Alex Anthopoulos does not want to be the Twins’ new President of Baseball Ops

On Tuesday, we found out that the Twins had serious interest in former Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos to be their new President of Baseball Operations. Fans rejoiced. Church bells rang out. A leper was cured. One of the most profoundly broken organizations in baseball had taken the first step to correcting its course.

Well, forget about all of that, because Anthopoulos just took himself out of the running.

The good news, if there is some, is that it wasn’t because of anything the Twins did. Twins beat reporter Mike Berardino reports that

“Anthopoulos has told associates the timing isn’t right for him to jump back into the GM pool…. The native Canadian recently moved his young family out to southern California, where his children, ages 4 and 5, started school this week…. [He] also is said to be extremely comfortable in his current working relationship with Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and Dodgers general manager Farhan Zaidi.”

So now it’s back to the drawing board for the Twins, who are trying to get their new showrunner in place before the end of the season. But that could prove difficult. On Wednesday, they were connected with Cubs executives Jason McLeod and Shiraz Rehman by Jon Morosi, but those two may not want to leave Chicago until, as Cubs president Theo Epstein puts it, “we win this thing and have a big parade.” In the meantime, Minnesota will collect the resumes of anyone who they think can help them balance analytics with scouting, including confirmed in-house candidates Rob Antony and Deron Johnson.

If the top candidates continue to turn them down, the Twins are definitely going to need them.