Well this is it folks. Today is the last day to vote. So let’s get busy and get the votes in!

1st: Go to MLB FanCave Voting and pick Lindsay’s video and vote! Do it as many times as it will let you! LOL

2nd: if you’re on twitter, go to @LindsayGuentzel & give her a follow

If you haven’t voted yet, this is your chance. if you have been voting already, thanks for your efforts!

Is that something you even say? I’m not much of a Mardi Gras-er, so I don’t really know the lingo. Here’s pretty much all I know about Mardi Gras:

• I know what it is… kind of. (Fat Tuesday is the night before Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, but people pretty much celebrate for several weeks leading up to that date).
• I know that, while New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras, it’s actually celebrated in a lot of other cities, too. (I still haven’t figured out what the difference is between Mardi Gras and Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, but then I really don’t care, either.)
• There’s something about “king cake” with a tiny plastic baby baked in to it, though I never cared enough about that to ask what it’s all about. (I do like cake, but I’m not real big on choking to death on tiny plastic toys hidden in my cake.)

That’s it, really.

Oh wait a minute…

• Beads… I know about beads and how they are acquired. (Men have to buy them, women don’t, yet somehow by the end of the night, women are wearing almost all of them.)

One thing I’ve really never quite figured out about Mardi Gras is… well… WHY? Best I can tell, Mardi Gras is about partying without conscience right up to Ash Wednesday, when I guess you’re supposed to sober up and face the reality of your actions.

No, I really don’t “get” Mardi Gras.

Then again, I have a lot of friends who can’t quite grasp why I get all excited about Spring Training, either. They don’t understand why I would devote so much time following what really is nothing more than “baseball practice,” much less why I would use up a week’s worth of vacation from work and a fair amount of money every year to travel almost 1,000 miles to WATCH that practice and a few games that don’t count.

I try to explain…

• It’s a stretch of several weeks when we get to watch baseball and talk about baseball without guilt or anxiety. Yes, there are games being played (a full month’s worth, actually), but we really don’t care who wins them. After all, a loss in a Spring Training game has absolutely no effect on a team’s place in the standings.
• We’ve spent months dealing with snow and cold and Spring Training is held someplace very warm. Face it, if you told your family you wanted to go to Florida for a week in March for any reason other than Spring Training, they’d probably tell you that you’re too old for “spring break.”
• But the best thing about Spring Training is that it allows us to celebrate the arrival of the baseball season and think about all of the “what ifs” that might allow our favorite team to be contenders. We can spend several weeks speculating about whether this veteran still can play or that young player will have a breakout season, without being proven right or wrong immediately.

But most people don’t get it. Only other “baseball people” understand… and not even all of them seem to grasp the concept.

By this time of year, I am tired. I’m tired of arguing about moves that were made and moves that weren’t. I don’t want to debate whether finishing .500 is a reasonable expectation for the Twins or whether there’s any chance they could compete for the AL Central Division if they stay healthy and I certainly don’t want to think about the possibility that they could be as bad as (or even worse than) last season. There will be time enough for that when the euphoria of spring ends and we have to face the reality of the wins and losses that count.

Right now, I just want to celebrate the arrival of Spring Training. I want to talk about what could be. I want to get drunk on stories about bullpen sessions and batting practice and fielding drills and how the Twins are going to play much better defense this season.

I’ll just keep overindulging on the possibilities, right up through the last Spring Training game of the year. Then, and only then, I’ll return to reality when the Twins take the field at Camden Yards on April 6.

Yes, Spring Training will be my Mardi Gras. Now… who wants beads?

- JC

SPRING TRAINING!! BASEBALL’S HERE!! My thanks to JC for carrying the load so well while I’ve been house-obsessed. But if there is one thing that can get my brain out of packing/moving/cleaning/painting world is the start of another baseball season. I can’t wait to get down there!

I’ve hardly been able to tear myself away from my twitter feed because our ever dutiful beat guys are down there sharing pics, videos and general hilarity from the pitchers & catchers who are going through the beginning of daily exercises! I totally encourage you to follow them – you’ll feel warmer just reading!

Phil Mackey – @PMac21

LaVelle E. Neal – @LaVelleNeal

Rhett Bollinger – @RhettBollinger

John Shipley – @shipleykid

It feels like I should write something monumental to mark the occasion, but as is almost always the case, I find that there are other Twins bloggers who can speak to the occasion much more eloquently than I. So, if you haven’t done so already, go check out the blogs of the following terrific writers:

K-bro welcomes our favorite players back in to our lives with poetry and optimism with her “The Start of Something Great” post.

