The Terry Ryan era ends

Terry Ryan is out, Bill Smith is in as Twins GM. Scouting director Mike Radcliffe and baseball ops assistant Rob Antony are getting promoted to essentially work just underneath Smith. That should improve their ML scouting and development. Hard to say how it will affect their minor league scouting and the draft.

This may sound odd, but when you think about it, Terry Ryan stepping down as the Twins GM is an absolutely fascinating story, more so than even the departure of Kevin Garnett to the T-Wolves.
Everyone understood why KG had to go to Boston. But the Ryan story is a mystery. It could’ve been caused by a confluence of literally dozens of factors, and it could have repercussions that will still be felt 20 years from now.

I’ve ripped on Ryan hard this year, and I stand by all of it. He failed the team this year.
Having said that, my initial reaction to the news was an upset stomach, the feeling that this was merely the initial dropping of the bomb, with the horrible after-effects yet to come.
At Thursdays press conference it seemed that Ryan is simply ready to take on a lesser workload, as he will remain with the team as primarily a scout.
But there could be other factors that played into the decision.
*He feels as though he failed, and needs to step aside and let Smith, his replacement, take a shot.
*He fears that he has so angered Johan Santana, Torii Hunter and others, that the Twins will have a better chance of signing them with someone else doing the negotiating.
*The Pohlads have told him they will not pay Hunter and/or Santana, and Ryan is resigning in protest.
*He lost a power struggle with Ron Gardenhire. It’s a rather poorly kept secret that Gardy and Ryan butt heads regularly. Gardy butted heads with Al Newman and forced him out. Maybe he and Ryan are at odds often enough for Ryan to decide he’s had enough.
*He’s just tired of it. He’s always been the guy taking the bullet for Pohlad’s cheapness, and with the emergence of blogs and talk radio stuff in recent years, he’s taken much more heat from the fans, if not so much from the media. Some of it has been deserved, but I could understand if he’s had enough.

And the potential fallout
*My biggest fear is that Gardy will now have more power. He’s an awful evaluator of talent, and he’s dangerously loyal to bad players who “bust their tails.”
As much as Ryan failed to help the team this year, I was pretty confident that he’d do something to address 3B and LF. With Ryan gone, will Gardy lobby for giving Nick Punto another chance at 3B? Or 2B over Alexi Casilla? Will he be able to bully Smith? Or will Smith do a better job of reigning in Gardy’s lesser impulses?
*Will the team continue to have as much success in developing pitching? The rejuvenation of the franchise that began at the turn of the century came about because of a general change in philosophy to focus on drafting pitching, and Ryan was the driving force behind it. Ryan has struggled to identify valuable veterans, but he’s been more than astute at finding and developing young pitchers.
Ryan convinced teams to give away Santana, Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano, Carlos Silva, Joe Mays and others essentially for free, and oversaw drafts that have loaded the Twins minor leagues with more pitching than any organization could know what to do with.
*Will Bill Smith make it his top priority to resign Santana and Hunter? It would sure help him make a good first impression with the fans and players.
However I’m afraid to say that I think it’s more likely Ryan is leaving because the team won’t let him sign those two than it is that he’s leaving to improve the chances of signing them.
*With a team on a payroll, erring on the conservative side is often the best way to go. Will Smith be an irresponsible spender? It sounds like he has a rep for being just as, if not more, conservative than Ryan.
On the other hand, Smith billed himself during Thursday’s press conference as an administrator, and made it clear he will lean heavily on his assistants to help in the evaluation process.

In the final analysis, Ryan’s career overall can be termed nothing less than a big success. After spending his first few years trying to keep an aging team afloat, he finally cut his losses, swallowed hard and blew the thing up. He started over, and by the turn of the century, had the organization poised for its longest period of sustained success in team history. With a strong finish, this year’s Twins could post a winning record for the seventh consecutive season. That would’ve seemed unfathomable in the 90s.

But in fairness, the success of the early 2000’s was due in part to the suckiness of the rest of the division. When the rest of the division got better, the Twins also had to.
They did, with the emergence of Santana, Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Hunter and others. But if things continue the way they went this year, and Santana, Hunter and Morneau end up elsewhere, it’ll be hard not to look back at the Santana/Morneau era as a missed opportunity, and it would be hard to blame anyone more than Ryan for missing said opportunity.
No, not because the owner was cheap (though he unquestionably is), but because Ryan took the few discretionary funds he had and spent them on Ramon Ortiz, Nick Punto, Rondell White, Sidney Ponson, Tony Batista, Ruben Sierra, etc.

I’ll try to be somewhat optimistic that this can be a change for the better. Smith worked under Ryan and his predecessor, Andy McPhail, and will likely continue the basic philosophies that have worked for the team. Maybe he can make a couple significant moves early in his tenure to make a good first impression with the players.
But keep in mind, Ryan’s former assistant, Wayne Krivsky, got the Reds GM job, and by most accounts is off to an awful start there. So there are no guarantees.

And you can look at it this way - when Tom Kelly stepped aside, everyone was shocked, no one understood it, and conspiracy theories abounded.
Gardy replaced him, and despite being a buffoon, the Twins went on to great success.
There's a lot of similarities in this situation, and if the Twins can survive replacing TK with Gardy, they should be able to handle replacing Ryan with Smith.

One thing we know for sure, this will be one of the most important and interesting off-seasons in team history.