NASHVILLE, Tenn. — How will the Minnesota Twins replace Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda in the starting rotation?

That’s the topic manager Rocco Baldelli and president of baseball operations Derek Falvey found themselves answering early and often Monday during the opening day of MLB’s annual Winter Meetings.

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Baldelli’s afternoon media session was attended by multiple reporters from St. Louis, who peppered him with questions about Gray following the free agent’s recent three-year, $75 million contract with the Cardinals.

Baldelli was predictably full of praise for Gray and what the Cy Young Award runner-up meant to the Twins the past two seasons, but he also expressed confidence in the front office’s ability to make the moves needed to keep the rotation a team strength in 2024.

Twins starters led the American League with a 3.82 ERA last season and also ranked fourth out of 30 big-league rotations with 895 innings pitched.

“Our rotation was good to us last year,” Baldelli said. “They were very productive, very effective. Every time we handed the ball to someone, we got a good start, it felt like. It’s not going to be the same rotation. But you start adding Chris Paddack in there, you start looking at Louie Varland. We have some guys. And we’re going to stay open-minded and see if maybe we can even add to the group.”

Live from the Winter Meetings…it’s Rocco Baldelli. #MNTwins

— Dustin Morse (@morsecode) December 4, 2023

That was the first-day theme from Baldelli and Falvey. They’re happy with the group of starters on hand, with Paddack and Varland joining Pablo López, Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober in what could, theoretically at least, be a season-opening rotation better than many the Twins have had in recent years. But the goal is to add to that group, and with a quality starter rather than merely a back-of-the-rotation innings eater.

Doing that via free agency was always unlikely, even before the news that the Twins plan to lower their payroll in 2024. After all, the largest contract the Falvey-led front office has ever handed to a free-agent pitcher is a two-year, $20 million deal with Michael Pineda. Given the self-imposed payroll limitations, the Twins are simply unlikely to have the monetary firepower to land a mid-rotation starter in free agency, let alone a frontline replacement for Gray.

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But that’s nothing new, and the Twins under Falvey have consistently preferred to build the front of their rotations via trades. It’s how they acquired Gray in March 2022 and Maeda in February 2020. It’s also how they acquired López last offseason in a controversial but ultimately shrewd trade with the Miami Marlins for Luis Arraez.

“You never want to lose good players,” Baldelli said. “But you constantly just have to be looking around at ways to get yourself better. We’ve done it over the past five years since I’ve been here. We’re going to have to continue to do that. We’re going to have to be aggressive when the opportunities are in front of us. You don’t know when those opportunities are going to come.”

Tyler Glasnow, Corbin Burnes, Dylan Cease, Shane Bieber and Logan Gilbert are among the frontline starters rumored to be available in trade, and there are countless other quality starters — like López last season — who will be available at the right price even if they aren’t widely known to be on the trade block.

Falvey suggested Monday that the Twins may have to let the free-agent market play out a bit more before the league-wide trade action picks up. Once some of the bigger-name free-agent hitters come off the board, it makes sense that teams could turn their attention to the Twins’ trade pieces.

“We’ve always been a team that waits out some of the market and waits to see how things shake out to some degree,” Falvey said. “The team isn’t made at the end of the Winter Meetings. This has never been a key marker for me personally or for us in general. Our approach is basically the same. Our approach and the way we’re thinking about how to find fits in our team.”

Falvey avoided mentioning anyone by name, but speculation has centered around Jorge Polanco, Max Kepler and Kyle Farmer, veteran hitters entering the final guaranteed seasons of their contracts.

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“There’s been a lot of interest in a number of different players on our team,” Falvey said. “We’re still trying to figure out the landscape around free agents, trade partners and otherwise. I think we’re still in that early feeling-out phase. It feels weird to say that in December, but that’s just the way it is now.”

Sonny Gray picks up a baseball to describe the way he could improve his hand positioning for movement, command on pitches. He brought the baseball with him to St. Louis. #stlcards

— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) November 27, 2023

Re-signing the 34-year-old Gray to a three-year, $75 million deal was never going to be in the Twins’ plans, regardless of the payroll situation. They traded 2021 first-round pick Chase Petty for Gray in 2022, got two very good seasons out of him and will receive a first-round pick as compensation for losing Gray via free agency. That was always the Twins’ plan.

According to multiple team sources, the Twins were interested in re-signing Maeda to a one-year contract, but his market quickly grew to the point that he landed a two-year, $24 million deal with the Detroit Tigers. While the $12 million annual salary is reasonable for a pitcher of Maeda’s caliber, the Twins were hesitant to commit multiple years to a 36-year-old who logged just 104 innings in his first season back from Tommy John surgery.

All of which is logical, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Twins have two large holes in the rotation after Gray and Maeda combined to make 52 starts with a 3.31 ERA in 288 1/3 innings last season.

Paddack will take one of those rotation spots as he returns from Tommy John surgery, and the Twins are optimistic that he can be at least as effective as Maeda. But replacing Gray will be much more difficult, and their attempts to do so may ultimately define the Twins’ offseason.

Varland is penciled in as the No. 5 starter, essentially by default. He’s very much capable of filling that role after posting a 4.83 ERA in his first 15 starts for the Twins and looking even better in a late-season bullpen role. But much like they did with Ober last season, the Twins would likely prefer to have Varland begin 2024 as the No. 6 starter.

Doing that will first require making a significant addition to the rotation, likely via trade.

(Photo of Sonny Gray: Jesse Johnson / USA Today)