Minnesota Twins: Who Will Be The Next GM?
Now that the team has made a couple moves at the trade deadline, where will the Minnesota Twins look in their GM search?
The baseball world (including Twins beat writers) were shocked on July 18th, when less than two weeks before the trade deadline, the team announced that General Manager Terry Ryan would be relieved of his duties. There have been a few conflicting reports as to why it came to the point of the team making that decision midseason, but whatever the motivation, interim GM Rob Antony made three pretty intriguing deals at the deadline, one of which, the Ricky Nolasco/Alex Meyer deal for Hector Santiago and a prospect felt like cleaning out some of Ryan’s pet guys in order to move on as an organization.
This leads to some interesting questions about what direction the Twins will go with their search. We’ll explore that in just a second, but first, let’s take a look back at Terry Ryan’s tenure with the team:
Ryan’s legacy
Andy MacPhail was hired as the General Manager of the Twins in 1985. He and Ryan have been the GM for all but 4 seasons when Ryan’s hand-picked successor Bill Smith didn’t quite work out as hoped, and he was let go after the 2011 season and Ryan returned to the chair. Needless to say, 3 men holding the GM role over 30+ years is incredible in modern baseball.
Ryan actually got his start in baseball with the Twins in a very different way – as a minor league pitcher, where he started brightly, but flamed out due to injuries. After a tenure as a scout with the New York Mets, he was hired as the scouting director with the Twins in 1986 and began finding pieces that would win the 1987 and 1991 World Series titles with Minnesota. After the 1991 season, Ryan was promoted to the role of assistant general manager, and when MacPhail left for the Chicago Cubs after the strike-shortened 1994 season, Ryan was promoted into the head role.
This was an unenviable task as the team was in a tight budget spot, and when Twins icon Kirby Puckett had his career abruptly ended due to damage to his eye sight following a hit by pitch in Ryan’s first season, he went about rebuilding the club, which meant a number of years of tough times for the Twins in the win-loss department. In spite of those rough years, Ryan was putting the pieces together for a revival in the Twin Cities. In August of 1996, he traded away his third baseman in an August waiver deal for an unknown first baseman named David Arias. If you don’t recognize that player, it’s because he now goes by David Ortiz. In spring of 1998, he traded All-Star second baseman Chuck Knoblauch for a return that would become the cornerstone of the Twins for nearly a decade with Brian Buchanan, Cristian Guzman, and Eric Milton all coming back in that deal.
The Twins went from the doldrums to the top of the AL Central by 2002, and the team became a fixture at the top of the division, with only one sub-.500 season from 2001-2010. After a disaster of 2011, Ryan returned to manage the rebuild of the franchise, but his firing seems to indicate the team may be shooting another direction in their pursuits.
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