1 hour ago, TheBoofIsLoose said:

You can make the argument that Pohlad is more concerned with the bottom line than winning games, but not the FO or Rocco. You can't fire an owner, but those three don't have the luxury of indefinite job security; they are absolutely playing to win every day. I'd guarantee they're not champing at the bit to be fired, especially since there is always the chance they won't coach or run a front office again. Tampa is the exception to the rule, if every team could be as savvy and ahead of the curve as the Rays seem to be they would do it in a heartbeat, it's not an easy task. 

Absolutely playing to win every day I disagree. Always concerns about yesterday or tomorrow and a sense of paralysis in real time in-game decision making repeatedly screw up our best chance to win today's game, whatever day it is and whatever game we're playing. Invariably pulling all the wrong strings over and over comes from a lack of gut feel for the people, place and situation at hand. Something is very wrong in this clubhouse in spite of Seth's terrific litany of valid reasons, and it shows up on the field most every game.

15 hours ago, GoBlue48 said:

Twins need to evaluate Roccos performance and not rely events from the past. Change should be highly considered.

Why not? Past events can show competence in a manager. Baldelli didn’t suddenly become a different manager over the 2020-21 offseason.

13 hours ago, beckmt said:

I am one in the fire him now category,  for many of the reasons stated above. Maybe Rowson will make a better manager and at the same time fix the hitting issues.  This is not all on him, but the lack of fire and sloppy play makes this an easy call for me.

It sure does seem as though their hitting has completely fallen apart after Rowson left?  Pitching has been awful this year, but I'm almost just as convinced that the hitting has been more of an indicator of the poor season than the pitching has.  

Never been a fan of Baldelli. I can repeat a lot of what has been said about him already. His first season 2019 he didn't have to manage cause the Twins were hitting HR's and scoring runs at will. His second season 2020 they played 60 games against some of the weakest teams in what was a soft schedule. I think 2021 is showing us the real Baldelli. The team has no focus or fire.  Doesn't play fundamental ball. Can't score UNLESS they hit a HR and his management of the pitching staff has been atrocious since the beginning of the season starting with the way he used Alex Colome. 

As a manager if you are going to get applauded and take credit for when the team does well then you also have to take the criticism and blame when the team does poorly. If the Coaches have something to do with his success then it still falls on him. He gets to pick his Coaches, No?

There's surely plenty of blame to go around. Early in this disaster of a season I was leaning heavy on the front office being most culpable. But the Twins might have the best batter, best starting pitcher and best reliever available this trade deadline. They have so many usable and movable players that that we have a poll going with FIFTEEN different players listed.

I've swung back the other way; this team is way too talented to be playing this poorly. The front office needs to do better, but the losing and poor play is almost all on the coaching staff and the players.

I agree with Brock that the Twins and Rocco have suffered a bit from not having a bench coach, especially early in the season. There's a lot going on in the middle of a game. I also wonder about Wes Johnson. He's good at increasing velo and he's been able to convince middle relievers to change their pitch mix. I don't see many examples, even last year, of him helping pitchers find their command when they struggle.

OTOH, managers and pitching coaches look like geniuses if you have studs in the bullpen and a solid rotation.

I have no problem with Wes Johnson, He can only use what he is dealt with.  In this case Happ and Shoemaker.  Relievers tend to be good and bad from year to year.  

Front office gets a pass after last year, we have about 2 years to see if the pitching pipeline is set up. 

However lack of fundamentals and bad managing cannot cover for the errors this year. 

Two things will come of this, whether Jim Pohlad and the family open the checkbook, and whether this front office can put a pitching pipeline together.  I am hopeful on the latter.  However there must be accountability so Rocco must go.  And yes he will probably be better elsewhere, but can we let him continue to make mistakes here? 

23 hours ago, gunnarthor said:

Heck, even Bellachick was fired once.

Which Bellachick are you talking about? Nikki or Brie?

Just how many games do you think a manager is worth in a year? Because it isn't much, or they'd be paid a lot more ....

I agree with Seth, there is a need by humans to assign blame, when sometimes stuff just happens. This idea that he gets zero credit for the good years is ridiculous. His job either matters, or it doesn't. 

All that said, the coaches and front office need to show that this year was the fluke, or there should be consequences.

6 hours ago, nicksaviking said:

I've swung back the other way; this team is way too talented to be playing this poorly. The front office needs to do better, but the losing and poor play is almost all on the coaching staff and the players.

A disproportionate amount of that poor play belongs to guys the FO brought in for this season. It's hard to look at this staff overall and say "the talent is there." 