TwinsGeek adds his own twist to Franklin Pierce Adams’ famous poem, with his “Baseball’s Happy Lexicon – 2012.”

Seth Stohs isn’t as poetic as the Geek and K-bro, but his prose is no less enthusiastic in his joy at the uttering of “Four Words that Make Me Smile: Pitchers and Catchers Report!”

They said it right.

- JC

Pitchers and catchers report this weekend!

The Twins’ pitchers and catchers officially report to Spring Training Saturday, with first official workouts, I believe, scheduled for Sunday. When that happens, it’s officially “baseball season.” I guess we’ll have to come up with some kind of new “countdown” widget to put up over on the right side of the page. Maybe a countdown to Opening Day? Ah, a blogger’s work is never done.

Speaking of which, with the season quasi-officially underway, our work here is about to get more serious, too. Sure, it’s been fun ranting about Bud Selig and the Twins’ moves (or lack thereof) and how things are shaping up for other teams, but if we’re being perfectly honest, most of us ran out of really interesting topics to talk about a long time ago. But with baseball players actually getting on the field this weekend, that’s about to change.

We’ve already been getting a few reports from Ft. Myers from both paid professional media like the Strib’s LaVelle E. Neal III (who’s been getting his blog warmed up with occasional reports) as well as bloggers fortunate enough to be on the scene like John Swol of TwinsTrivia.com (who’s posted about several pre-camp visits he’s made to the complex, along with links to a whole bunch of pictures).

Pretty soon (though not soon enough), it will be our turn. I’ll be making my way down to Ft. Myers toward the end of Spring Training for my annual trip and I will be posting pretty much daily while I’m there.

Babs: Now you've seen Ft Myers Beach... so you can just go watch baseball

But this season, I won’t be the only Knuckleball reporting from the Lee County Sports Complex. CapitalBabs will be embarking on her first-ever Spring Training adventure early in March. She has promised to post her impressions and we can pretty much count on seeing a whole bunch of pictures, though she did mention that she and her hubby also have plans to spend time on non-baseball related activities while they are in Ft. Myers. She mentioned something about golf and beaches. Heck, I didn’t even know there was anything going on in Florida besides baseball that time of year.

Anyway, I really enjoy seeing and hearing about the Spring Training experience through different eyes and especially from the perspective of fans who haven’t been down there before, so I’m looking forward to reading Babs’ reports.

Of course, we won’t be the only bloggers to make the journey. I haven’t heard or read about everyone who’s announced plans to make the trip but I did read that Thrylos, from Tenth Inning Stretch, is planning on reporting from Ft. Myers at some point. If you know of other bloggers going down there, do us a favor and mention something about it in the comments section. Likewise, if any of our readers are going to be down there, let us know that, too. We’d love to hear from you and maybe even share your favorite pictures from your trip, if you’re willing.

If you feel inclined, you can also click here… and here… and here… to go back and read the Spring Training Guide tips I posted about this time a year ago. Or just wing it and discover things on your own!

Podcast Appearance

I also want to mention that I participated in “The Phil Naessens Show” podcast Thursday night. You can give it a listen over at The Baseball Page site (www.thebaseballpage.com). If you haven’t added The Baseball Page to your regular list of sites to check out, you should. The folks there cover a wide variety of MLB issues. Phil is interviewing bloggers representing all of the Major League teams. I encourage you to overlook his questionable judgement in choosing me to be his Minnesota Twins blogger representative and check it out anyway.

Condolences

Finally, we send our condolences out to the family, friends and fans of Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter, who passed away Thursday, less than a year after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Carter was never one of my favorite players, probably because he never played for a team I felt any particular affinity toward, but I do remember the enthusiasm he brought to the game. I remember watching him and thinking, “that guy really enjoys playing baseball.” He obviously also played the game very well. Carter was just 57 years old at his passing and I have to admit that hits just a bit too close to home for me. Rest in Peace, Gary.

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Once again, if any of you have Spring Training plans, by all means leave a comment or at least email us and let us know about your plans!

