful of rookies who had minimal impact — produced negative results. But maybe these things even out after all, because for all that went wrong a year ago, everything seemed to go right in 2019, from hiring an inexperienced rookie manager to signing a designated hitter a year older than him.
A couple of stopgap infield acquisitions, C.J. Cron and Jonathan Schoop, turned out to be excellent fits, on the field and off. A couple of young cornerstones, Jorge Polanco and Max Kepler, accepted early long-term contracts, then began outperforming their big raises. A veteran utility player, Marwin Gonzalez, signed on during spring training and played all over the diamond. A surprising midseason callup, Luis Arraez, needed about 10 minutes to adapt to his new surroundings and begin thriving.
And most memorable of all, the Twins invested in righthanded power hitters at the same moment that baseball experienced its most meteoric escalation of home runs ever, a fortunate coincidence that reinvented Twins baseball. A franchise that once took pride in "peskiness" rebranded itself as samba-dancing sluggers and became the greatest home run hitting team not just in franchise history, but in the entire sport's 150 years of existence.