9:44pm: Dan Hayes of The Athletic writes that the Pohlads remain firm in their $1.7 billion ask. Hayes adds that while the Pohlads have indeed received interest from multiple parties, they’ve also heard a few concerns — including the collapse of their local TV deal with FanDuel Sports Networks and the upwards of $425MM in debt which the organization has accrued. Those interested in the process are encouraged to read Hayes’ column in full for more details.
8:14pm: The Twins have been for sale at least dating back to last October. Those efforts seemed to stall in February, as perceived frontrunner Justin Ishbia dropped his pursuit in favor of taking a larger minority share of the White Sox under Jerry Reinsdorf.
That opened some question about whether the Pohlad family might pull the franchise off the market entirely. That still doesn’t appear likely. Phil Miller of The Minnesota Star-Tribune reports that the Pohlads have welcomed several potential buyers to Target Field this month. While there’s no indication that any formal offers have been made, Miller writes that one source suggested the process was nearer to a conclusion than its beginning.
In March, The Athletic reported that the Pohlads had an asking price of at least $1.7 billion. Around the same time, Forbes estimated the Minnesota organization was worth roughly $1.5 billion in its annual franchise valuations. CBNC placed a $1.65 billion evaluation in mid-April, more closely aligning with the reported asking price.
Carl Pohlad purchased the team for $44MM back in 1984. After Carl Pohlad died in 2009, his son Jim took control. Jim Pohlad turned over operations to his nephew, Joe, in November 2022.
I’ll buy them for $29.99 not a penny more.
I invite the Pohlads to come relax by my pool in Carlsbad, have some mimosas and hear my pitch of a lightly used 2016 Lexus, an even lighter used $50 Starbucks gift card, a punch card for a free coffee at Petco Park and I’m willing to transfer all my 2025 Dodger game tix.
I always wait until Black Friday to buy teams.
Earl Scheib won’t even paint a car for that any more!
I bid $1.7 billion. Can someone lend me $1.7 billion???
Can I write a check?
Sure! As long as you don’t mind being paid back in Monopoly money!
Make sure that it is certified.
Certified Monopoly money, check!
With the Cardinals are doing better than expected —- maybe a solid Cardinals Billionaire Fan will buy the Cardinals from the DeWitts!!!
They have NO intention on spending money on Quality players at the trading deadline nor in the off seasons…..
Can’t you imagine—— With John Mozeliak gone and new Owners spending money —-
That would Equal a Guaranteed 3 Million Fans in the Stands for 2026!!!!
How much of the CHEAP Pohlad genes was JOE Pohlad blessed with?? i
Guardians minority owner David blitzer is worth 3.6 billion. Been minority owner since 2022 and hasn’t put a penny in the team. When John Sherman was minority owner before buying the Royals he wrote a check for 60million for3 years to sign double e. David blitzer is no John Sherman ! All blitzer is worried about funding a new arena in Philly with his partner josh Harris with no taxpayers money. If not going to invest in the guardians sell your shares and don’t wait until 2028 to take over majority ownership in the team !
Wolf Blitzer has that much moolah? That’s how he kept the CNN gig. Not because of his charm. Peeps say noone goes near him since he stinky
I bet this family who ruined a once great twin franchise cannot wait to cash in and hit the big bucks and fade away to be forgotten by all.
both championships were after the pohlads bought the team. I’m not a big pohlad fan, but let’s be real here.
Baseball is big business…and turning $44M over 40 years to $1.65B is pretty good…one wonders whether these valuations might make their positions reasonable at the next CBA—naaah.
but think about how much money they lost all of those years /s
Supposedly, if you believe them, they are currently operating at a negative 465 million dollar. No business could afford that.
If they get their asking price, it is a nice return. Almost as high of an annual return as the S&P 500 index over the same period.
That’s true for the team valuation amount, but they also maaay have drawn out some cash along the way, In fact over 40 years that cash is likely approaching the total sale amount (40 * $40m = 1.6bn).
One can also borrow cash (to make more money) against an investment portfolio so that doesn’t change what @CKinSTL stated.
If you want to summarize the returns on the investment you don’t exclude half the value. It’s a dumb distinction.
Crise – where are you pulling that $40 million a year figure from?
Made it up, but pretty plausible.
They always claimed that payroll was about half revenue and over time available data more or less backed that up. So if payroll is near $120m, for example, that would mean they had $100-120m to run the enterprise and make a profit. That matches with reported shared rev data plus the local TV contract. And for every year in the 90s when they were only taking out $10m they’ve had a more recent year where they cleared far more than $40m. Plus 1.6bn / 40 years comes out to a nice round number.
Everyone who doesn’t have Bob Nutting as an owner can stop complaining about their team not spending money. Very limited company will be allowed—looking at you club formerly named Oakland
I’d hope Miami & WSox fans are included as well, as those 2 and WestSac are the only worse payrolls than the Jolly Roger’s crew.
