Stars have formed and clustered into galaxies since the Minnesota Twins began soliciting offers for ace pitcher Johan Santana, and will likely collapse by the time they actually trade him. So, at least, it seems to anyone following what was once the winter’s most important story and has since become merely its most interminable.

As revolting as it has been to watch the Yankees, the Mets, and the Boston Red Sox tussling over the rights to send tens of millions of dollars worth of prospects west in exchange for the sport’s best pitcher, though, it’s also been instructive. This whole auction has generally been taken as evidence of the grotesque, insatiable appetites of the game’s three richest teams, an indictment of a fundamentally corrupt system that robs small market teams of their best players. It may be those things, but it’s also a demonstration of how much power has shifted away from New York and Boston, the game’s centers of gravity for more than a decade.

Minnesota is a successful team. They’ve made the playoffs four of the last six years — as often as Boston, and more often than the Mets have had winning seasons — and boast one of the more impressive talent bases in the game. Joe Mauer, for instance, is 24, a former batting champion, and a sterling defensive catcher. First baseman Justin Morneau, 26, is a former Most Valuable Player. Baseball America rated outfielder Delmon Young, 22, the third-best prospect in the game last year.

Even leaving Santana aside, the Twins don’t lack pitching. Francisco Liriano, 24, posted a 144/32 strikeout-to-walk ratio and allowed nine home runs in 121 innings as a rookie while showing the filthiest raw stuff of any young left-hander; he’s due back this year, after rehabilitating from elbow surgery. In Kevin Slowey, Scott Baker, and Nick Blackburn, they have a small army of right-handed control pitchers with good chances of developing into sold starters. And closer Joe Nathan, who’s posted sub-2.00 earned run averages three of the last four years, is one of the very best in the game.

Not only will nearly all of these players be under the Twins’ control for years, most of them aren’t even eligible for salary arbitration yet. The Twins, who will open a new stadium in two years, are not some perpetually crippled franchise trying to extract a bit of value from some star they can’t afford. They’re a first-rate operation sitting on a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault of young star talent and looking to add to it by marketing a 28-year-old two-time Cy Young Award winner. They suckered the San Francisco Giants into giving them Liriano, Nathan, and starter Boof Bonser in exchange for A.J. Pierzynski, a catcher best known for playing video games instead of attending scouting meetings; no one should doubt that they’ll get exactly the players they want in any Santana deal.

Who exactly those players might be is the interesting question. The Twins have peculiar ideas about baseball; this is the same organization that preferred Doug Mientkiewicz to David Ortiz because Ortiz hit for too much power. They value speed more than most teams do, because it plays on both offense and defense, and they prefer talented prospects to skilled ones, believing that skill can be taught.

For a team that builds from within, these are good principles; Branch Rickey built the modern farm system on them. They work especially well for the Twins because they are excellent at teaching certain skills. Santana and Liriano, for example, have perhaps the best two left-handed changeups in baseball, and both learned their grip from Triple-A coach Bobby Cuellar. The aforementioned small army of control pitchers, as well as Matt Garza, the prospect who fetched Delmon Young in trade, went through the same system.

Because the Twins have a system, certain players will be more, or less, valuable to them than other teams. They are good at training raw young outfielders to take the ball the other way and play alert, hustling baseball in the field and on the bases. They are good at teaching a changeup to a starter with a live fastball. They generally aren’t good at cultivating young power hitters, and they don’t tolerate wild pitchers at all.

Given all this, I suppose that if Santana is traded, he’ll end up in Queens, even though the Mets can’t offer the long-term infield help the Twins need. Carlos Gomez is just the kind of unrefined athlete the Twins would want, and Mike Pelfrey is just the sort of pitcher one supposes could really use a few months with Cuellar. They may not have the superstar potential of the Yankees’ and Red Sox’s best prospects, but then that may not matter. A team that believes in its system enough to get rid of David Ortiz isn’t always concerned about superstar potential.

What’s really interesting about the situation, though, is this: For all the success of their system, for all the young talent they have, and for all the prudence with which they manage it, the Twins are the third-best team in their division, even with Santana. Cleveland and Detroit, run by two of the smartest and most aggressive front offices in baseball, look like absolute juggernauts. Minnesota looks like Toronto, a team that would make the playoffs in the National League but is being squeezed out by the behemoths in its own division.

In the end, the trade of Santana may have a lot more to do with how brutal the Central Division is than how brutal the East is. It’s a welcome change.

tmarchman@nysun.com