Derek Falvey

Um, there's a lot of, a lot of young talent, um, coming in Minnesota and I think the big questions for Jeremy Zoll, they're now I guess first full year as, as kind of running the ship.

He's been, you know, assistant GM and, and their nominal GM for a few years now behind President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey.

But Falvey departed in February or January and so you're gonna see what, uh, how Zoll wants to, you know, evaluate who's gonna stick, who's a core piece.

Um, and there's no real shortage of options that they can pursue this off season.

But they just stopped playing fundamental baseball.

And Derek Falvey said as much after that season was over that they just fell apart.

2025, the second half, come on.

I mean, they traded away 40% of their roster.

So yeah.

And, and also, I mean, I said this when they parted ways with Derek Falvey, and, you know, Dex alluded to it.

I'm not saying that Jer- I, I, you know, I'm not gonna pretend to, like, know Jeremy Zoll, uh, at all, quite frankly, on the level that I got to know Terry Ryan and Bill Smith and, like, some of the other Twins, uh, you know, heads of front office, covering them.

But if you were to open up that job for the best possible baseball executives in the world, which is what you should be hunting for as a Major League Baseball team, is Jeremy Zoll one of the 12 to 15 best leaders of a baseball operations department? Or did you settle on an easy pivot from Derek Falvey? Not saying he can't be in an organization, but, like-

Yeah

... is, is he that dude-

You have a new manager in place in Derek Shelton, who I think has mostly done a very good job with what he has had.

You got Jeremy Zoll, who took over for Derek Falvey essentially in the 11th hour before spring training reported.

You have a new Polad running things in Tom Polad, who had no affiliation with the team prior to this for the most part.

And yet, I believe this is now the fourth time in the last six years that the twins basically entered september or august 31st today but they entered in the state fair time right like last week in august sitting in a decent spot to be potentially a playoff team and they're sitting on the heels of having their fourth biggest collapse essentially in the last like six years getting back to 2022 um in 2023 that was the case And in 25 and now 26, they're in the same case.

Um, but I, I, I, I, I believe him.

Uh, I, I give him credit, you know, what else he's, he said that he said, he has said things that we all, um, have expected they need to say they've you know he's apologized for how they've handled things in the past he knows that they have to regain the fan base's trust and respect and dollars um they did spend some money a little bit of money at this trade deadline and look this has come with some pain and suffering here you know because it came at the expense of his brother joe Also, you know, the whole Derek Falvey thing, let's not forget, you know, at the trade deadline last year, they decided to gut the roster and trade everybody.

Tom comes in, you know, they got new investors.

Now they want to compete.

[laughs]

Th- this is the biggest surprise in Minnesota sports, I think, since, what was it, January 31st, when back-to-back on the same day during recordings, Derek Falvey resigned and Kwesi was fired.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, we've had some crazy Friday news stuff this year so far.

They have so many left-handed hitting corner outfielders.

I mean, going even back to 2023 this was an issue for the Twins and Derek Falvey just kept adding them.

It's like, what do you do with Max Kepler? What do you do with Matt Wallner? What do you do with Trevor Larnach? What do you do with, in 2023, it was Joey Gallo? There were so many of these things that they just had no room, and it's like, okay, well surely they will trade an odd man out for something else, so they'll try and get something and then that trade just never m- materialized.

And so the- they, the Twins have over the last few years constantly run- ran into this issue where they have no right-handed hitting corner outfield help, but all of a sudden they have just so many left-handed hitting corner outfielders that it gets in the way.