But I do agree. While it is no blessing, there are deeper depths than what the Twins are in, and at least the Pohlads are giving someone else the shovel to dig themselves out. My heart goes out to the Pirates, Nutting’s nutty.
Only 1.7 billion? I might try to put together a group and buy them at that price.
Count me in for $100
The Twins should be contracted.
CC will buy so he can then contract the WAMT
How on earth do the Twins have $400+ million in debt? They haven’t been spending on payroll, what else could they have possibly spent that much money on?
Cheap debt where the money was used for something more profitable than MLB franchise value. That is, borrow against the team at 2% and go invest in something more lucrative. It could have been done any time since rates dropped 30 years ago, not necessarily part of anything recent or due to real estate or whatever. We’ll never find out.
Steve Cohen bought the Mets with $350M debt on their books.
Yes, I understand the economics of leverage, that’s not the part I’m confused on. But if the debt is carried by the Twins franchise and not the Pohlads then it was money borrowed *by* the Twins for the team’s use, not *against* the Twins for the Pohlads’ use. Not to mention, the Pohlads made their money in banking and the Pohlad conglomerate includes an asset management arm and multiple real estate firms – they have plenty of ways to access plenty of capital without needing to use the Twins as a piggy bank.
So I still wonder what they could’ve possibly spent all that money on if it wasn’t payroll and it wasn’t stadium/land financing. I’m not trying to be accusatory either if I come off that way, I don’t have any basis to say it wasn’t legit, I’m just really curious and can’t think of anything myself that would make sense.
There’s a very solid chance that any individual professional sports franchise is being run in very non-standard ways, much more akin to a family business than a major corporation. So to answer your question there could be a 0% loan to the Pohlads on money borrowed by the team. it could have been a bonus paid using low interest borrowed money that would be paid back when the sale eventually happened. if you think of it as a a small family outfit where the numbers are comically large you can more easily see where the cookie jar mindset might pop up.
That’s a good point, if they knew in advance they wanted to sell I suppose they very well could structure some stuff like this to essentially advance themselves some of the money. See, this is why you ask questions lol. I could’ve or should’ve been able to come up with this but was thinking too inside the box.
A newish stadium?
$850M to build in ’09 subsidized by $615M of public money.
Nope – that was funded mostly by the Hennepin County taxpayer and is expected to be paid off entirely within a couple years, about a decade ahead of schedule.
Was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. Fact is there is very little chance they have any legitimate debt.
How much of the increase in value is due to taxpayer support of stadium etc
Given how the area surrounding Target Field went from a bunch of dilapidated, mostly abandoned warehouses to the trendiest part of Minneapolis, I’m sure the value of that real estate has appreciated tenfold, but it is owned by the Minnesota Ballpark Authority, not the Twins or the Pohlads, so its impact on the team’s valuation would be approximately nil.
You dont understand the way the world works
He’s right inasmuch as the area around the stadium is not owned by the team, so it shouldn’t be counted on as some untapped source of potential revenue. It’s both not theirs and the value has already been realized, so it won’t make a new owner any money the way a bunch of undeveloped space around a new park might.
Thanks for your brilliant insight, Mike! Please, enlighten us then as to how the value of taxpayer-owned real estate is factored in to the value of a privately-owned baseball team.
Have you considered that if a team paid for its stadium it would have significant debt and therefore reduce its net value ?
Are you slow? You are conflating two completely separate things. The taxpayers funded the property, but the Twins don’t own the property. Buying the Twins gets you no claim to the property. it gets you a baseball team and a long term lease payable to Hennepin County. Which is a liability. Do you understand the difference between equity and a liability?
Have you considered that a stadium that is on track to be fully paid off in about 2 years would *not* constitute a significant debt?
They got $350 million of public money for construction in 2007 from 30 year bonds backed by a sales tax. Target Field has sparked such an economic boom for the Warehouse District/North Loop that those bonds are set to be paid off ten years early. So for one, the taxpayer is getting quite a good deal here via ten years’ worth of interest payments that won’t have to be made and the sunset of that sales tax. Two, even if you pretend the value of the property has not changed since 2007 – they’d be sitting around 90% equity in the property. Do you know the difference between equity and a liability?
Once you consider – as you clearly have not – that the Twins took a chunk of land that used to be an empty parking lot, a garbage dump, and a bunch of abandoned warehouses and turned it into one of the most valuable property markets in the entire state of Minnesota, and thus the value of the real estate has increased exponentially since 2007, their equity in the property would probably be more like 99% right now, with the small bit of remaining debt a mere sliver on their balance sheet.
