The Twins are moving on from pitching coach Pete Maki after a late-season collapse left the organization searching for answers on the mound.
Minnesota announced Monday that Maki and assistant pitching coach Luis Ramirez have been fired. Assistant athletic trainer Jason Kirkman also will not return next year. The club said it will start filling those openings right away, while the rest of the coaching staff is set to come back for next season.
Maki’s run with the organization stretched back to 2017, when Minnesota hired him as its minor league pitching coordinator. He held that post through the start of the 2020 season before moving up to the big-league staff in June 2020, replacing Bob McClure as pitching coach because of COVID-19 concerns for McClure. McClure later retired after the season, and Maki kept the job.
He stayed on as bullpen coach until late June 2022, when Wes Johnson abruptly left the Twins to take the pitching coach job at Louisiana State. Minnesota elevated Maki into Johnson’s spot, and he remained in that role through the 2026 season.
The results, though, turned ugly in the stretch that matters most. Since Maki became pitching coach, Twins pitchers rank 21st in ERA.
The staff was strong in 2023, when Minnesota won its first playoff series in 21 years, but the last two seasons have been rough. The Twins ranked 24th in ERA last season and slipped to 25th this year.
Not all of that landed at Maki’s feet. Pablo López missed the entire 2026 season after Tommy John surgery, Joe Ryan was out for a significant stretch with a glute strain, and Mick Abel was expected to be a major part of the rotation before his season ended after just four starts. Those absences were beyond Maki’s control.
The bullpen situation didn’t help, either. Last summer, the Twins stripped that group down by trading Jhoan Duran, Louis Varland, Griffin Jax, Brock Stewart and Danny Coulombe before the 2025 trade deadline. Then they went through the offseason without landing the kind of impact relievers they needed.
Even with that context, the move feels like a reset that had to happen. Maki absorbed plenty of the blame for a pitching staff that has struggled for too long, and Minnesota clearly decided the staff needed a new voice.
Derek Shelton, hired last offseason, now gets to choose his own pitching coach. Maki was not Shelton’s hire; he took over the job while Rocco Baldelli was still managing the team.
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