I have some cousins that live in a house with a large unfinished basement. They moved to this house from one that was considerably larger, not so much in an effort to downsize, but more to find a residence that was more affordable. The problem with this was my Aunt is a longtime suffer of “I might still need that syndrome.” She will fully deny it, but it is a debilitating illness that has hampered the functionality of said basement, and more obscurely, her lifestyle in general. She attaches fond memories with items that were once a mainstay in her life, and because of those memories, has an intense affinity with holding on to them. I fear that my Aunt and the Pohlads suffer from the same affliction.

When Terry Ryan was fired last season many of us hoped for the “clean house” take when rebuilding the front office. We hoped that names like Rob Antony, Deron Johnson, and (maybe this one is just me) Jack Goin would be sending resumes to other organizations or maybe jumping into a different line of work all together. We hoped that with the hiring of Derek Falvey and Thad Lavine would come a new era of analytics in Twins baseball that would return us to glory days of being hated by the White Sox for our piranha-esk qualities and our “right way” idealistic of how a baseball team should be run. Many of us were disappointed.

But what I failed to see at the time is that the Pohlads have this pack-rat nature that was not quite blatantly obvious. Like my aunt, they have fond memories associated with some of these people and hold to the ideas that what we once found so useful could be just as useful once again. With a younger and more Beane-like view on baseball, I find this shortsighted.

Personally, I am not a pack-rat. I throw things away hoping that they will never be needed again, sometimes to my down fall. I risk that chance because I am a firm believer that the future holds greater value than the past, and to fully harness that value, we need to embrace it. Enter, the duo that some of us affectionately call, Falvine.

Falvine is like showing your aunt a Property Brothers-esk rendering of what her basement could be like. They are the people that will hopefully update this franchise to its full potential, restoring it to the glory days that the Pohlads are so desperately holding on to. But the two different factions disagree with how to do that.

The most effective way to clean out my begrudgingly stubborn aunt’s basement is to send her on a week’s vacation and make executive decisions on what to keep and what to sentence to the landfill (or send her away for two weeks and find out how to properly recycle everything…). Falvine does not have this option available to them.

The other way to clean the basement is to introduce new things, to slowly change the functionality, until my aunt realizes that her old items are no longer useful and the pipedream of them once again becoming mainstays in her life is unrealistic. This is what Falvine is doing.

Many of us were disheartened by the roster that the Twins appear to be headed north with. Danny Santana on the bench, Mauer (love the guy to death by the way and will always be my favorite player) appearing to be slated for 162 starts. Hughes and Santiago in the rotation. 13 pitchers because of the mortal fear that the aforementioned starters will have a hard time completing more than 3 1/3 innings. I believe that these are all carefully calculated decisions that Falvine has made to show the Pohlads that the way the Twins of a decade ago were so successful is no longer sustainable. It is their way to slowly normalize to the Pohlads that Falvine’s way of doing things is the way of the future.

None of us realistically expected this team to compete for a championship, a pennant, a division title or heck, even a winning record, this season. To me that makes this way of doing things justified. Because in a few short years, many of us hope to be talking about who will be the pinch runner when we get a man on first in a tied game 3 of the ALCS. And when we have that conversation, I want Carl Pohlad’s opinion as far from the realm of consideration as possible.