Miller: Waiting for prospects is the hardest part

There's no mystery about how to make the Twins a contender again. They just need better players.

No, not better — the best. Future MVPs such as Clayton Kershaw or Mike Trout. Franchise cornerstones such as Giancarlo Stanton or Andrew McCutchen. All-around contributors such as Josh Donaldson or Jonathan Lucroy.

So how do teams acquire such unique but scarce talent, a Jason Heyward for the lineup or a Felix Hernandez for the rotation? It's simple: They draft them (or in the case of international players, sign them as teenagers), then develop them. All eight of those players rank among the top 10 in Wins Above Replacement by Fangraphs.com or Baseball-reference.com — meaning they're the best players in baseball — and all eight are playing for the team that originally signed them. Throw in Alex Gordon, Anthony Rendon and Chris Sale, and it's clear that difference-making ballplayers mostly require scouting — and patience.

Which is great news, and terrible news, for the Twins. The potential superstars are in the pipeline, and while Twins fans have heard their names for two or three years now, all that has changed during this injury-riddled minor-league season in the timeline. The Twins are developing five of the 50 most promising prospects in baseball, Baseball America judged at midseason, three of them pitchers, and that's not even counting the young players who already have arrived in Minnesota and begun producing.

But in the meantime, Minnesota has been stricken with a sobering realization: This is what rebuilding looks like. What else did we expect?

For baseball's middle class, halting a free fall takes time, and most of that time is spent losing. The Twins have lost more than 90 games for four consecutive seasons, have basically been irrelevant before August, and fans are crying out for changes, big ones.

If Facebook had existed in the mid-80s, when the Twins went seven seasons without a winning record, there's no doubt the demands would have been the same. And imagine the Twitter outrage of the late 1990s, the last time the losses reached 90 four years in a row. Yet both times, a new wave of talent was arriving en masse, first a Puckett-Hrbek-Gaetti-Viola core in 1987 for the first of two world titles, and later a Hunter-Koskie-Pierzynski-Santana bunch that, with Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau joining them, spent a decade winning division titles.

Scouts say it has the potential to be one of the best groups in franchise history, with a talent level and quantity that the Twins could never hope to acquire through trades or free-agent signings. A player with what Ryan and his staff believe is championship-level ability is on his way at every position on the diamond. Some, like Buxton, might take until 2016 to be ready, but some will arrive next year. Some are here already.

The 2014 season might seem a failure, with 90-plus losses in the majors and injuries to Buxton and Sano, but a few years from now, this season might seem like a critical first step. It's the summer in which Kennys Vargas established himself as a big-league power hitter, Oswaldo Arcia learned to tame some of his inconsistency and Danny Santana became the Twins' best player, at least for now. That trio has 84 games of combined Class AAA experience.

Pitching is trickier, and more critical, as the Twins well know: Their annual difficulties in identifying an effective rotation has undone much of their incremental improvement in offense and the bullpen. But Alex Meyer, polished and possessing a dominating repertoire, figures to join the rotation next season, Berrios a year later, and Kyle Gibson figures to take strides with experience.

"We've got a little something working here, and you hope you can keep it, because it's going to get better," manager Ron Gardenhire said. "It's going to get a lot better around here. It's going to get better in a hurry. … They're holding each other accountable. They're going to each other, they talk to each other. That's when you start making headway."

Which is why the best prescription for the Twins is a difficult one to execute: Wait. Just wait.