2 October 2024
The Twins will have new voices leading their hitters next season after a late-season collapse cost hitting coaches David Popkins and Rudy Hernandez and assistant hitting coach Derek Shomon their jobs.
Those three, along with assistant bench coach/infield coach Tony Diaz, will not return to the major league staff as the Twins shake things up following their disappointing end to the 2024 season. The Twins expect the rest of their coaches to return to manager Rocco Baldelli’s staff in 2025.
The three hitting coaches’ dismissals from the major league staff came after the Twins slumped down the stretch from mid-August on.
In the final month of the season, when the Twins were fighting to make the playoffs, which they ultimately missed by four games, Twins hit .218 with a .285 on-base percentage and .338 team slugging percentage. They averaged just 3.48 runs per game.
The Twins were without two of their top hitters — Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton — for some of that stretch but also saw late-season dramatic drop offs from some of those whom they were relying upon, including Royce Lewis.
Popkins had been in his job for the last three seasons and Shomon the last two. Hernandez, meanwhile, was the longest tenured member of the major league staff, hired as part of Paul Molitor’s coaching staff ahead of the 2015 season. He had served in a number of roles within the Twins organization over the past 29 years.
Diaz, who joined the Twins alongside Baldelli for the 2019 season, served as the team’s third base coach for three years before moving into his assistant bench coach role three seasons ago.
Their dismissals will mark the most turnover the coaching staff has seen in one offseason since 2018, when the Twins replaced Molitor with Baldelli as manager and flipped over nearly the entire staff.