T.O.

I was a big Flavine fan. They originally brought in some good coaches like Wes Johnson & Tanner Swanson. They pick up some good FAs, like Castro, Cruz, Cron, Schoop, Perez & Pineda. & Odorizzi trade fell into their laps. The perfect storm of the "bomba squad" that organically came about due to the "juiced ball". This all set up the 100+ game season. Falvey was the head mainly because of the Twins' switch to an analytical approach & his association with the CLE pitching pipeline.; Although Levine did most of the talking at 1st. One thing I didn't like about this regime was its being occult. We had no idea who was responsible for what between Falvey, Levine or Baldelli. But we were winning, so who cared back then?
Falvey was hailed as a genius and credited with the Twins' success. This all went to Falvey's head. He did more talking, took more & more credit & more & more control. Resulting in becoming more & more imbalanced. Analytics is a necessary tool that all MLB teams have devoted themselves to developing. Because of this mindset, Falvey has been well thought of. But IMO, this mindset has gone extreme; that MLB baseball has turned into a fantasy baseball game, driven completely by biased stats & HR Derby; that has compromised the game. MLB baseball isn't cold & hard stats. It's a game played by human beings, not video avatars. With human elements like conditions, intangibles like instinct & heart that analytics can't register, or fundamentals that analytics have difficulty measuring accurately.  It's time to bring back the baseball-smarts back into the game & not be completely dominated by analytics. I'll state again that analytics is a necessary tool, but we can't not driven by them. We need to get away from this mindset that Falvey possesses. Falvey doesn't have the baseball smarts that is needed to be a GM.

Hello, fellow humans! My name is William Malone IV. Son of William Malone III. And I come with great news! The baseball season is in full swing and the Minnesota Twins are back in action.
I know some of the frontrunners are angry at their record, but the real fans are just happy to watch their favorite team play baseball. It's such a wonderful sport, and many of us have missed the greatness of the Twins for the winter months. These negative fans have some reason to be negative. Minnesota has not played well so far. But some of the complaints are just hollow and fake. So if you're going to complain, find something that's actually worth complaining about.
Crying about Rocco Baldelli pulling Joe Ryan at 81 pitches is the latest example of fans complaining for the sake of complaining. So, it didn't work out. But did you watch any of the other 14 games across Major League baseball that day? It's a fairly normal occurrence. And yes, sometimes managers go against this practice. And many times, it doesn't work.
On Saturday night, just hours after Joe Ryan was pulled against St. Louis, Griffin Canning of the New York Mets having an even better start. He was through five innings on 72 pitches, allowing only one run. Canning came out for the sixth inning, allowed the go-ahead run, and New York wound up falling to the Houston Astros.
There is no right or wrong decision for these managers to make. No matter what they do, the players have to show up and do their jobs. They decide the outcomes. For every "losing" decision fans complain about, there's another manager who makes the opposite decision and still winds up losing. But most fans only watch their favorite team, and ignore the other 29. So they're missing out on all these "losing" decisions that other managers make. How many angry Twins fans turned around to watch the Mets blow that game against Houston with Carlos Mendoza making opposite decisions? Probably a pretty small number.
The same thing goes for third base coaches. All 30 fan bases will insist that they have the worst third base coach. You see it all over social media every single time someone gets thrown out at home. "(insert name) is the WORST third base coach in the league!!!" But none of these fans watch the other 29 third base coaches to get a fair grasp on how their own coach actually stacks up. And whenever their opponent has a player thrown out at home, these same fans will never blame the opponent's third base coach. They'll just praise their outfielder for a great throw or their catcher for a great tag. It's only on the third base coach if it's their own team getting hosed at home.
Nobody is saying you can't complain. Just complain about real issues. Not these made up issues when you have no real frame of reference to stack up your team against the other 29. You know what has been a problem for the Twins? Offense! Even if Baldelli had stuck with Ryan, and there's no guarantee that Ryan keeps putting up zeros, Minnesota would still have to score another run at some point. They never had the lead. It was a tie game. You can't win a 1-1 game without eventually scoring again, which the Twins never did. It's not illegal to score eight runs. Just do that! And all the managerial decisions get so much easier.
And I know the pitching hasn't been great either, but hitting is probably more important. It's often easier to out slug your opponent than to try and win 3-2 or 2-1 games every night. The Seattle Mariners allowed the least runs in 2024. They also missed the playoffs. And you still need to slug your way through the playoffs against "playoff pitching." Remember that 2019 World Series with loaded rotations on paper? Strasburg, Scherzer and Corbin against Verlander, Cole and Greinke? The winning run totals in those seven games were 5, 12, 4, 8, 7, 7 and 6. And then the takeaway from fans across baseball was "you need a three headed rotation monster to win the World Series!"