Twins Ownership Thumbs Through Media Guide to Find New GM

The Minnesota Twins fired general manager Terry Ryan on Monday after he had been with the club in some capacity for more than 30 years. Ryan had been GM or advisor to the GM for the past 20 years. The Twins made the playoffs six times with Ryan making decisions, not a small consideration, though those successes came from 2002-2010. The Twins have lost 90-plus games four times since 2011, and with a 33-58 record in 2016, they're well on their way to doing it again.

So he's out. But what's left? Trouble, that's what. The Twins aren't the only major league team owned by a family—in this case, the Pohlad family—but they are the only MLB organization that comes off as though it's run like a family. To wit, read this unbelievable but true statement from Jim Pohlad, the CEO, in the wake of Ryan's dismissal:

I asked Jim Pohlad if he has studied other team's organizational structures. He said he's looked at every team's media guides. Not kidding.
— chipscoggins (@chipscoggins) July 18, 2016

Good lord, no. The media guides?! "Not kidding," Scoggins notes—remember?

Baseball nerds surely love to look through media guides, but researching them for front-office flow charts, as if such nominal details explain much about how organizations run? It's just so facile. Pohlad, by the way, turns 63 this year and reportedly has been helping to make big decisions for the team since the late 1990s.

You can almost hear Pohlad musing aloud after checking the Red Sox media guide: This Dombrowski guy looks pretty good. Think he'd come here?

Scoggins also asked Pohlad if he feels nervous about the process of picking a successor for Ryan:

Asked if he's nervous about process of finding new GM, Pohlad: "Well, I'm certainly not cocky or over-confident. Yes, I would say nervous."
— chipscoggins (@chipscoggins) July 18, 2016

Oh, great. Points for honesty? Sure, as long as you deduct more for sounding completely out of your element. Having grown up around baseball as the oldest of Carl Pohlad's kids, Jim Pohlad surely loves the Twins. And he must know something about baseball. If both are true, he will get together with his siblings and come up with a plan to sell the team to a corporation that knows what it's doing.