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Rocco Baldelli couldn't pick up a bat and take the place of any of the hitters who lost touch with their talent in the second half of 2024, and he couldn't toe the rubber in the places of injured hurlers Pablo López, Zebby Matthews or Bailey Ober as the season fell apart in 2025. However, after failures of several different forms over the last half-decade, the team finally decided that a new voice was needed to lead the club out of the rut into which they've fallen.
The Twins dismissed Baldelli Monday, the team announced, despite having picked up the 2026 option on his contract in June. Back then, it felt like they had little choice. Baldelli had just overseen a 13-game winning streak, and the team appeared to have turned around its season after a brutal sub-.500 start. Alas, that magic didn't last. Though they didn't immediately spiral out of contention after the end of that streak, they could only hover around .500. The loss of López to injury at the beginning of June and the persistent underachievement of several young hitters on whom the team had relied coming into the season conspired to slowly drag Minnesota down in the standings.
For all involved, this year's failure felt uncomfortably like an extension of last year's, when the team was riding high in mid-August and then cratered, missing the playoffs because of a 12-27 plane crash of a finish. Baldelli held onto his job after that calamity, but couldn't survive the slow death of the 2025 team, accelerated by the trade deadline fire sale undertaken by the front office in July.
The roster Baldelli was given was far from ideal. The fault for that lies (in large part) with the Pohlad family, who constricted spending, and with a front office who was too slow to change direction when their player development faltered. With no significant new spending on the horizon, though—and with the longer-tenured, equally unsuccessful Derek Falvey locked into his role via contract extension and promotion to president of both baseball and business operations—the franchise apparently felt that some visible, tangible change was needed.
Baldelli's legacy achievements will be the 100-win record to which the team romped in his first year, 2019, hitting a record 307 home runs; and the snapping of the team's long drought between playoff victories, when the 2023 division-winning Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the Wild Card Series at Target Field. He has been a fine steward of the organization's reputation and a liked and respected figure among players and media members. His approach—very much manager-as-delegator, allowing his assistant coaches to make significant contributions and rarely seizing the initiative by demanding a particular style of play or mode of preparation—sometimes frustrated fans, but he was good at the vital functions of the job: communicating with players, the media, and his bosses in the front office.
Minnesota might now look to hire a skipper who takes a more proactive or specific tack in their coaching and direction-setting, but the front office loved Baldelli partially for the very pliability and openness to input he brought to the job. The team had too little success to justify keeping the manager around for an eighth season, but whether this change will prove to have been sufficient (or even necessary, as an alternative to overhauling the front office or the ownership suite) is a much murkier question.
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