Commentary: Twins better make moves

MINNEAPOLIS – This is the Twins’ sixth decade in Minnesota. The decade of 2001-10 belonged to the Twins more than any since they arrived on the Bloomington prairie and led the American League in average attendance from 1961 through 1970.

There were exceptions to this:

The Wild were big news when the NHL returned for the winter of 2000-01, and again when they made an unlikely playoff run in the spring of 2003.

The Timberwolves added Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell to Kevin Garnett for the 2003-04 season and reached the Western Conference finals.

The Vikings reclaimed most of the attention in August 2009, when they brought in Brett Favre for a glorious season before losing an exceptional NFC title game in the Louisiana Superdome.

The Twins also were not without detractors, with the inability to manage more than a whimper in the last five of six playoff appearances.

Still, it’s hard to diminish a decade in which the Twins averaged 88 wins, reached the postseason in six of those seasons and lost Game No. 163 in another.

The first nine of those seasons were played in the Metrodome, and the Twins averaged 1,887,521 tickets sold. That was a historically impressive stretch for indoor baseball in Minnesota.

The Twins moved into Target Field in 2010, broke out their version of Favre in Jim Thome, won 94 games, sold out 79 of 81 games and totaled 3,223,640 tickets, and then came disaster out of nowhere:

The 99 losses in 2011 – and now a follow-up that has the Twins again standing as the worst team in the American League.

Halfway through the schedule, the Twins are 175,000 behind last season’s attendance pace. They have 16 home games after Labor Day and will be announcing fewer than 30,000 tickets sold for a number of games. They will finish in the neighborhood of 2.7 million, after selling 3,108,107 tickets in 2011.

And then things will get tough. This year’s 23,000 season-ticket equivalents will take a big hit this winter, and the groups that bought far fewer tickets this summer surely will not be motivated to increase those numbers in 2013.

The Twins did some remarkable building of the “brand” during the previous decade. There were more people attending, watching and listening to games – and wearing Twins’ merchandise – than for any long stretch in Minnesota’s major league history.

Presumably, the people that built that brand – the baseball and business departments – know where this franchise could be standing in the Twin Cities sports market in the immediate future. Presumably, they realize normal operating procedure won’t work this time.

The Twins have minimal starting pitching in 2012, and less than that on the horizon, and if the Pohlad brothers don’t take a hint from Leipold’s approach – “you have to spend money to make money” – the Twins will sell fewer tickets in 2013 than the 2,416,237 for the final season (2009) in the Metrodome.

The Twins will have to buy a couple of big-league starters. Period.