The injury to Joel Zumaya once again brings up the Twins' lack of pitching, especially in the bullpen.  We all know that there were a lot of free agent pitchers out there, and that almost all of them went to teams other than the Twins.  That means the Twins will enter this season with pretty much the same pitchers they had last year other than some subtractions, most notably Joe Nathan.  It seems obvious this will not be good enough.

The thing is that if it's obvious to us, it must be obvious to the people running the Twins, too.  That raises the question of why the Twins didn't do more to deal with it.  There are two default explanations we tend to go to in a situation like this, but neither seems to apply.

1.  The Twins are a bunch of tightwads.  Maybe they are, but that's not really an answer here.  No one was expecting them to sign a superstar.  As many people have pointed out, most notably Aaron Gleeman, there were lots of pitchers the Twins could have signed for very little.  The Twins may or may not be cheap, but that's not the reason they did not make more moves.

2.  The general manager is a doofus.  I have to confess, if Bill Smith was still the GM, this is where I'd have gone, but he's not.  Terry Ryan is, and I don't think Terry Ryan is a doofus.

When Terry Ryan ran the Twins before, he always had some sort of plan.  It may or may not have been a good plan, but he always had one, and eventually we could see what it was.  So, assuming he has a plan now, the questions are what is the plan, and why did making moves to improve the pitching this off-season not fit the plan.

I clearly don't know, but here's my best guess.  Terry Ryan made the decision that the Twins were not likely to contend for the division anyway.  While the pitchers out there might have helped some, they were not good enough to turn the Twins from a 99-loss team into contenders, and they were not good enough to be part of a long-term solution.  Therefore, he decided to go with what they have.  This will save a little money, but I don't think that was the primary motivation.  I think the main reasons are a)  to give some of these guys one last, long chance in the majors and determine, once and for all, whether they're good enough to pitch there and b) to make sure there's room for guys like Liam Hendriks, Carlos Gutierrez, and Deolis Guerra when they're ready to come up.

We may or may not like this plan, but that's my best guess at what the plan is.  What do you think?