Twinkie Town, a Minnesota Twins community

Seems Forbes may have been off the mark.

Via Jon Krawczynski's AP column today (I can't find a direct AP link, so I just picked a Google result - more page hits for the Willmar paper!): The Twins' payroll reached $115 million this season, and after watching the results on the field, it could be a tough sell to ownership to get to that number again. "I think we pushed it beyond where we should have," Smith said. "Ownership let us go with it in an attempt to win and it didn't work. It backfired a little bit. All of the injuries made it tough. "We want to win and ownership wants to win. We also have to be somewhat responsible. Payroll becomes a function of revenues. We're going to have plenty of money. We're going to win with players not money." If that's not a setup for reducing next year's payroll, I don't know what is.

In a post by SBN's Oilers' affiliate, The Copper & Blue, the Hurricanes were rated today as the eighth-best team in the league as determined by Marginal Cap Efficiency. That statistic is calculated using the points earned by the team compared to the team's payroll, showing in an unbiased manner that Maurice and his young 'Canes might not have done so bad at all given the team's financial constraints.

But there is nothing to worry about here: The bounced checks were made out to part-timers and the team did have the money needed to pay them. It's just a messy, icky legal thingy.

For the first time in over a year, I've updated the White Sox payroll spreadsheet