Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad, the mogul whose miserly way of running a baseball team made it a target for contraction and a symbol of the game's ass-backward financial situation, announced his intention to sell the team on Thursday. This represents something of a victory for fans of baseball everywhere. So wherever you are, Twins fan or not, raise a glass and toast the coming end of an era.
It's not that Pohlad didn't have some success during his tenure as the Twins' owner. On the contrary. Shortly after buying the Twins from Calvin Griffith in 1984, Pohlad's team won two unlikely World Championships, in 1987 and 1991. While that does feel like a bygone era--back when ANY TEAM, it seemed, could win a World Championship--anyone complaining about a team which has gone only ten years without a championship is advised to try selling that from atop a Boston barstool (Step Two: attempt to pick up broken teeth with broken fingers).
And it's not as if Pohlad hasn't tried to sell the team before. Recall that back in 1997, Pohlad, unable to squeeze a publicly-funded stadium out of Minnesota taxpayers, agreed to sell the Twins to North Carolina businessman Donald Beaver. That deal fell through when Carolina residents proved themselves to be no more gullible than their North Star counterparts, voting down referendums to raise taxes to support a publicly-funded stadium. In 1999, Pohlad agreed to sell the team to St. Paul-based group which included the owners of the NBA Timberwolves and NHL Wild. Again, voters rejected a stadium-related referendum, halting the sale.
So perhaps we shouldn't get too excited yet about the prospect of the Twins being sold out of the hands of Forbes.com's 115th Richest Man in the America. But let us indulge in some premature jocularity anyway, because the news of Pohlad's latest announcement offers yet another emphatic rebuke to Bud Selig's already-shelved contraction plan. Had that plan gone through, Pohlad stood to receive $150 million or more in blood money as Major League Baseball bought the Twins out of existence.
He'll almost certainly receive less than that from selling a live team--but then, you can't take it with you anyway, Carl. And his departure will remove a huge obstacle for the Twins in solving their stadium woes. Pohlad has long shown a less-than-sincere committment to building a new ballpark if it involved any of his billions--one past proposal amounted to him receiving an $82.5 million loan from taxpayers to do so while giving him a huge tax break for "donating" 49 percent of the team to the public.
It will also remove a chronic abuser of baseball's current revenue-sharing system. Since the current plan was put in place, Pohlad has taken advantage of the lack of a minimum payroll to field bargain-basement teams with little chance of competing on the field or drawing interest at the box office (until last season, at least) and depending on revenue-sharing money to bring his team back into the black. Last year, the Twins showed a $536,000 profit after receiving $19 million in revenue-sharing. In 2000, they received $21 million in revenue sharing--$5 million more than their entire payroll. In 1999, they showed a $5 million profit after receiving $14 million in revenue-sharing. (Once again, I'm indebted to the work of Doug Pappas for providing this information). Does anybody detect a trend here?
Alabama businessman Donald Watkins has made lots of noise about buying the Twins and lining up a privately-financed ballpark. Watkins has also expressed interest in two other teams on the auction--or chopping--block, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Montreal Expos, so who knows how serious he really is. But other suitors for the Twins, including a group of Twin Cities lawyers and businessmen, have emerged as well, and without Pohlad's track record of trying to screw the Minnesota taxpayers, they may find a more sympathetic public.
The bottom line is that we don't know what will happen to the Twins, but in any hands but Pohlad's, they'll likely be far better off. And so will the game of baseball as well. Let's all hope we can soon bid adieu to this miserly mogul and crony of Bud.
The heightened security measures which have made it more difficult for foreigners to attain work visas post-September 11 have shaken several ballplayers' birth-certificate discrepancies out of the trees. Among those aging before our very eyes: Indians pitcher Bartolo Colon (4 years!), Yanks hurler Orlando Hernandez (3 years, one year less than the Yankees and the local media had posited for quite some time), Angels pitcher Ramon Ortiz (3 years), Mets outmaker Rey Ordonez (2 years), Royals shortstop Neifi Perez (2 years), and Yanks futilityman Enrique Wilson (2 years).
I've got mixed emotions about these revelations. Lying about one's age is a time-honored tradition in baseball, particularly among Latin American ballplayers--a mode contract-signing gamesmanship and a way to give a vulnerable segment of the player population a little bit of leverage to use with teams. It can certainly make a prospect more enticing--developmentally speaking, the skills shown by an 18-year old are worth even more when shown by a 17-year old. But it can also cause a team to lose a player if they can be shown to have signed him while he was underage (witness several cases involving the Dodgers in recent years, including Adrian Beltre, whom they at least were able to re-sign).
Several years down the road, it can make a 28-year old suspect out of a 26-year old "prospect," (as in the case of Wilson, whose hype has impressed the likes of John Hart and Brian Cashman but not me) or reveal a "29"-year old to be even further past his statisical peak then previously thought (see Rey .000rdoñez). With so much riding on player contracts, it remains to be seen whether teams use these discrepancies to wriggle free from suddenly even-less-favorable commitments (like the Yankees did when they found out Cuban defector Andy Morales had lied about his age and couldn't even hit AA pitching).
These revelations may also shed light on mysteries such as why Colon seemed to be so durable a pitcher at such a tender age, or why Carlos Baerga seemed to fall apart so quickly. Baerga's age hasn't officially been affected by the situation, presumably becaues he remained in the country this past winter, but it certainly would make sense if we were to discover he was 25-29 during his Indians heyday and 33 when he began his tour of oblivion instead of 22-26 and 30). Still, we may never pin down the ages of some players who haven't left the country, or who are no longer active, and that's probably a good thing. We'll just have to wait until Fernando Valenzuela's tree has fallen to count his many rings.
I'm back from Salt Lake City, having spent the past nine days totally immersed in the Winter Olympics. My friends and I had an absolute blast--our vacation was everything we'd hoped for and more. I'd intended to post something of our goings-on, but our schedule, with 5 AM wakeups and often two events per day, was so jam-packed that I couldn't find the time or the energy while there (I can hear you all sobbing for me right now; really, I think I'll be okay...).
I'm in the process of putting together a writeup of our experiences, which I'll post in the next few days.
