Twins part ways with four coaches on Major League staff?

MINNEAPOLIS -- A difficult offseason of reckoning for the Twins’ organization began with the first major reaction to the club’s season-ending collapse on Wednesday, when the team announced that all three hitting coaches -- David Popkins, Derek Shomon and Rudy Hernandez -- and assistant bench coach Tony Diaz will not return for the 2025 season.

At this time, all other coaches are expected to return to the ‘25 staff.

This is a fairly unprecedented level of coaching turnover in response to a failed season for an organization that has long been known for its relative stability on the coaching staff -- but such is the response to a similarly unprecedented 12-27 skid that pushed the ‘24 team from a seemingly safe playoff spot to out of the bracket altogether.

Only three other times in club history have four or more members of the uniformed coaching staff turned over after the season -- 1969, 2014 and ‘18 -- and all of those prior instances were part of managerial changes, with new skippers bringing in their own staff members.

This was not such a case, with president of baseball operations Derek Falvey and manager Rocco Baldelli set to remain in place for ‘25, as the club indicated on Sunday.

“I just think that there will be decisions we have to make, challenging conversations we're going to have, ultimately, to reflect on this,” Falvey had said Sunday. “But the combination of emotions are significant. We need to be better than this. There's no other way to put it. And we will be better than this and the group we go forward with will be better than this.”

That will involve entirely new hitting leadership following a finish during which the Twins were held to four or fewer runs in 24 of their final 30 games to play a significant role in the club’s nosedive in the standings, with the bats’ inconsistency also responsible in large part for the team’s slow 7-13 start to the season and a mostly quiet first half to the ‘23 season.

Multiple players had spoken in the closing days of the season -- both on and off the record -- about their satisfaction with Popkins’ work as the Twins’ primary hitting coach since he was hired away from the Dodgers’ organization prior to the ‘22 campaign, after which the Twins elevated Shomon from their Minor League ranks in ‘23.

There remains a chance that Shomon could be reassigned back to a player development role within the organization.

“Definitely learned a lot about my swing, learned a lot about my approach, learned a lot about just the game in general,” Carlos Correa said Sunday. “Popkins, the hitting coach, helped me understand myself a little better.

“A .900 OPS for some people comes with homers and walks. For me, it comes with being a little more creative and he helped me understand that I don’t have to hit a home run every at-bat. Pop has been a huge help for me, and I’m grateful that I came to this organization and he was my hitting coach.”

The challenge is that the Twins’ offense was effective in aggregate -- they were ninth in the Majors in team wRC+ (107), 11th in slugging (.411) and 10th in runs scored (742) -- and ranked similarly in all three categories last season under the three departed leaders.

But that production was rather inconsistent, often alternating deep struggles and periods of extended success. Such was the case last season, when the club’s first-half offensive malaise extended to the point that players themselves briefly took over leadership of hitters’ meetings, or late this year, when Baldelli was openly critical of his team’s lacking offensive approach.

“For a while, we’ve been in swing mode where we’re just swinging at a lot, things we shouldn’t be swinging at and not as concise of a plan and approach as we need to have,” Baldelli said on Sept. 24. “We need to tighten it up as much as possible in these last five games, and I think that’s what’s going to give us the best chance to go out there and score some runs.”

Hernandez had spent 29 years in the Twins’ organization, including 24 as a coach. He had been the longest-tenured coach on the staff and the only holdover from the Paul Molitor regime, having been elevated to the uniformed staff in 2015 and to his current role in ‘19, when Diaz joined the Twins’ staff following a career in the Colorado organization.