In between time spent watching his teenage daughter’s volleyball matches and appearing on SiriusXM MLB Network Radio’s show “Loud Outs,” new Twins manager Derek Shelton had plenty of time to reflect last summer.

At home in Florida after being fired as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in May, Shelton had more free time in front of him than he had in decades. That left him plenty of time to analyze what went wrong, besides the obvious — a payroll that is always near the lowest in the league makes Pittsburgh a tough place to win — and what he might do differently if he got the opportunity to manage again.

This is a 2026 photo of Derek Shelton of the Minnesota Twins baseball team. This image reflects the Minnesota Twins active roster as of Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026 when this image was taken. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

One of the things he landed on was communication; not just delivering a message and expecting that it was understood, but having follow-up conversations and making sure that the ideas he delivered were received in the way he intended.

“It’s something that I don’t think I did a great job of last year, and probably at the end of ’24, and want to make sure I do a better job of personally as a leader going forward,” Shelton said.

That often means asking a player what he heard in those conversations, to make sure he understood and could relay it back. Early feedback from the Twins’ clubhouse has been positive in that respect. Asked about Shelton, multiple players first lauded his ability to communicate as a major strength.

Days after landing the new job, Shelton flew to Texas to meet with third baseman Royce Lewis at a barbecue restaurant. Lewis left their meeting feeling energized.

“I’m ready to run through a wall for him, man, literally and figuratively,” he said. “I think I’m just excited. He brings some positive vibes,” Lewis said. “… Even when guys were signing in the offseason, he’s calling other guys saying like, ‘Hey, this doesn’t change how we view you.’ And that’s so important. It’s stuff we’re not used to.”

On the end of one of those calls was catcher Ryan Jeffers, whom Shelton phoned hours before the Twins signed veteran catcher Victor Caratini to a two-year deal in January. Shelton wanted to talk through the move with Jeffers and discuss how it would affect him. He also met with Jeffers in person this offseason around Thanksgiving in North Carolina.

“I told Shelty when he called, ‘I really appreciate the transparency that’s been there,’” Jeffers said. “It’s better to be truthful and say something you don’t like than to have questions floating in the air. Everyone would rather be told something they don’t want to hear than not be told anything at all.”

That communication style was one of the reasons veteran reliever Taylor Rogers was hoping to reunite with Shelton when he was going through free agency this offseason. Shelton was the Twins’ bench coach in 2018-19 when the southpaw was in his first stint with the Twins, and Rogers valued Shelton’s demeanor and competitive spirit.

He also said he enjoyed the way Shelton viewed the game, the conversations they had and how straight-to-the-point he can be.

“If you have to give somebody constructive criticism, a lot of times you’re going to get a really long answer,” Rogers said. “You give them two positives and a negative. He’s like, ‘I’m going to skip the positives because we’re all going to lose our train of thought so I’m just going to hit you with it and we’re all going to move on.’ … There’s less fluff, and you know where you stand.”

As camp started, Shelton held one-on-one meetings with each player in the clubhouse.

One part of the meetings was clearly stating to each player where the organization sees them; some are on the roster, some are competing for a spot, others are there to learn from the veterans and get valuable experience before heading back to the minor leagues to begin their season.

The other component of those meetings was getting to know them personally. Do they have a significant other? Kids? Hobbies? What makes them tick?

“I hope that players feel they’re comfortable being able to have conversations with me and that we can talk about things not only baseball-related, because I think that’s how you develop relationships,” Shelton said.

That desire to “understand who you are” and build relationships is something center fielder Byron Buxton remembers fondly of Shelton from his tenure as the Twins’ bench coach. And as a result, the two remained connected even as Shelton left the Twins to manage the Pirates ahead of the 2020 season.

“He tries to engage himself, and it’s one of them where when you try to engage yourself, you start figuring out a little more about your players, you start figuring out more of what goes on in their life, situations, communication,” Buxton said. “The only way for you to know that, you’ve got to communicate with your players. So, I think he does a great job of that. It’s something that will take us a little further than what we have in the past.”

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Tim Walz, as governor, and Keith Ellison, as attorney general, took office Jan. 7, 2019. Walz had been a congressional representative from Minnesota’s 1st District, most of southern Minnesota. Ellison abandoned his congressional seat representing the 5th District, most of Minneapolis, to run for attorney general. Ilhan Omar, with Ellison’s robust support, won the congressional seat Ellison’s leaving had made available and was sworn in Jan. 3, 2019.

Minnesota has essentially been financially destroyed ever since.

There were intervening calamities that Walz, Ellison and Omar had nothing to do with, COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd. But both episodes will go down in state history as poorly handled, bungled beyond all understanding, the two shoves on our back that sent us spiraling out of control. Businesses closed. Buildings burned. Law enforcement was held in contempt. Schools closed. Masks were required. We didn’t come through COVID or Floyd with any cohesiveness or solidarity. We were shredded apart and remain so, stained forever by mistrust and a sudden tribalism that seems to define us.

And then fraud, which, looking back, was inevitable given our shattered and incompetent leadership.

Walz and Ellison were brought before the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee in Washington this past week and filleted on fraud. Predictably, our fellows were filleted by Republicans, just as Republicans would have been filleted by Democrats. These hearings are theatrical in nature and orchestrated to serve the vocal chords of a Congress that hasn’t done much of anything else under the spell of President Donald Trump.

“You have not been good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky told our squirming worthies. “And the Democratic position is to keep the money flowing. The American taxpayers have had enough.”

No, Minnesota taxpayers have had enough. Other states did not squander an $18 billion surplus and raise taxes to boot. Other states can’t equal our records for fraud. Walz tried to blunt the inquisition by blaming the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and, by extension, Trump, but even the most rabid Walz supporter has to realize that ICE and Trump have nothing to do with our state swirling down the drain. Walz, Ellison and Omar knew about the fraud. Omar was instrumental in legislation that streamlined the rules to pay for food during COVID.

