The Twins need to re-sign Joe Mauer, now!

"This one's special, and special steps should be taken" - Jim Souhan, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Jim Souhan wrote a great article about why the Twins should re-sign Joe Mauer right now. It makes total sense and I agree 100% with the article. We have the money right now and with the new stadium opening in just over a year, the Twins will have more than enough money to add on a good $10 million to just Mauer alone. Of course there are other players that need to be re-signed as well and other player's salaries that will get larger, but the Twins cannot afford to lose Mauer.

Mauer's value is sky-high right now, but I don't really seeing it going down anytime soon. With the economy the way it is right now, teams need to take extra precaution when they sign players to long-term, expensive deals. But I just don't want to see the Twins make the same mistake with Mauer like they did with Johan Santana a few years ago. Had we had really made a hard attempt to re-sign Santana a year earlier than we did, he probably would still be in a Twins uniform. Of course it would probably still be a deal worth an excess of $100 million, but the Twins probably could have gotten him to sign for well under what the Mets shelled out.

On the other side of it, like Souhan said, had the Twins traded Santana a year earlier too, we probably would have gotten a king's ransom in return (ei. Jacoby Ellsbury & Jon Lester, Clayton Kershaw & Matt Kemp, Jose Reyes, etc.) but like Souhan said, it would have been very unpopular given that the Twins were contenders and were just coming off of one of the greatest comebacks in the history of baseball to win the division on the last day of the year.

I'm in no way suggesting that we trade Mauer, but I am just bring it to the attention that the Twins cannot wait until it gets too late with Mauer, because like Souhan said, "this one's special."