Could the Twins Afford a Mid-Rotation Starter if Millennials Gave Up Avocado Toast?

There’s an old saying: “The fans pay your salary.” It’s a very wise one typically directed at stuck up athletes who refuse to take criticism from the people who watch every single game and know team history much better than the self-centered players. It’s true. If we didn’t pay for tickets to the game, the athletes would have no salary.

Let’s take it a step further. I am calling all Millennials to forgo their most sacred snack, just one time, for the good of the team. Me personally, my favorite snack is hose water and also licking the walls for that tangy lead taste, but that’s besides the point.

It’s time to do some analytics.

The Barnes and Noble in Edina sells avocado toast for 12 dollars, per Elon Musk’s Grok AI 2.0. If you’re eating it three times a day, then no wonder you’re not building equity, but that’s besides the point. Let’s just start with one forgone avocado toast. It’s good to start them off slow, like texting them before calling. Back in my day we just would call and say “Hi Mrs. Butz, is Seymour there?” when we wanted to talk to Seymour, but I guess times have changed. Can you imagine if Tom Kelly had to text the bullpen before calling the bullpen phone? Let’s just say there would be a lot more Jack Morrises and a lot less Blake Snells if Millennials were managing.

Anyway, let’s just start with 12 dollars. Now, Dave St. Peter said with the direct-to streaming the Twins now reach 4.40 million households, up from 1.08 when they had the Ballyses’s deal. Now, obviously, not every household is filled with Millennials. But many households have a lot of them all living six people in a two bedroom hovel getting up to who knows what. But I digress.

According to Google AI, approximately 21.7% of the US population is Millennials. There’s 2.5 people per household according to ChatGPT. That’s the problem with analytics because unless we’re talking Charley Sheen, there’s no half men. It should be 2 or 3, but these are the same people (Michael Lewis) who say that a player can be worth 4.6 wins, which is especially egregious when the player in question is Joey Gallo in 2022.

So now we have our numbers, let’s do some math. Luckily I went to a time where they taught us math in school by memorizing time tables instead of understanding numbers like they do in Common C(rap)ore. We learned how to calculate the area of a rectangle by its hypotenuse but Millennials were told to just color the rectangle in however they felt that day. Rectangles are green and they always will be. But that's I digress.

4,400,000 households in Twins Territory times 2.5 people per household gets us a total population of 11,000,000 people in Twins Territory. Of those 11,000,000 people, 21.7% of them are Millennials, or those born between 1981 and 1996, AKA kids who didn’t go to Woodstock and grew up with the World Wide Web. So we take 11,000,000 and times it by 21.7 and we get 238,700,000 Millennials in Twins Territory. Or at least we would if we did Common C(rap) math. Or if cheap pohlad had just removed the blackout restrictions earlier so everyone in the world would be Twins fans.

Instead we have to times 11,000,000 by .217 because that’s how percentages work. We get a grand total of 2,378,000 Millennials in Twins Territory. If each of those Twins Territory Millennials gave up avocado toast one time, at $12 dollars a toast, that would be a savings of $28,644,000. Boom. Payroll crunched solved. Talk about a fanbase pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. If a backend starter like Jorge Lopez can get paid 21 million from the Twins this year, imagine what 28 million gets the team. Maybe Sunny Gray.

“But Gregg,” I hear you say. “Not all Millennials are baseball fans. Its too boring for their short attention spans.” That’s right but that’s a problem we need to solve. Do you think that anyone said “But I didn’t enjoy the first World War, I don’t want to help with the second”? No. They knew what Uncle Sam asked of them. And Baseball is America’s pastime, so Uncle Gregg asks you, Millennials in Twins Territory, not what your baseball team can do for you, but what you can do for your baseball team.