NOTE: These links appeared at RandBall, your home for humanity.

Baseball’s Winter Meetings are this week, and I think you’re about to see a split in the Twins fan base – one that pits fans of the 2013 Twins against the fans of the 2015 Twins.

The 2013 Twins fans expect Terry Ryan and company to come back from the Winter Meetings with at least the beginnings of a competitive starting rotation for next season. The Twins are woefully short on starting pitching and everyone knows it; they have only Scott Diamond set for next year, and he’s no more than a #3 starter, at best. 2013 Twins fans know that the team needs to fill the top end of the rotation, and so they’re looking towards guys like Dan Haren and – even though they know this is hope beyond reason – Zack Greinke. They figure that the Twins, who have around $70 million committed for next year, have $30-40 million to spend in free agency this year, and they expect it to go towards putting the team back to the top of the AL Central next year.

The 2015 Twins fans, however, are mostly hoping that Josh Willingham gets traded this week. They see that pitching has so far been outlandishly expensive on the free-agent market this winter, and as Nick Nelson at Twins Daily points out, the kind of high-dollar, high-risk signings the Twins need to make would leave the Twins with zero room for error. For these fans, it’s time to deal Willingham for any pitchers, minor-league or major-league, that they can get, and to operate with an eye on restocking for three years down the road. These fans will be less concerned with another 90-loss season, and more concerned about Kyle Gibson’s development and whether Joe Benson can bounce back and the possibility that Aaron Hicks could make his major-league debut in 2013.

Neither side is right and neither side is wrong, but they represent two very different ways of looking at the future. The 2013 Twins fans can’t stand the losing, and are less worried that the wrong moves now could doom the Twins for a decade; the 2015 fans wish to plot for the future, while ignoring the worry that this would be the beginning of a Royals-style 25-year rebuilding project.

*On with the links:

*Grantland’s Katie Baker made a visit to what she called “Eden, or as it’s more popularly known, Minnesota,” to watch some Gopher hockey – both men’s and women’s. I don’t suppose that many of the people reading this are NHL fans but not college puck fans already, but if there are, I just want to say to those readers that there’s plenty of room on the Gopher hockey bandwagon for all of you.

*I really cannot get enough of the Vikes Geek writing sarcastically about Christian Ponder. Discussion question: if all else were equal, would you take the perennially terrible Alex Smith over Christian Ponder? If you’re even thinking that over right now, there’s your answer.

*Michael Weinreb is writing about Big Ten expansion in this column, but for me the interesting thing was a pair of charts showing the per-capita population of football recruits in America, by state. For Gopher fans, I must tell you, they are terrifying.

*And finally: Is anybody really sure what what pass interference actually is anymore? (Clearly, NFL referees, especially the refs in last week’s Bears-Vikings game, are a little weak on the concept.)

In week four, it became apparent that Minnesota’s biggest struggle is the ability to shoot the ball from more than five feet away from the hoop.

A Wolves team that was a shocking 5-2, and had players coming back from injury, is now 6-8 and has almost a full complement of players. To say that disappointment is rising would be an understatement.

The Minnesota Stars began their offseason by picking up contract options on 13 different players, including the core of their defense and exciting young winger Miguel Ibarra. However, questions still remain, mainly regarding free-agent team captain Kyle Altman and the team’s lack of any options at forward.

Tuesday, the North American Soccer League introduced new commissioner Bill Peterson, a veteran of several different facets of the sports industry. I had a chance to participate in the conference call to ask about a few things, including Peterson’s plans for the league going forward, and the split season – and what that might mean for Stars fans.

Monday, the Twins signed minor-league first baseman Jeff Clement, who has spent most of the past four years in the Pittsburgh minor-league system.

With Clement on his way to the Twins minor-league system, let’s find out: who is Jeff Clement, anyway?

NOTE: This also appears at RandBall.

The state high school hockey tournament is Minnesota’s most famous prep event, the only one that draws national attention unless Blake Hoffarber is involved.The thing is, though, that the Prep Bowl is better – and here are five reasons why.

1. The Prep Bowl actually involves teams from around Minnesota – Caledonia and Moose Lake-Willow River and Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley and so on – rather than being the Suburbs, Private Schools, and Warroad/Roseau State Championship like the hockey tournament.

2. Watch the Prep Bowl, you’ll see every kind of football; spread offense and offenses that throw twice a year, quarterbacks that can sling the ball seventy yards and quarterbacks that appear to be throwing with the wrong hand, teams that kick field goals and teams that can’t hardly kick off. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of football. Unless you’re a particular student of the one-man vs. two-man forecheck, the hockey tournament is more or less a lot of the same thing all day.

3. The Prep Bowl gets the benefit of being played on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, the best possible dates on the calendar, when days off and leftover turkey combine with high school football to make the best possible sports viewing experience. Half the hockey tournament is played while you’re at work.

