Has it actually been a slow offseason for the Twins?

As you may have noticed by frantically hitting the F5 key on this and many other baseball websites for the past couple of months, nothing is happening in the baseball world. Many people have written many words on why so many free agents remain unsigned this season — but none of them talk specially about the Twins! No one talks about ‘em!

So I’ll do it! I’ll talk about the Twins!

Has this offseason been as slow for Minnesota specifically as it has been for the rest of the league? I took a look at how many players the team signed to minor and major league contracts for the months of November through February of every season going back to the 2010-2011 offseason on the transactions page of the Twins website. I didn’t go back any further because for some reason it says no transactions of any kind happened in the 2008-2009 offseason, and I don’t think that’s actually true.

There wasn’t a single player signed to a major league contract in March or April of any offseason, and there were very few minor league contracts given out, so I didn’t include those months.

Here’s the graph/chart. Hopefully it’s readable.

In regards to major league talent, the Twins have already signed more players to big league contracts than they have in any offseason since 2011-2012. Seeing as the club is aiming to sign at least one starting pitcher to help out the rotation, it’s possible the team could sign as many major leaguers as they did in the 2011-2012 offseason, when they signed six.

However, it’s already the end of January, and the Twins have traditionally not signed a player to a major league contract after the first month of the year. The Twins’ signing of Matt Belisle on February 3, 2017 is their only February-or-later MLB signing going back at least six years. Still, with the way things are looking this offseason, the Twins could make a later signing, and end up with quite a lot of new major leaguers compared to their own recent history.

While most are lamenting the bitterly slow pace of major league signings, it looks like the Twins have actually had their minor league signings slow down this offseason. The team signed 11 players to minor league contracts in just December of the 2016-2017 offseason and 16 players in just December of the 2015-2016 offseason, but this offseason they’ve signed only 17 minor league players total from November through January. That’s the fewest number of minor league deals through this point of the offseason in the time frames I looked at.

So despite the snail’s pace of the offseason in general, the Twins have actually signed more players to major league contracts than they have in recent years, and are on pace to potentially sign fewer players to minor league contracts than they have in at least the last six offseasons.

What does this all mean? I dunno. I was just curious about a thing, made a table, and then wrote about it.

What do you think?