I was listening to Henry Lake on WCCO last night. He was taking a listener call about the Pohlad family’s announcement they intend to sell the Minnesota Twins after 40 years of ownership. The caller suggested the family was going to willfully bungle the sale in a way that would create a long era of future misery for fans. It was an absurd conspiratorial precept, but they are now commonplace among Twins fans.
A lot of ink has been spilled, a lot of radio waves emitted, even a few pods have been cast in the last 24 hours over the announcement. Much of what has been reported, mostly speculated, rings false to me. I hear mostly frustrated fan emotion from baseball pundits, while from journalists I hear a lot of ignorance of the economics of billionaire families.
So, I made some calls and dug through a bit of data to try to come up with a more accurate narrative of what is going on at One Twins Way and the Pohlad family offices at the top of Nicollet Mall.
The historical analogue I see in this announcement is the 1997 sale of Cowles Media, owner of the Star Tribune, to McClatchy Corp. for $1.4 billion. The Cowles family sold at the top of the market, right before newspaper valuations crashed, but that was less the motivation than a new generation coming to prominence that had different priorities than being stewards of a business they did not build. The only way to satisfy those priorities was to sell. As one observer with knowledge of family businesses like the Pohlads put it, “that second to third-gen transition is always challenging, because the number of stakeholders is often too large to achieve consensus.”
The thesis that the second Pohlad generation (Jim, Bob, Bill Pohlad)—or the newly installed third generation representative (Joe)—lost interest in the Twins is absurd. I have interviewed the brothers and Joe multiple times in recent years. Selling was not in their plans. They rarely talk to the press, but when they do, they don’t bullshit.
I am guessing Joe is privately devastated by this turn of events. He planned on spending the peak of his career running an MLB team. But Joe is one of a group of seven first cousins, some of whom work for Pohlad Companies—some of whom don’t—whose priorities are going to guide the family’s investments in the coming decades. And my sense is that a majority of them, for whatever reason, wanted to monetize the team rather than maintain it. They are young and middle-aged adults who did not build Target Field, do not remember 1987 and 1991, who see their family relentlessly demonized in the public sphere, and who don’t see themselves as baseball stewards.
The Pohlads are an intensely private group, often to their disadvantage. They don’t take to the media to justify decisions; they don’t gladhand at Target Field. They are the third-longest tenured owner in MLB, after the Steinbrenners in NYC (Yankees) and Jerry Reinsdorf in Chicago (White Sox), but they let professional management run the team and take the credit (though the family usually ends up with the blame).
Not all their decisions as owners, particularly under patriarch Carl’s tenure, are Hall of Fame worthy. The brinksmanship over moving the team at the turn of the century, in particular. But the narrative that they are misers who squeeze the team for profit is equally absurd.
The Pohlads signed Kirby Puckett and Joe Mauer to market-setting contracts. They maintain Target Field as a jewel even though they don’t own it. They green-lit a modernization of the organization and bankrolled a massive expansion of staff when president of baseball ops Derek Falvey replaced Terry Ryan in 2016. The family’s charitable works go little promoted but average $10 million a year in local disbursements. When Covid hit, the team did not furlough employees or cut payroll as most of MLB did. (Even those who believe taxpayer-built Target Field is the source of much of the team’s value should look at the valuation of the Oakland A’s or Tampa Bay Rays, teams without lucrative ballparks, which are worth only slightly less than the Twins.)
Yet the “cheap Pohlad” narrative persists. Fans and pundits describing the current season as a “new low” in fan interest would do best to open the history books to the ‘90s at the Metrodome and even a couple years at Target Field in the mid-2010s. Nostalgia for Dome Dogs should not induce amnesia.
The Twins are a private business but being highly visible, there are many estimates of scale. Sports business journal Sportico estimates 2023 revenue at $309 million and the team’s value as $1.7 billion. Meaning the 2023 payroll of roughly $160 million was in line with the oft-quoted “best practice” metric of allocating half of revenue for player salaries.