4. Chris Dilks at the Western College Hockey Blog wrote a convincing column this week that suggests that it’s time to stop pretending there’s any basis for community-based prep hockey, since most players gravitate towards the all-star teams that tend to be created at that level. You’ll never read a similar column about prep football in Minnesota.

5. The best high school hockey players in Minnesota play Elite League hockey and junior hockey and summer hockey and go to the USHL and go to the National Team Development program in Ann Arbor. The best high school football players in Minnesota play high school football in Minnesota.

*On with the links:

*The Twins need a ton of pitching, which isn’t a secret. John Bonnes thinks that Josh Willingham is worth basically nothing on the trade market, which leads into Nick Nelson’s home truth: if the Twins aren’t going to be terrible next year, they’re going to have to spend an enormous amount of money this off-season.

*With John Gagliardi’s retirement at St. John’s, SJU grad Shawn Fury takes a look back at the legendary coach.

*Hamilton Nolan writes about Adrien Broner, boxing’s next, unbeatable, unpunchable thing.

*The Economist takes a scientific look at Formula One’s successful return to the United States.

*And finally: I will never fail to be entertained by this kind of thing.

Everybody who was out short-term for the Timberwolves is back in the lineup now. Ricky Rubio is on his way back, but won’t be much of a factor until the new year. As I look back on the third week of the Wolves’ season at SB Nation Minnesota, it’s striking to me that the team that lost to Denver on Wednesday is, effectively, the Wolves’ team for most of 2012-13.

Last Thursday, I looked back at the week that was for the Timberwolves, a week in which everybody got hurt. This was depressing.

Since then, the Wolves have lost to Golden State at home, and now it’s come out this morning that Brandon Roy needs more knee surgery. This is doubly depressing.

I need Ricky Rubio and his sense of wonder and his dreamy eyes to come back soon.

Today, the Gophers take on Nebraska, a team ranked either 14th or 16th in the nation, depending on which poll you happen to read. The question I have is this: in this age, does anyone really care who the nation’s 16th-best team is? Nebraska is ranked above Oregon State in the BCS, but behind the Beavers in the AP poll – and for the life of me, I cannot think of a reason that it would matter to fans of either school. Perhaps there are some OSU-Nebraska marriages that are split over the topic.

With a four-team playoff set to begin in the 2014 season, I imagine this will only get worse. No one will have a reason to pay attention to any portion of a poll that isn’t about the playoff teams. Everything beyond the eighth spot will be completely ignored, as well it should be. In fact, I think it’s time for the AP – for one – to cut its poll down. There’s historical precedent; until 1989, the poll never ranked more than the top 20, and for much of the 1960s only the top ten were acknowledged.

That’s the direction I’d like to head in. Let’s get all of the polls – AP, Coaches, BCS – down to the top 10. Let the voters focus on the best ten teams in the nation; maybe then they can put some thought into their ballots, rather than spend their time agonizing over whether Louisville or Louisiana Tech really deserves that #19 ranking.

Ideally, I’d get it down farther, maybe to six or eight teams. And in a perfect world, no polls would be released until mid-October at the earliest, to stop voters voting based on “not moving a team up/down” even though that team’s previous ranking was ultimately based on nothing more than a pre-season guess. But ten is a round number, and I suspect the folks at the AP and at all of the other poll organizations won’t be able to help releasing polls as soon as they possibly can, so one step at a time here.

And if you think that ten is too few teams for a poll, consider this. There are 349 teams in division 1 college basketball, 25 of which – just over 7% – are ranked. Even with a ten-team ranking, football would still have a higher percentage of its 124 teams appearing in the poll.

*On with the links

*If you think that Christian Ponder proved anything with his performance last Sunday, the Vikes Geek reminds you that you really shouldn’t.

*In Twins news, we’ve got the transcript of Ron Gardenhire’s conversation with Torii Hunter after the latter signed with the Tigers, as well as the team raising money on Kickstarter to buy some starting pitching. Are either of these links serious? No! Are both of them great? Yes!

*Will Leitch asks an important question: what the heck happened to Rick Reilly?

*You should really read Chris Brown at Grantland, writing about how despite Oregon’s vaunted high-speed offense, they’re really not doing anything but finding a new way to pound the football.

*Deadspin has the story of how ESPN quit with the journalism and chased Tim Tebow to the bottom of the barrell.

*And finally: here’s a representation of how all Blue Jays fans feel right now.

A while back, I got a request to write a few hundred words about the Twins offseason for Big League Monthly, an online baseball magazine. My writeup on this season’s edition of Hot Stove is in the November issue, out today – and it’s all about the one thing that the Twins are focusing on this winter: the starting rotation.