No one has been with the Twins longer than Minnesota farm director Jim Rantz. He joined the team as a player in 1960 while the organization still was located in Washington and he's been with it ever since, either as a minor leaguer (he was a teammate of Tony Oliva) or in the front office (he discovered the team's most important player, Kirby Puckett).

Rantz has seen a lot in his four decades with the Twins. The glory days of Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew and Oliva at the old Met, the move to the Metrodome, Calvin Griffith's threat to move the team to Florida, the sale to Carl Pohlad, the two world championships, the repeated attempts to secure funding for the Twins' third stadium, Puckett's career-ending glaucoma and Pohlad's threat to move to Mayberry.

But he's never dealt with anything like this.

Last week, commissioner Bud (Sad? Why Is This Sad?) Selig announced that Major League Baseball will exterminate two teams in the next month, and the Twins are expected to be one of them. Thus, a franchise that has been in the American League since its inception a century ago and was in first place barely three months ago may cease to exist by spring training.

"This is the furthest down the road that I think we've ever been," Rantz said. "Obviously, there are a lot of emotions running through a lot of people. We're not looking at it that it's a done deal. We're looking at it that we are going to operate next year.

"We're still hanging onto hope this franchise is still alive. After all, we're 100 years old."

This is an odd time for the Twins. Call their office and you can hear an advertisement for TwinsFest, scheduled for the first week of February. If you want, you can even buy season tickets for 2002 -- about 30 fans bought them in the last week as a show of support.

But running a team when Selig is busy nailing "Going Out of Business" signs on your office windows isn't easy. The search for a new manager has been placed, Robert Urich-like, on hiatus. Rantz should be signing six-year free agents, but who wants to sign onto a cruise with the Exxon Valdez (no one has since Selig's announcement). The team should be mailing season-ticket renewal forms but decided against doing so because it would be like rubbing salt in the wound (though they will accept orders from fans who come forward).

While employees try to work as usual, they also worry whether they will have jobs in a couple weeks. If Selig kills the Twins, he puts hundreds out of work during the holidays in a state where thousands just lost their jobs at Northwest Airlines last month. As senior vice-president of business affairs Dave St. Peter said, "There is no dispersal draft for front-office employees."

The Twins employees come to work every day and strap themselves into an emotional roller coaster, not sure whether they'll get off safely. Sometimes they feel optimistic about the future and sometimes they're wondering what type of paper they should print their resumes on.

"It's a pretty resilient group of folks here, but this particular episode has taken a toll," St. Peter said. "We thought we had taken strides to get back on track this year, beginning with the progress of the team. We won 85 games and were the talk of baseball for two-thirds of the season. Attendance was coming back, too. We were looking to draw 2 million to 2 1/3 million fans next season."

Now, they don't know what they could draw even if they do play next season.

"Will people rally around the team and try to support it through the purchase of tickets?" ticket director Scott O'Connell said. "Or will they be so put off by this that they won't want to have anything to do with us?"

That's what makes Selig's doomsday announcement as poorly timed as it is revolting. Not only has he threatened to murder a team that was competitive last year and has made modest profits for several years, he has crippled that team's chances for success next year if he can't squeeze the trigger.

And I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Selig can't pull this off, not with so little time before spring training and with so many people potentially firing off so many lawsuits. The players union, in particular, could put a halt to this, or at the very least, delay it a year (placing Twins management in the very odd position of rooting for Donald Fehr).

As the days pass, the whole extermination plan reeks more and more of pure negotiating leverage with the union and cities reluctant to build stadiums. Why, after all, did Selig conveniently avoid naming the teams he's placing on death row if not to pressure several communities into building stadiums and give them time to secure the funding?

Whichever is Selig's true goal, he's acting shamefully. He cannot be condemned enough.

This should be a grand winter for the Twins. They are coming off a winning season, much of it spent in first place. They are a young and promising team that is only a bat or two away from being one of the league's very best. The community is excited about them again. Finally, the front office has something to sell.

Instead, Selig and Pohlad are destroying it all, then blaming fans and leaving the employees to wonder how much longer they have jobs in a deepening recession.

When I talked with O'Connell on Tuesday afternoon, I asked him whether the emotional roller coaster was going up or down. "It's five o'clock and I'm still in my office -- so that's good."

Lies, damn lies and statistics
Here's some numbers you won't see from Bud: The Expos have drawn two million fans more seasons (four) than Selig's Brewers (twice) and finished in first place as often. No team has gone longer since its last winning record than Selig's Brewers. Selig's Brewers have drawn below the league average in 27 of their 32 years in Milwaukee. No team other than the four-year-old Devil Rays has fewer two million attendance totals than Selig's Brewers. And this man is making the decision about which teams supposedly deserve to die? ... And as far as new stadiums being the answer to all problems, consider this: The Pirates opened a new stadium this year, and while there attendance rose, it still was below the league average and they still lost 100 games. The Tigers, meanwhile, lost 96 games in their second year in their new stadium, and not only drew less than the league average, they drew fewer fans (1,921,305) than they did their final year at Tiger Stadium (2,026,491). ... Finally, of the 14 teams with stadiums 20 years or older, nine had a winning record this season. Of the 16 teams with stadiums built since 1989, nine had losing records. ... Anyone else out there still trying to figure out how come Curt Schilling was co-MVP of the World Series when he won one game and left Game 7 with his team behind by a run and needing to use Randy Johnson on no rest? ... It's nice the way people stood up and sang "God Bless America" and waved flags during the last weeks of the season. Of course, it would have been nicer had a majority of them also actually voted last week.

From left field
With seven batting titles and a .353 career average in Japan, the only time Ichiro might have resembled our standard concept of a rookie was during the Mariners road trip to Tampa Bay when the team's veterans made him wear a Hooters outfit as part of rookie hazing. (How much could the Japanese paparazzi have gotten for a photo of that?)

In fact, Chris Assenheimer of the Chronicle Telegram in Eyria, Ohio, didn't vote for Ichiro for Rookie of the Year because he said C.C. Sabathia better met the criteria of a true rookie. Assenheimer is dead wrong, though. Ichiro's experience in another league should not have affected his eligibility for the award.

Remember, the first person to win the award (and the player it is named after in the National League) was Jackie Robinson, who played in the Negro Leagues before breaking baseball's color barrier. If playing in that league didn't exclude Robinson, then playing in any league other than our "majors" should not, either.

The other writers made the right call by making Ichiro the overwhelming winner of the award, the second consecutive year a Japanese player was the winner. The players to win the award who were as old as Ichiro:

Old but good
Player	Age	The Skinny
Sam Jethroe, 1950	32	Seven season in Negro Leagues
Kazu Sasaki, 2000	32	42-33, 2.31 ERA, 229 saves in Japan
Joe Black, 1952	28	Seven seasons in Negro Leagues
Jackie Robinson, 1947	28	WWII service and a season in Negro Leagues
Jack Sanford, 1957	28	Made debut a year earlier
Ichiro Suzuki, 2001	27	Seven batting titles in Japan
Walt Dropo, 1950	27	WWII service
Harry Byrd, 1952	27	Made debut in bigs two years earlier

Win Blake Stein's money
This week's category is: If He Was Any Younger, Michael Jackson Would Have Been His Biggest Fan.

Q. Who was the youngest player to win the Rookie of the Year?

Answer below.

Infield chatter
"Did you see the President threwout the first pitch to Game 2 of the World Series. The White House said it was a strike. The Taliban said it missed and killed several innocent people."
-- David Letterman

A. Dwight Gooden, who was 19 in 1984.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.