On a more serious note...

This is an important offseason for the Minnesota Twins (so important that I'm going to revive this blog with a post that is not a complete joke). The Twins have a lot of talented young players, and are a late-inning reliever and an everyday right-handed 3B with a good bat away from being one of the best teams in baseball. They also have an apparent log-jam of outfielders, one of whom they might be tempted to trade in order to acquire the pieces they need.

Last offseason, we learned that Bill Smith is not nearly as gun-shy as his predecessor when it comes to making big deals. That might be a good thing, and only time will tell whether those trades were good ones or not, but it would be a lie to say, at this point, that they have worked out in the Twins' favor. Will the GM be afraid to pull the trigger again? Will he be eager to unload some of the pieces of those trades that have looked particularly awful? We might know the answer to that question sooner than later, and this is why the current offseason is so important.

Ron Gardenhire has publicly stated that he wants an outfield of Cuddyer, Span and Gomez next year. Barring the possibility that he is purposefully making such statements in order to inflate Cuddyer's trade value or something equally sneaky, this means that he and Bill Smith are actually considering either using Young in a backup role or trading him. Both would be huge mistakes, given that the Twins are unlikely to receive good value for Young right now.

Delmon Young was one of the best hitters on the team last year, despite having a dissapointing season. Carlos Gomez was the worst. Both are extremely young, with huge upside. The most obvious, almost painfully obvious, choice is to let Carlos Gomez start the season in AAA. He will not be valuable to a major league club until he learns how to get on base at a rate that is close to average, not swing at every slider in the dirt, and successfully steal bases. Last year he showed, for an entire season, that he cannot do any of these things at the major league level. The Twins wasted an entire year of service time letting him "learn" last summer. Let's not make the same mistake again. At this rate Carlos Gomez will be arbitration-eligible before he is major league ready. That gives the Twins very little chance to get good production out of him while paying him much less than he is worth. Franchises like ours need to be smarter than this.

The next most obvious choice, if Gardy and Smith really can't stomach the idea of sending Gomez down, is to trade Michael Cuddyer. He is actually earning real money thanks to the contract he signed last offseason, and by earning I mean he was injured the whole summer and has had one good offensive season (2006) in his entire career. That injury, in fact, proves exactly why we need to start Carlos Gomez in the minors. Remember last year when we seemed to have the usual glut of weak-hitting middle infielders? Matt Tolbert was playing every day and we weren't even sure what the Twins would do when Everett came off the DL. Punto was still on the roster, of course, and Brendan Harris was having trouble turning the DP at 2B. And then there was Alexi Casilla hitting the cover off the ball in the minor leagues. Once you factor in Lamb in the majors and Buscher at AAA, we didn't have anywhere to put all these guys. And yet there were points in the season when it was difficult to put an infield together. Injuries happen every year. With probability 1.

Sometime before July Cuddyer, Kubel, Young, or Span will probably go on the DL for a little while. I'd much rather be bringing Gomez up to play everyday than fielding Span in left, Gomez in center and Pridie in right when Cuddyer gets hurt again. There is no log-jam in the outfield. There is just an obvious choice to be made. Here's hoping the front office makes it.