Candid Ryan respected throughout time with Twins

Right down to the end of his tenure with the Minnesota Twins, Terry Ryan’s loyalty was clearly in evidence.

When a team that finished second in its division as a genuine postseason contender hits the middle of the next season with the worst record in the league, somebody is going to take the blame.

Unfortunately, in the Twins’ case, that somebody turned out to be Ryan, the club’s executive vice president and general manager. The Twins announced Monday that Ryan had been dismissed. Assistant GM Rob Antony will replace Ryan on an interim basis.

This was the same Ryan who in his first stint as Minnesota’s GM put together the teams that won six division titles in nine seasons in the first decade of this century. In those years, Ryan’s Twins were role models for every small-market organization in baseball.

After stepping into an advisory role with Minnesota after the 2007 season, Ryan returned to the GM position in November 2011. It appeared that he had engineered another breakthrough in 2015.

But the encore that was supposed to be the 2016 season, went south, in a mixture of injuries and disappointing performances. Some of Ryan’s free-agent pitching signings were more expensive than effective.

Typically, in this sort of situation, the GM can blame the manager, or the pitching coach, or the hitting coach, or a combination of those individuals, anything to deflect the heat from himself.

Ryan repeatedly did the opposite. He insisted on taking all of the blame, thus protecting manager Paul Molitor and his coaching staff. This is a perfect reflection …

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