If I Owned The Minnesota Twins: A Wish List

As Matt Lenz wrote in his recent piece, the last several ownership changes across baseball have produced a mixed outcome. While there are owners like Steve Cohen who act like fans, willing to lose substantial money to win, there are multiple other examples of new ownership groups running their team more like a business.

It’s currently impossible to predict which way the winds blow for the Twins, but I will attempt to provide a realistic wish list that any owner could — and should — execute on in order to restore fan morale and build the competitive team this community clamors for. In a perfect world, the next owner will be an actual fan of the club. There are three main areas of opportunity — payroll, fan engagement, and creative marketing — that any owner should take an interest in evolving. Let’s dig in.

Payroll
Look, the Twins probably aren’t going to wind up with a $200 million payroll in the next couple of years – and that’s ok. As a firmly mid-market team, the expectation should be spending in a manner commensurate with media market size and contention window. The Twin Cities is the definition of an average media market – 15th among metropolitan areas that have a baseball club. In the Venn diagram of wishes and reality, the sweet spot in the middle is probably to average an average payroll. During periods of contention, ramp up by $10-20M. During rebuilding or otherwise non-competitive windows, by all means cut $30-40M and restock the farm.

So what does "average" look like? According to Spotrac, in 2024, the team with the 15th-highest payroll was the Padres, at $171M. Now, that’s not quite a fair representation as their owner gave the go-ahead to spend a little recklessly in an attempt to win now. Dropping down to the 16th-highest payroll, we have the Mariners at $148M. That is a good, realistic target for the Twins’ new owner to aim at. To be clear, if the Twins had the extra $20M to work with this past season, they almost certainly would have walked into the playoffs.

With the RSN media landscape crumbling, ownership and the business side will need to explore additional revenue streams to make this realistic, and a lot of this can be bucketed into fan engagement and creative marketing.

Fan Engagement
A good business owner understands that creating happy customers is the key to a sustainable, healthy business. Furthermore, new customer acquisition is the key to growth. Over the past several years, the Pohlads and the business side of the organization demonstrated an inability to do either. The new owner will need to solve this problem, in order to prevent a downward spiral of fan morale, attendance, and the quality of the team on the field.

How should they go about this? There are several options here. Low-hanging fruit would be to extend TwinsFest, lengthen the winter caravan, or do more community engagement across greater Minnesota.

The Twins do some nice things with their Twitter account, which expresses a fun personality and engages in various ways with the denizens of “Twins Twitter.” There have been some impressive efforts to create high-quality content and multimedia, such as their behind-the-scenes “The Diamond” series on YouTube. The Twins could absolutely lean harder into these frontiers to reach digitally-minded fans, who will have greater access to games via DTC streaming broadcasts.

The Twins could also do things to bring people from the community in on off-days or through lunch time on night games. At Target Field, there’s a thing called “Creator’s Corner” – local vendors that sell products like pottery and furniture. They could choose to expand this program in order to draw the community in. Perhaps they could air classic games on the big scoreboard on off days and sell concessions and merch. FanHQ currently handles most player meet-and-greets and signing events. The Twins could choose to hold similar events in-house before games to draw additional fans.

Beyond that, there could be opportunity for pop-up events, such as having a concession stand devoted to various guest chefs and concepts, and local brewery takeovers. That might give fans a reason to go out for dinner at the ballpark and also catch a game while they are there. The possibilities are endless — all it will take is a little creativity, and a real desire to draw fans in.

Creative Marketing
There are a number of ways to increase fan interest and juice ticket sales: through creative promotions, flash sales, better concessions deals, or season ticket incentives; the sale of jersey patches; initiating new brand partnerships; or creative marketing.

Historically, the Twins haven’t done a great job with “of the moment” marketing. While both Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton were on the IL, advertising talked about coming to a game to watch them play. That’s just not effective. More effective? Invite people to a game to watch a streak continue. Play up rivalries. Celebrate star players from the visiting team. When Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, or Bobby Witt are in town, use that. If a pitching matchup is a battle of aces, reference that to sell tickets. Do “the weather isn’t great today” flash sales and push it on Twitter and TikTok. Give fans a free ticket on their birthday. 

There’s also an opportunity to involve social media influencers to increase interest among younger fans, and to otherwise use non-traditional media to create awareness and interest.

Conclusion
Whoever ends up purchasing the Twins will benefit from several built-in things: a great stadium, a good team with a young core, a deep farm system that also has a lot of high-end talent, and a fanbase that’s (finally) able to watch games without blackout restrictions. They will have the rare opportunity to create immediate goodwill among fans by saying they want to win a World Series, and backing it up with action. If they engage the fanbase and show even a modicum of creativity, they have the ability to create a virtuous cycle that is capable of solidifying and strengthening the fan base, and fielding a perpetually competitive team at the same time.

What do you think? Is this wish list reasonable? Is anything missing? What would you wish for? Comment below!