twins/mlb

All reports are that the Twins received a can't-miss prospect for Denard Span, the very good leadoff hitter and pretty good center fielder who has been moved to a team that has enough of everything to be a legitimate World Series threat.

Where does this leave the Twins?

Too soon to tell. How we're feeling about the Twins in 2013, which is a rightful concern in addition to looking down the road, depends on what Terry Ryan does in the coming weeks.

The challenge is to get beyond the idea that the Twins have to lose 95 games in 2013 to be in position to win 95 or more in the years ahead when the organization's talented youngsters will be ready to join whatever solid core of veterans exists at the time.

Trading Span and losing Scott Baker has pretty much shrunken the Twins veteran core to seven players -- Mauer, Morneau, Willingham, Doumit, Carroll, Perkins and Burton. Jared Burton is the only one without a contract for next season, but you can figure on those seven taking up about $56 million of the team's payroll.

Payroll history: Carl Pavano's $9 million, Baker's $6.5 million, Francisco Liriano's $5 million, Matt Capps' $4.5 million, Tsuyoshi Nishioka's $3 million, Denard's $3 million and Alexi Casilla's $1.4 million.

If you assume that Justin Morneau's $14 million and Jamey Carroll's $3.75 million will come off the books next year -- and the Twins opt to spend extra knowing they won't be paying them starting in 2014 -- Ryan has an ample checkbook to work with when the winter meetings start next week in Nashville.

You can go all over the web to find people who will name who the Twins should pursue, and I'm not going there right now.

One reason: The list of available talent will change substantially late tonight, which is the deadline for teams to offer contracts to arbitration-eligible players for 2013. There will be players who for one reason or another or another are no longer fits for their current teams and could well help the Twins in the short term.

I will give Twins management enough credit to know that it can't put a stripped-down product on the field in 2013 while waiting for its youngsters to be ready. In the expanded-playoff world, the Twins need to put together a roster that can at least be among the teams looking to be in the chase if things break right.

I'll also repeat what I've said before, that it's sad things have plummeted to where they are.

But now it's time to look ahead. I'm expecting Ryan to be one of the busiest men in baseball over the next month or so, and to create a roster that will excite us for 2013.

That'll make me a happier camper than I've been when thinking about the Twins lately.

You know, I don't really want to hear much about baseball right now, and it isn't fun to feel that way.

It is discouraging to see the postseason awards handed out without anyone from the hometown team even remotely under consideration. That R.A. Dickey guy who won the Cy Young Award. He was a Twins pitcher once, right?

It is discouraging to see the discussion about Scott Baker leaving the Twins, because whether or not Baker was going to be part of the 2013 Twins wasn't likely to make much difference. He was a placeholder, one that should be able to be replaced pretty easily. More cheaply even, if that matters.

It is discouraging to see the Toronto Blue Jays make a bold move and pickup a star shortstop and two starting pitchers in one monster trade. The Jays get Jose Reyes. But, hey, maybe the Twins will sign Jo-Jo Reyes. He won six games in Triple-A last season!

It is discouraging to have a conversation in the office, as happened this week, about whether the Twins as currently constructed are a 100-loss team ... or a 110-loss team. Yeah, that's a bit gloomy, but it's a conversation the Twins created with their talk of a "perfect storm" that lead to what we watched in 2011 and the dismal encore of this season.

In 2011 and 2012, the Twins pretty much fielded 100-loss teams that managed to lose only 99 games and 96 games.

It is discouraging to be this discouraged.

The Section 219 household has cut back its ticket-holdings by one-fourth for 2013. I don't know how many of us are in the "giving-it-one-more-year camp," but right now I can't see throwing more good money at bad performance if we endure a third season of crudtastic baseball.

We've been quick to mock Tsuyoshi Nishioka. But aren't the Twins pretty much the Nishiokas of major league baseball right now? What else should you call the last-place team in the worst division in baseball for two years running?

No, the 2014 All-Star Game will not be incentive enough to renew my season tickets. From the conversations I've had, I know I'm not alone. Unlike some people, I'll keep going to games even if the Twins are wretched. But I'd be switching from having my box of season tickets in the basement to buying cheap ones on the street.

I've pretty much stayed away from blogging since the end of the season -- save for the changing of the coaches -- because I haven't felt there's much I could add to the conversation. I feel an obligation to say nothing if I can't contribute to a healthy dialog.

But some stuff needs to be said on behalf of those who have been faithful and might think their faith is being taken for granted. And for the people who have already walked away until things get better at 1 Twins Way.

