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I’ve covered the Twins since the beginning of manager Rocco Baldelli’s tenure at the helm of this club in 2019, and I was as taken aback as everyone when I watched the normally mild-mannered skipper walk out of the dugout, hurl his cap across the backstop dirt, and put on a display of outright anger I haven’t even seen from far more emotive managers in my (admittedly short) time around baseball.

And it carried through into the press conference after Sunday's loss, too, when a beyond frustrated Baldelli aired all of his emotions in a profanity-laden tirade for three minutes in a defense of his players.

None of that was going to change anything about the play that had transpired or the loss that had already gone into the record books, obviously. But the image of that fiery manager stepping up in that moment to express a team’s frustrations in that explosively emotive and wholly unexpected manner certainly seemed to energize Twins fans around social media.

Perhaps it’ll provide that kind of jolt in the clubhouse, too.

“I hope that does happen, I really do,” Baldelli said before the series against the Dodgers began. “I didn’t go out on the field because of that in any way, but I hope that does happen. If our guys can grab onto some of that and go out there and have a great at-bat or go out there and pitch a great inning, make a good pitch, make a good play, anything along those lines, or just go out on the field with a little extra bounce in their step, whatever, I’ll take any of that all day long.”

It’s tough to imagine the Baldelli of several years ago putting on a show like that, and it certainly seems, with the media behind the scenes, that he’s grown more candid in the manager’s seat over the years. But Baldelli also said he hasn’t experienced a situation that felt quite so unjust in all his years of baseball, either, so this level of reaction hadn’t been warranted in the past.

Whatever the reason for this level of explosion, however rare it might continue to be moving forward, Twins players seem to have received it just as well as their fans.

“Any time that your manager is willing to put his neck on the line and go out there and argue in front of hundreds of thousands of people watching, or whoever, everybody's seen all the clips and everything of it, you appreciate that as a player,” said Jake Cave, who has known Baldelli since the start of the skipper’s tenure in Minnesota.

“Just seeing it from him, knowing his personality, it definitely hits harder because of that,” said Caleb Thielbar, who has pitched for Baldelli since 2020. “It was good to see. Obviously, we're happy he stood up for us, and it was a pivotal part of the game. We needed someone to do that, and he stepped up and did it."