Souhan: Firing hitting coach was not the answer for the Twins — so what is?

The Twins reached a new low Thursday night, getting swept by the Chicago White Sox in a four-game series in Minnesota for the first time in franchise history.

That’s right — even the Twins teams that admitted they weren’t trying to win, in the late ’90s, never suffered that indignity, although their crowds also sometimes numbered in the dozens.

Now it’s time for the Twins to fire a coach or two.

Last season, the Twins collapsed largely because of their young hitters, so they fired their hitting coaches. Sounds logical, right?

This year, the Twins collapsed earlier, and their young hitters looked as bad or worse.

Should they keep firing coaches, or should this failed exercise teach us about the nature of hitting coaches and organizational scapegoats?

I don’t have one tidy narrative to offer, so I’ll list six observations on this phenomenon:

2. You can give the current hitting coaches blame or credit, but a lot of quality big-league hitters employ their own coaches. During Torii Hunter’s best years, he’d send videos to Bobby Bonilla or Class AAA hitting coach Bill Springman. Carlos Correa had his own hitting assistant. Sometimes the team’s hitting coach is more of a cheerleader or servant than analyst.

3. By the time a hitter reaches the majors, he has had success, has dealt with a handful of professional hitting instructors, and may not be capable of changing, or willing to change, in the middle of a big-league season.

4. In 2024, the Twins ranked 10th in runs scored. Entering the weekend, the Twins ranked 24th. The Twins fired hitting coach David Popkins after the 2024 season and he joined Toronto. Toronto ranked 23rd in MLB in runs scored in 2024 and ranks fourth this season. Firing Popkins was not the answer.

5. The most successful Twins hitting coach of recent vintage, James Rowson, spent as much time putting positive thoughts in his hitters’ heads as he did working on mechanics. Rowson would tell hitters that the ace pitcher they were about to face was wearing a fake red nose, like a clown, and it was their job to knock it off. Which lightened the mood, and provided a reminder that trying to hit a line drive up the middle is as good a thought as any in the batters box.

6. Two of the Twins’ most important young hitters, Royce Lewis and Matt Wallner, have idiosyncratic swings that contain flaws. Lewis uses something between a dance step and a leg kick to activate his swing, and when the timing of that step is off even a little, he becomes vulnerable to any competitive pitch. Wallner uses a massive leg kick and dives toward the plate. Both have experienced destructive slumps over the last 14 months, and at times are helpless at the plate. Asking a big-league hitting coach to fix inherent problems might sound logical, but someone higher in the Twins organizational chart would have to green-light that decision, and the player would have to buy in.

Their rotation could be good to excellent, presuming reasonable health.

The bullpen is a wasteland. The Twins’ brain trust sounds confident that it can fix the problem in one winter. I doubt it.

The lineup remains a question mark. If Lewis, Wallner and Luke Keaschall perform like stars and Byron Buxton stays healthy, the lineup could be more than good enough.

But, as has been the case since 2021, the Twins will enter a season relying more on hope than certainty when it comes to scoring runs.

Of this we can be certain: There are two ways for this team to immediately improve its lineup — signing quality free agents, and improving the current young players.