- JC

We asked what the plan was for rebuilding a bullpen that arguably made the rotation look good, by comparison, and that was losing the guy who’d been anchoring said bullpen for most of the past decade, in Joe Nathan. Some of us (OK, maybe it was mostly me) hoped that he’d upgrade the rotation to the point where the team would get more than five innings out of starts by pitchers not named Pavano, which would almost certainly make the bullpen look better. But whatever the plan was, we mostly just wanted to know that there WAS a plan.

Can Rick Anderson get lucky and give Glen Perkins some help in the bullpen? (Photo: Reuters/Steve Nesius)

Now… finally… thanks to Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson, as reported in this article posted Sunday by the Pioneer-Press’ Tom Powers, we have our answer. “It’s like Terry Ryan said to me the other day, ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky,’” Anderson said.

I don’t know about you, but I feel better already. Here we were concerned that maybe Ryan and the Twins didn’t really have a plan for improving their pitching in 2012.

My biggest concern was that the Twins were going to repeat Bill Smith’s ill-fated attempt to restock their bullpen a year ago, after losing Jesse Crain, Matt Guerrier, and others. Smith, you may recall, brought in about a dozen guys to compete for the honor of filling in the empty bullpen spots behind Nathan, Matt Capps and Jose Mijares. The field consisted of both new faces (Jim Hoey, Dusty Hughes, Scott Diamond) and old faces (Pat Neshek, Anthony Slama, Kyle Waldrop, Glen Perkins, Alex Burnett). In the end, only Perkins made significant positive contributions on the mound.

It didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable plan, at the time. After all, most effective middle relievers are “discovered” when they stand out given similar opportunities. But it certainly didn’t work for Smith and the Twins, so many of us hoped for a somewhat different approach in 2012.

Thankfully, Terry Ryan does indeed have a different plan. He’s bringing in THIRTY-THREE pitchers.

Yes, I know, some of those guys are going to be in the rotation and a couple others are pretty much locks for bullpen roles, so they aren’t all competing for bullpen spots. But the rotation is pretty much set and only Capps, Perkins and Duensing can be considered virtual sure-things to be members of the Opening Day bullpen corps.

That leaves 25 pitchers competing for the remaining 4-5 bullpen spots. How in the world will Anderson and manager Ron Gardenhire possibly sort through all of those guys to determine which should claim a Big League roster spot?

Again, thanks to Mr. Powers and Coach Anderson, we have a few clues:

“We’ve got 33 pitchers coming in,” Anderson said Sunday from Florida. “I’ve already talked to just about every one of them. We have 13 days to get ready to play. We have the time to get ready.”

There’s clue number one. If you’re a pitcher with an invitation to the Twins’ Big League camp, but Anderson hasn’t spoken to you yet, it’s probably premature to lease an apartment in the Twin Cities.

But there’s more:

“We’ve got ‘B’ games and split squads,” Anderson said. “With 33 pitchers, we need to find innings to see what they’ve got. I was thinking about this just this morning: In the past, maybe we’ve had a couple of spots open, and we didn’t have a whole lot of options. This year, we’ve got nine or 10 guys with a legitimate shot. Maybe more.”

Hmmmm… nine or 10 guys… maybe more… with a legitimate shot. But which nine or 10 guys?

“T.K. [former Twins manager Tom Kelly] always says, ‘Don’t let spring training fool you,’ ” Anderson added with a laugh. “But this year it’s going to be go, go, go. If you don’t have a good spring, we’ll send you down to Triple-A and say, ‘Maybe we’ll see you again.’ This year, guys are pitching for jobs and not just to get in shape.”

Well, I still don’t know exactly who the nine or 10 guys are with a legitimate shot at making the ballclub, but it sounds to me like we’ll all discover pretty quickly who ISN’T in that group. That would be anyone who’s first inning or two of work in Ft. Myers sucks.

So that’s the plan, fans. Invite a crapload of maybes, wannabes, usedtabes, and almostweres to Spring Training, put them on the mound and see if any of them can get anyone out… and, “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

And here we were worried they didn’t have a plan.

- JC

Yes, I’m going to rant… again… about broadcast blackouts and how MLB doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about fans throughout Iowa and parts of Nevada (and a few other states) where fans are literally prevented from watching just about any team they care at all about play baseball on cable television or the internet.

I won’t rehash the issue in its entirety. You can click here to read all about it or just type “blackouts” in the search window at the top of our site to bring up any number of my previous rants on the topic. Here, I’ll just provide a little updated rant.