I agree that you don't need a $100+ million payroll to be a postseason contender. Half of the teams that played into October were in the bottom half of MLB's 2012 payrolls -- at $82 million or less. Oakland was 30th among the 30 teams.

But...

But if your* roster and farm system has been shredded by bad decisions and bad fortune and your* ownership is as committed to winning as to having a beautiful ballpark with craft beers and gelato, then it behooves you* to bust payroll constraints that exist because of formulas that you* have set as opposed to resources that you* have available. To retain customer loyalty, sometimes you* have to do things that hurt you* a little bit more in the bank account than you* would like.

(*You and *Your = Twins ownership, a/k/a the royal You.)

In the Twins' case, that means spending on starting pitchers -- spending more than management was planning back when Target Field was being built and postseason baseball in Minnesota was a common occurrence. (Yes, that era ended only two years ago, even if feels like two decades ago.)

Sometimes, the dramatic moves don't work. Look at Miami.

Sometimes, they do. Look at Detroit.

And here's my statement of faith: Give Terry Ryan the resources to make moves right now. Buy and trade for several of the proven starting pitchers that are on the market. Add a couple of arms to a bullpen that should be pretty good if it isn't worked into submission. Good pitching can carry a team that has weaknesses elsewhere.

But nothing can carry a team into contention if its pitching is atrocious. If the pitching is good enough, I don't care if Darin Mastroianni and Chris Parmelee split right field, the shortstop is a competent fielding .220 hitter and the second baseman is as close to my age as my son's age.

When you're done reading this, you should read the new TwinsCentric post by Seth Stohs, who knows more about the Twins minor-league system than you and I combined. He makes the argument that the Twins should be building for 2015, and writes about the promising young players the Twins can expect to have ready by then.

But the Twins should not write off 2013 and '14. If there is as much future talent in the system as Seth suggests, some of it should be used to procure players who can help now.

The Twins must build a bridge to their future that fans can feel comfortable walking across, as opposed to a bridge that requires a detour deeper into irrelevance. In a 10-team playoff system, it is not unreasonable to expect the Twins -- with some combination of Mauer, Willingham, Morneau, Span, Plouffe, Revere, Perkins and a few others -- to compete for one of those spots in 2013.

In the bigger picture, I'm still lowering my expectations. Not long ago, we were talking about how the Twins needed to make the move from playoff participant to World Series winners. Now, we're talking about bold strokes just to color the Twins as contenders for the expanded postseason.

The Twins must go hard, not just nibble at the corners.

When I see that happening, I promise to stop feeling so discouraged.

First of all, the Twins didn't intend for the news to come out this way, for the coaching staff casualties to dribble over over the course of Thursday in ones and twos.

That was the excellent work of writer La Velle E. Neal III, who was hard-wired into the organization and went all Brian Urlacher, totally disrupting whatever plans existed and reporting on the firings in as close to real time as they could be confirmed. La Velle was also in transit from Toronto to the Twin Cities, getting the information and getting it to startribune.com as quickly as he could confirm things.

Let me suggest that the Twins should get on with their overhaul with the same intensity that La Velle showed on behalf of Twins fans.

General Manager Terry Ryan decimated Ron Gardenhire's band of brothers Thursday -- firing three coaches, reassigning two and sparing the manager's best baseball buddy, pitching coach Rick Anderson. If we assume that the Rochester pitching coach, Bobby Cuellar, will take over as bullpen coach and Gene Glynn, the Rochester manager, will get a Twins coaching job, you can consider Gardy and Andy to be on a very short leash in 2013.

Talk all you want about the weak starting pitching -- or obfuscate even more and blame it on the injuries to several of the failed starters -- and you ignore the fact that the "Twins way" has become one of mental mistakes in all aspects of the game: Mental errors, giveaway at-bats, flawed pitching. All of those traits manifest themselves in a second season of frightful baseball unworthy of their new ballpark.

However hard the coaches and Gardy were working, things were lost when the messages were delivered from the staff to the players. Ten years ago, the Twins were in need of Gardy's folksy approach as a replacement for the taciturn Tom Kelly.

Now, Gardy is being told by Ryan that what his staff was doing had stopped working and that he'll be given one more chance to fix things without a staff of his own choosing. Faced with what Ryan decided, there are managers who would have walked away with their guys.

I'm going to take it as a good sign that Gardy decided to take on the challenge. Whether he can lead the change is an interesting and debatable question.

Over the last few weeks, when people have asked what I thought would happen, I suggested that things were too quiet for big changes not to be made. I am also certain that nobody in the Twins organization thinks a new coaching staff alone can be sold as big change.

