You're the worst team in the American League. You've gone from six division titles in nine years to a possible second straight season in the cellar. Your pitching and defense is so bad, you need a telescope to spot the next-worst run prevention team in your league. You have one or two impact prospects in your farm system, but they're years away from cracking the majors, let alone making a significant impact. You're Terry Ryan, general manager of the Minnesota Twins. What do you do? What do you do?
You make incredibly dated Speed references, because when it comes to rebuilding the Twins, you're kind of screwed.
To understand how bleak the Twins' near-term future looks, it's instructive to see how they got here.
• As with most teams, a few years of fallow drafts can wreak havoc down the road. The Twins developed a nasty habit of drafting pitchers with good command and fastballs that can't dent a piece of bread. Pitching injuries have compounded the problem: 2009 and 2010 top picks Kyle Gibson and Alex Wimmers, both college starters, are both recent Tommy John casualties. Fellow top-50 picks Matt Bashore and Shooter Hunt (two more college starters, of course) have also stumbled with injuries laying waste to a generation of Twins high-draft selections. Meanwhile, 2008 top pick Aaron Hicks has seen his development stall over the past year-plus, posting a mediocre .720 OPS in High-A ball last year, getting promoted to Double-A anyway, and faring no better this year.
• The Twins' trades … haven't been so fresh. The most notorious whiff came after the 2007 season, when Minnesota dealt Johan Santana for four prospects. That in itself isn't a problem: The Rangers traded Mark Teixeira six months earlier for five prospects, and used that deal to help build the nucleus of a two-time (and counting?) pennant winner. Unfortunately, Minnesota got Carlos Gomez, Deolis Guerra, Kevin Mulvey, and Philip Humber for Santana, who was one of the four or five most highly regarded pitchers on Earth at that time.
• Trading a perfectly capable, young, everyday catcher candidate in Wilson Ramos for pedestrian reliever Matt Capps was another great idea, because when you have two good catchers you have to sell one for Savezzzz or something. Dumping J.J. Hardy for nothing and signing Tsuyoshi Nishioka have been awful mistakes, too.
• Injuries have whacked the careers of several key Twins players, including two former MVPs. Justin Morneau is just now getting back to hitting homers, after having half his 2010 wiped out, then hitting like Alexi Casilla's evil … um … Twin last year, on the rare occasion when he stayed healthy enough to play. Meanwhile, Joe Mauer has returned to his .400 OBP ways, but his persistent leg injuries have raised questions about a position switch and other undesirable outcomes. Problem is, Morneau still has most of this year and all of next year left at $13 million per, while Mauer's just a year and change into a $184 million contract that looks awful because of the injuries, and also because Mauer's 28 homers in 2009 now look like a big, fat mirage.
• Francisco Liriano might be the most frustrating player in the history of baseball. He's shown flashes of Cy Young–level performance, but spends most of his time alternating an intense aversion to the strike zone with more meatballs than a Lady and the Tramp marathon. If you picked him up in fantasy after he shut out the A's for six innings Wednesday, please head straight for your nearest mental institution.
Some of these problems are fixable — stop making bad draft picks and dumb trades is an easy enough goal to shoot for. But getting impact talent on the roster other than Mauer, Morneau, and 33-year-old Josh Willingham won't be easy, or fast. Top power-hitting prospect Miguel Sano just turned 19 and is toiling in Low-A, while 20-year-old second base prospect Eddie Rosario is also playing in Beloit; both players won't be major league-relevant for several more years. There'll be money to spend as some of the team's bigger contracts expire. But MLB's new draft and international signing caps will restrict the Twins' ability to more aggressively restock their farm system, while the trend of teams locking up nearly all quality players before they can sniff free agency will make it exceedingly difficult for the Twins to reel in a big-time free agent … something they've rarely to never shown an impulse to do anyway.
The Twins do have a few factors working in their favor: They'll pick second overall in the upcoming amateur draft, and figure to land another top-five choice next year if their terrible play continues. They've got a new ballpark that's still got enough sheen to goose attendance a bit (though the Twins have seen a bigger drop in attendance this year than any other club). And they do play in the AL Central, which will continue to not be the AL East for the foreseeable future. But between the long haul of getting top draft picks to the big leagues and the far-away nature of their current top prospects, the Twins might not be good again until long after Morneau's gone and Mauer's past his prime.
So you cross your fingers and hope … that Brian Dozier can be a quality major league shortstop, that Ben Revere can parlay his high contact rates and excellent speed into legitimate offense, that Trevor Plouffe and Scott Diamond and all the rest of the Twins' young players can pan out better than their relatively modest pedigrees would suggest. If they don't, the most logical course of action might be to shop the M&M boys and hope to speed up the rebuilding process. Of course, Joe Mauer's not going anywhere anytime soon, not even with every objective measure in the world pointing against paying him $184 million for what he has left. But whatever they do, it might have to be something drastic. Because right now, there might be no team further away from success than the Minnesota Twins.
bamainatlantaYou wake him up, you keep him up