Wes Johnson reveals the biggest lesson he learned from Rocco Baldelli

Wes Johnson spent almost every day of three summers working with Minnesota Twins manager Rocco Baldelli as his pitching coach. Spending such time together helps build strong bonds, ones which Johnson still has with Baldelli even after he left to the take the pitching coach job at LSU last summer.

Now the head coach at Georgia, Johnson talked about Baldelii and their relationship during his introductory press conference in June.

“Rocco is like a brother to me,” Johnson said. “We still talk and communicate at times and text and so forth. I don’t even know where to start with what I’ve learned from Rocco. I think the biggest thing, I’ll tell you this. If I had to narrow down one thing that I think I’ll always take away from Rocco, it’s his ability to understand hard losses and how to react to ’em. We were in a pennant race in ’19 to give you an example, and we had a tough one. I won’t go through the whole situation. This guy went into that locker room and touched every guy and got ’em going and we turned it around. I can tell a lot of stories about that.”

Baldelli hired Johnson as his pitching coach for his first season as a manager in 2019. The Twins won 101 games that first season to win the AL Central and make the playoffs. Baldelli, for his job as the manager of Minnesota, won the AL Manager of the Year award.

The Twins won the division and made the playoffs once again during the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The team dropped off in 2021, falling to last place in the AL Central with just 73 wins.

One of the biggest lessons Johnson learned from Baldelli was the former major leaguer’s skills at coming back from defeats and uplifting players when they are feeling down.

“How to handle tough losses and the ability to go in and get guys back up,” Johnson said. “Everybody thinks you see these guys on TV, they’re robots and they’re superhuman. They’re human beings. They’ve got a mind. They’ve got a brain. They deal with stuff just like everybody else, just because they’re making millions of dollars doesn’t mean that they’re not. I would say that the relationship side that Rocco has with different player in his locker room is something that I’ll take away in doing. He’s been successful, extremely successful.”