How 'Beer and Tacos methodology' made the Twins one of MLB’s most entertaining teams (2024)

MINNEAPOLIS — When exactly they first began to use the phrase is unclear, but nobody with the Minnesota Twins doubts the importance of beer and tacos.

The term isn’t related to their diet. It’s a nickname for the team’s draft philosophy, which pairs an experienced scouting core with an analytically based model that alerts evaluators to a player’s red flags and hidden positives.

In an era when many teams are laying off scouts, the Twins are leaning more heavily on their veteran amateur department, while embracing analytics at the same time. Hoping to modernize a franchise in desperate need, the Twins began merging the two philosophies in 2017 after the hire of Derek Falvey, the team’s president of baseball operations.

“I’m not sure what year we got the beer and tacos mantra,” Twins amateur scouting director Sean Johnson said. “What’s better? Beer or tacos? Beer and tacos together is the best of the three.

“Are the scouts the beer? Probably. Then analytics are the tacos. When we find the player the scouts like and the analytics support that player as well. … That’s the players you see us take. Those are ones where everything’s kind of lined up.”

After eight seasons of constantly fine-tuning the system, the Twins feature a major league roster full of talented, homegrown players backed by one of the best farm systems in baseball. They’re tied for the second AL wild card spot, three games out of first in the Central. And they’ve been doing it with a group of players who seem to be having the time of their lives off the field, with rally sausages, group Polaroids and impromptu concerts in the clubhouse.

Falvey’s hire in October 2016 initially concerned many of the team’s veteran scouts, including a supergroup of six who have been with the organization for at least 30 years. Falvey was hired to replace Terry Ryan, the team’s longtime general manager, who’d been dismissed earlier in the year. A veteran of the scouting world, Ryan relied on his evaluators at a time when other organizations were minimizing their departments. The Houston Astros, Tampa Bay Rays, Milwaukee Brewers and Washington Nationals are among those that slashed their scouting departments in recent years while turning to analytics-heavy approaches.

Many on the Twins wondered if Falvey’s hire meant the Twins would join that group, and feared losing their voice in the draft room to a brand new draft model created by Ezra Wise, the team’s manager of scouting research.

While Falvey intended to alter the team’s draft approach, the goal was simply to modernize it. The Twins eventually reduced several roles in their pro scouting department this offseason, but the amateur staff has largely remained intact. Eight years in, the merging of methods has resulted in a team that features 17 homegrown players on the 40-man roster with more on the way. In the past month, Baseball America, MLB Pipeline and ESPN ranked the Twins farm system between the second- and fourth-best in baseball.

“We have more talent in our system today than we ever had,” Twins assistant scouting director Tim O’Neil said. “It was a difficult transition initially, but it’s really a healthy environment to work in.”

Falvey believes the beer and tacos term was first used in a draft room conversation between the person responsible for creating and maintaining the draft model, Wise, and Zane MacPhee, the team’s professional player procurement coordinator.

“It stuck,” Falvey said. “It became a thing. … The players who were on one side of the spectrum or the other, we tend not to take those guys. We go in a different direction. Ultimately, the players we select do tend to meet the beer and tacos methodology.”

He only possessed scant details of the celebration to come, but Twins manager Rocco Baldelli approved it anyway.

Baldelli learned last Thursday that the wife of one of his players, catcher Christian Vázquez, wanted to properly ring in the veteran’s 10-year service time anniversary. Due to have a child in September, Gabby Vázquez couldn’t fly to Arlington, Texas, to attend the party.

So she sent everyone else in her place.

A few hours before first pitch, Christian Vázquez’s parents, Rafael and Eileen, who were flown in from Puerto Rico, entered the clubhouse accompanied by a seven-piece Puerto Rican band, Pleneros 100X35. Players danced and clapped as Vázquez rang in his achievement to a song with lyrics written for the catcher.

Well, this is one of my favorite days of work ever. Well done @gabyovazquez pic.twitter.com/d8aSDQWxWv

— Audra Martin (@Audra_Martin) August 15, 2024

It was the second musical act to perform in the clubhouse this season. In May, bench coach Jayce Tingler invited singer Davy Andrews to perform his song “Edouard Julien Are You Going to Rule Again?” for the second baseman and his wildly amused teammates.

“Rocco lets us do it all, which, kudos to him for allowing us to have fun and eat cookies before a game and have a band in the clubhouse,” veteran Kyle Farmer said.

The manager’s relaxed temperament is only part of the equation.

With beer and tacos providing affordable, homegrown talent, the Twins have had room in their budget to acquire a core of experienced veterans they believe know how to foster a winning environment. From Vázquez to Farmer to Carlos Correa to Pablo López to Carlos Santana, the Twins signed or traded for players who understand the importance of team building.

Not only did he pitch the Twins to their first playoff victory since 2004 last October, López views himself as the team’s party planner. He is responsible for Bingo Night, the team’s Prince-themed home run outfit and the Twins’ version of “Wheel of Fortune,” where the player and pitcher of the game played rock, paper, scissors to determine who’d spin to win lavish prizes.

López thinks the team’s youth provides an easy platform for fun inside the clubhouse.

Julien, David Festa, Zebby Matthews, Bailey Ober, Trevor Larnach, Royce Lewis, Cole Sands, Ryan Jeffers and Matt Wallner were all drafted by the Twins since 2017. So were Lee, Alex Kirilloff and Kody Funderburk, currently on the injured list. Byron Buxton, Max Kepler, Griffin Jax and Jose Miranda are homegrown products, too.

“They’re always giving each other a hard time or remembering times in Cedar Rapids, Fort Myers, Pensacola, wherever they were,” López said. “That’s really fun to see. It makes that intimacy come a little easier. You’ve been playing with the same people since you were drafted. You know what you need to do to keep each other going, to keep each other with good energy, and then you bring in a blend of people from other teams and we get the vibe.”

