Seeking familiarity with their internal process, the Minnesota Twins hired Derek Shelton to be the team’s manager on Wednesday, a league source confirmed to The Athletic.
The Twins’ bench coach from 2018 to 2019, Shelton becomes the 15th manager in club history as he replaces Rocco Baldelli, whom the team fired Sept. 29. A finalist in the 2018 managerial search that resulted in Baldelli’s hire, Shelton left the Twins in 2020 and spent 5 1/2 seasons managing the Pittsburgh Pirates until he was fired May 8.
Early in the process, Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey said the club sought a candidate who would focus on fundamentals and ideally buy into the plan to aggressively run the bases as the club did over the final six weeks of the 2024 season. Multiple league sources said the Twins made it clear late in the process they sought a candidate with whom they were already familiar.
Shelton, 55, was well-liked in the clubhouse upon joining the Twins organization in 2018 and was a key member of then-manager Paul Molitor’s staff, maintaining close ties with the team’s front office.
He maintained strong relationships with the team’s players during his time with the Twins, and one example of his good rapport with the players came when he set up Joe Mauer’s symbolic catching appearance in the ninth inning of the final game of Mauer’s Hall of Fame career in 2018. The longtime coach also maintained those close ties with players as the Twins won 101 games in 2019, popularizing the phrase “L.A.F.” in a team chat thread informing them what time to arrive at the clubhouse on certain days late in the season, in those instances “late as f———.”
Routinely working with the lowest payroll rosters in baseball, Shelton never produced a winning season in Pittsburgh.
In 5 1/2 seasons, Shelton’s Pirates lost 100 games twice. He led the team to 76-86 records in 2023 and 2024, but was dismissed after the team got off to a 12-26 start in 2025. Pittsburgh’s payrolls during Shelton’s tenure ranked 30th, 30th, 28th, 27th, 29th and 26th in baseball, according to Baseball Prospectus.
Before joining Molitor’s staff in 2018, Shelton was the quality-control coach for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2017. He also served as the Tampa Bay Rays’ hitting coach from 2010 to 2016 and was the hitting coach in Cleveland from midway through the 2005 season through 2009.
Shelton, former Twins hitting coach James Rowson, Chicago Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty and former Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais all interviewed for the position. San Diego coach Nick Punto (a former Twins infielder), Kansas City third-base coach Vance Wilson and Boston Red Sox bench coach Ramón Vázquez also interviewed for the position.