4 Twins who deserve the most blame for embarrassing collapse to miss playoffs
Everyone deserves blame for the Minnesota's meltdown, but a few guys stick out as having let the team down even more.
It's going to take a while to sift through the rubble of the Minnesota Twins' season, both because so much happened to cause a historic collapse and it's way to hot to touch at the moment.
Minnesota had an over 90 percent chance to make the playoffs in early-August, and was well on pace to eclipsing its expected win total. What happened over the course of the next month is one of the worst collapses not just in Twins history but in all of baseball.
After blowing a late lead to the Texas Rangers on August 18th, the Twins went on to post the third-worst record in the league and ended up winning just one more game than the Chicago White Sox did in all of September. The bullpen, which was hailed as one of the best before the season, cratered and posted the second-worst ERA and a WPA so bad that it was nearly twice as worst as the next closest team.
It's hard to comprehend just how bad the Twins were and everyone deserves a share of the blame. Ownership set a pathetic tone over the winter by choosing greed over putting together a good team and everything that could go wrong ended up doing so.
Zooming in on the month-long collapse, though, there are a few guys who stick out as having been particularly disappointing by letting everyone down at a time when they were needed the most.
4 Twins who deserve the most blame for the team's embarrassing collapse
Royce Lewis
After talking a big game about how he doesn't slump, Royce Lewis did exactly that from pretty much that point on. We all know how good he can be, but this last month of the season showed Twins fans the ugly flip-side to that coin and it's one we hope to see very little of in the future.
— Baseball Images that Precede Unfortunate Events (@UnfortunateMLB) September 27, 2024
It's been a broken season for Lewis, who is developing a concerning knack for being injured more than he's healthy. He played just three innings on Opening Day, hitting a home run and reaching base again later, and missed the next two months. He hit the IL again later in the summer but was helping power the Twins' offense by hitting .371/.437/.903.
That's when things fell off a cliff.
Lewis has hit a meager .205/.267/.347 from June 2nd on, with just six home runs and none of the blustery swagger that helped give the team an energy to feed off of. His collapse late in the season has been just as disappointing to see, as he's so very clearly one of the most important players on the team but when he can't produce the team feels it.
Minnesota felt his absence on offense when he was out for two months, but the fact that he made that lack of production felt while in the lineup was even worse. He flat out let the Twins down, slumping when Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton were on the IL rather than lifting the team up like the superstar we know he can be.
Rocco Baldelli
When a team melts down the way Minnesota did, it's impossible to not point the finger at the manager. Rocco Baldelli isn't the only person in management who deserves blame, as the buck stops with ownership and the pieces they gave him, but the way this last stretch of the season has gone is a bit concerning.
Sure the Twins were ill-equipped to deal with the bad injury luck they had, and Rocco did what he could with what he had. The utter lack of care and smarts the Twins showed down the stretch, and some of Rocco's managerial decisions, are why there's some conversation about him being on the hot seat.
We have an across stadium yelling contest going here. One man wants the #MNTwins to fire Rocco. Across the way, another man said "Don't blame him, blame the Pohlads."
— DanHayesMLB (@DanHayesMLB) September 27, 2024
He had a closed doors meeting with the team after they were swept by Kansas City in early September but it didn't inspire the team at all. He wasn't playing with a full deck in terms of healthy pitchers but fans weren't pleased with some of the bullpen management down the stretch, specifically in the series against Cleveland.
Then there's the lack of care, which is more about fundamentals than it is actually caring. Ryan Jeffers bunted into a popout that also saw Carlos Santana got caught napping ang get doubled up. This happened in the 12th inning of a must-win game against a 100-loss team. That's just one of many examples of the Twins fanning the flames of the dumpster fire this last month has been.
Ken Rosenthal has been adamant that Rocco shouldn't be fired, and there's a fair case to be made that he doesn't deserve to be scapegoated for what happened. That being said, the Twins had the sort of collapse that usually gets managers fired, and it's hard to deny that Rocco helped play a role in what happened.
Ryan Jeffers
At the start of the season Ryan Jeffers was on a tear that suggested he might be a huge part of the future. That was short-lived though, and his' role in the Twins' collapse has soured the positives he had earlier in the season.
Kyle Farmer has gotten a lot of flack this season for how bad he's been offensively, but the gap between him and Jeffers isn't that big. Since mid-May, Jeffers has hit .196/.269/.339 which is significantly worse than where Farmer will finish the season (he's closer to .223 thanks to a nice hot streak in early-September).
Jeffers had 10 home runs through the first two months of the season, but ended up hitting just 10 more over the last four. His defense started to become a liability as well, which was one of the more troubling parts about his slump considering how that was his chance to have a bit of saving grace.
There was once a conversation about Jeffers first splitting time with Christian Vazquez and then taking a bigger share of the starting catcher role. Both are under contract for 2025 but it's hard to see the Twins moving forward with a ton of confidence in Jeffers after what we saw out of him over the course of the team's collapse.
Jose Miranda
There's an argument to be made that the Twins' season peaked in late-June and the All-Star Break. The offense was mashing, pitching was starting to turn a corner, and that stretch of games the team had is a big reason why a wave of momentum was built that had Minnesota at a 90 percent chance of making the playoffs.
It's also where Jose Miranda's season peaked, which is one of the biggest bummers out of all this.
Miranda cratered hard last season, to the point where his future with the team was in serious doubt. Bad injury luck and poor play had pushed him to the fringe of the roster, something punctuated by the rise of Royce Lewis happening during Miranda's downfall.
That's why watching Miranda bounce-back and turn into a key piece of the lineup was so thrilling to see. Nothing will top his epic hitting streak that saw him set a new record for reaching base in consecutive at-bats. He looked all the way back and more, but that's where things came to a grinding halt.
He went on the IL after the All-Star Game, a common theme that connects a lot of the Twins' troubles, and he never looked the same again. He's set to finish the season hitting .212/.242/.301, which is a gut punch considering how high he was flying earlier in the year. Minnesota needed the guy we saw in June but he never showed up when the team could have used that type of production during the collapse.
More Minnesota Twins news and rumors
feed