Twins exercise 2026 option on manager Rocco Baldelli

Rocco Baldelli is in his seventh season as the Minnesota Twins’ manager. It was unclear whether his deal ran beyond this season, but the 43-year-old skipper is apparently signed for another year.

Dan Hayes of The Athletic reports that the Twins have exercised their 2026 club option on Baldelli, though it’s unclear when they did so.

Minnesota did not make any kind of formal announcement at the time. Many teams do not publicly reveal the length of the contracts for their non-playing personnel, so that’s not a huge surprise.

Baldelli being under contract for next season doesn’t mean the Twins couldn’t make a change before then. Still, president of baseball operations Derek Falvey has been steadfast in his support for his longtime manager throughout their tenures in the Twin Cities.

Falvey again expressed confidence in Baldelli’s leadership Monday, ruling out the possibility of making a change at the moment.

“It’s just making sure no one runs away from the work that is right in front of him, and Rocco is not running away from any of the work. … We’re all side by side with him, as is the staff and as our core players,” Falvey told Hayes. “We’re trying to figure it out together.”

The Twins have made the postseason in three of Baldelli’s six full seasons. They won the AL Central in each of 2019, ’20 and ’23 but only won one playoff series in that time.

They’re 3-8 in the postseason since Baldelli was hired. They looked on track for another playoff berth late last season, peaking at 17 games above .500 in the middle of August.

They collapsed to a 12-27 finish over the final six weeks, ultimately landing at 82-80 and on the outside looking in.

That dreadful run carried into this April, as the Twins won only seven of their first 22 games.

They picked things up in the second half of the month and ripped off a 13-game win streak — which remains easily the longest by any team this year — in the middle of May. They climbed as high as seven games over .500 earlier this month, but June has been a disaster.

Injuries to Pablo López and Zebby Matthews have dealt a huge hit to the rotation, and none of their starters have pitched well in recent weeks. The bullpen has been even worse, allowing more than seven earned runs per nine innings this month.

They entered play Monday with an MLB-worst 6.59 ERA overall in June. That’ll climb even more after Bailey Ober and Joey Wentz were torched for 11 runs by the Mariners. They just wrapped up a defeat that drops them to 37-41 on the season.

They have lost 14 of their last 18 games.