After Rocco Baldelli’s first season as manager of the Twins, his hitting coach, bench coach and assistant pitching coach were all poached by other teams, given promotions in their new roles.
Until this offseason, that represented the most year-to-year turnover the Twins’ coaching staff had experienced since Baldelli’s hiring before the 2019 season.
But earlier this week, the Twins announced that hitting coaches David Popkins, Rudy Hernandez and Derek Shomon, as well as infield/assistant bench coach Tony Diaz, will no longer be part of the major league staff, turning over a significant part of their staff as the Twins seek different messengers to guide their players following their late-season collapse.
“At different periods of time, the best staff for the team and the players going forward will change, and that’s hard to acknowledge,” Baldelli said. “I think sometimes as time goes on, sometimes the players need a different voice with a different message and sometimes we have to make very difficult decision.”
The decision to dismiss the hitting group came after a season in which the Twins finished the season with above-average numbers league-wide (10th in runs scored, 11th in OPS, among them) but fell into a deep slump at the end of the season that sank them and kept them out of the playoffs.
In their final 39 games, during which they went 12-27 and fell out of playoff contention, they hit a collective .228 with a collective .646 OPS. They scored just 3.6 runs per game across that stretch.
“There were just things from a performance standpoint as we dug deep into what we were doing and how we were doing it, that when you don’t get the results you’re hoping for… you try to evaluate,” president of baseball operations Derek Falvey said. “But admittedly, over different stretches of time for us offensively this year, we had some struggles in a way that it felt like we had a hard time getting out of.”
One of the first steps of the Twins’ offseason following their late demise was assessing the coaching staff. The next part, as the playoffs unfold and player transactions are frozen, will be figuring out how to assemble the new-look staff.
While the rest of the coaching staff is expected back, Falvey said they would not necessarily be locking each coach in exactly the same roles. Diaz, for example, filled two roles but the Twins don’t necessarily need their new infield coach to also be their assistant bench coach.
While the dismissals of the hitting group seemed pretty straightforward after a season full of offensive inconsistencies, Diaz’s seemed less so. The reason for it, the Twins said, is their desire to change their infield approach going forward.
“There’s going to be a lot of new things implemented and, as hard as it is to do, I thought having someone new and a new infield voice being able to take that project on from the very start would help us,” Baldelli said.
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