The biggest culprit is ownership. I'm furious at them, to be blunt. They're bad managers of a business, particularly an entertainment business. They're just bad at their jobs.
When your entertainment business is cyclical, with natural peaks and valleys, you do not knee-cap your investment when it's HEADING TOWARD A PEAK. That's just poor management, that's short-sighted and not very smart. One might even call it dumb. I would.
Additionally, while you're restricting the ability of this entertainment business to entertain, you DO NOT also make it ****ing impossible for fans to watch your product. And you don't remove $4 ticket flash sales. You don't close the third deck of Target Field in April, forcing hesitant fans into more expensive seats because you're greedy asses. And you don't do a dozen other things this third generation of Pohlads has done in the past two years.
And now, to boot, we've found out they're doing all of this in part because they're siphoning money out of the Twins to prop up their other failing businesses.
The third generation of Pohlads have done everything in their power to make fans not give a **** about the Minnesota Twins. And congratulations, you nit-wits, YOU DID IT. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. I now pay farrrrr more attention to the competent organization one state to the east of us, the Milwaukee Brewers. They've faced the same problems the Twins have in TV, and they play in an even smaller market. Yet they've somehow weathered this RSN apocalypse better than the bigger-market Twins. They've offered in-market streaming for years. They provide a fan experience that encourages people to show up. They're chugging along, making the playoffs every season, and not going out of their way to piss off the fanbase.
Now on to the front office.
It's not their fault ownership knee-capped them. That's a really unfortunate thing to have happen right as you've built a winner with some success. Not their fault.
But it IS their fault that they've been sitting on their hands for literally years now. They didn't try to trade minor-league pitching to round out the roster before 2024. They basically did absolutely nothing in the wake of the team putting up one of the most pathetic collapses we've ever seen in the second half of 2024. All that inaction, and now they're ****ing selling. Pathetic.
Screw this franchise.