The Twins Toolbox: Building a Winner in…

Wiggle room, of course, comes in many forms. Teams don’t relish using it, in any sense, because the modern approach to team-building is to be so ruthlessly efficient as to obviate wiggle room. As the Twins have proved lately, though, sometimes that attempt to control and optimize everything only backfires, begetting fragility and eventual sclerosis. Just as a team has to be willing to be flexible, they have to have the luxury of that flexibility, even once they embrace the concept. A lack of ownership investment reduced the team’s flexibility when it comes to building a winner last winter, and unfortunately, it looks very much as though those conditions will persist during hot stove season this time around.

Last winter, though, the team’s greatest failing might have been the inability or unwillingness to use the levers available to them to create more flexibility even without financial options. They pursued their customary, plodding strategy in an offseason that moved at a pace that should have suited them, but they never found the right opportunity to pounce and rapidly create new value. They didn’t leave their comfort zone in order to overcome the new challenges posed by a lack of spending power, and as a result, they brought back a more extreme version of the team they were in 2023: older, more power-reliant, more athleticially limited.

Realigning one’s principles based purely on a shift of the wind is a lousy way to live, but one could argue that the Twins have cleaved too tightly to their team-building paradigm, even absent a sudden and dramatic change of direction from ownership. They believe so fervently in a pull power-focused offense and a strikeout-mad, four-seam-only, soft-and-spin pitching approach that they might be trapped in that mode, at the expense of both mental dexterity and roster maneuverability—both of which are indispensable if you’re already dealing with sparing financial capacity.

Maybe the tears that rolled down Derek Falvey’s cheeks at his intimate season-end media scrub were the waters of onrushing change, though. Maybe they symbolize that the pain of their late-season collapse broke this front office open and forced them to seriously reconsider some things about their own approach to team building. In that case, maybe flexibility is back, even if the belts are still tight all along the factory line. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers, to find out.