Twins quit on centerpiece of Santana deal real quick

There's nothing more frustrating to me than knee-jerk reactions to the performances of young baseball players. No one quits faster on young talent than baseball teams. Andy Marte, Dan Johnson, and at one point, Adam Lind was in this boat before the Blue Jays decided to give him more than 400 at-bats to prove himself.

The latest casualty is outfielder Carlos Gomez, who was traded to the Brewers today for shorstop J.J. Hardy. As you may recall from the headline you just read, Gomez was the biggest name the Twins got back from the Mets when they dealt Cy Young winner Johan Santana to New York.

Gomez was 23 when he played his first full season with the Twins in 2008 after getting just 125 part-time at-bats with the Mets in 2007. He wasn't great at the plate, but he was respectable for someone with such little experience, hitting .258 with 7 homers and 59 RBI. He walked just 25 times in 577 at-bats, but he stole 33 bases and played a tremendous center field.

It was at that point that the Twins decided they had seen enough.

Gomez, still only 24, was reduced to a part-time player last season. His numbers fell off across the board, but he remained a pretty outstanding defensive player.

Still, the Twins decided a season and a half was enough time for him to develop into a star and that would be the end of his time in Minnesota.

I seriously don't get it. Organizations spend years grooming guys to get them ready for the majors, yet they are so quick to quit on them or not let them get a couple of seasons under their belt in the toughest league in the world. Did the Twins think Gomez was going to step right into the lineup and hit .300/20/80/50?

A lot of baseball players need time, and a guy like Lind is the perfect example of patience paying off. He was a .300 hitter at every level he played -- college, A-ball, AA-ball, AAA-ball. But when he received his chance to play everyday with the Jays as a 23-year-old in 2007, he hit just .238 and spent a good chunk of the season in the minors.

Sound familiar?

It was more of the same the following season for Lind. After a 1-for-19 start, he was once again shuttled back to Syracuse, where he spent most of May and June. He eventually came back up again, but his .282/9/40 line in 326 at-bats wasn't exactly turning heads.

Of course, Lind got his chance to spend a full season in the majors last year and hit .305 with 35 homers and 114 RBIs and had an OBP of .370. And this was a guy with a tremendous minor-league player who had just 676 sporadic at-bats spread out over three partial seasons before last year. If Cito Gaston didn't demand that Lind be given a chance, who knows what would've happened with his career.

No one's saying Gomez has the minor-league statistics that Lind does. But his career timeline is eerily similar to Lind's. They were the same age when getting their first taste of the big leagues, both were sort of jerked into and out of the lineup, except the Jays hung onto Lind and finally let him get enough experience where he could take off in his age 26 year.

Gomez turns just 25 this offseason, and if the Brewers can remain patient with him and let him take his lumps as an everyday player, it can pay off in a similar (but definitely not as grand) fashion as it did for the Jays and Lind.