Twins To Hire Derek Shelton As Manager

The Twins are hiring Derek Shelton as their new manager, reports Jon Heyman of The New York Post. The team will not announce the hire tonight, as MLB discourages clubs from revealing personnel news on playoff game days. Dan Hayes of The Athletic reports that Shelton will be officially introduced sometime next week.

Shelton returns to the Twin Cities, where he previously spent two seasons as bench coach. He held that role between 2018-19, working one season apiece under Paul Molitor and Rocco Baldelli. His familiarity with the front office surely gave him a boost in the managerial search. Shelton was a finalist during the 2018 hiring process that led to Baldelli. While he didn’t get the job at that point, he only needed to wait one more year before he got a managerial opportunity. Shelton landed the top job with the Pirates going into 2020.

Pittsburgh was coming off a 69-93 season that had led ownership to fire manager Clint Hurdle and GM Neal Huntington. They brought in Ben Cherington to run the front office and Shelton to oversee a rebuilding roster. Pittsburgh went 19-41 in the shortened season, then posted consecutive 100-loss records in 2021-22.

Things appeared to be trending up by 2023. The Bucs improved to a 76-86 record. The next season, they hovered around .500 for a while and were very soft deadline buyers. Pittsburgh finished with a 21-33 performance in the final two months, leaving them 10 games under .500 for the second straight year.

The poor finish carried into the ’25 season. The Bucs began the year with a 12-26 record and were more or less locks for another last place showing when they fired Shelton in the second week of May. Pittsburgh played .500 ball under Don Kelly the rest of the way, so they’re sticking with a Cherington/Kelly tandem going into 2026.

Overall, Shelton holds a 306-440 career record. That’s heavily weighed down by the first three seasons in which no manager stood a chance of posting good results with such a poor roster. The Bucs stalled before they ever pulled out of the rebuild, however.

Pittsburgh especially struggled to develop young hitters. Highly-touted talents like Ke’Bryan Hayes, Henry Davis, Endy Rodríguez, Nick Gonzales and to a lesser extent Oneil Cruz did not click the way the organization needed. That’s not entirely the fault of any one coach or manager, of course, but Shelton came up as a hitting coordinator in Cleveland and spent parts of seven seasons as an MLB hitting coach with the Rays before getting the bench coach position in Minnesota.

Shelton’s experience working with a rebuilding roster should come in handy with the Twins. They’re amidst at least a retooling effort after trading Carlos Correa and essentially their entire bullpen at the deadline. The Pohlad family ownership group has pulled back spending since the Twins won 87 games and an AL Central title in 2023. They’re coming off a 70-92 showing that had them above only the White Sox in the American League. That resulted in them firing Baldelli after seven seasons. Any or all of Joe Ryan, Pablo López and Ryan Jeffers could be traded this offseason.

The Twins landed a couple upper level starting pitchers (Taj Bradley and Mick Abel) at the deadline, and they have some interesting young hitters to build around Byron Buxton. Maybe there’s a path back to competitiveness by 2027, but this is likely to be one of the worst teams in the AL next year. They need to overhaul the bullpen and have too many holes in the bottom half of the lineup to fix in an offseason that is likely to be more about which players they trade away than the ones they bring in.

Shelton was reportedly one of four finalists for the Minnesota job. Yankees hitting coach James Rowson (another former Twins staffer), Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty, and Padres special assistant Scott Servais were the others. There are now four teams still searching for a new skipper: the Padres, Braves, Rockies and Nationals.

Flaherty and Servais have each been floated as potential candidates for the San Diego position, which is expected to be filled by the end of the week. Rowson has only publicly been linked to the Twins position. Atlanta and Washington have played their searches close to the vest. (Baldelli is reportedly of interest to the Nats.) Colorado has yet to even get the process underway as they focus on hiring a new GM. It’s possible that any of the three other finalists gets a look from one of those teams.

Image courtesy of Charles LeClaire, Imagn Images.