At a Hot Stove banquet the week of Twinsfest, I had the pleasure of listening in on a Q&A session with a panel that included Twins President Dave St. Peter. With encouragement from a fellow Twins fan and blogger who shall remain nameless (other than to say he has a view from Section 219 of Target Field for several Twins games a year) and emboldened by the beer or five I had during dinner and the following couple of hours, I asked Mr. St. Peter whether the Twins would ever address the crazy “blackout” issue that prevents me and my fellow Iowans from seeing Twins games either on cable television or via the internet.

St. Peter admitted that Iowa was in the middle of a “Bermuda Triangle” (his words) and that he and the Twins would like to see the situation changed, but the matter is dictated by MLB’s broadcast rights policy and any changes would have to come from league headquarters. He also suggested I write to Iowa’s Congressional delegation.

Frankly, I was surprised someone in baseball would actually encourage a fan to complain to my Senators and Congressman about MLB (because certainly he must be aware that such a complaint would naturally include a suggestion that baseball’s anti-trust exemption be considered for review), but I let the matter drop at the time.

I didn’t bother to let him know that I had already written a polite letter (really… I CAN be polite when I want to be… and when I think it might be more productive than being brutally honest) to Commissioner Selig a couple of years ago about the blackout policy and got exactly the kind of response I expected. That is to say, no response whatsoever.

I also didn’t point out ot Mr. St. Peter that this issue has been raised by far more influential people than I, such as former MLB president Bob DuPuy, who lobbied for an end to the blackouts… in 2008… with no effect whatsoever.

Of course, I don’t really expect Bud Selig to step in and make a decision regarding the broadcast blackouts. After all, we’re talking about a guy who is seemingly paralyzed by inaction regarding any decision at all that might not be 100% okie-dokie with all of the owners and all of the Networks, so it’s not logical to think he’d make a decision on this matter either.

Then again, considering the decision he did make on the whole All-Star Game/World Series home field thing, maybe we’re all just better off waiting for the next Commissioner anyway. After all, Selig will retire when the latest “last” extension is up in two years, right?

Yeah… right.

- JC

~You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant~

You’re all familiar with “the Peter Principle,” right? It’s the organizational principle that states, “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Here’s the Wiki synopsis:

The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.” “Managing upward” is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly “manage” superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing. (emphasis is mine)

There’s a very strong example of the “managing upward” corollary sitting atop Major League Baseball.

I wasn’t at all surprised last month when MLB announced that Bud Selig’s contract had been extended two years. Disappointed? Yes… but far from surprised. In fact, I’ll only be surprised if the MLB team owners eventually do kick Selig out of his office while he’s still breathing. 

Why should they? The owners with the most clout (read: owners of teams with the greatest revenue streams) have been successfully “managing upward” for years. If they hired a new Commissioner of Baseball, there’s a pretty good chance that he or she would come in and expect to be able to make decisions in the best interests of baseball. The big market owners sure don’t want that.

Sure, paying a guy $23 million a year to make no decisions might sound like a lot of money, but each team’s share of his salary is less than the price of a below-Replacement Level Player. That’s chump change (an appropriate turn of a phrase in this case) to the bazillionaires who own MLB teams.

But wait, didn’t Bud Selig lead baseball through an unprecedented era of labor peace and didn’t he implement the toughest drug testing program in professional sports? Yes… of course he did. If you actually believe he “decided” any of that, rather than those decisions all being made as part of collective bargaining sessions. I’m sure there was not a lot of unilateral decision making by the Commissioner in those sessions, folks.

Bud Selig

Then again, Selig’s fingerprints did seem to be all over the Mitchell Report. You remember the Mitchell Report, right? It was Bud’s response to being called in on the carpet by Congress for providing impotent leadership on PEDs. Imagine that… perhaps the most impotent body of “decision makers” in the country criticized Selig for his lack of leadership. That ought to tell you something. The Mitchell Report itself was the kind of work product you would expect from a group with no subpoena power and which leaked almost as many names that ultimately did NOT show up in the report as those who did. (I’m betting Jeff Bagwell still would like to know who he should see about that little matter, since so many HOFvoters seem to think he was ”named” in the Mitchell Report.)

