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.
We’ll look at the candidates by clicking on the next slide.
Next: In House Candidates
Rob Antony, Interim GM
Antony was named the interim GM, and he was the assistant before Ryan’s departure, so he would make sense if the team stayed in-house. As he revealed in this interview with the Star Tribune, Antony discussed his lifelong fandom of the Twins. As a guy who has worked in multiple areas of the Twins from media to PR to scouting, Antony does bring a diversity of experiences that most candidates do not. He would also fit the reported desire of the Twins to find a GM that is “young”, as he’s 51, which would put him at the younger end of GMs in the league.
Mike Radcliff, VP of Player Personnel
When MLB Trade Rumors asked around the league for guys that should be considered for GM positions, his peers identified Radcliff as one of those guys. Radcliff, like Antony, joined the Twins in their World Series winning season of 1987 and has been with the team ever since, holding the position of scouting director for many years before taking his current position. Radcliff was pursued by Baltimore in 2011 before the Twins declined permission for him to be interviewed. This may be that opportunity for him.
Brad Steil, Director of Minor League Operations
Steil has been in more of an administrative role in his current position, and he’s been with the Twins since 2001, so he’s been a part of the good and the bad. He’s been in his current role since 2012, so this would be a fairly quick promotion in comparison to the other guys mentioned who have been with the organization for much longer, but he has worked on the administrative side of things and he could end up as a paired option in a situation like many teams run with VP of Baseball Operations along with a General Manager with Steil in the latter role working under someone who has more experience in the operations role.
Deron Johnson, Scouting Director
Last, but definitely not least is probably the brightest shining star in the Twins organization. He was hired by the Twins in 1994 after a brief minor league career, the son of hard-working parents who instilled a tremendous work ethic in him. Johnson has worked his way up the Twins ladder from area scout to cross checker to his current role, which he took over in 2007. Johnson is well-known to many due to his role as one of the few African-Americans in a major front office role, even more so in the scouting side of the game. He is an extremely likable guy, and his article in MLB.com got a good chunk of attention when it was released, yet he’s stayed with the Twins since, so the Twins should lock him down before another team comes calling.
We’ll look outside the organization next…
Next: External Candidates
Kim Ng
Ng is the Senior Vice President for Baseball Operations with the Major League Baseball league offices after working in the front offices of the New York Yankees under Brian Cashman and the Los Angeles Dodgers. She even interviewed for the Dodgers GM job before the team hired Ned Colletti in 2005. She has interviewed for other positions since taking her role with MLB in 2011, so she’s open to the idea, and it would be a huge step for baseball diversity to have an Asian-American woman in a GM role!
Ben Cherington
Cherington fits the mold of the young, stat-oriented GM that the Twins have publicly stated that they would like to hire. He has served as the Boston Red Sox GM for the 2012-2015 seasons. He had been with the Red Sox organization since 1999, working his way up the organization in the scouting side of things, eventually taking over the head role after Theo Epstein left Boston. He’s currently working at Columbia University.
Alex Anthopoulos
Anthopoulous is not yet 40, but he’s already been around baseball for over 15 years. In fact, he got his start with an organization that technically doesn’t even exist anymore, working his way up with the Montreal Expos from an intern to assistant scouting director before he was 27. Anthopoulos worked with the Toronto Blue Jays from 2003 to 2015, working from scouting coordinator to the GM’s chair (in 2009). Anthopoulos reportedly was not a fan of the lack of autonomy in baseball decisions that new President/CEO Mark Shapiro expected of him when he was hired after the 2015 season, and he chose to leave his position. He is currently working as vice president of baseball operations for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He could be a guy that the Twins could hire in a President/CEO role with someone internal like Johnson underneath him.
Randy Bush
Twins fans will fondly remember Bush from the 1987 and 1991 championship teams, but Bush has shown high acumen in baseball operations as well, working his way up within the Chicago Cubs organization from advanced scout to assistant GM. Bush was even the interim GM before Theo Epstein was hired in Chicago, and Theo chose to keep him on board, which speaks loudly about Bush’s acumen in the job. Bush is the oldest candidate mentioned in this entire post, but his tie to Twins history and background in one of the more successful franchises in recent history in completing a rebuild could weigh heavily into his possible hire.
Now, for one outside of the box idea…Billy Beane. Yes, that Billy Beane. Beane was a member of the Twins 1987 team, though he wasn’t on the playoff roster or anything like that. He does have playing ties to the organization, however, and after years of banging his head in search of new facilities in Oakland, taking over the Twins with their gorgeous facilities in downtown Minneapolis could be tremendously attractive. He’d also take over a minor league system that is left in good shape and about three times the budget he’s used to in Oakland, which is crazy to consider, seeing as Minnesota is very much a small-market team themselves.
Next: Can Joe Nathan Still Contribute?
Beane’s contract does run through 2019, but he also signed that in 2012, so he may feel that a price adjustment is in order, and if the Twins are willing to open the purse strings, he could be an intriguing outside the box selection.