Neal: Twins face lots of questions but have very few illuminating answers

We now know that Derek Shelton is the next manager of the Twins.

What bugs me is what we still don’t know.

We don’t know whether the Pohlad family is done slashing payroll.

We don’t know in whose starting rotation Joe Ryan or Pablo López will be next season.

And we don’t know the identities of these two mysterious limited-partner groups that the Pohlad family is bringing in to help pay down roughly $500 million in debt. Or when this long-awaited announcement will take place.

For a fan base that is starving for any morsel of information about how the roster will be funded and constructed, the Twins could have let something slip out in front of the media horde assembled on Tuesday at Target Field.

Shelton and Twins President Derek Falvey declined to be specific whenever they were asked about the team’s offseason plans.

Joe Pohlad, the Twins executive chair, stood in the back of the room, and when the news conference ended, I attempted to get more clarity from him.

“What, setting a payroll?” Pohlad said. “It’s a long offseason. But, yeah, we have talked about it.”

I will point out that the Twins signaled last offseason that they were going to hold payroll steady. But in February, they allowed for the signings of Ty France, Harrison Bader and Danny Coulombe. So, plans can be altered.

Not altered on a let’s-go-sign-Pete Alonso level, but plans can change.

Then I asked Pohlad about the limited partners. He said in August that the family was taking on investors instead of selling the team. Their identities were expected to be known by now.

There were rumblings in September that one of the groups was still adding partners late in the season, and those partners had to be cleared by Major League Baseball. So Pohlad’s response meshes with those rumblings.

So when will this all be completed and the identities of the limited partners be known?

“I’ll kick myself if I put a timeline on it,” Pohlad said before adding, “I would anticipate by the end of the year.”

If that is true, there are some checkpoints in the coming weeks.

One is next Tuesday when the GM meetings take place in Las Vegas. This is where the groundwork for trades often is made. Sometimes, deals that fell through at the trade deadline are revisited. This is where the Twins’ intentions with righthanders Ryan and López could be learned.

The winter meetings begin Dec. 7 in Orlando, where trades and free-agent signings could happen. Baseball’s workflow habits, however, mean deals will be reached until pitchers and catchers report.

As for Shelton’s first day on the job, he was asked how he can get a disgruntled fan base to reinvest — or remain invested — in a team that has stripped its roster of talented players since the end of the 2023 season, including the trade of 10 major league players in July.

“I understand the frustration,” Shelton said, “but I also embrace the passion that they have, and I think it’s one of the main reasons that I wanted to be back here, because I know how passionate Twins Territory is.”

Shelton was the bench coach in 2019, when the Twins hit 307 home runs on the way to a 101-win season. The club is in far worse shape now than when Shelton left, and he will be challenged to work with a roster of developing players and return the franchise to a winning form.

“The biggest thing that that I would say to [fans] is, every night they come out to the ballpark, you’re going to see a team that competes, that fights, that is gritty,” Shelton continued. “It’s going to run the bases the right way. It’s going to do those small little things. And I know from my time in this division a long time ago, Twins fans really appreciate those things.”