Twins named potential landing spot for pair of top free agent pitchers

While the MLB season ended in September, the Minnesota Twins season was over long before that. The team zombie walked its way down the stretch of the season, missing the playoffs after having a near-90 percent chance of making it and one of the best teams in the American League.

All of that came apart at the seams when a team that was held together by duct tape and bubble gum was met with the intense heat of a playoff race. The Twins weren't a bad team over the summer, but injuries and poor play converged to magnify ownership's lack of investment in the roster.

Perhaps that will change this year.

The Twins are a historically frugal franchise but they've also been owned by the same family for the last four decades, something that's soon going to change. The Pohlads put the Twins up for sale this fall, and while no buyer seems to have emerged yet the hope is that it will be someone who actually cares enough to meaningfully invest in the team.

An ownership change isn't expected until sometime after the offseason, unless things move incrediby fast, but maybe the Pohlads will more motivated to spend knowing they won't be on the hook for needing to pay it off in the future.

If that happens, then some of the early offseason predictions for the Twins might actually play out.

Twins listed as potential landing spots for Yusei Kikuchi and Luis Severino

Bleacher Report looked at the Top 10 pitchers set to hit free agency, but apparently didn't get the memo about how little the Twins actually spend. Minnesota is listed as a potential landing spot for two of the top arms: Houston's Yusei Kikuchi and New York's Luis Severino.

This isn't the first time Minnesota has been linked in some way to Kikuchi. He was reportedly a trade deadline target before the Astros blew Toronto away with a massive offer. The Twins were wise to not overpay to beat it, but they team paid the price for not having a frontline starter later in the season when the rotation collapsed.

Had the Twins acquired Kikuchi, perhaps their season would have gone differently.

Severino was on the radar last offseason as a potential free agent target, but we all know how that went. He signed a $13 million deal with the Mets and became one of a handful of mid-buget pitchers who were priced out of Minnesota's frugal range.

That's ultimately what this all comes down to again. Just like last year, Severino and Kikuchi make a ton of sense for a team that wants to go out and spend $13 million on a starter and be competitive. Nothing the Pohlads have done suggests they're remotely interested in doing that and fans are bracing themselves to once again watch the team pinch pennies rather than meaningfully add to the roster.

While nobody is expecting much in the way of free agency moves this offseason, starting pitching is one area the Twins might be able to get away with going lean. The Twins have a ton of pitching depth, as demonstrated with the elevations of David Festa and Zebby Matthews this past season. Marco Raya is bubbling under the surface as well as Andrew Morris and Cory Lewis.

It's not a wise decision to kick the can down the road and assume young pitchers will make up for the lack of spending, but it's a strategy the Twins have long worked with. There's an easy argument to make that spending some money now to acquire Kikuchi's 5-1 record and 2.70 ERA or Severino's 1.214 WHIP across 182 innings of work, but that's what a serious team would do.

There's a chance Minnesota gets active in ways they teased but never followed up on last year, but we've all been fooled before.

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