Now $1.7 billion is quite a gain for a business purchased for $44 million in 1984. And that’s typically why the rich buy sports teams, for the gain, as they are expensive and volatile businesses to run year to year due to the potential for millions in losses due to a pandemic, a star’s injuries, or a season that unexpectedly goes south in April.
Facing a $20 million to $30 million loss of regional sports network (RSN) revenue in 2024, the team pulled payroll down—below half of revenue perhaps—and were savaged in the media and among fans, frequently for not having the PR sense to do otherwise! The team was in line for a playoff run despite the lower payroll, until a late season collapse which might or might not have been an outgrowth of the budget. (Three teams in the division made the playoffs with lower payrolls than the Twins.)
There is a perception among fans and the punditry that the Twins are profitable, but conversations with people close to Pohlad Companies say the team has not consistently made an operating profit in the Target Field era. I’d also point out that a roughly $40 million annual boost in payroll, what is frequently called for among the punditry, amortized among the life of the Pohlad ownership, would have eliminated the family’s profit on the asset.
The narrative that the Pohlads are so wealthy that they should see the team as a loss-leader and manage it as a community asset is a take. As is the narrative that more spending would pay for itself in revenues. But the evidence from this baseball season is that it takes roughly $235 million in payroll to guarantee a playoff spot. Most teams in the middle, like the Twins, didn’t make the playoffs.
A new owner might be tighter-fisted (see Pittsburgh, Colorado), or looser. MLB has revenue sharing for its poorest teams, but in the Target Field era, the Twins are not believed to have been a large payer or beneficiary, currently ranking 20th of 30 teams in revenue according to Sportico.
As for the future, I’d take what you’ve heard with a grain of salt. Very few MLB teams have sold in the last decade, and two, Anaheim and Washington, set out on a course to sell and could not attract offers that brought the owners to the table. The take that this is a six-month process seems specious. I’d suggest one or two years. The most likely scenario is the Twins have new owners for the 2026 season.
The Pohlads will look for a local buyer. But neither the Vikings, Timberwolves, or Wild could find one when they were last sold or marketed for sale. And baseball is a less attractive asset right now than the NFL or NBA. Consider that many valuation estimates put the Wolves at nearly $3 billion, near double the value of the Twins.
MLB’s revenue imbalances between large and smaller market teams act as a depressive on values. Commissioner Rob Manfred is using the collapse of the RSN universe to drive the league into more shared media revenue (local media revenue drives the imbalances), but it’s likely facing a half-decade of declining then flat broadcast revenues as the post-RSN reality settles and scales. The Twins were reported to be earning between $40 million and $60 million in rights fees from Bally’s at its peak, while next year it will struggle to generate a fraction of that selling its own ads on an MLB broadcast platform.
In the sale interregnum the team will have to work to keep executive talent, though it’s believed Falvey is committed to the organization and longtime President Dave St. Peter will stay to help manage the transition, though few expect him to remain long beyond the sale.
In terms of who might buy the Twins, the modern owner fans want is more like Alex Rodriguez or Mark Cuban, a voluble, visible figure who talks about being the best and is front and center in the community. They don’t run their team “like a business,” though that is easier in the NBA and NFL with salary caps and ever-rising broadcast revenues. Local figures with the means to buy the Twins, such as Loons owner Dr. Bill McGuire or the Davis family (Cambria), might resemble the Pohlads more than fans wish.
And the Pohlads were an important tonic after the rough and raw old-school approach of the Griffith family, especially in the era after Carl’s passing. They lacked a media playbook, but brought the region two championships, which no other local sports franchise (other than the Lynx) has done. The family would surely love to find a buyer who takes a less disciplined approach to business than it does and bring the region an era of big-spending baseball dominance, after all, they are not going anywhere.
I’ve seen many sports owners depart over the years, in this market and others. I’ve seen a lot of fan bases say “good riddance,” often with cause. But if that’s the take on the day the Pohlads turn over the keys to Target Field, it’s because fans simply lack interest in a nuanced understanding of the last four decades. It may not have been the best of times, but it was hardly the worst.
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