If Derek Falvey believes what he's saying, the Twins are in big trouble

If it wasn't obvious already, Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey made it abundantly clear on Tuesday that Rocco Baldelli was the fall guy after a 70-92 season that saw Minnesota miss the playoffs for the fourth time in the past five years.

Falvey was promoted to president earlier this year and constructed an unreliable roster, albeit under the constraints of the payroll-slashing Pohlad family. But rather than Falvey and general manager Jeremy Zoll being dismissed for piecing together a failing roster, it was Baldelli who was fired one day after his seventh season with the organization ended.

"It’s incumbent upon me as the head of this to talk with ownership about what the right direction is going forward,” Falvey said. “And we had those discussions privately about what that means and where we are and what we’ve learned, not just about one month of baseball but about over the course of a longer period of time. And ultimately, in those discussions, we collectively arrived at this being the right time for a new voice and a new direction. It’s not about Rocco — I said this yesterday — this isn’t about a failure of Rocco for this season. This is a collective underperformance from our group."

Falvey hasn't constructed reliable rosters

Baldelli is deserving of his fair share of criticism, but he's not the guy who built a roster full of boom or bust players who spend more time in slumps than hot streaks. Falvey, whether he's aware of it or not, admitted as much when he said he "felt like this roster had a lot of talent on it that could go perform."

“And we didn't collectively perform to that talent level," Falvey said. "And so that, to me, is when I say that you evaluate it, you say, were we wrong on that assessment? Were we wrong on the players that were in this room? Did we have the wrong mix? Did we miss on something specifically?"

Uh, yeah. He got it wrong. Again.

Falvey certainly had a restricted budget that forced him to shop at MLB Goodwill, but when the budget is tight there has to be high-quality scouting to find the best deals. He hasn't done that. But instead of the Twins finding a new architect, they fired a handful of pro scouts and dumped Baldelli while keeping the top of the chain intact. Why would anyone expect different results if Falvey has led an operation that has gotten it wrong more often than not since he was hired in 2016?

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in Falvey's meeting with Baldelli on Monday.

"Rocco and I had a very deep and long conversation," Falvey said. "I think that he took it, certainly like a pro and as a partner. I discussed with him lots of things that we won't get into here from a private standpoint."

Heres' the thing though: Falvey knows he's working with an uncompetitive budget, but the Twins, under his guidance, have failed to do develop talent.

"In our situation, in our market, the dynamics — this is no secret — we're going to need to develop players at the big-league level while also trying to bring in some veteran guys who are going to help us win," Falvey said. "[The next manager needs] the ability to work both with veteran guys who have been there before and young players who are going to continue to develop. That's the type of person we'll go seek."

But if Falvey and his front office can't find the right young players, how are the coaches supposed to develop them? Has every manager, hitting coach and pitching coach been awful in the past decade, or has Falvey and his team failed to give them the right players to develop?

The fall guys before Baldelli were hitting coaches and pitching coaches. Not just one, but two hitting coaches were dumped in the Baldelli era and the Twins went through three pitching coaches, though only one was fired (Wes Johnson left for more money at LSU).

Falvey struggling to sell hope

If Falvey hasn't been very good at finding and developing talent that can keep up in the AL Central, much less with the big boys of baseball, then he's surely good at selling hope, right? Wrong.

"It's tough. Any time you come off a season where you don't perform well, it's a challenge to look out there and go, 'What's the hope? What does it look like going forward?'" Falvey said before giving his best effort to generate hope.

"We had two guys rep us on the All-Star team, right? Byron Buxton and Joe Ryan, those guys are still in the clubhouse and they're guys that we know can really lead," he began.

"It would've been nice to have Pablo Lopez on the mound a lot more than we had him this year. We know when he's on the mound the type of team that we can be. We know Bailey Ober has been a guy that's been a top 20, 30 starter in the game at different times and ultimately didn't quite get there this year, kind of battling through some things."

Are you sold on that? He also mentioned promising young players like Luke Keaschall and (gulp) Matt Wallner.

Keaschall does look like a potential star, but Wallner? Come. On. Wallner had a .202 batting average with 22 homers and 40 RBI. That's your guy?

"There's a lot in that room that we like," Falvey continued. "There are some times, when you look in the room at the end of a tough season and you realize, 'OK, we're still some time away from being able to see what hope looks like.' There's a lot of hope in that room. There's a lot of optimism. There's a lot of belief in the players in that room. I have it personally."

If Falvey believes what he's saying, he's lost touch with reality — and nobody should be surprised because he's a reflection of the entire organization.

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