Twins Fire Pitching Coach Pete Maki

The Twins announced Monday that they’ve fired pitching coach Pete Maki and assistant pitching coach Luis Ramirez. Assistant athletic trainer Jason Kirkman is also being let go. The rest of the coaching and training staff is expected back in 2027, per the club.

Maki and former Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson were both hired out of the college ranks under now-former president of baseball operations Derek Falvey. Maki, who’d been coaching at Duke University, was originally Minnesota’s minor league pitching coordinator. He joined the major league staff in 2020 as the bullpen coach under Johnson, who’d been hired away from the University of Arkansas and become one of the more well-regarded coaches in the league.

Johnson stunned the Twins by leaving the club midseason in 2022, with the team in first place, to take a pitching coach role at Louisiana State University. (The following year, the University of Georgia named Johnson its head coach.) Rather than go the interim route, the Twins announced Maki as their permanent pitching coach less than a week after Johnson’s surprise departure. Ramirez, who’d been assistant pitching coach under Johnson, maintained that role under Maki.

Over the past four seasons, Twins starters rank 21st in the majors with a 4.27 earned run average. Their relievers are a bit worse, sitting 24th in the league with a 4.36 ERA. Of course, as with any coaching scenario, the successes and failures of the staff rest on far more than just the shoulders of one or two coaches.

The Twins had one of the best bullpens in baseball to begin the 2025 season, but a disappointing first half and ongoing payroll reductions from ownership prompted a deadline fire sale that shipped out Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, Louis Varland, Brock Stewart and Danny Coulombe, gutting that relief corps. Minnesota entered the 2026 season expecting Pablo López and Joe Ryan to lead the staff; López suffered a UCL tear in his first bullpen session of spring training and required internal brace surgery, wiping out his entire year. Those payroll reductions — from about $155MM in 2023 all the way down to $109MM in 2026 — also left the front office little to no room to add established arms to the staff in free agency or via trade.

Maki was hired by Falvey and named to the big league coaching staff under former skipper Rocco Baldelli, however. Baldelli was fired following the 2025 season and, after a round of interviews, replaced by his own former bench coach, Derek Shelton. He’d been managing the Pirates but was let go about one-third of the way through the 2025 campaign. Shelton and Maki surely crossed paths in their prior roles within the Twins organization but never shared a dugout until this past season; Shelton was Baldelli’s bench coach in 2018-19 before being hired away by Pittsburgh for the 2020 campaign. Maki joined the Twins’ staff in 2020.

Ramirez, like Maki, was in the Twins organization during Shelton’s original run but was not on Baldelli’s coaching staff at the same time. He was working alongside Maki on the minor league side of things while Shelton was bench coach. He was elevated to assistant pitching coach on the major league staff in 2021. He spent 21 years in the Twins organization overall.

Shelton brought in several new coaches last winter, hiring hitting coach Keith Beauregard, first base coach Grady Sizemore, bullpen coach LaTroy Hawkins and bench coach Mike Hallberg. The departures of Maki and Ramirez will further give him the opportunity to put his own stamp on the staff.

General manager Jeremy Zoll, who’d been the Twins’ No. 2 executive under Falvey but is now running baseball operations, also surely ideas about the type of coaches the front office would like to bring into the fold to work alongside a young group that’s poised for plenty of turnover. López, Ryan, Bailey Ober and Dean Kremer can all become free agents next winter, while the Twins’ rotation of the future includes some combination of Taj Bradley, Mick Abel, Kendry Rojas, Connor Prielipp and Zebby Matthews (among others).