The roster of names is as impressive as any team has had, more glittering than most: Rod Carew, Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett, Tony Oliva, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Zoilo Versalles, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat, Frank Viola, etc., etc., etc. The Minnesota Twins were as good as any team and better than most teams at discovering talent. They scouted these players, in some cases drafted them, and signed them. No analytics were involved.
“The people who worked hardest on that were George Brophy and his scouting staff,” Clark Griffith, a former Twins executive and son of long-time owner Calvin Griffith, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Then he related an incident that epitomized the way the Twins conducted their scouting business.
“Jim Rantz, who was Brophy’s assistant, in ’81 during the strike went to see his son play at Illinois,” Griffith recalled, “and he spotted a player named Kirby Puckett. That’s the way we ended up with Puckett.”
Besides Puckett, the Twins had enough talent to win division titles the first two years of division play (1969-70), then won the World Series in 1987 and ’91 and won an additional six division titles in nine years in the first decade of the new century.
The Twins, however, haven’t discovered any Kirby Pucketts in recent years. They haven’t won any division titles or World Series either. There is probably a correlation there. What the Twins have, though, is the worst record in the major leagues this season.
Their piteous poor play has cost long-time General Manager Terry Ryan his job and prompted Twins ownership to redo the structure of the organization. The Twins are interviewing candidates for a job that will resemble the roles of the top executives of a dozen teams, 10 of them known as president of baseball operations.
“We will not have that title,” said Dave St. Peter, the Twins’ club president. “I suppose if you look at the structure that is envisioned it would be comparable to the recent trend. You’ll have that executive position and then ultimately with that individual potentially hiring a general manager. It’s not necessarily set in stone that that will happen.
“Ultimately it will be up to whoever we bring in to that leadership role, and certainly their ability to help shape the structure as they see fit but also in collaboration with ownership and myself. We don’t go into this with any predisposed structure below the head baseball executive.
“I’m not focused on titles. The lead role will not be president of baseball operations, but the lead role also will not be general manager.”
The title president of baseball operations is relatively new, emerging in the last decade, though the responsibility is basically the same as general manager. The Baltimore Orioles, whose owner Peter Angelos hates the term general manager, hired Andy MacPhail as president of baseball operations in June 2007.
In October 2011 the Chicago Cubs used that title to lure Theo Epstein away from Boston, where he was general manager of the Red Sox.
Today 10 clubs have presidents of baseball operations, seven of whom also have general managers; Oakland has an executive vice president of baseball operations (Billy Beane) and Arizona has a chief baseball officer (Tony La Russa). Oakland and Arizona also have general managers, and both also have won-lost records that are among the worst in the majors.
Whomever they hire and whatever they call him, the Twins hope he will be more successful than the Athletics and the Diamondbacks.
“We have looked at a lot of other teams,” St. Peter said, “we’ve certainly spent a lot of time evaluating our own organization and believe that the role of somebody leading a baseball operation has evolved, changed and we believe that an executive position that allows somebody to be more at 30,000 feet potentially looking at all aspects of the baseball operations departments, whether it be major league, minor league, scouting, analytics, medical, sports science.
“All of the things that go into that role and structure that gives you the best chance of success. It requires somebody who can provide visionary leadership but also somebody who can insure that we’re providing on those strategies across multiple platforms. It’s our hope that we can provide the right person to do that.”
Having finished last season with an 83-79 record, the Twins had not been expected to be as bad as they have been. What happened, I asked Tom Kelly, who managed the Twins to their 1987 and 1991 World Series titles and is a special assistant to the general manager.
“Two, three, four, five major things happened,” he said. “I think we counted on guys coming back from injuries and hoping they would be ok. Hughes and Perkins to name two,” he said, referring to pitchers Phil Hughes and Glen Perkins.
Kelly also cited a failed experiment in the outfield with Miguel Sano. “We were hoping Sano would be OK in the outfield. That didn’t work. We wound up moving people around” and playing poor outfield defense generally.
Third baseman Trevor Pluoff missed a lot of time with injuries, Kelly added. “That created some inconsistencies in our infield play.”
Second baseman Brian Dozier “was awful offensively the first two months, he added. “Lately he’s been one of the better players in the league. We played the game not as well as we’re capable of playing. Advancing runners, doing the little things we need to do. Defensively we’re near the bottom. We’re way down there somewhere.”
Finally, Kelly said, the team’s starting pitchers haven’t been good enough to stop losing streaks, citing the recent 12-game losing streak that made a bad season worse.
“We didn’t play good enough,” he said. “Too many inconsistencies in pitching and defense. Too much wishing and hoping.”
And maybe too much for the new person to do to make an early impact.
What is likely is that the Twins will expand their use of analytics, which is the popular thing to do in Major League Baseball today. Noted for their scouting success, the Twins are not given credit for using analytics with all of the so-called advance statistics.
One man, however, defended the team’s use of statistics. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to be speaking about something that isn’t his area of expertise, he said the Twins use “plenty of analytics. They don’t talk about it very much. They get a bad rap for being behind and all that stuff. It’s a bunch of crap. The stereotype of the Twins just being old school scouting and development is not accurate. It’s the foundation but they certainly use statistics and analytics. It’s certainly a piece of the puzzle. It might not be as big as other places but it’s not the stereotype you hear from other places.”
Indeed, the Twins have a vice president of technology, John Avenson. He’s not an Ivy League graduate, as are many of the technology people in other front offices, but he is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a degree in computer science.
Ask Tom Kelly his view of analytics, and he gives the idea that he’s glad he’s not managing in the analytics age.
“We have that department up there,” he said, “I’m probably too far removed to try to begin to understand it all. I do grasp some of it.”
Then he related an incident he recalled from his managing past.
“Many years ago,” he said, “I needed somebody to run in September. I asked can he read the ball, go first to third, second to home, all that stuff? ‘Well, he’s a six runner.’ I said I’m not too interested in a six runner. I’m interested in somebody who knows how to run and score a run. The next answer was ‘he’s a six runner.’
“Well, he stole second one night, stole third or got there on a passed ball. He got to third. Tie game in the ninth inning. The ball hits in the dirt and scooted way in front of the dugout of the opposing team. You know how far away that is, how it rolls on the Astroturf. Everybody jumped up in the air and we’re waiting for the fellow to come down and score and he went back to third. So there’s that six runner.”
“I still think there’s a big part of the eye test that you have to pass,” Kelly said. Eye test? That’s how scouts refer to evaluating players the way they do. They actually see a player on the field, not on a computer.