Still, maybe we’re being a bit unfair. After all, drug testing and labor negotiations are huge and complicated matters. No one person could have stepped up and unilaterally made the kinds of decisions necessary to work through those issues. Commissioners’ decisions are more geared toward the less complicated, “keep the trains running on time” issues that pop up occasionally, like… well… like how to determine home team in the World Series, I guess. After all, he stepped up and made a great call on that matter, right?

In that vein, here are a few more decisions that you would think the Commissioner should be able to take a swing at:

Playoffs:

The big news in the off-season was that the Astros will be moving to the American League in 2013, as part of a realignment geared toward bringing consistency to the number of teams in each league/division and in scheduling. As part of the reorganization, we’ll have two wild card teams in each league that will play one game against one another to determine which of the wild cards will move in to the Divisional Series. Personally, while it’s been widely criticized, I’m on board with that. But we’ve been waiting for months to find out whether the new playoff format will be implemented this year or not.

Selig apparently wants it implemented now. But there are scheduling challenges and clearly the Networks and the people who would have to address those challenges would have easier lives if MLB waited until 2013 to implement the new format. So, the only way the format will be changed this season is if Bud Selig stands up and says, “just frigging get it done!” Yeah… THAT’S not gonna happen.

So we’ll just continue to sit around and wait without a resolution until it just becomes too late to make any changes and Bud will shrug and say, “I tried.”

The Oakland/San Jose Athletics:

The A’s play in a really bad excuse for a ballpark in a community not inclined to do much to change the situation. Several years ago, their owner decided he wanted to move his team down the road to San Jose, where a new stadium could be built and a “genius” GM like Billy Beane could finally compete on a level playing field with the rest of the league.

The problem is, San Jose is considered part of the “home market” of the San Francisco Giants and the Giants aren’t crazy about letting the A’s move in to “their” market. The Giants gloss over a few things, of course, such as the fact that the reason San Jose is part of their home market is that they asked the Athletics to relinquish THEIR rights to San Jose years ago when the Giants were contemplating moving there, themselves. Then they got a new downtown stadium in San Francisco and their plans (or was it a threat?) to move ended. So now that the Athletics want to move there, instead, the Giants won’t give back the rights to the area.

Sounds like a call that a Commissioner should make, right? After all, we’re talking about deciding a matter in the best interests of baseball.

But Selig couldn’t bring himself to make a decision like this without knowing all the facts, so he established a group to study the matter… THREE YEARS AGO.

Today, there’s still no word from Selig on the issue and, by God, A’s owner Lew Wolff is pissed off and tired of waiting. Word from the Commissioner’s office in December was that a decision was coming by February (no word on whether or not Selig has allowed his staff to flip the calendar pages past January 31 at MLB headquarters).

Still, how important is this to Wolff, compared to the prospect of having a Commissioner who might actually WANT to make decisions? All you need to know is that Wolff voted with his peers to extend Selig’s contract two more years. Maybe you’ll have that decision sometime in 2015, Lew.

Compensation for Theo Epstein:

Last fall, Red Sox GM Theo Epstein was hired by the Cubs to run their team, despite having time remaining on his contract with Boston. The clubs apparently agreed that they would work out compensation later and that, in the unlikely event that they couldn’t work out a deal, the Commissioner would decide.

That was in October. This is February and, surprise, they can’t reach agreement on fair compensation. Boston wants every player in the Cubs organization who’s got a chance of ever being good (yes, both of them) and the Cubs think two old catchers masks should be sufficient.

Of course, what Selig SHOULD have done at the time was is say, “BS! Come to an agreement now or forget about it.” But he didn’t. So now he’s faced with making a decision that will certainly upset one team owner or the other.

So, in true Bud Selig fashion, he’s dragging the process out as long as possible in the apparent hope that people will forget about it. And he may be right… the other 28 owners would like him to forget about it. The last thing they want is for a precedent to be set giving the Commissioner the authority to settle such things.

There is one more little decision that I’d like to see the Commissioner step up and make, but this post has run on long enough for today, so I’ll save the last point for tomorrow. Those of you who’ve been reading my stuff here for a while can probably already guess the issue I’d like Mr. Selig to address, but I’ll leave you with a little hint:

~You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant~

- JC

It almost goes without saying, but if you need more evidence that judging an organization’s minor leaguers is an inexact science, at best, all you need to do is compare prospect rankings of even the most reputable sources.

