Derek Falvey will be Twins president as Dave St. Peter moves to advisory role; Jeremy Zoll is the new GM

A Twins offseason that once appeared destined to be static and uneventful might turn out to be one of the most consequential periods of upheaval in the franchise’s history.

Five weeks after Minnesota’s baseball franchise was put up for sale by the Pohlad family, six weeks after the Twins turned over the production and distribution of their telecasts to MLB, and 35 years after he joined the team as an intern, Twins President Dave St. Peter announced Tuesday morning that he is stepping back from the chief executive role he has held since 2002.

“This is a difficult decision because this [team] has been my life. This has been my journey. I’ve given everything I have to this organization and have been proud to do it,” said the 57-year-old St. Peter. But after more than two years of consideration and consultation with Twins owner Jim Pohlad and executive chair Joe Pohlad, “we felt now was the right time.”

St. Peter will remain with the Twins as a strategic advisor to his successor — current President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey, who will become the team’s chief executive over both baseball and business. There are only two other executives in the sport (Toronto’s Mark Shapiro and Tampa Bay’s Matt Silverman) who are believed to hold similar roles.

And to help build the roster, one of Falvey’s top lieutenants, Jeremy Zoll, has been promoted to general manager.

“I feel truly convicted that Derek is the right successor, and I want to support him in every way and set him up for success, hopefully, over the long haul,” St. Peter said. “The move is important because it signals, I’m hoping, to the broader organization and to our partners that there is stability and continuity.”

He is not retiring, St. Peter emphasized several times, but merely turning over control to a younger generation — a transition that will become official sometime before the 2025 season starts next March — as the franchise prepares for a potential new owner.

Falvey, hired in October 2016 to succeed Terry Ryan, has been included in many high-level discussions about the team’s business, media and partnership strategies, St. Peter said, and has a collaborative instinct as a leader that makes him suited for a dual role.

“There are many decisions made, more than [people] realize on a daily basis, that I don’t make, that the likes of Jeremy and other directors and assistant GMs and VPs and others make,” said Falvey, who has greatly expanded the team’s player development, analysis and coaching staffs over the years. “Key roster decisions, trades, those are still going to involve Joe Pohlad, me, Jeremy, Dave.”

The leadership shuffle was in the works well before the Pohlad family decided to sell the team, and Falvey admitted that the prospect of a new owner lends more uncertainty to the future than he expected.

“My hope is that what a potential buyer sees is what we’re trying to accomplish, a very thoughtful plan around the leadership [and] organization that we have,” Falvey said. “If I were a buyer, I’d want to know what leadership looks like and what their plans look like. … If they knew there was a structure in place and a plan for the future, I think that would be reassuring.”

For Zoll, the promotion continues a rise through the baseball hierarchy that began in the front offices of the Reds, Blue Jays, Angels and Dodgers organizations. He joined Falvey’s staff as director of minor league operations in 2018, and became an assistant general manager two years later.

Zoll now inherits the title most recently held by Thad Levine, who left the organization in October, but perhaps with a somewhat broader role, given Falvey’s new responsibilities.

“A number of the most recent trades we’ve made, from start to finish, [Zoll] was the lead negotiator,” Falvey said, citing the Twins’ acquisition of Sonny Gray in 2022 as an example. “It’s clear to me that agents have a tremendous amount of respect for Jeremy. … He’s gotten so many reps with agents and other teams, that’ll be one of the easier aspects of this transition.”

“I’m tremendously honored and grateful to Derek, Joe, Jim, Dave, for their trust in me,” said Zoll, 34. “I’ve always tried to throw myself at whatever opportunity was in front of me to the best of my ability.”

Now his challenge will be to help Falvey and the Twins find more success on the baseball diamond. The Twins, who collapsed down the stretch of a promising 2024 season and missed the playoffs, have not appeared in a World Series since 1991, nor even an American League Championship Series since 2002. They have posted a winning record in five of the eight seasons since Falvey’s arrival, but have a 3-9 record in postseason games during that span.

The team’s failure to win more championships during his tenure is St. Peter’s biggest regret, he said. St. Peter helped broker the deal that got Target Field funded and built, shepherded the team through the COVID pandemic and the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and greatly expanded the outreach of the Twins Community Fund’s charitable work.

Yet “probably my biggest regret is we didn’t do more damage in the postseason, because we had some really good teams, some really good players,” St. Peter said. Still, “I’m really proud of the fact that we were able to compete. We had some ups and downs, but in the 2000s, winning six division titles in nine years — and it should have been seven if it wasn’t for Jim Thome [who homered in Chicago’s 1-0 tiebreaker victory] — I’m proud of that.”

And he will be proud, too, if the Twins finally end their World Series drought in the coming years.

“The organization, in my mind, is poised to succeed in the future,” said St. Peter, who served as an intern, a communications assistant and even the manager of a Twins team store before working his way up to CEO. “I feel like the mark of a good leader is leaving the organization in a better place than you found it, and I’m confident that I did that.”