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No team has been more antonymous with change over the last four decades than the Twins. The Pohlad family has presided over a long period of conservative stewardship, in which changes in the front office, the field staff, and even the roster tended to come more slowly than almost anywhere else in the league. Out of nowhere, today, the chances of enormous and fairly imminent change loomed up over Twins fans in an exhilaratingly unfamiliar way. Phil Miller of the Star-Tribune was first with the news.
It's too early to make definitive statements about this. If, as Joe Pohlad said in his statement, the family arrived at the decision to explore a sale this summer, this could move fairly quickly, but the owners of both the Angels and the Nationals have announced intentions to sell in the last few years, only to close up shop and hold onto their clubs, after all.
Should this come to fruition, though, it will be a radical change, at a moment when such a thing is precisely what the fan base craves. Over the last few years, the relationship between the team and its fans has become tangibly strained, and last year's decision to scale back payroll after the most exciting season in over a decade snapped one or two strands of connection for good. If this was under consideration, though, it certainly explains that choice to some extent. Keeping relatively clean books is a common tactical choice for owners eyeing a sale. It tends to read well to prospective buyers and inflate the asking price.
This probably doesn't come with immediate changes in tack or spending expectation for the team, but it rocks the world of Minnesota baseball. Over the next several weeks and months, it will be a background story, but it could well be the most important one in years for this team. Most Twins fans have only a fuzzy memory of life before the Pohlads bought the club, or none at all. The culture of this organization has been persistently different from that of most others around baseball, and that might soon change, for the first time in decades--for better and for worse.
Without a doubt, a sale would net a massive profit for the family, who bought the team for roughly $40 million. They won't sell for less than $1.5 billion now, and that number could easily reach $2 billion. Target Field is a relatively new, well-kept and beloved park. No prospective owner will have interest in moving the team in the near term. They might, however, run things very differently. It's impossible to predict what that will look like. That doesn't mean some fans won't spend the next few months daydreaming, though.
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