MINNEAPOLIS -- Carlos Correa couldn’t have been clearer in his public comments through the closing weeks of the season: He’s looking for a long-term deal from a team this offseason -- whether it’s the Twins or otherwise -- and he's gone so far as to colorfully compare the pursuit of his services to teams shopping at the Dior store at the mall.

The message was evident: If you want my services, you’ll have to pay the appropriate price.

On Monday, Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey played along with the superstar shortstop’s analogy. But for as much as he seemed to enjoy Correa’s turn of speech, Falvey seemed less committal to the fact that the Twins might actually be willing or able to make that Dior-level commitment (in baseball terms, anyway) to keep Correa in a Twins uniform.

“The Dior store? I went rummaging around in [Correa’s] locker in the corner -- I couldn’t find [his] price tag,” Falvey said. “I thought [the quote] was hilarious.”

Correa’s decision to opt out of the remainder of his three-year, $105.3 million contract is due five days after the conclusion of the World Series, and it has always been expected that he’ll exercise that opt-out, from the day he inked that stunning deal in March. Nothing has changed on that front -- especially with Correa coming off a 5.4-WAR season (per Baseball-Reference) with his best average (.291) and on-base percentage (.366) since 2017.

Until that deadline, the Twins have exclusive negotiating rights with Correa and super-agent Scott Boras – and Correa indicated that he has loved it in Minnesota and hopes to engage the front office about a possible long-term deal. In fact, they’ve had that right all along -- though Falvey said the Twins always communicated to Boras and Correa that they’d broach the topic at the “appropriate time.”

When Falvey was asked Monday if the Twins had a sense of what specific level of commitment it would take to keep Correa in Minnesota, he replied in the negative -- though there’s still nearly a month remaining before Correa could officially exercise the opt-out.

“I would say we're not at that stage,” Falvey said. “You get right to the offseason, you get right into the beginning of free agency, I'm sure they're working through what the options are. I think they probably have some ideas as to what they would want, but there's always questions about term and upside and what does that look like and how can we find a match somewhere. I don't have that sense yet.”

Looking at the history of the mega-deals that Boras has negotiated for his clients, the ask is likely to be astronomical compared to any commitment the Twins have made since the eight-year, $184 million extension they gave Joe Mauer in 2010, and far in excess of the seven-year, $100 million extension they gave Byron Buxton last offseason.

Corey Seager, another Boras-represented shortstop who secured $325 million from the Rangers last offseason ahead of his age-28 campaign, could offer a benchmark for what to expect. If it comes to something like that, can the Twins match offers from the deep-pocketed spenders?

"I would say we don't know exactly where those [big spenders] are going to be, right?” Falvey said in response. “Ultimately, we don't know what they're going to prioritize or where the investment's going to go. I think that's really what I'm getting back to, some of the creative parts of the conversation and what that looks like. Now, a couple of times over the last 12 months, whether it was Buck or Carlos, the way we kind of navigated to find mutually agreeable solutions, it takes partnership for sure.

“It takes an investment on both sides in maybe some of those decisions. I can't speak to what some of those other markets are going to do through this cycle, but I can tell you that we know Carlos is a really good player, and we know he's going to have options. Ultimately, we're going to hopefully be in the middle of that conversation. Where it takes us, I can't say today.”

That word, “creative,” came up, over and over again, in Falvey’s comments on Monday -- as it did seven months ago, when Correa first stunned the baseball world by signing with the Twins on his unique deal, the result of a deflated market due to the extended labor lockout. Falvey said the Twins will continue to try to be creative with the conversations with Correa’s representation in the meantime.

That’s because it’s also true that this front office has little track record of longer-term commitments outside the seven-year extension to Buxton, which was obtained at a steep discount with considerable performance-based incentives due to the center fielder’s extensive injury history. Outside that, their longest commitment has been to Josh Donaldson, who only played out two seasons of his four-year, $92 million deal before he was shipped to New York.

How would they feel about the length of the commitment Correa will likely desire?

“It's just a risk conversation,” Falvey said. “How comfortable are we with the risk that far out? Where's the player in his cycle and curve? What kind of upside does it come with, right, in terms of actual [average annual value]? And how do we build out the rest of the team?

“I think, for us, one of the challenges is we're always trying to figure out how we make all the pieces fit. You can sign the single best player in the game, and if that's the only player you have, I don't think that's going to be the most successful path to being a good team.”

Ultimately, if there’s no middle ground to be found, the Twins will have to add shortstop to their (rather limited) list of needs this offseason as they wait for No. 2 prospect Royce Lewis to heal from another torn ACL and for the continued maturation of 2022 first-round pick and No. 1 prospect Brooks Lee, who finished his first professional season in Double-A.

But for now, they’ll keep searching.

“We were very clear with [Correa] and with his representatives at the end of the year that we wanted to have that conversation at the appropriate time,” Falvey said. “But we also recognize how this business works. There’s an element of trying to know exactly what the options are, what that looks like. He said all the right things in the way we felt about him, and it was all genuine in the way we all navigated it.

“I think he really did enjoy it here. He really liked it here, for sure. He obviously has that opt-out decision to make, and we have some conversations to have internally. What I would say on it is, we’ve already had conversations with Scott and with Carlos, some. We’ll continue to have those over the next few weeks. We’ll never go into specifics about what that looks like. But we’ll continue to try and be creative and have conversations with him and see where that takes us.”