3 hours ago, KirbyDome89 said:

A disproportionate amount of that poor play belongs to guys the FO brought in for this season. It's hard to look at this staff overall and say "the talent is there." 

Well again, they may have the best hitter, starter and reliever available at the trade deadline. They have numerous other players too. Most sellers at the deadline don’t have this many good players to sell. Most down years the Twins are lucky to have one player worth selling.

The talent is most certainly there to be in a position where they should at least still be fighting for a playoff spot.

9 hours ago, nicksaviking said:

Well again, they may have the best hitter, starter and reliever available at the trade deadline. They have numerous other players too. Most sellers at the deadline don’t have this many good players to sell. Most down years the Twins are lucky to have one player worth selling.

The talent is most certainly there to be in a position where they should at least still be fighting for a playoff spot.

Definitely but the Twins dug themselves such a huge hole in the first six weeks through some terrible play in key moments that they’ll still end the season looking worse than their talent level. That happens when literally every player wilts in a crucial moment for six weeks.

The Twins were 14-28 on May 20th.

They’re 40-55 today.

They’ve played .500 ball for 55 games now after doing everything they could to tank their entire season in the first 40 games.

And, congratulations, they succeeded!

2 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Definitely but the Twins dug themselves such a huge hole in the first six weeks through some terrible play in key moments that they’ll still end the season looking worse than their talent level. That happens when literally every player wilts in a crucial moment for six weeks.

The Twins were 14-28 on May 20th.

They’re 40-55 today.

They’ve played .500 ball for 55 games now after doing everything they could to tank their entire season in the first 40 games.

And, congratulations, they succeeded!

Interesting.  The six-week mark correlates with the team giving up on some of the strange player decisions on the pitching side of things.  Hitting certainly did not magically repair itself at that time, that's taken longer.

7 minutes ago, Dodecahedron said:

Interesting.  The six-week mark correlates with the team giving up on some of the strange player decisions on the pitching side of things.

I think most of it is due to many of those pitchers no longer being terrible.

Alex Colome:

Date	Tm	G	GS	GF	CG	Rslt	Dec	DR	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	HR	HBP	ERA	BF	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	BAbip	Pit	Str	StL	StS	GB	FB	LD	PU	Unk	GSc	IR	IS	SB	CS	PO	AB	2B	3B	IBB	GDP	SF	ROE	aLI	WPA	acLI	cWPA	RE24	DFS(DK)	DFS(FD)
Apr 1 to May 1, 2021	MIN	10	0	6	0	3-7	W-L:1-3,Sv:2,BSv:3	2.3	9.2	13	15	8	5	10	2	3	7.45	51	.310	.412	.500	.912	.355	209	61%	15%	10%	0.65		36%	3%	0		0	---%	2	1	1	42	2	0	0	1	1	2	2.54	-2.186	2.47	-1.36%	-8.90	17.15	47.00

Date	Tm	G	GS	GF	CG	Rslt	Dec	DR	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	HR	HBP	ERA	BF	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	BAbip	Pit	Str	StL	StS	GB	FB	LD	PU	Unk	GSc	IR	IS	SB	CS	PO	AB	2B	3B	IBB	GDP	SF	ROE	aLI	WPA	acLI	cWPA	RE24	DFS(DK)	DFS(FD)
May 5 to Jul 21, 2021	MIN	26	0	4	0	11-15	W-L:1-1,Hld:5	2.1	24.2	25	14	10	9	23	3	0	3.65	110	.255	.309	.408	.717	.293	421	64%	14%	15%	1.52		15%	1%	0		7	29%	3	0	0	98	6	0	0	3	3	4	.77	0.086	.17	-0.01%	-2.12	65.10

I’m curious to know who specifically is a better alternative to Baldelli at the moment. If you want to fire him, who do you want to replace him with and why?

Just now, prouster said:

I’m curious to know who specifically is a better alternative to Baldelli at the moment. If you want to fire him, who do you want to replace him with and why?

We could get into that, but it's sort of moot because we all know he isn't going anywhere.

1 minute ago, Dodecahedron said:

We could get into that, but it's sort of moot because we all know he isn't going anywhere.

So then what’s the point of this thread?

4 minutes ago, prouster said:

So then what’s the point of this thread?

Intelligent discussion.

38 minutes ago, prouster said:

I’m curious to know who specifically is a better alternative to Baldelli at the moment. If you want to fire him, who do you want to replace him with and why?

