Yesterday, the Twins claimed outfielder Darin Mastroianni off waivers from Toronto, designating relief pitcher Esmerling Vasquez for assignment to make room for him. You're probably saying to yourself, "Who is that?" If you're me, you're also probably saying, "Esmerling Vasquez? He was on the 40-man? I should've remembered that, since I write about the Twins in a light-hearted manner once a week." Here, then, is a little more about Darin Mastroianni, another piece of the puzzle that is the 2012 Minnesota Twins.

• He's 26.
• He has played in one major league game in his career, on August 24^th of last year. He went 0-for-3.
• The only reason he played in that game was because Kelly Johnson forgot his passport.
• As noted by Rhett Bollinger at MLB.com, his best season in the minors was 2010, when he was the Double-A Eastern League leader in steals and hits.
• He has played for both the Lansing Lugnuts and the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, both of which are not made up. A good prank might be to assign him to the Waterloo Clog Dancers, just to see if he buys it. "Eff it, maybe that's their thing down there."
• He does not appear to be related to the great Italian film actor Marcello Mastroianni. Yes, he died before you were born, but he had a child with Catherine Deneuve and dated Faye Dunaway when that meant something, man.
• Is Aaron Gleeman nonplussed by the move? Yes. He gives it two "meh"s.
• Seth Stohs says/speaks that offensively, Mastroianni's high-end would be Ben Revere. His low-end is former Twins designated hitter Jason Tyner (never forget). Joe C. thinks Jason Repko is a good comparison, and says he is not expected to be on the Opening Day roster.

As per usual, if anything else happens in Twins Territory today, we'll check back in. Pick the move apart, complain about how bad The Office has gotten, talk about girls or do whatever it is you do in the comments.

It doesn't take long for a farm system to turn around. A solid draft or a great trade can imbibe new blood into a system, just like a bad trade or graduating players can leave a system dry and underwhelming. For the Twins it seems they've always been a middle of the road minor league franchise, but over the last few years the trademark has changed.

For the longest time that trademark was pitching. Looking at the hurlers from the turn of the millenium, a vast majority of the staff not only came through the Minnesota farm system but they were good pitchers as well. A few years later another wave of pitchers came through. But we've seen very little since. Remnants of that last wave are still around, obviously: Scott Baker, Francisco Liriano, Nick Blackburn, Glen Perkins.

That was a wave we were excited about six years ago, and things have changed. There is no "next wave" of pitching on the horizon, only a player here or there. And the calling card of the system certianly isn't pitching.

On the plus side, the system is more balanced. Where years ago there were no position players of note on the rise, now our best prospects play anywhere but on the mound.

SB Nation's John Sickels recently rated the farm systems of Major League Baseball, and pplaced the Twins in the middle of the pack at number 17

Another middle of the pack organization, fairly balanced between hitting and pitching, some potential regulars with several solid role players.

ESPN's Keith Law ranked the Twins a bit higher (Insider required):

I pick on these guys for taking low-ceiling college arms with great control, but they have quietly mixed in some interesting high school bats and added a few high-impact Latin American prospects.

What's interesting is that although Minnesota is clearly a middle-of-the-road system as far as a couple of the game's more respected minor league analysts are concerned, they actually have the consensus second-best system in the AL Central. Nobody likes the White Sox minor league system (ranking dead last on both lists). Cleveland isn't much better; Detroit ranks just a tad higher. The Royals are ranked fifth (Law) and sixth (Sickels) on the two lists, and with good reason.

It doesn't happen often, but every few years the Twins can't work through an arbitration case with a player and they go through the arbitration process. The last player that wasn't able to find a midway point was Kyle Lohse back in both 2005 and 2006, which wasn't a surprise at the time.

Casilla made $865,000, and after hitting .260/.322/.368 with a pair of homers, 21 RBI and 15 stolen bases in 97 games last season has submitted $1.75 million for his 2012 salary. The Twins offered $1.065 million. For an objective look into these numbers, in an effort to see which side is most likely to come out of the arbitration hearing as a winner, let's look at a comp list that we'll swipe from MLBTR's post earlier today.

