ST. LOUIS — The first sign of change at Minnesota Twins spring training was a revamped daily schedule, with specific times for position player drills focused on base running and defense.
The next sign came during batting practice, when the team’s hitters were required to spend their first two rounds focused on hitting to the opposite field, and then smacking line drives.
The surest sign this spring would be different was when veteran Carlos Correa dropped the word “mandatory” as he described the new series of exercises planned by Twins manager Rocco Baldelli.
After months of introspection about their spectacular season-ending collapse — a calamitous 12-27 stretch in which they went from postseason locks to missing the playoffs entirely — the Twins realized their demise was about more than key injuries, a short-handed pitching staff and a slumping offense. Looking back during the offseason, they also discovered a team more fractured than they had thought.
Determined to not let their epic slump go to waste, Baldelli and a changed Twins coaching staff designed a program they hoped would create an identity based on teamwork and detail-oriented play. After encouragement from several key players in conversations over the winter, Baldelli implemented the idea this spring.
“The last two months was a s— show,” Correa said of the 2024 season. “It went as bad as it could have gone, your best players getting hurt, the timing of it, some guys hit slumps. It was just a complete mess. But the good thing is we learned from it.”
Considering the Twins brought back largely the same team from last season, there were only so many ways to move forward. The most productive, they believed, was to adapt and learn.
Of the 26 players on the 2025 Opening Day roster, 22 are holdovers from a group that at one point last season was 70-53 with a 95 percent chance of making the playoffs. Four more returnees are on the injured list.
As they reviewed the wreckage from last August and September, the Twins front office still liked the bones of the roster. They believed a significant portion of the collapse could be attributed to key injuries to Correa, Byron Buxton, Joe Ryan, Max Kepler and Chris Paddack, along with the struggles of a young core.
But they also knew change was needed.
There was no room for players’ poor effort and execution, which Baldelli had deemed “unprofessional” after an ugly September sweep in Kansas City. Players needed to work together and play for one another. A repeat of the difficult days when Correa and Pablo López, among others, felt the need to publicly admonish the younger players, needed to be avoided at all costs.
The group decided to change how they’d work together.
“Post-Covid, there was a lot of focus on individual work,” said Twins president Derek Falvey. “Guys weren’t even allowed to be in the same areas for a little while. It became a little more of a norm: Work in the cage individually; work with one individual coach at a time. … As an industry we got a little away from some of the more team-oriented goal focus.”
Baldelli and his staff, including new hitting coach Matt Borgschulte, discussed different avenues to bring the group together. After three seasons with Baltimore, Borgschulte brought in a fresh perspective and mentioned the success the Orioles had working as a unit.
With approval from players and the front office, the Twins created a program they hoped would produce a healthier, more productive environment.
Several weeks into camp, Baldelli was pleased with the results. Players were too.
Baldelli always prefers to look forward. He wanted players to allow the collapse to motivate them in the offseason, and was pleased with how they prepared before arriving in Fort Myers, Fla. But as camp went on, Baldelli wanted them to focus on the season ahead, not on past failures.
“At this point, talking about it isn’t productive,” Baldelli said. “If you didn’t take something out of that, you missed the boat. … It set us up to be motivated in a way that I think many of them have not been motivated before.”
Rocco Baldelli was happy with how Twins players responded over the offseason and this spring. (Jonathan Dyer / Imagn Images)
In the aftermath of yet another tough loss last Sept. 8, Baldelli couldn’t contain his disappointment any longer. The manager yelled so loudly and persistently inside the visiting clubhouse at Kauffman Stadium that players and club personnel were certain it could be heard outside the thick, concrete walls.
At the conclusion of a 2-5 road trip, one in which Royce Lewis continued to openly express concerns about playing second base, Baldelli vented his frustration in a rare outburst. Normally mild-mannered, the veteran manager was furious with the effort from a team playing without Correa and Buxton, who’d both been out a while with injuries.
Baldelli saw players who weren’t executing the game plan or playing as a unit, but rather as a collection of individuals. Everyone was struggling to hit, including Lewis, who’d carried the team for long stretches earlier in the season and the previous year.
It wasn’t just Baldelli who was unhappy. A group of younger, unestablished players brooded about a game plan that revolved around constant platooning. Surrendering at-bats to Manny Margot, who went 0-for-30 as a pinch hitter, wasn’t a popular tactic.
All of the team’s collective frustrations boiled over during that devastating Royals sweep, concluding with the Twins’ 14th loss in 20 games.
“We were dead,” Lewis said. “It felt like baseball wasn’t fun. It was like a bunch of guys who were trying their best to find it, figure it out. But when everyone’s failing at the same time … it just felt like everything was going wrong for us.”
Typically loquacious in his postgame media sessions, Baldelli instead made a brief statement calling his team’s effort “unprofessional” before turning the assembled press loose on the clubhouse. Over the next day, several players commented about Baldelli’s blowup — and how the team deserved it.
They hoped to see more of it.
“We probably should have got our ass chewed,” outfielder Trevor Larnach said.
For all that, Baldelli’s eruption didn’t change the team’s fortunes. The boat already had sprung too many leaks; the Twins just didn’t yet realize it.
Still without Correa, Buxton and Ryan, whose injury forced the team to depend on three rookie starting pitchers who were at or about to reach career-high workloads, the Twins managed to win only three of six games at home against Cincinnati and the Los Angeles Angeles, teams who combined for 184 losses on the season.
