Dan Hayes of The Athletic reported that Rocco’s 2026 option was picked up at some point in the last six weeks, amid the Twins’ downward spiral.
According to Dan Hayes of The Athletic, the Twins reportedly picked up manager Rocco Baldelli’s 2026 team option at some point since late April.
While the exact timing is unclear, it’s easy to surmise that happened in the wake of the Twins’ MLB-best 13-game win stream last month. A Twins official confirmed the news as speculation has been running rampant on Baldelli’s job security amid Minnesota’s latest cold streak.
I’m on record as, mostly, a Baldelli defender. In general, I think the impact a manager has on a team is fairly minimal and what can actually be evaluated (player communication, clubhouse cohesion, etc.) are things we’ll never be made privy to as fans. However, I think there was a clear argument from moving on in the offseason and an even better one now.
Outside of the aforementioned win streak, the Twins have been bad and borderline unwatchable for the last nine months. If you want to extend things out further, Minnesota has clearly been trying to compete for a World Series the past five years, and yet they’ll have missed the playoffs completely in four out of the five seasons (assuming they don’t make it in 2025). Within that were two historically terrible collapses (2022, 2024) and a fifth place division finish (2021), though they did break the playoff losing streak in 2023.
This season, the Twins have seemingly just had bad break after bad break. For the first two months of the season, Minnesota had a top-three pitching staff but the offense couldn’t generate any runs. This month, the bats have looked like we expected them to all season, but the pitching staff has completely collapsed and allowed the most runs in baseball (though that falls mostly on the starting staff, with Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and Louie Varland still performing great in the few games they’ve been needed).
Whatever your specific feelings on Baldelli, I can’t imagine many other managers in the sport getting this type of runway. As our friend Brandon Brooks pointed out, Rocco is now the seventh-longest tenured manager in MLB. All six ahead of him have won a pennant since Baldelli was hired and three of them have won the World Series. At some point, these team-wide issues that keep reappearing year after year have to reflect on the manager.
The same can be said for President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey. Coaching staff contracts aren’t made public, so it’s possible there was some mid-season deadline for this option, but barring that there was no reason Falvey needed to make that decision right now.
While Falvey has undoubtedly done a lot of good for the Twins as an organization, he’s repeatedly shown an affinity for the status quo over the necessary risks teams have to take to contend at the highest levels. Be that Baldelli, the veterans he clings to way past their expiration date, the lack of any upgrades at the trade deadline the past few seasons, or running back the exact same core after 2024’s collapse.
Even Falvey’s “riskier” personnel moves never seemed that troublesome. Byron Buxton accepted an incredibly team-friendly extension. Carlos Correa’s second Twins contract is one that any team in the league would have happily agreed to at the time. Sonny Gray was acquired for a first-round pick that the Twins re-obtained when he left in free agency. The Pablo Lopez/Luis Arraez swap was a no-brainer.
Preemptively selecting Baldelli’s 2026 option is just the latest in a line of moves that signals complacency from a (potentially) lame-duck front office ahead of a team sale. The baseball season is long and the Twins have plenty of time to turn things around, but the Twins will be mired in mediocrity until Falvey decides to take some risks.