Given they’d be 18 years into payments right now, even if they were just paying on schedule and weren’t pre-paying like the smashing success of the sales tax has allowed the government to do, there is no way their outstanding stadium debt could account for even close to half of this $425 million.
But they didn’t buy the land, Hennepin County did. That land and its appreciated value belongs to the taxpayers. No potential buyer of the baseball team will get any economic value out of the land, so it won’t be factored into the value of the franchise. A lease, on the other hand, is an actual cost any owner will be on the hook for, so that will reduce the net value because it’s actually relevant to the purchase price.
I have a background in finance and evidently you don’t
If Pohlad can get interest in his team even though he wants $1.7 billion, now that they’re out of the horrible MASN deal Selig made with the Orioles, the Lerner’s are definitely going to increase their asking price for the Nats.
Eventually, *every* RSN deal other than a select few (Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs, Mets, and because they own MASN, the Orioles) is going to collapse. It took months of bankruptcy court proceedings just to get DSG to a temporary reprieve from where everybody including MLB knows they’re headed. The “problem” really isn’t the Twins decision to buy into MLB’s vision for a streaming service that includes every team with no blackouts, it’s that potential buyers are skeptical MLB’s going to be able to make that happen.
The four big market teams that make good money off their RSN aren’t “eager” to give up any of that money to help the less wealthy, and MLB/Manfred really doesn’t have much power to solve that problem. The Orioles/Nats were a different RSN challenge that MLB utterly failed to solve until the sale. Nobody really knows what MLB and the Nats almost assuridly gave Rubenstein to get him to make what was otherwise a *really* financially stupid decision.
MLB’s long term problem, big market vs small market, with nobody really caring about the fact they’re each simply one part of a more important whole (MLB) is going to keep rearing its very ugly head on a variety of issues.
You forgot NESN, which is owned by the Red Sox and not only nets them nearly an estimated $100 million per year in TV revenue, but also shields likely tens of millions of dollars from being subject to revenue sharing. According to Forbes the Red Sox were baseball’s most profitable team last year, so they’re playing the RSN game better than anyone.
You’re right, I forgot about the Red Sox ownership of NESN.. With 5-7 teams allied against what MLB wants to do with streaming, IMO the best they’re ever going to be able to do is a bigger version of what we have now. A majority of teams end up on the MLB in-market streaming service, but thhere will be blackouts.
I also didn’t include the Nats, although if the Lerner family decides to sell I think Ted Leonsis is almost guaranteed to buy the team. He tried before, because he wants them on his Monumental Sports channel. They msy end up making more than the $60 million a year they’ve been guaranteed by MASN, but not approach what the Red Sox, Dodgers, Yankees and Mets make.
The Orioles are in a unique situation in that continuing to operate MASN is *definitely* preferable to shutting down MASN and trying to sell their broadcast rights. A coupke years ago, an unnamed source in the Orioles front office said if they had to sell their rights, the team wasn’t sure *anybody* would be interested because Baltimore by itself is a small market. The $60 million they make from MASN per year is better than most small market teams will do in the future.
IMO, as long as it makes sense geographically, the revenue disparity should factor into realignment after the next expansion, Put the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and Phillies in the same “Northeast Division.” Toronto probably gets stuck in that Murderer’s Row too, simply because there isn’t anywhere else to put them that makes sense. Then a Southeast Division with Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta and the two Florida teams.
Would they accept a third party out of state check postdated to the year 10,000?
You sound like you work in Washington.
“After Carl Pohlad died in 2009, his son Jim took control. Jim Pohlad turned over operations to his nephew, Joe, in November 2022.”
Hard work and meritocracy in action.
Twins ballpark isn’t old, 2010 I believe but I know I’m probably off, a really good fanbase that shows up when the product is great on the field, and I’ve visited the twin cities, beautiful out there!
I hope you guys get an owner that cares about the team and wants to win. At least you guys have a shot, White Sox fans are stuck in perpetual mediocrity as long as the baseball gods punish us with having Jerry Reinsdorf.
They can remain firm, and no one will pay that for a small market team as we have seen.
Valuation is only what someone will actually pay, not some number someone pulls out of an orifice.
Amen. There’s a revenue war coming between Haves and Havenots and anyone thinking of buying a team on this side of the tracks better have a solid grasp of how they think things are going to play out before writing a check. There could be a long lockout after 2026, and the resulting revenue model could leave a lot of these middle ground teams in a tough financial spot if they want to compete with the wealthier RSN clubs.
Just to paint a picture, the old TV deal for the Twins was in the low $50m range and the estimates for the $100 season mlb.tv pass put that new revenue well under $10m. As the old RSN deals expire the league can’t possibly replace 80% of everyone’s lost income without a massive redesign of everything.
They could easily sell a share of the team to a party that would be able to add more cash to the organization and business smarts.
And here I thought Billy owned the Twins!!