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com released his “Top 100″ prospects list and it wasn’t good news for the Minnesota Twins. Only two players in their organization, consensus top Twins prospect Miguel Sano (#23) and Aaron Hicks (#72) made the list. Since there are 30 MLB teams, logic would tell you that to be considered as having an “average” number of highly ranked prospects an organization should have at least three players among any “Top 100″ list.

Predictably, there were a few articles popping up within both mainstream media and social media that discussed the sad state of the Twins minor league talent levels.

Fast forward to yesterday morning and we had a new “Top 100″ list from ESPN’s Keith Law (Insider subcription required). Surprise! The Twins post FOUR players on Law’s list, with Eddie Rosario (#50) and Oswaldo Arcia (#85) joining Sano (#28) and Hicks (#80). Placing four in Law’s “Top 100″ might indicate the Twins organization is a bit above average. Funny how an organization can improve so much over the course of a couple of winter weeks without playing a single game, isn’t it?

So which is it? Is the Twins organization straggling behind the competition when it comes to developing high end prospects or are they a bit above the norm? I suppose we could await Baseball America’s “Top 100″ list to break the tie, but that’s really not necessary. The answer is “yes.”

Aaron Hicks

What’s that you say… that wasn’t a “yes or no” question? I know that. After all I posed the question. But the answer really is that the Twins organization is both a bit below and a bit above the competition.

Why below? Because three of the four players Law thinks highly of are at least two years (and more likely at least three years) away from being Big Leaguers, and the fourth (Hicks) fell like a rock in Law’s rankings from 10th in 2011 to 80th in 2012. Not exactly cause to be optimistic that he’ll be leading the Twins to the playoffs any time real soon.

In addition, in an era when top-end starting pitching has become obscenely expensive on the open market, making “growing your own” an absolute necessity, the Twins have zero pitchers in any “Top 100″ list released to date this year. Sure, they had a bit of bad luck with Kyle Gibson’s injury a year ago, but you don’t get extra points for bad luck.

On the other hand, the Twins obviously intended for this imbalance to occur. While you never can be 100% sure how any 16-21 year old will mature, mentally or physically, there’s usually a reason top draft picks and international signees get big bucks… they are the most likely to become top prospects and, ideally, star players. And the Twins have been focusing on position players above pitchers in the high rounds of the draft and in their international scouting.

So now four of those players appear to be among the top prospects in baseball, which should indicate that the organization’s plans are working out roughly the way they hoped. How comfortable fans should feel about that conclusion is, I suppose, another topic for reasonable debate.

The Twins had some bad luck and some bad drafts a few years back (as the Strib’s LaVelle E. Neal III has done a good job of reviewing on his blog). So unless you count Gibson, there simply isn’t a “big impact” player in the organization that’s going to be stepping in to a leadership role with the Twins this year or even in 2013… maybe not even by 2014 unless Hicks gets things turned around.

The bottom line is that there is reason for some optimism that help is on the way, but it’s tempered by the fact that such help is likely on the distant horizon, rather than anything imminent. There’s a solid group of young players with the potential to be productive Major League ballplayers making their way up in the organizational ranks and that includes a lot of players over and above the guys you see on any “top prospect” list.

For now, and likely for the next couple of seasons, the Twins will need to continue filling out their Major League roster with mid-level free agents and other teams’ cast-offs. But if Twins fans can be patient, there is the potential for the next wave of stars to be very good.

I know… Twins fans being patient? Not likely.

- JC

P.S. If you want to know more about the Twins prospects mentioned above and about 150 others in the organization, it’s not too late to order your Minnesota Twins 2012 Prospect Handbook. Head on over to SethSpeaks.net for the link and order your copy. I’ve got four copies myself, so what are YOU waiting for?

You may not have even heard about the competition but I gotta admit, if I wasn’t so naturally lazy, I might have tried for it.  But yeah, that’s not me regardless of how fun it looks.

BUT there is a Twins fan in the list! Lindsay Guentzel.

You may or may not know her if you’re in the blogging community but she’s a local baseball nut who knows her blogging, reporting, radio and general Twins world. I think it would be FANTASTIC if we could organize our folk to get her voted in! It’s easy enough to do but as always, we’re battling larger networks for some of the other fans…  But we can do this!

1st: Go to MLB FanCave Voting and pick Lindsay’s video and vote! Do it as many times as it will let you! LOL

2nd: if you’re on twitter, go to @LindsayGuentzel & give her a follow.