End of An Era?

No, Ron Gardenhire can't pitch.  If you ask
me, he shouldn't be managing anymore either.

Where is the blame on Ron Gardenhire for the Twins recent failures?

The media has recently cooled off on the Minnesota Twins.  Thank goodness.  For a while there, the feel-good Twin Cities franchise was driving me insane.  With constant postseason appearances despite a changing supporting core, the Twins represented MLB's equivalent of the Dallas Mavericks.  The knock on the Mavericks for all those years, however, was that they were always just there - a high-seeded playoff team but never actually great enough to win a championship.  Of course they shocked everyone in 2011 by actually the job done, but the Twins are definitely not about to do that.

For the latter part portion of the 2000s and into this new decade, the Twins gained a disproportionate amount of attention as a favorite small-market team of East Coasters.  Why?  Well perhaps the fact that the Yankees played the Twins in the ALDS four times between 2004 and 2010 helped New Yorkers notice that this team had talent.  The Yankees won all four series, but they had seen enough to respect the Twins.

No catcher in the game today is worth
$184 million over eight years.  Besides,
Joe Mauer's Head and Shoulders
endorsements are more than enough
to cover the utility bills.

And instantly, they became overrated.  Joe Mauer's fluke MVP season in 2009 earned him back-to-back covers on the MLB: The Show video game series and a monster, badly-overpaying contract extension.  Mauer, the catcher, became the hero on a team lacking one.  The Twins won most of their games because they were a team that played fundamental baseball during the regular season, only to watch themselves get destroyed in the playoffs as more talented teams came barreling through.  The 2008 Twins, for example, didn't have any starting pitchers earn more than 12 wins, and yet five of them earned at least 10.  And yet, they got to watch the White Sox come down the stretch in September and beat them in a one-game tiebreaker for the division title.

Manager Ron Gardenhire was given much of the credit as to how a team with relatively little star power could play with such a strong collective baseball intelligence on the field.  However, there is the fact that they never won anything in the playoffs.  Ron Gardenhire took over as manager in 2002 and produced immediate results as the Twins made it to the ALCS.  However, they haven't gotten there since and never really made a big push for the World Series.  The Twins of 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2010 all lost in the divisional round. Meanwhile Gardenhire got all this credit for successfully operating a small-market team and maximizing value out of his players.  However, these strategies never held up as stronger teams that simply had more talent strutted past them each fall.

Target Field is more of a challenge to left-handed hitters than
taking a walk is for Alfonso Soriano.

The Twins haven't been nearly as good of a team since they opened Target Field in 2010.  They did win the Central in 2010, but were swept by the Yankees in the ALDS (surprise) despite having home-field advantage.  The team imploded in 2011, however, as the new ballpark's dimensions caught up to them and the their lefty sluggers - namely Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Jim Thome, and Jason Kubel - suffered horribly.  The four hit only 31 homers combined on the season despite having all hit at least 25 in 2009 (Thome did it with the White Sox).

The power outage and/or foolish dimensions of Target Field are not Gardenhire's problems, but his problem is that he did not make necessary adjustments to get the offense going.  The team's RBIs leader, third baseman Danny Valencia, had 72.  He also just watched as his formerly-good pitching staff, which clearly resembles a 'groundball' staff, struck out less batters than any other team while allowing the second-most runs.  In 2010 the Twins allowed the fifth-fewest errors in MLB.  In 2011, they allowed the third-most.

In all facets of the game, the team completely reversed trends negatively while sliding 31 games in the standings between the two years.  This is not the type of season a manager should be able to keep his job from.  When your team goes from a 94-win team to a 63-win team, any defining managerial characteristics you used to pride yourself on have diminished and then look preposterous as your team gets crushed harder than Milton Bradley's stress ball.

The Twins enter 2012 with Gardenhire still at the helm, yet very low expectations to live up to.  This core of Twins players - focused around an overpaid catcher, oft-injured first baseman, and a hodgepodge of mediocre starting pitchers - has made its last playoff run.  Therefore, an era in Minnesota Twins baseball has ended.  It's time for the captain to abandon ship while there's still hope for another to redirect it, and redirect it into rebuilding mode.