Players will come and go during the off-season. I would bet on minimal drama before things happen and a couple of dramatic moves intended to make 2013 more than a season of meandering toward .500. Many of the empty seats that you could see at Target Field as the season wore on were generating revenue because they were held by absentee season-ticket holders. In my circle, many people are bailing out on their season-ticket investments -- cutting back or getting out entirely.

Baltimore and Oakland this season have shown what's possible. Keep in mind that, with better geography, either of those teams would have handily won the AL Central based on the bigger chunks of Twins, Royals and Cleveland on their schedules.

The Twins not only finished last in their division, but they finished last in the only division in baseball that had three teams lose 90 or more games. The AL Central finished 28 games under .500 against the West and 24 under .500 against the East. (The Twins were 22-50 outside of their division, a .305 winning percentage.)

What happened on Thursday was a message to Gardy. He will have a boatload of work to do during the winter, preparing a new coaching staff -- one that won't of his choosing, however the replacements get spun -- to function the way he needs when the Twins gather in Florida next February.

In return for keeping his job, Gardy has basically forfeited the right to make personnel decisions about his staff that, in a better situation, a GM wants to be able to mostly leave to his field manager. On Twitter, Patrick Reusse described Gardy and Andy as being on "double secret probation."

That's the price of stink.

What needs to happen next are more moves by Ryan and ownership to further show that the painful performances we've witnessed for two years will be replaced by ones we can watch without holding our noses and looking away.

This is what the outfield seats at Target Field looked like a couple of innings into Wednesday's night miserable  baseball game:

Now, let's give the Twins the benefit of the doubt. It drizzled all day, clearing up and turning into a fairly nice night an hour or so before game time. And school's in session and the Royals are in town and ... blah, blah, blah.

Friends, this isn't working. If you wanted to go on StubHub and buy tickets at the last minute Wednesday, you could find a batch of tickets for $.01. Yes, that's a penny (plus a 10 percent surcharge -- $.001? -- and the $5.45 download fee..) At around 4 p.m., there were four tickets in the Legends Club listed for $5 each. Yes, that's five as in one-two-three-four-FIVE.) There were 2,500 or so unsold tickets on the 'Hub, all of which counted as part of the "attendance" of 28,139. Basically, you could have taken advantage of the one-cent sale and sat pretty much where you wanted, as long as you looked like you belonged.

In our row of 20, it was me 'n' Julie and the delightful couple who have the seats next to use and a party of four further down the row of 20. By comparison, we were packed in. By the seventh inning, the front three rows next to us in Section 220 were empty. Totally empty. We counted nine people in the no-alcohol Section 311 early in the game and figured that one fell off the wagon when we counted only eight a couple of innings later.

Here's the problem for the Twins: Attendance figures are being padded significantly by tickets already sold for 2012.

How will they sell those tickets for 2013?

My friends, who have varying degrees of baseball intensity, weighed in when they saw the above photo posted on my Facebook page:

A sampling:

"Holy Cow, that is bleak."

"Wow, that's sparse."

"Glad to see the new stadium was worth the investment."

"Seems like only yesterday I was hearing how a new stadium would allow the Twins to 'stay competitive.' What they didn't add was 'with the Indians.' "

And here's the best-face scenario from a season-ticket holder friend:

"Only difference, and it's a big one, the Metropolitan Club is a nice place to hang out when the game is too frustrating. I hate to admit it, but tonight I was one of THOSE people who watched very little of the game but had a great night at the ballpark chatting with friends. So wrong. But so fun. I'm sorry Grandpa. I'm sure he's rolling in his grave!"

One other fan-experience observation: Last year, we wanted to go out to dinner before the game at the Town Ball Tavern, the nice bar/restaurant in the left-field corner. We knew we pretty much needed to be there when the gates opened in order to get seated, even though it was a weekday night and not a particularly high-interest game. Last night, we did the same thing, getting to the restaurant about an hour before game time and having a number of tables to choose from.

I'm not talking baseball right now. If you want to watch Ryan Doumit's three-error inning, go here and skip to the 1:20 mark. I'm talking about observations and soft data. The Twins appear to be doing a pretty good job of dispiriting their fans. 

Obviously, fans who just want to support a winning team are staying away. The more observant have spent another season wondering about the team's injury management, its pitching and defensive failures and much of anything that speaks to things getting better soon. The most intense have wondered about roster moves, recently focusing their nth degree analysis on why reliever Anthony Slama isn't being given another chance to see if his minor-league dominance can translate to the majors and why Chris Parmelee wasn't used in the outfield at Rochester, if that's where he has the best chance to play for the Twins. And we all marveled at the Nishioka thing a few weeks back.

