Pohlads Avoided Sale of MN Twins to Have New Investors Pay Off Debt

We are more than two weeks from the Pohlad-mandated teardown at the trade deadline. The roster was gutted, and future payroll was slashed. Among the most eye-opening moves was paying $30 million to rid a future $70 million of Carlos Correa’s contract to the Astros.

After confidently selling down to the roster bones at the deadline, the Pohlad’s decided to do the opposite with their sale of the Minnesota Twins organization, taking the team completely off the market and instead opting to fix their financial troubles by taking on minority investors for the first time since 2002.

Of course, the Pohlads and their propaganda president, Derek Falvey, spun their recent roster teardown and ownership decision in a positive light. But in reality, if it looked more like a short-term cash grab by financially desperate owners, well… that’s because it was.

Minnesota Twins could have sold, but Pohlads chose $500 million instead?

When the MN Twins went on the market last October there was much rejoicing. Without knowing who the next owner could be, the hope was that another owner… no matter who, couldn’t be as bad as the Pohlad family or the questionable $400 million they racked up in family debt since 2020.

The Athletic’s Aaron Gleeman didn’t hold back in his criticism of the Minnesota Twins’ longstanding ownership group, during a recent episode of Gleeman and the Geek.

There, the longtime Twins fan and now beat-style insider/reporter estimates that the Pohlads received as much as $500 million from their new minority partners, uncoincidentally just enough to cover their $400+ million in reported debt.

“It’s more clear than ever to me that the could have sold it. They didn’t consider them good enough offers. But they received, or would have received lets say, what would have been considered by the rest of baseball, market rate offers. $1.4, $1.5B something like that.

Joe Pohlad didn’t want to give up the team. This was a better scenario because they can get $500M without giving control of the team…They absolutely chose this path of chunks of minority ownership to get money to pay down the debt over selling the team. It wasn’t a situation where they could not get $1.5B for they team and so they pivoted. It’s a situation where they chose this path actively over that”

Aaron Gleeman

We can debate whether or not $1.5 billion should have been enough to make a deal work. Major League Baseball probably would have preferred to avoid that. The goal is to always have the water level raising. The Tampa Bay Rays are selling for $1.7 billion, and recent valuations had them below Minnesota.

Pohlad quest to fix their money problems

Since the Twins went up for sale, we’ve known the Pohlads’ magic number to be $1.7 billion. Given the Rays got that amount, theoretically they should have too. However, the Rays (at least not according to any reports) weren’t carrying massive amounts of debt either.

Dan Hayes and Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic reported that the minority shares sold by the Pohlad’s were completed at a higher valuation than $1.7 billion. That is much more feasible though when it’s coming in at a significantly smaller chunk of the franchise.

Ultimately though, this continues to boil down to a worst case scenario. The Pohlad family put the Twins up for sale. They couldn’t find a buyer and their ask was too rich. Rather than pivot, they just found a pair of entities willing to buy their debt in exchange for a seat at the table.

Related: Rocco Baldelli Takes Responsibility Minnesota Twins Bosses Won’t

Unless the two new parties are going to be both publicly identified, and actively interacting with the operation, there’s little reason to believe the future will be more than status quo. Joe Pohlad and Derek Falvey want you to believe this is all a good thing.

Guess what? It’s not.