Twins takeaways: Team President Derek Falvey explains his decision to fire Rocco Baldelli

Twins President Derek Falvey met with Joe Pohlad and the ownership group Monday morning at Target Field where they collectively made the final determination to fire manager Rocco Baldelli following a 70-92 season.

Falvey met with Baldelli afterward, which Falvey described as a “difficult moment and a sad moment.” It was the end of seven seasons and nearly eight years working together.

“Sometimes these conversations are short. This was not one of those,” Falvey said. “We sat for close to a couple hours talking after I shared it with him. We shared a lot of really positive things, a lot of things that went well and a lot of things that didn’t go well. A lot of what could we have done differently discussion. We both very much care about whatever happens next with this team.”

Falvey, one day after Baldelli was ousted, spoke for nearly an hour alongside General Manager Jeremy Zoll at a news conference Tuesday. Here are three takeaways as Falvey explained their decision to search for a new manager:

Pohlad slashed the Twins payroll by about $30 million after their playoff run in the 2023 season, costing the team some depth to withstand injuries and extinguishing the organization’s momentum, but the team entered the last two seasons expecting to contend for division titles.

Instead, the Twins missed the playoffs in both years. They collapsed at the end of the 2024 season, and they were five games below .500 with a 50-55 record when the front office started trading away players this season.

“This was a decision that was organizationally made, obviously with ownership, around what’s the right direction and new direction for this club,” Falvey said. “Yes, we knew some of those trades and where those were going were going to put a strained position on that. I made it clear to ownership in different discussions that we had that we should evaluate the second half of the season very differently than just the outcomes on the field.”

“I felt like this roster had a lot of talent on it that could go perform,” Falvey said. “And we didn’t collectively perform to that talent level.”

The Twins exercised a 2026 club option in Baldelli’s contract “at some point going into the year,” Falvey confirmed Tuesday, so the Twins will be on the hook for Baldelli’s salary next season, along with paying a new manager.

There are currently seven major league teams searching for a manager, but the Twins are open-minded about the type of candidates they want to replace Baldelli.

“Once you start defining the exact traits you need, then you actually start thinning the pool,” Falvey said. “You start from a place of saying, well, that person doesn’t fit what I’m looking for. I think we start more blank sheet of paper because if you look around baseball, and you look at the postseason right now, there are all kinds of different managers marching around the postseason right now.”

A strong background in player development, though, could hold importance. The Twins didn’t see many of their young hitters take a step forward this year. Royce Lewis and Matt Wallner didn’t hit as well as they did in past seasons. Brooks Lee has yet to establish himself. Edouard Julien and Jose Miranda seemingly fell out of the team’s plans.

The Twins plan to give their new manager a lot of input on the coaching staff, so it’s unclear how many coaches from Baldelli’s staff will return.

The Twins are expected to enter next season with a lower payroll. No teams that conduct fire sales at the trade deadline turn around a few months later and start spending heavily.

After all their trades, particularly dumping most of Carlos Correa’s contract off their books, the Twins will have a much lower starting point with their payroll than previous offseasons. The Twins entered this year with the 17th highest payroll at $142.8 million, according to figures obtained by the Associated Press, and now the Twins have only two players — starting pitcher Pablo López and All-Star center fielder Byron Buxton — who are making more than $10 million.

The Twins front office, at this point, doesn’t know how much money it will have to work with because the Pohlad family hasn’t had budget meetings with the two new, yet-to-be-identified minority investment groups.

“There will be some limited partners that are coming in and involved in some of the discussions around how we operate going forward,” Falvey said. “Those have not yet happened. Those are likely to happen in, hopefully, the weeks to come.”