When you can frustrate everyone from the advanced-statistics posse to the guy who asks which league has the designated hitter -- a question we heard last night -- it's a sign that the fan base is going, going ...

Putting my money where my blog is, I'll tell you that I'm involved with three sets of season tickets: My scorecard for 2013 has me keeping one, cutting back on another and bailing on the third. Am I alone?

Right now, I think the Twins can win back most of their fans by going boldly into 2013 with a makeover that could take many shapes. If they tarry and pretend that all is good enough at 1Twins Way, they run the risk of being just another pretty ballpark with plenty of good seats available.

Tuesday's announced attendance at Target Field was the smallest since the ballpark opened and the first time it fell below 30,000.

The announcement that the All-Star Game will be played at Target Field in 2014 is supposed to be a salve for the ugly product that the Twins are putting on the field -- a combination of terrible starters, an offense that too often goes clueless in key situations and an overworked bullpen that would be suspect even if it worked under ideal conditions. And the defense isn't very good, either.

"Stay with us and you'll be rewarded with (the opportunity to buy) All-Star Game tickets" will be among the messages the Twins will put forth after Wednesday's party when the commissioner, the mayor, the owners and top team officials put on their happiest faces to formally announce what's been assumed for a long, long time.

One can only hope that the Twins put as much into fixing their product for April 2013 as they will into dressing up for July 2014.

Right now, I want to hear an owner who forcefully tells his fans that bad decisions and bad performance have contributed to a ball club that he's unhappy to have associated with his name. So far, all I've heard is elevator music -- Terry Ryan is the GM and he'll decide the manager's future and nobody likes losing and obviously there will be changes in 2013.

Here's the story that ESPN1500's Phil Mackey wrote from Doogie Wolfson's interview with Jim Pohlad last weekend. There are a handful of strong-sounding phrases and others where I'm not quite sure what the message is beyond the owner's assertion that "losing sucks."

And Ryan told Jim Souhan on Tuesday that he won't fire Ron Gardenhire or ask him to make changes in his coaching staff. and that he doubts he'll pursue any of the handful of elite free-agent pitchers who could be available.

I want someone to throw high-and-inside at the All-Star Game news conference, where the Twins officials who can give the answers will be gathered.

Here's a starter list of what I want to know:

*How long do you expect season-ticket holders to keep faith with an undertalented, underperforming team?

*Explain further how the jobs of the field staff are secure with a team that is again threatening to lose 100 games -- this time without a "perfect storm" of injuries to key players to explain it away? (Keep in mind that if the Twins were in the AL East or West, 100 losses would be a foregone conclusion.)

*Is the ongoing problem with injuries and roster management primarily the fault of the medical staff, the field staff, the front office or a shared responsibility? More importantly, how will you fix things?

*Do the Twins believe that the "ballpark experience" compensates for lousy baseball? If so, based on what model? Don't say the Chicago Cubs because you can go on StubHub right now and find $2 tickets for Wednesday's game. (As of 8:15 a.m. Wednesday, about 10 percent of Wrigley's capacity was for sale on StubHub.)

*As management insiders, do you have the sense that players are tuning out the coaches and manager? Do you read anything between the lines when Justin Morneau says, "There's far too much talent for us to get beat the way we're getting beat."?

The Twins have pretty much become unwatchable. They lost badly in three of the four games in Texas and were within a few more Jeff Gray pitches of giving away the game they won on Sunday. (I can't remember a pitcher giving up two home runs while I was waiting at one traffic light.) They played badly in Seattle and Oakland during the previous stops on that road trip and lost 5 of 6 games on the homestand before they left.

Of their last 19 games, they've lost 16.

Of their last 200, they've lost 123.

There's no way to sugar-coat this: Fans are picking up the pace of not paying attention. Keep in mind that Tuesday's record-low attendance included all the tickets that were sold and didn't get used. (I had four of those and I've got to tell you, the Lynx played an exciting game, Novak Djokovic doesn't mess around with overmatched opponents and the Chicken Pad Thai at Wok in the Park is worth a trip to St. Louis Park.)

And I see little that shows urgency at 1 Twins Way.

It's frustrating for me because I want to make time for this team. I want to think that better days are ahead. I want to watch the September games with hope. Really, I'm not a tough audience. But the investment isn't worth the reward right now, and I know I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Let me know if I'm missing something. That could be the case because, like many other people, I haven't been watching as closely as I used to.