Seems like a reasonable question and I don’t see anyone in season. He doesn’t have a bench coach that might step in. Is Toby Gardenhire ready? Is he clearly better?

I sure hope your question is a large part of any discussion in the Twins front office. If you fire a manager with his two his previous successful seasons you better have a pretty good idea of how you will replace him and be confident that it is a clear upgrade.

2 hours ago, jorgenswest said:

Seems like a reasonable question and I don’t see anyone in season. He doesn’t have a bench coach that might step in. Is Toby Gardenhire ready? Is he clearly better?

I sure hope your question is a large part of any discussion in the Twins front office. If you fire a manager with his two his previous successful seasons you better have a pretty good idea of how you will replace him and be confident that it is a clear upgrade.

Also, I think it needs to be considered how much time are you willing to give a new manager. If you're dead set on firing Rocco after two division titles in three years, then how long are you willing to stick with a new manager if they struggle? Do they only get a season because the expectations for the playoffs are set, or if they're not knocking on the door to the World Series after two years are they gone? Or does removing Baldelli mean it's rebuild time, in which case why not keep him if the team isn't going to be that good?  

On 7/20/2021 at 8:26 AM, Greglw3 said:

I agree with you and it’s refreshing to finally see someone who notices the trend of Rocco leaving in pitchers who are getting shelled from the start (Shoemaker 2021, 9 run 1st and M. Perez 2019, 8 runs in two innings) or are gassed like Berrios was last night. A competent manager would have noticed that after 1 or 2 batters and relieved him and would have had a bullpen arm warming up sooner than Thielbar appeared to be. 

Quite simply, Baldelli leaves in pitchers who are either gassed or just don’t have it, both starters and relievers too long on a consistent basis for all three seasons! This often puts them too far behind for the stage of the game to come back. He shows little in the way of a sign that he’s going to change this or even realizes this incredibly long hook is losing games.

They may have won 106 in 2019 if he would relieve pitchers properly. The Martin Perez example is only 1 example from 2019. When your team is the greatest hitting HR outfit in the history of baseball some of those managing missteps are covered up.

No longer. Falvey and Levine have blundered away so much talent since then and made such poor acquisitions that the talent can no longer cover for Rocco’s abysmal pitching staff management. I think it’s the worst I’ve ever seen from any manager and I’ve been following the Twins since 1964!

I don’t take pleasure in this blunt assessment due to Rocco seeming like a nice guy, good with players. But the position of manager is a position that is merit based and his pitching staff management is killing us. His extra inning management has also been poor, IMO. For all those reasons I think he should be relieved of his duties ASAP. I’d prefer to lure Jim Leyland out of retirement than see Rocco blowing games for the Twins by leaving pitchers that are getting blasted in too long. It almost hurts to say it but that’s the cold hard truth as I see it.

true

Falvey lost my faith when he refused to part with any of his precious prospects to upgrade the rotation in 2019. Best offense in team history wasted. He was officially Terry Ryan II as of that day. This market will never win a WS if they won't strike when the window is open.

 

Rocco lost it with how he handled Berrios and Maeda in the play-offs last year. He's so robotic he even manages play-off games by the book/spreadsheet. That can't work. He's not terrible and this season is mostly not on him. But he's not a guy to pull the car out of the ditch after a tough stretch either. TK, Gardy and Molitor were all better managers IMO.

I don't expect either to be fired now, even if I would like to see it. But if they flop again in 2022 and also fail to sign Berrios/Buxton long-term and cause a total rebuild, they should both be fired after 2022.

 

On 7/20/2021 at 10:26 AM, Greglw3 said:

I think it’s the worst I’ve ever seen from any manager and I’ve been following the Twins since 1964!

Billy Gardner was pretty bad at managing pitching.  His pitching was way too good for some of those W-L records.

One year they had 1 bad pitcher in the bullpen -- the closer -- and barely missed the playoffs.

17 hours ago, nicksaviking said:

Well again, they may have the best hitter, starter and reliever available at the trade deadline. They have numerous other players too. Most sellers at the deadline don’t have this many good players to sell. Most down years the Twins are lucky to have one player worth selling.

The talent is most certainly there to be in a position where they should at least still be fighting for a playoff spot.

Colorado can make a similar claim as far as trade assets go, but I doubt we'd argue that they're a particularly talented team as a whole.

Offensively, I agree; they've been somewhat disappointing, but they could still finish top 10. You can't run out two of the worst starting pitchers in baseball every week and have a bullpen this bad. That's a lack of talent, which reflects on the FO.