Minnesota Twins: Paul Molitor deserves to win AL Manager of the Year
Minnesota Twins manager Paul Molitor deserves to be named American League Manager of the Year.
A year ago, Minnesota Twins fans were checked out as the team was slowly pulling into the station of a 103 loss season. Fast-forward to this season and the Twins clinched a playoff berth with four games to go in the season. That is quite the turnaround and manager Paul Molitor should be recognized for that.
Molitor has not been given a full deck of MLB quality baseball players, but he has had the team over achieve in two of his three seasons at the helm with this season paying off in a playoff berth. The impressiveness of the playoff berth can be highlighted in all of the struggles the team has, frankly, won through during the 2017 season.
First off, the Twins started the season with one starting pitcher you could trust. It was Ervin Santana for the first month of the season and nothing else. Jose Berrios came up in May and the Twins grabbed Bartolo Colon off the scrap heap later in the season to give them a quasi-solid top three in the rotation. Molitor should be awarded just for getting something out of Colon and Kyle Gibson this season.
The bullpen has never been great. The one dependable bullpen arm, Brandon Kintzler, was traded at the trade deadline and it took a series of minor league call-ups to achieve an okay bullpen. There was a point that bullpen coach Eddie Guardado would have been the best pitching option out of the bullpen at the age of 46.
The lineup has started to click later into the season, but the team went through a bunch of cold streaks from Byron Buxton, Brian Dozier, Jorge Polanco and Max Kepler throughout the year to make things much more complicated.
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First half MVP Miguel Sano has been out for a good chunk of the second half of the season, too.
A lot has happened and yet the Twins have made the postseason. They have a good shot to beat the New York Yankees in the American League Wild Card Game, too.
Give Molitor the American League Manager of the Year award. Do it.
Molitor led the first team in baseball history to lose 100 games the season before and then turn around and put it in the playoffs the next season. The leadership in the clubhouse was shown while a new front office took over and rumors about Molitor’s future employment with the team was always in question… and it still might be.
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Awards are odd things to figure out and they really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but I don’t think anyone has done a better job of managing a team this season than Molitor. Hopefully the potential Manager of the Year trophy isn’t the only one that is paraded around Target Field in the coming weeks.