While Jared is blogging about geo political issues, that is too deep and depressing for me to handle. That’s why I still to stuff that makes me happy. Like the Minnesota Twins Baseball te… Oh yeah… That makes me depressed as well.

Melodrama notwithstanding, Baseball is in its last month of regular season play, which means the end of Twins baseball for 2013. As probably one of the few people who followed the Twins this year, believe me when I tell you that it has been ugly. So ugly that I can think of 4 or 5 different topics for really long winded blog rants. No one wants to read that, so I’ll choose one and try to stick to it as close as I can.

As the title suggests, the Twins are in full rebuild mode, and that was evident in the last offseason when they traded away both of their proven, MLB calibre center fielders for low minor league pitchers with good upside.

So, with those pitchers, as well as the players they got in the draft, the Twins look to be pretty dangerous in the future. But how far away is that future, and will the front office even know how to supplement incredibly talented rookies with solid veteran players to make this rebuild worth it? It’s that second part that worries me. Not all prospects pan out; it is a well known fact that even the best, most talented prospects flare out. But even assuming that the core of Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano both live up to their potential, I honestly don’t believe that the front office and the Pohlads will pull the trigger on a high impact free agent signing. Now, why are those important, and why wouldn’t they do it? The first answer is that it isn’t possible to entirely home grow a World Series calibre team. None of the division leaders have more than 5 or 6 players that came up in their minor league system and are dominating. And yet, the Twins don’t ever seem to go out and even try to get a big name. Now, the second answer is money. Basically the Pohlads don’t want to pay for a big name, cause guess what? Those high impact, big name, free agents aren’t cheap. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars for multiple years here, and while the Pohlads can definitely afford to spend that money, they haven’t seemed inclined to do so in years past, and probably won’t in the future.

The Pohlads aren’t entirely to blame for the lack of a free agent market presence. General Manager Terry Ryan also has to take some of the blame, he is the one asking people to play for the team for crying out loud. I guess the real test will be several years from now, when the home grown boys are ready to take over, if TR and co can get people to play in Minnesota. Here’s a hint: probably not.

This is probably the pessimist in me, but I don’t see a future in which the Twins win a World Series in my lifetime. The front office and the owners are too unwilling to spend money, and while they’ve done extremely well to stack up the minor league system with awesome talent, I don’t think they will ever look at the team, see a weakness, be it an ace pitcher, or a short stop, or what ever, and then go and spend big money to fill that hole.

The problem is my pessimism is based in fact. In 2010, the last year the Twins went to the playoffs, the ace of the rotation was Francisco Liriano. Liriano is a great pitcher, (although he never really dominated for the Twins outside his rookie season) but he lacks the mentality to lead a rotation. Remind me again how far the Twins got in the playoffs that year? Oh yeah, eliminated in the first round. Correction, swept in the first round.

The term “ya gotta spend money to make money” is a term that greatly applies in baseball, especially nowadays when contracts can get up to the $200 million range. And the Twins will never win a World Series until they give in to that knowledge. Thus I see the “house” that the Twins are trying to rebuild get to the point where it wins a division title, and then gets swept in the playoffs. So I dropped the analogy before even really using it, sue me.