Bolder moves needed to buy hope in Twins' new regime

This is the time of year the Twins remind everyone that they're always there for you whether you want them to be or not.

They are conducting another Twins Caravan, packing ballplayers from sunny home states into vans and mushing through the slush across the Upper Midwest.

They are conducting another TwinsFest, another Diamond Awards and a media luncheon, all designed to tease fans who can't wait for the start of another spring training. The Diamond Awards, organized by Star Tribune baseball writer LaVelle E. Neal III, the University of Minnesota and the Twins, is a remarkable philanthropic enterprise that benefits research into ALS, ataxia, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease.

Give the Twins credit. They are accessible and their hearts are in many right places. They give fans outside the Twin Cities a chance to meet players and ask questions of the bosses.

Those questions were supposed to be different this winter. But they're not.

In the past five years the Twins have fired two general managers and a manager. For the first time since the 1980s, they went outside the organization to hire a GM.

They have vowed to invest in advanced analytics and rethink every organizational philosophy.

The Dodgers' trade of pitching prospect Jose De Leon to Tampa Bay kills any imminent chance of the Twins trading second baseman Brian Dozier to Los Angeles in a one-stop-shopping attempt to infuse life into a dormant pitching staff.

So the Twins again will bring a lineup dependent on youth and a pitching staff dependent on luck to spring training.

This isn't a criticism of the new front office. It's a reminder that fixing a broken pitching staff is a long and uncertain process, whether you rely on behind-the-backstop scouting or behind-the-desk calculating.

Free-agent pitchers are the riskiest investments in all of sports, always one elbow twinge away from erasing dozens of millions of dollars.

Pitching prospects are equally risky in terms of evaluation. Alex Meyer should be the Twins' ace today, and Jose Berrios should be ready to contend for the second spot in the rotation. But they're pitching prospects. Neither has yet demonstrated the ability to think his way through an inning, so Meyer is trying to resurrect his career with the Angels and Berrios is trying to prove he's not the next Meyer.

The 2016 season reintroduced reality to the story line and now that reality has been introduced to new baseball bosses Derek Falvey and Thad Levine.

They need Ervin Santana to pitch like an ace. They need Kyle Gibson to finally move to the top of the rotation. They need Phil Hughes to recover physically. They need Berrios, or Tyler Duffey, or Hector Santiago, to exceed expectations. And they need their farm system to produce quality starting pitching for the first time in decades.

Falvey doesn't deserve criticism for eschewing the free-agent market but he likely will enter his first spring training as a chief baseball officer having done nothing to distinguish himself from his fired predecessor.

You could see Terry Ryan adding a catcher known mostly for framing pitches. You could see Ryan ignoring big-money free agents and banking on his best young players, such as Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano, Max Kepler and Berrios.

At some point, Falvey will have to prove he operates differently than Ryan.

The Twins spend January trying to remind you how accessible they are.

They might have garnered more goodwill by doing something unpredictable. Something that indicates there are changes afoot.