Nick Nelson

Plenty of teams have 4-5 pitchers among their top 10 prospects (in addition to a full MLB rotation), the Twins have... one? The Braves were ready to give up Randall Delgado for two months of Ryan Dempster at the deadline – you're telling me no needy team would give that up for a full year of Morneau plus cash, or 3 reasonable years of Span? I'm not talking about an elite prospect here, just a decent young arm with some upside who can join the mix. I think you're exaggerating the extent to which "win-now" teams guard those types of players.

But you can't plan around bad luck. If **** happens, it happens. The Twins have had plenty of good luck in the past and have won the division or come very close with heavily flawed teams (2008/09 are great examples).

I'd leave almost everyone off that list for now. Hermsen hasn't even pitched in Triple-A, while Hernandez and Hirschfeld (seriously? Hirschfeld?) have had zero success there. These aren't top-flight prospects that you simply throw directly into an MLB rotation. Just because you haven't seen a guy before doesn't mean he's better than what you have. Plus, with the exception of Hendriks and Hernandez, none of those players are on the 40-man roster. When I suggested trying Duensing in the rotation, it was simply because he was readily available and has had success as an MLB starter in the past, and at the time the Twins were trotting out Swarzak and Blackburn. That doesn't mean I think he's a viable long-term option or that I'm "continuing to insist that he's starting material" – amusing statements coming from a person accusing others of being ignorant and not taking the time to track down and accurately recap past conversations.

I suppose I could just step in and settle this, since I don't need to "look" anywhere to identify my own viewpoints. In spring of 2011, when the Twins named Duensing as a starter very early on, I criticized the decision and heavily advocated for placing him in the bullpen. See here: It shouldn't be difficult to see why I was open to giving him a shot this year. The rotation has been an absolute mess and Duensing has had more success as an MLB starter than most of the "alternatives" suggested by jokin will ever experience.

It's not so much that it's an injustice to Mauer himself. He's making his money and he's had a couple shots in the playoffs already. More so, it's an injustice to the Twins themselves and their fans. Here they have this once-in-a-generation talent, a Hall of Fame caliber player that they paid an enormous amount of money to lock up. Now they're going to waste his best remaining years in a semi-rebuilding effort rather than doing everything they reasonably can to build a contender around him? Seems like a regrettable decision to me. Considering the condition of his legs and the likelihood that he'll need to fully switch away from catcher at some point, there's a very good chance Mauer's value will start fading fast as he ages into his mid-30s and it's awfully tough to build a great roster around a fading player earning ~25% of the payroll. People in the long-term rebuild camp often overlook this.

It's sad to look back at 2006 and how well positioned that team was for a run of success. 25YO MVP Morneau. 23YO MVP-caliber Mauer. 27YO Cy Young Santana. 22YO rookie sensation Liriano. Awesome young bullpen led by Nathan. Hunter, Cuddyer, Bartlett... And yet, not one playoff victory since that season. Sigh.

If you can't find a team with a surplus of pitching that might be willing to trade some for a leadoff man or middle of the order bat, you're not looking very hard.

Assuming his glove is what it's cracked up to be, I think the best bet is to go with Escobar at short and bat him ninth, then figure out a 2B who can give you at least something with the bat. It's been a long time since the Twins have even had a steady defender at SS.

Hard to say. Ryan has been very vague when discussing his offseason plans. If they're serious about keeping payroll steady going forward, though, I don't see how it would really be possible to not at least make a modest effort at fielding a decent team. They'll have around $25M to spend and few holes to fill outside of the rotation.

You can view the page at http://www.twinsdaily.com/content.php?904-The-Elephant-in-the-Room