Join us for the breakdown after the jump.

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In two weeks and two days, the dark and dreary days of winter will lose their icy grip on our souls. In two weeks and two days, a light will appear at the end of the tunnel, beckoning us forward as if to say "Yes, friends, you have made it, and I shall warm your heart." In two weeks and two days, pitchers and catchers report for our Minnesota Twins.

This time two years ago at this time we were still talking about the signing of Jim Thome, with the Orlando Hudson signing just days away while we tried to still our panic about the Joe Mauer contract situation. Last year we were out of payroll space (sounds familiar, right?) and speculating about potential contract extensions. This year, well, it's been about the least exciting off-season in recent memory. But we still have questions about our favorite team.

How much first base will Justin Morneau play?

Continue reading this post »

Here's what's making Twins news over the past few days:

• Joe Mauer and Denard Span both say they feel great. This comes on the heels of Justin Morneau talking about how great he feels. If The Black Knight had been a baseball player, he wouldn't have claimed it was just a flesh wound or shouted about how he was invincible; he would have just talked about how good he felt and how he's changed his workout / diet / treatment plan and is pretty confident that he can have a good year.
• The Twins will retire Tom Kelly's #10. I hope that Kelly gets to give one of his famous mumbly interviews at the ceremony. And that the ceremony is hosted by Dick Bremer so that Kelly can call him "Richard" for no real reason again. And that Kelly will re-enact the time he had to go out to left field and yell at a nearly all-student Metrodome crowd to quit throwing things at Chuck Knoblauch.
• Your Opening Day starter is Carl Pavano, assuming he doesn't get hit by lightning due to the jinx of naming an Opening Day starter before winter is half over. Thankfully, Trevor Plouffe will not be your Opening Day shortstop, which makes it much less likely that Pavano murders an infielder for playing awful defense. The righthander depends on the defense for outs, not on strikeouts, and with the comical infield defense the team put on the field last year, Pavano spent most of the year stalking around behind the mound and looking for all the world like a man who wished he could stab a shortstop to death.
• Ben Revere is trying to improve his arm strength. Apparently, this year he'll be ditching his old throwing method, which involved dribbling the ball to the cutoff man on the fourteenth hop, and then turning his back and pretending that the wind was in his face.
• Ryan Doumit says that he's a dead-pull hitter. I'm looking forward to seeing Doumit clash with the coaching staff, battle to hit the ball the other way, ride the pine because he won't accept the organization's word as gospel, get frustrated, go to Boston, and hit eleven million home runs for the Red Sox.
• In winter ball news, Francisco Liriano made a couple starts in the Dominican series. In Game 4, he actually pitched very well, going four innings and allowing just one unearned run on two hits, while striking out five and walking two. Liriano also started Game 8 of the series yesterday, a potential clincher for Leones del Escogido. He pitched 3.2 innings, but gave up five runs (three earned) on six hits, including two home runs, and took the loss. But he struck out four and only walked one. So it's still hit or miss for the lefthander, who's 0-4 in the Dominican playoffs.
• In other winter ball news, Alexi Casilla is back from the Dominican, where he was a raging success. Let's hope - let's cross our fingers - that this translates back to the majors.
  

You'll have to excuse me if this has already been shown, because it actually went down about eight months ago, but if you've seen it then I apologize for taking up your valuable time on this dearth-of-Twins-news Sunday evening. Still, I have to share this with you. Because it's amazing.

Thanks to the Facebook friend who posted this on their page tonight...