The Twins needed to bang their way to victories, but were incapable of doing so. The offense, earlier as high as fifth in the majors in runs scored, stalled; the Twins couldn’t score when someone didn’t hit a home run. Over their final 39 games, the Twins were 2-16 when they didn’t homer and 10-11 when they did.
Overall, the team’s 12-36 mark in homerless games represented the third-lowest winning percentage among all teams, only besting the Oakland A’s and Chicago White Sox.
“It sucked,” starter Pablo López said. “Losing a playoff spot that we have had for five and a half months? Afterwards, you could really see where things went awry. We still had a talented group, but it was talent that didn’t have the most clear idea where things stood culture-wise, philosophy-wise, maturity-wise, mentality-wise. You can have all the strategy, all the planning in the world, but if you don’t have the philosophies, you don’t have the culture, the standards, then there’s more room for people to feel like they’re just happy to be here.”
Nobody was happy in the Twins clubhouse.
Before their next road trip, the Twins decided to have Correa and Buxton, both of whom had been rehabbing their injuries at home because they were so far from returning, accompany the team on the road. With those leaders around to hold younger players accountable, the Twins might still be able to salvage their season.
It wasn’t enough. The Twins’ precipitous fall continued with a 3-5 trip through Cleveland and Boston.
Then came the messaging through the media. At the start of their final homestand, and with the Twins still vying for the final American League playoff spot, Correa said not everybody was playing with urgency, particularly several younger players. Lòpez followed with a missive of his own.
All of it was sanctioned by the front office, Falvey said.
“What was said publicly about our collective struggles reflected what we were already discussing privately,” Falvey said. “We all had areas to improve and needed to take more ownership. It wasn’t about blame, just being honest about where we stood as a team. The goal was to push ourselves forward together.”
Pablo López walks off the field during the Sept. 27 loss to the Orioles that eliminated the Twins. (Adam Bettcher / Getty Images)
Charlotte Sports Park is 53 miles from Hammond Stadium, the spring training home of the Minnesota Twins. Seeing veteran Twins players in the starting lineup there, or anywhere outside of Fort Myers, is akin to seeing Bigfoot in the wild.
Most Florida-based teams are located far enough from one another that veteran players rarely travel for road games, instead getting their work in at camp in a more efficient manner between home games.
But because they played consecutive road games, the Twins loaded up their lineup on Feb. 24 against the Tampa Bay Rays to keep players on a schedule that called for a heavier workload early in camp. Matt Wallner, Correa, Buxton, Larnach, Lewis, Christian Vázquez, Ty France and Edouard Julien all made the 70-minute car trip north.
“It’s something that needed to happen,” Buxton said. “Nobody complains.”
From the start of spring, Baldelli set a taskmaster-type tone. He required his players to do mandatory work. Everyone. No exceptions.
He was met with no resistance.
“It’s just to spend more time together on the field and get to see each other and help each other,” Correa said. “Just have a good time together. That’s very important. Everybody’s doing their own thing, which we all do to get ready for the game, but if you get an hour and a half out of the day to do everything together, it helps.”
In previous springs, players focused far more on individualized work. They were spread out across multiple fields working with coaches. This year, they were all on the same field, all the time.
The Twins come together during their first full-squad on Feb. 17. (Jonah Hinebaugh / Naples Daily News / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Beginning at 9 a.m. on home game days, groups of three to four hitters rotated into the cage for specific work with Borgschulte and newly hired assistant hitting coaches Trevor Amicone and Rayden Sierra.
After early hitting work, position players stretched and threw at 10:25 a.m.
At 10:45, team defensive drills began. The hitting rotation for batting practice began at 11 a.m.
During BP, players took five rounds of swings, six swings per round. The first two rounds were dedicated to hitting toward the opposite-field gap. The third round was focused on situational hitting toward the middle of the field with launch angles under 20 degrees. The fourth round was up to each batter, as was the fifth, shorter round.
As each of the three groups rotated through BP, the others worked on base running on the same field or more defensive work.
“It’s just getting back to our roots,” Larnach said. “Try not to just muscle up everything. Don’t just bang BP and go to the cage. Get your reps on the field, on the basepaths, little stuff that I think matters.”
Baldelli doesn’t expect his batters to become different hitters overnight, and that’s not the point. The goal is to work on fundamentals, with the idea that players will have already done the work if they’re asked to make in-game adjustments when pitchers throw differently than the scouting report suggests, or on cold nights the ball isn’t traveling.
The Twins hope that by incorporating a team mindset, players will know how to handle homerless games and find other ways to score runs.
“You show yourself over 162 games,” Baldelli said. “You will display all the things you’ve implemented or have worked towards implementing. You’ll show what type of team you are.”
The Twins hope to demonstrate they’re ready when the season starts Thursday and to avoid a start like last year’s, when they opened 7-13.
Baldelli got his team playing early with nine position players on the Opening Day roster accruing at least 50 plate appearances this spring.
“We felt like we were ready (last season), but we clearly weren’t,” catcher Ryan Jeffers said. “If we want different results, we gotta do something different.”
Now, the Twins think they feel a difference. Players who spent all of camp together believe they’re on the same page. They’re working with one another in batting practice, making observations together and trying to help one another.
“When you tell guys to get ready for the game, they will always choose the easiest path,” Correa said. “With this structure that we have, everybody has to be outside, everybody has to go out for BP, everybody has to be taking groundballs with the team, everybody has to run every day.
“It pushes everybody. That’s exactly what we need on this team.”
(Top photo of Carlos Correa: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)
