MN Twins Take Trophy for MLB’s Unhappiest Fanbase

Last week, the Minnesota Twins announced their new minority owners, clarified the organization’s debt situation, and officially pushed Joe Pohlad out of the spotlight.

Now, Tom Pohlad is their front man and the latest family member to promise real change in an ownership group that almost always falls short of promises and expectations. Unfortunately for the Twins and their expanded ownership family, fans aren’t interested in lip service anymore.

Joe Pohlad said all the right things when he was introduced as executive chair in November, 2022. He followed through for a couple of seasons, before suddenly having to “right-sized” payroll.

Fans Need Better From the Minnesota Twins

The last couple years of incompetence is hardly a surprise to MN Twins fans. The Pohlads have shown little care for their fanbase for years now, if not decades.

And when you repeatedly fail and frustrate your fans like our favorite baseball team has recently, well… that’s how your fanbase lands the No. 1 spot on ESPN’s most frustrated MLB fanbases.

Let’s turn back the clock to 2019. The Twins won 101 games, smashing an MLB-record 307 home runs, on their way to the AL Central title. Then consider where the rest of the division was. The Kansas City Royals were a mess. The Detroit Tigers were a bigger mess.

The Chicago White Sox had lost 89 games. Cleveland was about to embark on a rebuild of sorts…The Twins had the most talent in the division. They should have dominated the AL Central the next six years.

But that didn’t happen…Then came the 2025 trade deadline, when the Twins had a historic sell-off, dealing away 11 players in a series of moves that stunned the baseball industry.

David Schoenfield – ESPN

As Schoenfield points out, Minnesota fans have been climbing his list for years. Last season, they ranked fourth. One year later, their fans are even worse off than those cheering for the 102-loss Chicago White Sox.

Is there hope? Kind of. The AL Central is hardly a gauntlet, which should give the Twins a chance to compete in the short term, as long as team president Derek Falvey can put a decent budget squad together.

Trying to find hope in Twins’ future

But really, this is lipstick service for a pig. Because, as Schoenfeld points out, the moment this ownership group decided not to sell the franchise back in August, any real feeling of optimism for the future went along with it.

[After the trade deadline] The Twins went 19-35 the final two months and attendance fell to 1.77 million, the lowest full-season figure for the franchise since 2000.

In the midst of this, the Pohlad family, which has owned the Twins since 1984 and had been exploring a sale, took the team off the market in August — crushing the hopes of Twins fans everywhere.

David Schoenfield – ESPN

The addition of Josh Bell is a step in the right direction, but the bullpen still needs a complete rebuild. More than likely, Dan Altavilla isn’t the piece that gets it done.

Even with a new influx of cash, it would be unrealistic to expect the Twins’ payroll to rise significantly by 2026. That means Derek Shelton and the front office must squeeze more out of the talent already in place.

If the Pohlads truly want fans back at Target Field, it won’t be about what they say, it will be about what they do.

If there’s a glimmer of good news for a franchise that has just one playoff series win since 2002 (a wild-card series win in 2023) and last appeared in the World Series in 1991, it’s that the Twins will apparently hold on to Joe Ryan, Pablo Lopez and Byron Buxton, despite trade rumors at the beginning of the offseason.

Hey, in the AL Central, anything is possible. Maybe the Twins find a way to get off this list next year.

David Schoenfield – ESPN