This is what happened in Twins Territory this week:

• The Twins Caravan stopped at the Upper Midwest's finest Pizza Ranches, from Wahpeton to Glencoe. Thankfully, there were no reported casualties from the bus trip through the mysterious Biscay Triangle; nobody wants a repeat of the tragic 1979 Caravan, when Willie Norwood commandeered the bus, said he was, "Goin' south," and disappeared down US-15. He and Dave Goltz have not been seen since.
• Per Twitter, Perth native Liam Hendriks threw his first snowball. It was up in the zone and belted into the Fergus Falls night by Edwin Encarnacion. (DID YOU KNOW: although Australia does have winter, winter storm precipitation comes in the form of millions of tiny kangaroos and Men at Work cassingles, rather than snow. And that's...One to Grow On.)
• The next number the Twins will retire is Tom Kelly's #10. The announcement was made at Thursday evening's Diamond Awards. Hard to argue.
• The most important thing taking place during Twins Fest this weekend, besides waiting in line for Sweet Drew's autograph? Justin Morneau potentially getting the green light to start taking batting practice after wrist surgery. As Joe C. notes, Morneau also disputed an "Internet rumor" that he banged up his wrist in a locker room tirade, and said it was done through swinging.
• Joe C. also caught up with that one catcher guy, and says that, while he may not have gained 30 pounds as some have said, his face looks fuller and THERE ARE GRAY HAIRS BY HIS SIDEBURNS NOW. You're all one day closer to the grave, everybody!
  
• Speaking of whom, Danny Valencia tweeted that he's leaning on that one catcher guy to get on Twitter. In an entirely predictable occurrence, this caused internet wiseacres to kill the rest of their afternoon making #JoeMauerTweets jokes.
• In ACTUAL baseball news, Dan Wheeler, a relief pitcher who had expressed interest in signing with the Twins but the office phone kept going to voice mail, signed a minor-league deal with the Indians. Aaron Gleeman is nonplussed.
• If the Twins Geek gets too big for his britches and Aaron has to do the Gleeman and the Geek podcast by himself, Aaron Gleeman Is Nonplussed would be a good name for it.
• In other ACTUAL baseball news, the Tigers appear to be dead set on playing Miggy Cabrera at third base. As devastating as that lineup looks on paper, the thought of Cabrera and Delmon Young guarding the left field line with their combined UZR of "the car chase scene in Raising Arizona," should give Twins fans some measure of optimism.

Thoughts on these or any other things may be placed in the helpful comments section below.

If there is one player in the Twins organization who you expected to be on this list, it's Miguel Sano. He's a special talent, appearing at #23 on MLB.com's top 100 list but topping Baseball America's 2012 prospect list for the Twins. Sano is Twinkie Town's top prospect, too.

MLB.com places Sano's ETA at 2014, which would be his age 21 season. This seems a bit early, considering he was still in rookie ball in 2011. When we tried to estimate top prospect arrivals, we looked at the average time it takes a player from a certain position to reach the Majors and concluded that Sano would reach the Twins sometime between 2015 and 2016. That still makes him just 22 or 23, but it also seems like a very, very long way off.

It's feasible that Sano flies through the system, perhaps starting the 2014 season in Rochester and getting a callup later in the season. But if he were to make the Opening Day roster that year, I doubt any of us would be disappointed. This team needs young talent and needs it fast. Unfortunately, 2014 will have to suffice.

Speaking of young talent, the other player on MLB.com's list is Aaron Hicks, who slides in at #72. Hicks was the only other player who I thought had the chance to crack the top 100, although I was no longer sure he would. Particularly since he is no longer a top 10 outfielder according to the same source. Clearly his tools, particularly his speed, his patience (passiveness?) at the plate, and his raw and as-of-yet undeveloped power, still appeal to scouts. Which is good to hear.

Interestingly, Hicks drops to number four on Baseball America's list of top Twins prospects for 2012. Joe Benson is a sneaky and odd choice for number two, while Eddie Rosario is a well-deserved number three. Twinkie Town's top three include Sano follwed by Rosario, Oswaldo Arcia, and then Hicks fourth again.

In the post I referenced earlier, we estimated that Hicks would make his MLB debut in 2013...at the earliest. That would be his age 23 season. MLB.com has him arriving one year later, in 2014, apparently spending all of this year and next between double-A and triple-A.

More Twins top prospect reading...

Chris Parmelee MLB.com's #5 first base prospect
Miguel Sano MLB.com's #2 third base prospect
Anything by Seth Stohs