Rookie skipper Rocco Baldelli led the Minnesota Twins to one of baseball’s most surprising campaigns, a homer-happy season capped with Tuesday’s announcement that he had won the American League Manager of the Year award.
The other finalists were the Yankees’ Aaron Boone and Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash.
Baldelli, 38, had never managed before being hired by the Twins after last season to become the youngest skipper in the majors. With a laid-back, player-friendly style, Baldelli adapted quickly to his new role, leading the Twins to 101 wins and the franchise’s first AL Central title since 2012. It was the second-most wins in the 119-year history of the franchise and most since Sam Mele led them to 102 wins in 1965.
Baldelli became Minnesota’s second AL Manager of the Year in three years. Hall of Famer Paul Molitor won the award in 2017 after guiding the Twins to the AL wild-card game and was fired after Minnesota slipped to 78-84 in 2018. Ron Gardenhire (2010) and Tom Kelly (1991) have also won the award for the Twins.
“It was a great year,” Baldelli said after the Twins were eliminated in the playoffs. “I got to be a part of something that I consider very special, and I think we have a very unique, special group of people. We got a chance to watch some players reach new heights in their careers.”
From a tactical standpoint, Baldelli displayed a minimalist approach with an offense that erupted for a big-league-record 307 homers this season. The Twins attempted just 49 stolen bases on the season, 18 fewer than any other team.
The station-to-station approach worked, as the Twins returned to the playoffs and helped make Baldelli just the seventh person to win Manager of the Year honors during the season in which he managed his first big league game. The last to do it was Arizona’s Torey Lovullo in 2017.
As a player, Baldelli also got off to a fast start in what eventually turned into a hard-luck career. He finished third in the 2003 AL Rookie of the Year voting for the Rays, becoming one of the most popular players in franchise history. But his career was undermined by repeated injuries and a muscular disorder that eventually led him to retire after the 2010 season.
After his playing career ended, Baldelli worked for the Rays in a variety of coaching and front-office roles beginning in 2011, eventually becoming the club’s major league field coordinator under Cash in 2018.
Despite the fast start to his managerial career, Baldelli is facing the same hump that Gardenhire and Molitor couldn’t get over: winning in the postseason. After being swept in three games by the Yankees in the ALDS, the Twins have dropped a record 16 straight playoff games — 13 of them to the Yankees. Beating the Yankees is just one of the things Baldelli has yet to learn after just one season in a big league dugout.
“The experience part of this job does matter, and as someone who never had that experience, I was figuring things out on the go all the time,” Baldelli said. “I found that extraordinarily challenging, but also very rewarding. Every day when I left, I took something home with me, and I’ll keep those things forever. I wouldn’t trade anything that just happened for anything in the world.”
Boone, 46, led the Yankees to 103 wins despite numerous injuries during his second season in the New York dugout. The Yankees won their first AL East title since 2012 but ultimately came up short in pursuit of the franchise’s first pennant since 2009. New York went without a pennant during the 2010s, its first decade without an AL flag since the 1910s.
He’s off to a historic start to his managerial career after taking over the Yankees’ dugout before the 2018 season. He’s the first manager to ever win 100 games or more in both of his first two seasons, and his 203 wins are the second most for a skipper over his first two campaigns.
Boone became the 33rd manager in Yankees history before last season, leading New York to 100 wins and finishing fifth in the AL Manager of the Year voting. In many ways, Boone’s second season was more challenging than his first thanks to rampant injuries that hindered his efforts all season. New York had 30 players spend time on the injured list, for a combined total of 2,688 days, most in the majors. Among key players who missed time were sluggers Aaron Judge (limited to 102 games) and Giancarlo Stanton (18 games) and No. 1 starter Luis Severino (12 innings pitched).
Cash, 41, led the Rays to their second straight season of 90-plus wins, finishing with 96 — second most in franchise history. Tampa Bay earned an AL wild-card berth to return to the postseason for the first time since 2013. After winning the wild-card game in Oakland, the Rays went on to take the AL champion Houston Astros to the full give games in the ALDS.
Though he’s spent just five seasons in the Rays’ dugout, the attrition rate among managers has been so high during Cash’s time in Tampa Bay that he has already become the third longest-tenured skipper in the majors. A spate of managerial changes at season’s end meant that only Oakland’s Bob Melvin (nine years) and Cleveland Terry Francona (seven) have been at the helm of a club longer than Cash. Houston’s A.J. Hinch has led the Astros for the past five seasons.
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