Why? That’s the billion-dollar question.

Nothing came of the Oversight Committee hearing. Walz and Ellison were humiliated and could not account for their blundering. But we are left wondering what is the point that the hearing establishes. Such a hearing is useful only because the players, Walz and Ellison, were grilled by people not obsequiously invested in them and who don’t hold back their accusations of malfeasance. Confronted, Walz claimed he didn’t know that money paid to autism care providers in Minnesota went from a base of a million dollars to more than $300 million in a couple of years. Think about that.

Such hearings put the players in a spot they will never encounter at home. The conventional newsgathering institutions have been worthless in getting to the bottom of anything, especially the billion-dollar why question. There are independent news outlets that are picking and poking at the fraud, and former federal prosecutor Joe Thompson, before he resigned, was on a good roll throwing fraudsters into jail, but we are left still wondering how many more billions have been stolen in frauds we don’t even know about yet. Thompson called it industrial-scale fraud.

Will we ever get to the bottom of it? Well, we would need arrests and indictments of top-level officials and only then if they were somehow found to have created quid pro quo criminal arrangements with the thieves.

Confidence in such a development doesn’t seem likely. We are the state that doesn’t work. We are like the Edmund Fitzgerald. It looked pretty good when we left the shore of 2018, but then all hell broke loose and we were lost.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Today is Saturday, March 7, the 66th day of 2026. There are 299 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 7, 2010, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, taking the prize for “The Hurt Locker.”

Also on this date:

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for his telephone.

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In 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the demilitarized Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties.

In 1965, a march by over 500 civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; state troopers and a sheriff’s posse fired tear gas and beat marchers with batons in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

In 1975, the U.S. Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.

In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a parody that pokes fun at an original work can be considered “fair use.” (The ruling concerned a parody of the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman” by the rap group 2 Live Crew.)

In 2024, movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2021 fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal on the set of the Western film “Rust.” (Gutierrez-Reed served an 18-month prison sentence and was released in 2025.)

Today’s birthdays:

Hall of Fame auto racer Janet Guthrie is 88.
Actor Daniel J. Travanti is 86.
Entertainment executive Michael Eisner is 84.
Football Hall of Famer Lynn Swann is 74.
R&B musician Ernie Isley (The Isley Brothers) is 74.
Actor Bryan Cranston is 70.
Tennis Hall of Famer Ivan Lendl is 66.
Singer Taylor Dayne is 64.
Author Bret Easton Ellis is 62.
Comedian Wanda Sykes is 62.
Actor Rachel Weisz is 56.
Actor Peter Sarsgaard is 55.
Actor Jenna Fischer is 52.
Actor Tobias Menzies is 52.
Actor Laura Prepon is 46.
Poet Amanda Gorman is 28.

LAS VEGAS – On the first day of the rest of the season for the new-look Minnesota Wild, they came to the desert and started a winning streak.

Versus a Vegas team that had ended their season a year ago, the Wild put three of their new acquisitions on the ice and put together and lineup that was good for a 4-2 win on Friday at T-Mobile Arena.

Minnesota got goals from Mats Zuccarello, Zach Bogosian, Vladimir Tarasenko and newcomer Michael McCarron in a span of just over three minutes in the middle frame on the way to their second win of the week. In the other end of the rink, goalie Filip Gustavsson was outstanding, turning away 30 of 32 Golden Knights shots as the Wild swept the season series with Vegas.

Minnesota Wild defenseman Jake Middleton, left, and Vegas Golden Knights right wing Keegan Kolesar (55) fight during the second period of an NHL hockey game Friday, March 6, 2026, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Both goalies were busy early, with Gustavsson stopping a Colton Scissons breakaway in the opening minutes, and Kaprizov blasting a shot off the goalpost near the midway point of the first.

Minnesota had the only power play of the opening 20 minutes, and needed about one more second to get the game’s first goal, as Matt Boldy poked a rebound past the Knights’ goalie just an instant after the first period clock expired.

The heat turned up in the second, with a few post-whistle scrums, then a full-on fight between Wild defenseman Jake Middleton and Knights winger Keegan Kolesar which earned each of them a five-minute timeout.

A Knights mistake finally opened the door for the Wild to get on the board, when Vegas defenseman Noah Hanafin made a blind pass at the blue line that spring Zuccarello for a breakaway goal. Then the roof caved in on Vegas over the next three minutes.

Minnesota doubled the lead quickly when Bogosian blasted a shot from the top of the circle through a crowd and in. Just 18 seconds later it was 3-0, when McCarron’s long shot sailed past the Vegas goalie’s blocker.

It was the sixth goal of the season for McCarron, and his first in a Wild uniform since being acquired from Nashville earlier in the week.

Vegas spoiled Gustavsson’s shutout bid early in the third with a Pavel Dorofeyev goal on their first power play of the game. Tarasenko countered with the Wild’s final score of the game at 15:42, with Mitch Marner adding one more for the hosts just over a minute later.

Minnesota was without second line winger Marcus Johansson, who was hurt in their Tuesday night home win versus Tampa Bay. He did not make the trip and is day to day with an upper body injury. Brink took Johansson’s place with Joel Eriksson Ek at center and Matt Boldy on the other wing.

The Wild visit Colorado on Sunday for a 1 p.m. CT opening faceoff versus the Avalanche.

Briefly

This was the Knights’ first home game since the three-week Olympic break, so they took a moment to honor their players that had competed in Milan. While honoring Vegas gold medal winner Jack Eichel from Team USA, they also acknowledged the Wild’s three American players along with Wild coach John Hynes and general manager Bill Guerin.

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