The new guys

Derek Falvey (left) and Thad Levine during Monday's
introductory press conference.

So what did we learn from Monday's "meet the new boss(es)" presser?

Various forms of "collaborate" are among Derek Falvey's favorite buzzwords -- and he's got an impressive set of buzzwords that he sprinkled into practically every response.

Thad Levine has a knack for well-placed wisecracks, be they ad-libbed or rehearsed.

And, perhaps most significant, they're here to hire, not necessarily to fire,

Falvey intends to beef up not only the Twins relatively paultry in-house analytics department but also their strength-and-conditioning and nutrition programs. He and Levine said that one of the things that made the Twins an attractive opportunity is that the organization has some many long-term employees.

The idea, boiled down: Falvey and Levine plan an organization that collects ideas from everybody and reaches "evidence-based decisions". This will involve a greater use of analytics than under Terry Ryan.

And those who can make the change are, basically, welcome to stay. Falvey and Levine made it explicit about Rob Antony, assistant general manager under Ryan and acting GM after Ryan was bounced in July; they want him to stay as assistant GM. Presumably the same is true for Mike Radcliffe and Deron Johnson, the director of player personnel and scouting director respectively. They're interested in retaining Ryan as an advisor.

Falvey:

“What we’re going to do is introduce a vision and give everyone the opportunity to get on the bus. We’re going to build out and go that way, then see who’s aligned with that vision.”

Meanwhile, a little roster news:

The @Twins have outrighted Alex Wimmers to AAA & reinstated Glen Perkins, Phil Huhges & Danny Santana from the 60-day DL.

Roster now at 36

— Dustin Morse (@Twins_morsecode) November 7, 2016

Falvey, Levine and Antony were to fly out to Arizona Monday for the general managers meeting; during that time, the two newbies will confer with Antony about the roster and the coaching staff, with some decisions about the coaches expected before week's end.

Front office wanna bes

There are 30 teams in baseball and 30 general manager jobs. Well, some of the teams call the job something else -- Tampa Bay's org chart calls it "president of baseball operations" -- but each team has somebody at the top of the heap delegating, supervising, making the final call on moves (and getting the praise or heat on same).

Terry Ryan followed a essentially traditional route to the job: He pitched in the minor leagues, got hurt, went into scouting, moved up the ladder into the front office and eventually into the top job. But many organizations, maybe most, now have GMs -- and future GMs in the pipeline -- with no professional playing background whatsoever. Jed Hoyer (or if you prefer, Theo Epstein) of the Cubs. Jeff Ludnow of the Astros. Michael Silverman of the aforementioned Rays. Ben Cherington of the Red Sox. Sandy Alderson of the Mets, the man who built the Bash Brothers dynasty of the Oakland A's, was the pioneer of the type -- outsiders with academic acumen instead of athletic accomplishment.

Few men at the top of organizations today played in the majors. There are Billy Beane of Oakland, Ruben Amaro of Philadelphia and Dave Stewart of Arizona, and it's unclear to me how much authority Stewart actually has. I don't think there are any other former major leaguers now serving as general managers.

Beane is famous for his embrace of the sabermetric approach and Amaro notorious for his rejection of same -- from which we should draw afresh the caution that humans don't come out of cookie cutters. But in the main, front offices are becoming the domain of the non-athlete because the academics have the better grasp of the analytics.

Let us, with that background established, consider the front office ambitions put forth in recent days by a pair of Twins veterans, Glen Perkins and Torii Hunter. Perkins -- white and a college man who is, at least by player standards, knowledgeable about sabermetrics -- specifically talked about going into the player development side and merging traditional scouting with the new-age numbers. Hunter -- black and a high-school signee who this winter disparaged defensive metrics and those who consider them -- talks of wanting to someday be a general manager.

From USA Today:

"I really want to get into that front office, make some changes, and build a team that I want to build,'' Hunter says. "I'd love to learn everything from Terry. He'll be a mentor. One day, that's my goal, to be GM of the Twins.''

Watching this team from the outside, I see few signs that the front office takes the analytics seriously, even if Ryan insists he never makes a move without out consulting Jack Goin, the team's in-house numbers guy.

It is my hope that Ryan's successor, whoever it is and whenever that occurs, will be more attuned to to analytics than Ryan himself is. Off his commentary on the subject during the winter, that's not Hunter. Perkins has the more palatable mindset for a modern front office.

A little Series off-day Twins news

Pedro Hernandez
was 3-3, 6.83 in
56.2 innings for
the Twins.

The Twins on Tuesday announced that LHP Pedro Hernandez has been outrighted to Triple A, thus removing him from the 40-man roster. The Twins now have 35 players officially on the 40, plus Sam Deduno, who remains on the 60-day disabled list but should soon be reinstated to the roster.

The Hernandez move is hardly a surprise, and — as noted with previous roster-clearing moves — not the last such move to come this offseason. He's left-handed, and he's only 24, but his Triple A numbers weren't particularly appealing and his stats with the Twins are terrible.

---

Larry Corrigan, once a significant behind-the-scenes figure in the the Twins baseball operations, is returning to the organization.

He was, at various times, the Twins scouting director, director of minor league instruction and a special assignment scout. He left the Twins within weeks of the ascension of Bill Smith to the general manager's job when Terry Ryan stepped down at the end of the 2007 season; with no evidence other than the timing, I've always figured that Smith's rise prompted Corrigan to depart.

---

While the Twins have made no formal announcement about Corrigan and his future role, they did on Tuesday release their plans for TwinsFest, post-Metrodome. I really don't know how well Target Field will work for a late January event like that. but in all honesty, I haven't been to TwinsFest in years. (Driving in a Minnesota winter becomes less appealing as I grow increasingly older.)

