The Twins solved their short-term $400 million financial dilemma by agreeing to sell portions of the franchise to as-yet-unidentified minority investors, a transaction that is still in progress. It took more than 10 months of uncertainty before that solution became clear.<\/p>\n
And that might be the easy part.<\/p>\n
The Twins\u2019 long-term financial outlook might take far longer to guarantee, at least as a family-owned asset of the Pohlads, and depends upon navigating a far more turbulent path \u2014 baseball getting a new collective bargaining agreement after next season, a process that could shut down business for a lengthy period of time.<\/p>\n
Joe Pohlad, executive chair of Minnesota\u2019s Major League Baseball franchise and the grandson of Carl Pohlad, who bought the team 41 years ago, said in an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune earlier this month that the decision to take on partners but keep majority control of the team \u201caddresses the debt that we have incurred.\u201d The debt grew substantially when COVID-19 cost MLB nearly two-thirds of the 2020 season and forced games to be played in empty stadiums.<\/p>\n
But Pohlad added an observation that hints at the challenge that he believes still looms for franchises outside the country\u2019s major media markets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat debt built up as we tried to invest in the fan experience [at Target Field] and in our team,\u201d Pohlad said. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve found is that\u2019s really difficult to do in this current economic model.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pohlad did not elaborate, but he didn\u2019t have to \u2014 his complaint is hardly uncommon in a sport that has an ever-widening disparity between its franchises in revenues and, hardly unrelated, in player payroll. According to an analysis by CNBC published in April, the Twins\u2019 gross revenue, estimated by the television network at $356 million last year, is roughly half that of the Yankees and Dodgers, each of whom took in more than $700 million.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no wonder, then, that the Twins\u2019 2025 payroll, pegged at $128 million this season by baseball-tracker Cot\u2019s Baseball Contracts, is far less than half that of those MLB colossuses, with the Yankees spending around $297 million and the Dodgers spending a record $338 million. Not to mention the $336 million payroll carried this year by the Mets\u2019 Steve Cohen, the wealthiest owner in baseball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Twins solved their short-term $400 million financial dilemma by agreeing to sell portions of the franchise to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-108273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}