This early, whatever team you’re rooting for, the last thing you want is some major buzzkill to change how you feel about the season to come. So if you can spare a moment, give Minnesota Twins fans some pity, because the news that top third-base prospect Miguel Sano is going to miss the season after Tommy John surgery on his elbow just deleted one of the best reasons to look forward to the 2014 season from their picture.

Let’s face it: Year round, everybody loves prospects. It’s our anticipation of the new and unknown wrapped around the promise of something better, but in cleats. How good was the outlook? Insider’s Dan Szymborski projected Sano as capable of pounding 30 home runs and slugging .471 as a 21-year-old rookie. Who wouldn’t want a slice of that to spice up your season at Target Field?

ESPN injury expert Stephania Bell offers some reassurance to Twins fans. "He should be able to recover fully from this," she stressed. "The return time varies, just as it does with pitchers, but it’s typically shorter for a position player -- roughly 8-12 months, but, again, that can vary. For those wondering why he didn't have Tommy John right away when [he] first sprained his elbow last fall, this is consistent with how the injury is managed. Rehab is often the first course, especially since some players can play for a period of time with the injury. Also, the athlete has to buy into an extensive surgery/recovery process."

Anticipating Sano was part of my own four pack of reasons Twins fans could look forward to this season; now, that sort of expectation has to be ratcheted back down to waiting for catcher Josmil Pinto and hoping that center fielder Aaron Hicks recovers from a horrendous rookie season. That’s still worth looking forward to, but Sano’s power would have done much to make the Twins a much more dangerous lineup.

In the meantime, it isn’t like the man Sano was expected to replace at some point this season is chopped liver. Trevor Plouffe isn’t going to set the world on fire, but the wrist injury that hampered him last season has healed up, so his swing from an OPS around .700 back up towards .750 might seem relatively likely. The guy did belt 24 home runs in 2012 (albeit with an unlikely-to-be-repeated 14.5 percent clip of home runs on fly balls), and he’s heading into his age-28 season, still well within a traditional player’s peak, arcing from 25 to 29. Maybe the healed wrist helps keep him from being eaten up by fastballs up and in. Projected by Szymborski to deliver a .719 OPS, Plouffe is playable on offense -- the average OPS for third basemen last season was .735. But reports suggesting that Plouffe has bulked up enough to become an increasing defensive liability at the hot corner might send Twins fans on an unwanted return down memory lane with visions of infamously immobile Ron Coomer dancing in their head.

Now, sure, Sano will be back, and Twins fans can look forward to seeing him eventually take over at third base. But if spring is supposed to be a time of optimism and renewal, getting this sort of news this early on can only renew a sense that it’ll be another case of "wait 'til next season" in the Twin Cities.

Christina Kahrl writes about MLB for ESPN; you can follow her on Twitter.