---

On a purely personal note: Happy birthday, Mom.

Dissecting the Bill Smith era: Introduction

It seems safe to say that
the residents of Twins
Territory had lost
confidence in Bill Smith.

In the immediate wake of the Twins front office shakeup, White Sox blogger Jim Margalus (South Side Sox, linked to on the sidebar) noted that in Bill Smith's four years at the helm the Twins won two divisional titles and missed a third by the most slender of margins. "Contrast that to Kenny Williams, who has been to the postseason twice in his 11 years on the job, and man, Jerry Reinsdorf's patience seems endless."

Of course, Smith's fourth season was a doozy.

Margalus' critique of the Smith era focuses, as does that of many (most?) Twins fans, on the big trades Smith made and (mostly) lost. But those who judge a general manager on that basis alone are missing out on large swaths of the job, and the indictment against Smith — the problems that ultimately cost him his job — is deeper and more varied.

The charges levied against Bill Smith, charged as a failure in the court of public opinion and convicted by a jury of his bosses:

• He consistently "lost" in trades;
• He mishandled the payroll budget;
• He presided over a decline in player development;
• He presided over a decline in the medical/training/conditioning/rehab field;
• He failed to expand the organization's player evaluation from its expertise in traditional scouting to include sophisticated statistical analysis.

In coming days, I intend to examine each of these complaints against Smith (not necessarily in that order, and not necessarily consecutively). It is, however, valuable to remember that these are not necessarily failures of an individual, but collective failures by the organization. Smith takes the blame for the team's problems because he was the man on top of the pile.

At the peak of the Terry Ryan era, when it seemed the entire world of baseball media was anointing him as the bestest general manager in the game, Ryan himself was quick to deflect the credit to the men around him -- people like Mike Radcliff (then director of scouting); Jim Rantz (farm director); Ron Gardenhire (field manager); and Bill Smith (assistant general manager).

Some of the titles changed, but the same people were still around in 2011.

Further thoughts on the return of Terry Ryan

Terry Ryan reportedly asked for the "interim" tag
on his title, but his superiors are hoping he's back for years.

One of the initial takes Monday on the return of Terry Ryan as the Twins general manager was the sense of 'We're bringing the band back together." Not only is Ryan back atop the baseball hierarchy, but Wayne Krivsky, who had been Ryan's No. 2, is returning to the organization.

It's not precisely the same bunch in the same jobs as a decade ago, when the Twins began a long stretch as the dominant franchise in their division, but it's close.

And the needs and status of the club have changed. Target Field has lifted the Twins to baseball's middle class. Ryan indicated that the 2012 payroll will be around $100 million, which is (a) considerably more than he had to play with in his first go-around as GM and (b) some $15 million less than Bill Smith had for a payroll in 2011.

A whopping chunk of that $100 million is dedicated to Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, and the Twins have about $82 million already committed. Having $18 million available to fill out the roster almost certainly means Michael Cuddyer, Joe Nathan and Jason Kubel will get more lucrative offers elsewhere. That may prove, in the long haul, to be a blessing, but in the short term it makes the job of improving the team more difficult.

I've said repeatedly that the first key to 2012 is the health of Mauer and Morneau. If the M&M Boys are as unproductive as they were in 2011, nothing else matters. The front office shuffle doesn't change that fact. It may bring change to how conditioning, rehab and treatment are handled.

Smith was publicly protective of the medical staff, at times oddly so, even as projected returns for injured players were consistently erroneous and even as that staff seemed sometimes to go out of its way to make players, Mauer in particular, look bad. Ryan on Monday took note of the problem getting injured players back on the field. Recognizing the problem is the first step in fixing it.

Bill Smith out as Twins general manager

Bill Smith and Terry Ryan in 2007, when Smith took over
for the semi-retiring Ryan. Now Ryan is stepping in for
the fired Smith.

Terry Ryan is back in charge of the Minnesota Twins on-field product, at least for now; Bill Smith's future with the club is uncertain, but he isn't the general manager anymore.

Verrry interesting, given that Jim Pohlad had implied that the 2011 disaster was not sufficient reason to clean the organizational house -- an assessment with which I largely agreed. So what changed?

From CEO Pohlad:

The Twins' goal is to get better in 2012 and beyond. Bill was equally motivated to achieve that goal but we differed in the scope and approach that was required.

I infer from that portion of Pohlad's statement that there was division within the organization over where the club stands. Are they realistic contenders in 2012, or is it time to tear it down and rebuild? If the former, it's reason to bid heavily to retain Michael Cuddyer; if the latter, it's reason to wish him well and move on (Cuddyer being one concrete example of how that abstract question applies to the immediate offseason).

I don't know where Smith stood on that basic question. We'll see as the winter progresses what the operating consensus is.

Perhaps more pertinent: I don't know, not being a fly on the wall, how the player evaluation process worked with a GM who was more an administrator than a scout. The talent evaluators around Smith -- in particular Ryan, Mike Radcliff, Tom Kelly, the already-departed Joe McIlvane -- were by and large the same people evaluating players when Ryan was on top of the heap. I doubt everybody involved agreed on every move, and perhaps -- perhaps -- there was a growing sense/realization that Smith was consistently making the wrong choice when confronted with diverging opinions.

One other thought about Monday's move: That Ryan is being described as "interim" general manager suggests that he's not truly invested in getting back into the job. I wonder if the pending return of Wayne Krivsky -- who, as I said during the weekend, probably would have been Ryan's successor after the 2007 season had he not already taken the Cincinnati job -- is intended to get him familiar once more with the Twins organization before turning the reins over to him. Another in-house possibility would be Radcliff, who was blocked from interviewing for the Orioles job. But if the intent is to make Radcliff the top dog, there was probably no need to install an interim GM.