MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Just two weeks before the start of spring training, Jeremy Zoll suddenly learned he’ll be leading the entire baseball operations for the Minnesota Twins.
Zoll’s elevation with president Derek Falvey’s departure came less than two months after another major change, the appointment of Tom Pohlad as executive chair and controlling owner to replace his younger brother.
About six weeks before that, Derek Shelton was hired as the team’s new manager. Last summer, ownership directed the front office to further slash a shrunken payroll with a trading spree the week of the deadline.
As a franchise that had long been a model of efficiency and stability within Major League Baseball, the Twins have been in their unsettled era for awhile. When pitchers and catchers take the fields at the Lee Health Sports Complex in Fort Myers, Florida, for the first workout on Thursday, even the roster is probably due for a few more alterations considering the lack of depth in the bullpen and the excess of left-handed hitting outfielders.
Yet more uncertainty looms beyond this year, with the approaching expiration of the existing collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its players likely to create a labor dispute as the sport seeks to establish a more sustainable competitive balance between the biggest spenders and the rest of the clubs in smaller markets.
Despite all the shifting ground at the top of the organization, the current leadership from Zoll on down has been intact long enough to have a solid foundation to build on. If there’s a lasting legacy that Falvey left behind after he and Pohlad agreed that a split would be the best long-term move for both parties, it might be the function and structure he helped create over his nine seasons.
“We’re going to take a team approach at this,” said Zoll, 35, who kept his title as executive vice president and general manager and is now the youngest baseball operations chief in MLB. “Obviously everyone was geared up for the season with a certain delineation of responsibilities, and I think as we look at what’s ahead and working through this transition, we’re all just going to roll up our sleeves and lean in a little bit further together.”
Falvey said as much in a news conference he held to discuss his departure last month.
“This is a group that’s resilient. They’ve been through a lot of the change and challenge of the last couple of years, and they just keep plowing,” said Falvey, who was hired by the Twins at age 33. “I think this is a group that’s going to have a lot of success going forward, because I think the foundation is really strong.”
While Pohlad has been searching for a new president of business operations, he decided not to recreate Falvey’s original role on the baseball side before he took on the dual responsibility. Part of that was a belief in Zoll’s ability to do the job.
“If Jeremy Zoll won the job to be the GM a year ago,” Pohlad said, “that should tell you something about Jeremy Zoll. There was plenty of competition in this organization and outside this organization for that role. I’m 100% committed to him as being the right leader in this moment in time to assume all the responsibilities that Derek had with respect to baseball.”
Zoll, who was hired by Falvey eight years ago as director of minor league operations, played baseball at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and broke into the major leagues in 2014 as a coordinator of advanced scouting for the Los Angeles Angels.
Though their payroll remains well behind where it was two years ago, having fallen into the bottom quartile of the major leagues, the Twins kept stars Byron Buxton, Pablo López and Joe Ryan in a signal they’re serious about contending this season in the low-spending American League Central division despite trying to do so on the cheap.
“There was a strategic element to that to make sure we weren’t setting ourselves up for some massive rebuild and tearing it all the way down and knowing that there’s this way you can regenerate talent within the system much more quickly if you’re starting with upper-level or already-at-the-big-leagues talent,” said Zoll, referring to the flurry of trades made last summer. “We’re doing our best to put all those pieces together.”
___
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB
