It’s been a while since I updated my blog. To be honest, I’ve been spending most of my energy getting irritated by the Vikings. I could rant for hours about the Vikes but i’ll refrain for today.

I have been trying my best to understand why the Twins haven’t jumped (even slightly) into the mix. Although I hear that we are the “front runners for Sidney Ponson” (which even if we did sign him is far from filling Radke’s cleats) the Twins have done nothing outside of signing a few of our own guys. While all of this non-activity has been going on there have been many stories about free agency over the past few weeks since the signing period began. Most of them were only slightly interesting. Last night’s announcement that Barry Zito signed a 126-million dollar deal to cross the bridge from Oakland to San Fran was by far the MOST interesting (and upsetting) to me.

In a time where baseball salaries have been inflating quicker than that of our national debt one group of players has been somewhat undervalued. That group…. Pitchers. While the Twins would never be able to sign the likes of A-Rod or Manny we always knew that we could win games with pitching and defense. The strategy was to have better pitchers (as a whole) than the batters in the American League. We have been benefitted by having some good home-grown players and a little luck on our side (rule 5 pickup Santana).

The whole pitching free agent landscape has officially changed forever. Barry Zito is now the highest payed pitcher of all time. Generally TwinsNation has always had this idea that Johan would stay around. After all he is a “team” guy. Up until yesterday we had hopes of resigning him to a long term contract that would get him into our brand new stadium.

Well Twins fans… Those days are over. When Santana becomes a free agent he will leave. There will be no more Cy-Young winners on our team. He will likely be the first 200-million dollar pitcher in the history of the MLB. After all…. If Barry Zito (who is good but not always dominant) can get 18-million/year then certainly Santana can get WAY more than that.

We will be forced to do what we have always done in the past. We’ll have to hope that Pohlad will spend a few million extra and use our farm system to get the guys that make us successful. If our farm system fails us? Well, the we might slip back into what I like to call the “dark years”.