As the trading deadline approaches at the end of the month, there will be talk about teams interested in Twins players A, B, C and a few others. Think of Glen Perkins as A, Justin Morneau as B, Ryan Doumit as C and a bunch of others, including Jamey Carroll and Mike Pelfrey, as being among the few others.

The wisdom behind trading Perkins is that a terrible team doesn't need a first-rate closer and the lefty closer is the guy on the roster who would bring the most in return.

That's true ... but that doesn't mean the Twins should trade him.

Some people argue with vigor that it's reasonably simple to find someone who can be plugged into a closer's role. Maybe it was the time I spent covering the Twins -- when they traded for Yankees set-up guy Ron Davis and tried to make him a closer -- but I don't buy it. In addition to being a game of ever-expanding statistical models, which is a good thing, baseball is a game in which the same player can perform differently in different situations.

Check out RD's statistics in his four years as the Yankees set-up man versus his 4 1/2 as Minnesota's closer.

A few years back, Cleveland liked the stuff of the pitcher formerly known as Fausto Carmona to try him as a closer, an experiment that failed horrifically the season before he won 19 games as a starter.

Another example of a different sort: Journeyman Pat Tabler, a .282 hitter in 12 career seasons, was a killer force batting with the bases loaded during his career. How good? This good: In 109 bases-loaded career appearances, he had a .489 average, .505 on-base percentage and 1.198 on base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS).

By comparison, Miguel Cabrera, a pretty good baseball player, is .417/.413/1.034 in those situations. Joe Mauer? .333/.322/.850. (I use Mauer as a comparison not to make mock, but because Mauer has significantly more power than Tabler, but Tabler's numbers in this particular clutch situation are so incredibly extreme.) And yes, I know, we're doing some cherry-picking of stats here, but this is a five-minute model. Give me five hours and I'll find you more.

Not everyone can switch roles as gracefully as the fabulous Joe Nathan, who was a set-up man in San Francisco before the Twins traded for him 10 years ago.

OK, back to Perkins.

He is among the best in baseball at what he does. If you favor a trade, you're betting on finding a suitable replacement for what is currently the team's No. 1 strength. Plus, you may be conceding that the Twins are on a treadmill of trading top talent because you don't expect them to be competitive for another few years. I've made the case, more often than some would like, that one of the current Twins' failings has been their inability to field a competitive team while waiting for their young talent to be ready for Target Field.

Give up Perkins and you're creating another hole.

Trade Morneau or Josh Willingham (which won't happen right now because of his injury) or Carroll or Doumit, and you should quickly find someone to adequately fill those roles right away based on current, or even anticipated, performance.

Trade Perkins to an American League team and, a dozen years down the road, maybe the Twins would be presenting him with a rocking chair made of their broken bats. Trade Perkins and you're asking for trouble.

West Coast baseball tonight. Take a nap and maybe we'll trade some tweets.