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1862[/ATTACH]Earlier this week, Charley Walters of the Pioneer Press asked Terry Ryan whether the team's recent run of success has affected the way he's preparing for the offseason. "Regardless of what you look like right now, you still look at the club and figure out where you're headed and where you need to add," Ryan told Walters. "My focus and our focus will always be, as you go through a season, to look at what you've got and what you've got coming up." What the Twins have got and what they've got coming up are one in the same: bats. Their lineup is looking strong, and everyone is locked in for next year and beyond. In the offings, you've got Chris Parmelee obliterating Triple-A, while Aaron Hicks and Oswaldo Arcia thrive in Double-A. Where they need to add, clearly, is pitching. Everyone agrees on that. Opinions differ on the scope of the project. Should they focus solely on adding young, high-upside arms, even if it means disassembling their current core and delaying their window of contention by a few years? Or should they try to keep this group largely intact, picking up pitchers wherever they can and hoping for some good things to happen in 2013? From my perspective, there are a number of ways to work toward putting a contending team on the field next year that don't jeopardize the organization's long-term outlook. And not doing so would be an injustice to the franchise's most valuable (and highly-paid) asset: Joe Mauer. You may have noticed that Mauer has been rather awesome this year in spite of the club's struggles. After a sluggish start, he's turned it on the summer months and is back to ranking among the elite in batting average and on-base percentage while logging significant time at catcher. The likelihood that Mauer keeps playing at this level diminishes a bit next year. And a little bit more the year after that. And so on. That's because he'll turn 30 next spring, and historically baseball players have often started to show decline as they age into their fourth decade of life. Particularly guys with substantial injury histories. The time to build a championship-caliber team around Mauer is now, while he remains in his physical "prime." As the years pass, it becomes more difficult to center plans around him, and as long as he's consuming close to a quarter of the payroll there's really no other choice. As the Twins ponder whether to take a long-term approach in putting a competitive product back on the field, what they need to ask themselves is whether biding their time and stocking the farm is worth wasting the best years of Mauer's career.

More like $75M. And if they trade Span or Morneau that number drops below $70M.

I guess I just don't see the downside in taking a shot next year. You're not hurting your long-term outlook by dealing Morneau or Span for a young pitcher, especially with the presence of Parmelee and good OF prospects. Any pitcher they sign in FA will presumably be a guy they think can help them for several years. If there are too many backslides or injuries, so be it, it's not like they're any worse off than they were before.

I don't know how anyone could be offended by something so general. Then again, I'm no expert on such matters as very few things offend me.

I can't take credit for this caption, but I came across it on MLB.com the other day and it cracked me up:

Yeah, there's no need for all the racial descriptors being used here. If you want to refer to Japan because it's the league he used to play in, fine. Outside of that, I don't think his ethnicity or home country should really be a factor in the discussion. If those kinds of comments keep up we're going to have to start deleting them.

I like this idea. Problem is that Andrus is only signed through 2014 and he's going to hit the market as a 26-year-old multiple time All-Star SS. So unless the Twins are ready to break the bank for him he's probably a two-year rental. Still pretty valuable, especially if you're in my camp and you believe the Twins could contend in the short-term (and if you're as sick as I am of the near-constant ineptitude at short), but you've got to be careful about what kind of assets you give up in that kind of situation.

True, but we've never really seen him operate with a large payroll before. (He was heavily restricted in this past offseason.) If they're serious about keeping payroll where it's at, he'll have a good chunk of money to spend.

I actually never argued that we can "count" on anything – you never can in the game of baseball. But Plouffe and Revere are on a normal development curve – they struggled in their first 100 or so games in the majors then made adjustments and started hitting the way they had been in the minors. The problem with the Delmon comparison is that his breakout was sudden and isolated after he'd established himself as a lesser player. Plouffe has been steadily improving toward where he's at now and Revere, as I mentioned before, is doing exactly what he did at every level in the minors. Yes, the offensive unit has had the very good fortune of being shockingly healthy all year. But I really don't see them as playing over their heads. This lineup always had the potential to be very good.

Needs more explosions.

Rebuilding teams don't trade the cheap, young versions of their older players. Threads like this and the "Trade Revere" one are incredibly pointless.

Young's "breakout year" occurred after he had been playing regularly in the majors for more than three full seasons. Plouffe's came after 100 MLB games. The two players are not in any way similar, so I'm not sure why you're comparing them. Can I compare Plouffe to Jose Bautista or does that not count since he plays for a different team? If your point is that some players have breakout years and then hit a wall, well yes, you're correct. That doesn't mean you plan around it. If you made a decent argument for why we should expect any of these guys to drop off dramatically that doesn't involve comparing them to totally unrelated players, I'll hear it out. But picking out a worst-case scenario to use as a comparison doesn't make you a realist, it makes you a pessimist. No need to hide from it.