The teaser on the main page for this article says "The Twins are the type of team that usually sells aggressively at the deadline, but they stood pat."

When have they ever sold aggressively at the deadline?

I know Willingham has been really good, is signed cheap, and the Twins still need to field a team for the next 2+ years. But really, is he going to be part of the next good Twins team? Will the farm produce enough talent by 2014 to surround him? I think the general consensus is no.

The title of this article sure is misleading.

The toughest part of this equation is knowing what directive Terry Ryan got from ownership. I think it's pretty clear they need to do a full-on rebuild, and I would guess Ryan recognizes this, but I don't know if ownership wants to endure the public backlash if they ship off all their respectable players. The preference for major league players in return for their trade chips signals that ownership doesn't think it has the political capital with the fanbase to willingly diminish the major league team. It kills me as a Twins fan, because they lucked into some great deadline trade bait this year, with Willingham healthy and on pace to hit 40 homers, Liriano with a resurgence leading up to the deadline, Span a cost-controlled, up the middle player reemerging and avoiding a recurrence of his concussion problems, Doumit proving adequate enough at catcher that he's pretty valuable, Burton emerging from nowhere, etc. I mean, the stars aligned on some of these guys to bring back more value than one would expect, and almost certainly more value than they'll command at any future point. And yet nothing was done outside the underwhelming Liriano trade, which as far as I can tell has the purpose of locking up two 25-man roster spots at replacement level production for the league minimum for the next few years. To me this all points to a very long rebuild, in which the Twins let the existing roster rot on the vine and rebuild entirely through the draft. That was a painful strategy before, and it's even worse under the new CBA since they won't collect draft picks when these guys leave via FA. So yeah, I'm pretty depressed. Ever realize you fundamentally disagree with you favorite-team-since-childhood's core philosophies? It's not fun.

They should have tried to trade someone for pitching. This team can hit pretty well and score runs...but might have the worst staff in the bigs.

None of this should be surprising at all for an organization that:

A) Failed to use the surplus of tweener-type OFs it had 7-8 years ago before they spoiled to shore up the Guzman/Rivas sinkholes in the middle IF, and

B) Stubbornly refuses to recognize that Blackburn/Duensing-style pitch-to-contact types are the baseball equivalent of Viagra to opposing Yankee offenses in the playoffs, but that Liriano repertoires must be shipped out of town for pennies on the dollar simply because they don't fit the vaunted "Twins way" on the mound.

As an outsider, they are a frustrating club to watch simply because an institutional denial is the biggest thing that has kept them from capitalizing more fruitfully on the nice decade they had...and it is that, not money, which was the primary culprit despite the barrage of disinformation that the party-line financial mouthpieces constantly spew.