I've kind of come to expect a plan out of Falvine. And thinning out the catching depth in order to acquire a pretty good shortstop, then spinning that pretty good shortstop with your starting thirdbasemen into a worse catcher than you started with and a worse shortstop than you acquired is pretty tough to track.

Unless it's just about the payroll relief, which can't be discarded because this is Minnesota. But they've been making the right noises about playing in the deep end of the pool and sort of backed it up with Donaldson and the Buxton extension. Explicitly telling people for decades that they had no interest in spending money worked perfectly fine, so if the public is good with that then there's no reason to gesture at it now and make yourself into liars.

But the actual moves that would make all this make sense are pretty high effort. I don't like assuming things about their intentions because I'm a hopeful person and that's not a good position to be in. But given the circular nature of the trades:

kiner-falefa > urshela
garver > sanchez
paying Donaldson 44mm < not paying Donaldson 44mm

... it feels reasonable to expect that they've identified a better shortstop, right? I don't feel crazy here. Not finding good shortstop solutions is really common. Teams do it all the time. But when you punt away a useful (at worst) shortstop right before spring training starts, it feels like an unambiguous statement that there are better options available. Since Lewis isn't ready and maybe isn't a shortstop and Martin isn't ready and maybe isn't a shortstop and the team isn't pretending either of those things isn't true - then all we've got left to consider is names the Twins never consider: Trevor Story and Carlos Correa.

But posting about "what if Trevor Story or Carlos Correa played for my favorite team" isn't really a normal thing to do for a Twins fan, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens. No reason to spill 500 words on an all-star if I'm just going to turn around and pretend that whatever corpse they decide to reanimate is actually a smart and good decision. This could all be really fun. Will probably be kind of stupid.