The Twins Are Moving On from Pete Maki. What's Next?

[nicksaviking]

1 hour ago, MeleMouth said:

If a team was going to reject coaching suggestions by their manager just because of the teams the coaches previously worked for, it shouldn't have hired the manager in the first place.

Further, if you don't like using Shelton's network for hiring, who else among the front office would be the person whose network you would use?  

I said to reject them because of outdated pitching philosophies.

And why do they have to shop in-network? They don't have to bring in someone Zoll or Shelton are pals with. That's how the Twins got stale during Terry Ryan's tenure. If what we currently have is not working, then bring in new voices. 

[MeleMouth]

6 minutes ago, nicksaviking said:

I said to reject them because of outdated pitching philosophies.

And why do they have to shop in-network? They don't have to bring in someone Zoll or Shelton are pals with. That's how the Twins got stale during Terry Ryan's tenure. If what we currently have is not working, then bring in new voices. 

Absolutely bring in new voices. However, a lot of hiring in all industries starts with people either the boss knows or friends of the boss knows. Further, there is research behind the idea that people who are hired from within a known network performs well, although there can be large risks with doing so, such replicating the same demographics and ideas, the latter of which seems to be your concern.

[Cris E]

A couple things:

1. Baseball is famous for fall guys and scapegoats wearing things that really fit their bosses better. It's hard to reconcile Maki holding the bag on the negative parts of 2026 but not getting the credit for the positive things he built leading into the 2025 deadline. The same staff got two different results with two different staffs: who built those staffs?  We've seen so much excellent work from our old coaches in their follow-on jobs that I am starting to think we hire coaches just fine and something else might be holding us back.

2. Expectations are flimsy things, slapped together by weak thinkers or folks using their hearts more than their heads. Tom Pohlad tried setting a bar based on what he needed rather than what he had or would do, and he looked foolish.  Fans are not much better.  Consider CY candidate Bailey Ober:

Quote

Bailey Ober is perhaps the clearest example of that frustration. He entered the 2024 season as a dark horse Cy Young candidate after a breakout 2023 campaign, but that never materialized. Zebby Matthews has yet to establish himself as a reliable major-league starter, while the Simeon Woods Richardson experiment ultimately failed to produce the consistency Minnesota was hoping for. And that's really been the story of the middle and back of the Twins' rotation. Too much potential, not enough consistency.

Ober was a good young pitcher establishing himself as a solid #3, posting a 3.43 ERA in 144 innings and flashing a 9.0 K/9. Not bad. He posted a slightly worse season in 2024, but the higher ERA was offset by throwing 178 innings, so another 3.0 WAR. Good work, valuable to any team, but a Cy Young candidate? 

And that is followed by calling out Mathews for not being a mature, consistent starter after 247 innings. For every Roger Clemens that comes out of college throwing bullets there are a lot more guys that start slowly and have to grind before they turn into Randy Johnson (who didn't break the 110 ERA+ mark until his sixth season.) Zebby is inconsistent, but half the time he's outstanding, and that is what you build on. SWR made improvements and looked OK until he collapsed. In the end the problem is that pitching is hard and potential is handed out way too casually by fans with short attention spans. They love a good prospect and it often takes a lot of time for things to click in a role where you only get so many chances and injury is always lurking. 

3. The team is at a point where a lot of development must continue to happen even as some hard decisions have to be made. It's never been clear who was deciding which guys went in what roles, so it's impossible to know if Maki was good or bad at this stuff or how good the next guy might be. Best of luck to the old crew, and best of luck to the new ones.

[mikelink45]

4 hours ago, Patzky said:

Sonny Gray has got to be having Rocco flashback memories after getting pulled last night. Maybe he's available..

He should be upset. 

[TheLeviathan]

That's great.  Call me crazy but I'd rather tap into a network that isn't remnants of a Pittsburgh Pirates organization whose record looks this over the last ten years:

Hard pass.  That's not the organization I want to poach from.