I know that our focus is back to the Twins making the playoffs, which is exciting and all, but I'm still ready to plan ahead. I just think the Front Office should wait to do it until the offseason.

The following is my discussion of the Twins should improve themselves going forward, and it includes considering a pretty significant restructuring of the squat (i.e. the team should explore trading some top players)

C - top catcher in the league, for 1 more year

1B - top tier

2B - unclear. Currently poor, potentially average, extremely cheap

SS - poor, expensive (Punto). On the other hand, we have an excellent, if expensive utility player.

3B - One decent prospect, very immature. Miscellaneous replacement level talent who could fight for a spot

OF - One good defensive, excellent OBP OF (Span), who can play anywhere. One excellent defensive, poor offensive CF. One poor defensive, unclear offensive corner (Young), one average offensive, decent power, average defense OF (Cuddyer), one very good DH who can pretend on defense (Kubel)

DH - one very good DH, who can sort of play OF (see above), a bunch of other people who can handle 30 games each (Mauer, Morneau, Cuddyer, Young, possible additions next year at 3B), to keep them fresh.

Starters - who knows. I'm going with 1 front end starter (Baker), 2 middle rotation (Slowey, Blackburn), two good for innings back end rotation (Perkins, Bonser), and a bunch of mysteries (Liriano, Swarzak, Duensing, Manship).

Relief - again, who knows. I'm going with top end closer (Nathan), two average dependable late inning guys (Rauch, Mijares), a couple of average middle relief (Guerrier, Dickey, Crain), and some good long relief options (the entire Redwings squad, Dickey, Bonser). I'm not sure if we have Mahay next year or not.

To me, our positions of strength C, 1B, DH, low level OF prospects, and hopefully increasing revenue. We have a surplus of average OF talent. We are deficient at middle infield and all pitching. Our best in-house bet at 3B is very unproven. Also, our system is now relatively weak (it was already, but now subtract Pino, Mulvey, and Ladendorf).

My reaction is that the twins need to trade from their positions of strength to fill their holes.

Position of strength 1: OF / DH: The Twins should look to trade either Kubel or Cuddyer, depending on who will bring the most in return. I tend to say trade Kubel. As 33MorneauMVP pointed out in response to this earlier, Kubel is one of the best hitting DH's, particularly against RH pitchers. He also happens to be extremely cheap. I would imagine there are a lot of teams that could really benefit. Additionally, because he is better against RH, he would be more valuable to a team looking for a LH bat than the Twins. If teams won't offer enough for him, then we should trade Cuddyer, and his $8 million salary (maybe $9, I forget). The other alternative is Young, though I would rather keep him, and put him in RF.

This would allow the Twins to platoon Mauer (30-40 games games), Morneau (20-30 games), Cuddyer (20-30 games), Young (30 ish games) and a yet to be acquired RH bat that we sign in the offseason. Span could probably also get some DH at-bats, to save his legs a bit. If we still have Young, Cuddyer, Span and Gomez, then one of them sits when Mauer DHs, and Cuddyer slides to 1B when Morneau DHs, and one of them DHs the rest of the time.

This trade should be for a young, or AAA prospect middle infielder or pitching prospect. Again, I think that Kubel could net us someone very talented (Escobar or Escobar?). Maybe we and other teams could add in lower tier prospects to balance it out as deemed appropriate.

Position of strength 2: Closer. Someone mentioned this, but Nathan is worth trading, if the haul is right. I mean, don't the Mets want to spend a fortune on a third closer? :)

The deal probably won't be right, but if we could get back a middle infielder, or a decent 7th or 8th inning reliever and a starter prospect, to restock our system, it might be worth it. Remember, his salary could be used to get us some other talent in the FA market.

Position of strength 3: Lowel level minor league OF. If we are trying to play for the next couple of years (Mauer and Morneau's primes), then we need to look at using Revere/Hicks/Morales etc to get us the pieces we need now. I would happily trade any one of them (we'll still have others left), plus other lesser prospects, to get us elite players at our weakest positions.

Position of strenght 4: Money - depending on what happens with revenue projections, Cuddyer, Nathan, Cabrera,  and arbitrations, we should have money to spend. A pile of this should go to Mauer. More should be spend shoring up the pitching (starting or relieving, depending on who's available), and whatever we can't fill through trade.

The much harder part is figuring out who we should get, and that's because I know nothing about people's trade cost, or projected salaries for next year. So I'll leave that to others here to propose. The main point is this: we as fans need to remember that you have to pay to get value in return. The players we love as being top contributors are also those that could get us value in return. It's a risk, but it's the only way to try to really improve the team, after we hit our budget constraints. Kubel is my main example here. He's great, but he might be worth more to other teams than he is to us.