One of the first outward signs of that vibe was the sight, this spring, of an encased meat soaring through the air anytime the Twins scored a run. Discovered during a 10-game winning streak that turned around the season, the rally sausage introduced a national audience to the Twins’ energy.

“The thing hasn’t been refrigerated in many days,” Baldelli told reporters in May. “And when that thing opens up, whoever’s touching it is going to be in deep trouble. There’s no doubt in my mind that we are carrying around something that is very, very unhealthy to the human body.”

The Twins entered the season coming off a frustrating offseason in which they trimmed payroll by $30 million. They’ve dealt with a 7-13 start, significant injuries early and a “disheartening” trade deadline in which only one relief pitcher was added.

Even so, Twins players have kept the mood light.

When the team recently visited Chicago’s Wrigley Field, López instructed a group of rookies to make a coffee run in their uniforms, including 5-foot-6 interpreter Mauricio Ortiz, who was assigned the jersey of 6-foot-9 pitcher Bailey Ober. One of the team’s relievers tipped the bullpen cart driver before taking the mound.

Jeffers thinks familiarity with other draftees is responsible for the environment. Longtime teammates have seen each other at their best and worst.

“When it’s a family environment, you build those relationships and you can mess around with each other, you can talk s—, you can do all the stuff that leads to culture,” Jeffers said.

Lately, fun comes from Biñho, a table-top soccer game. Players sit or stand on opposite ends of a miniature felt soccer field and try to flick a marble soccer ball into their opponents’ goal.

Whether Biñho lasts the rest of the season is to be determined. But as certain as beer and tacos is a tasty combination, the Twins will find another outlet for fun if necessary.

“We all know how long the season is, how grueling it can be to stay level-headed,” López said. “Any opportunity you have to create a little team bonding to remind ourselves to keep things loose is a great opportunity.”

When he began as an area scout in the Four Corners region in 2002, Sean Johnson didn’t own a cell phone. He’d leave his scouting report on an answering machine, which would be manually inputted into a computer. Later, scouts began to email in reports.

But that was about it as far as advancements went.

When Falvey took over, his goals included building a centralized system for player reports where scouts, analysts and department heads could instantly find and easily digest analysis and video. Before, scouts couldn’t change player reports. Now, they’re encouraged to.

Falvey named Johnson the team’s amateur scouting director in December 2016. His experience, first as an area scout and then as West Coast supervisor, had provided him with open access to a group of evaluators he calls “separators” in the team’s draft process.

He credits a core that includes legendary scout and department head Mike Radcliff, who went into the Scouting Hall of Fame in 2014 and passed away in 2023, as well as O’Neil, Deron Johnson, Mike Ruth, John Wilson, Mark Quimuyog, John Leavitt and Earl Frishman, for helping him forge his own path in the scouting world.

“It’s experience being a Twin and what matters to us and what we like and don’t like,” Johnson said. “That’s a big deal when you get down to making decisions in the room. It comes down to trust. And we trust each other as much as one could.”

Knowing his veterans would be concerned by change, Johnson asked them to keep an open mind in the early days of the new regime.

Though the model doesn’t always align with scouts’ projections, Johnson believes it provides a much-needed system of checks and balances. Walk and strikeout rates are a bigger part of the process now, as is career performance. Strength of opponents and park factors are weighed against player performance. A player’s age has become more important, too.

Season-long numbers for exit velocity, spin rate and fastball carry also provide a better picture of how a player performs.

“We’re more aware of all the biases we have, and that’s a negative of being together for so long,” Johnson said. “You can have groupthink. If you don’t make adjustments and look back at the failures and the successes you’ve had in the past, you’re going to keep making the same mistakes.”

The model points out flaws in scouts’ beliefs by highlighting a player’s red flags. Concurrently, scouts identify issues with analytics’ favorites by providing context a model doesn’t understand.

Despite their differences, the meshing of styles is working.

“Our guys have done a phenomenal job drafting, signing, scouting and developing,” Baldelli said. “It always has to keep going. You’re going to need someone new tomorrow in order to function and (the draft is) where you’re going to get most of the talent and most of your good players.”

The team’s best hitting evaluator, O’Neil is about to finish his 30th season in the Twins’ draft room. The perils of selecting the wrong player keep him humble; for every success story, he has “four or more horror stories.” But even he’s cautiously optimistic about the current roster and the possibility of October victories.

“The scouts are very bullish on this particular group,” O’Neil said. “This group of players, we’re very proud. This is a very difficult business. We have to be careful of our optimism. … We’ve done OK (drafting). We can certainly do better.”

Still, the past few years are proving very fruitful.

Though none of them are still with the organization, the Twins benefited from the first five players they selected in 2021, trading Chase Petty for Sonny Gray, Noah Miller for Manny Margot, Steven Hajjar for Michael Fulmer, Cade Povich for Jorge López and Christian Encarnacion-Strand for Tyler Mahle.

The 2022 class produced Lee and Matthews, along with several other strong prospects. MLB Pipeline ranks the team’s first three picks from 2023 among the organization’s top 11 prospects, and the career of this year’s first-rounder Kaelen Culpepper is off to a good start.

Trying as the process originally was, Johnson has embraced beer and tacos.

“It’s certainly gratifying to our group,” Johnson said. “There’s so much failure in scouting. So when you’re able to see players that you believed in before anyone else impact major league games, it’s really what keeps you going. It keeps you motivated to go find the next player and the next player and attack the next draft.”

(Top image: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins via Getty Images; Mark Cunningham / MLB Photos via Getty Images; Jerry Holt / Star Tribune via Getty Images; Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty Images)