Terry Ryan, GM of the Twins, is a frequent reader of my blog, and looks to me for advice on what he should do during each offseason. To fulfill this request, I like to put together what I would do if I were running the Twins next year. I’m only doing this for Terry’s benefit, since he really values the input on someone who maxed out in 7th grade baseball after batting .053.
I’ll start with a base – if the Twins bring all the players back and exercise their no-brainer option on Joe Nathan, and don’t sign any free agents, they’ll have $51.17 mil in contracts and they’ll need a 3B, CF, DH and a backup OF or two. This means they’d lose Silva, White, Rincon (who could be trade-able) and I’d lose Ford & Tyner. That leaves us about $20-25 mil to spend, but with the concern that salaries will be escalating in 2009 (Mauer, Morneau, Cuddyer) plus Santana and Nathan will be free agents.
The Twins can afford to bring Hunter back because they can afford $15 mil per year. I personally would like to see us offer him a 3-4 year contract, but I doubt he’d be interested in something that little. What can we do if we can’t sign him – we still have some options, but we have to get some hitters. I think it would be reasonable for us to get Kenny Lofton to play CF for about $4 mil. Then we need to get a DH – but the best two are old and very fragile – Piazza and Mike Sweeney. If we sign Piazza for $4 mil we still need to get a 3B. Joe Crede or Morgan Ensberg are our best options and let’s say we end up with Ensberg for $2 mil. We would want to pick up some backup options, so I think we should go get Matt Stairs and Termel Sledge as backup options – probably another $3 mil. That puts us at $64 mil and leaves us under budget. I don’t think that team could win it all, but with our pitching and with some decent offense, we should be able to challenge for the playoffs.
One other option we should at least consider is the possibility of trading Santana. We should try to sign him, but if we can’t, we need to explore the possibility. If we can trade him to the Dodgers for Andy LaRoche (3B), Matt Kemp (OF) and a pitching prospect, we should do it. We have nothing in our farm system for hitters anywhere, especially 3B, so we could really use a trade for two good hitters. Our system is chalk-full of starting pitching, including two potential #1 starters with Liriano and Garza. If we lose Santana, we can replace him – as difficult as it is to imagine.
We’ll see why Ryan decides to do, but if nothing else, I hope he realizes this season is over and plays the rookies the rest of the way.
Eric's space 