The Minnesota Twins’ owners, the Pohlad family, have owned the Twins since 1984, following the death of Carl Pohlad, who purchased the team for $40 million. Under Carl’s ownership, the Twins were in the golden age of Minnesota baseball, winning two World Series titles in 1987 and 1991. Following Carl’s passing in 2009, his son, Jim, became the controlling owner and stepped down in 2022. Joe and Tom Pohlad have both helped with operations since 2022, but Tom was named executive chair owner in 2025. Sounds great, right? Think again. After the Twins won their first postseason game in 2023 after an 18-game losing streak in the postseason, the Pohlads decided to cut payroll by almost $30 million. This was infuriating for fans because, after coming off the most exciting Twins season in decades, they cut payroll while already being one of the league’s lowest-spending teams.
In the MLB (Major League Baseball), there is no salary cap or floor, meaning teams can spend as much money as they want, or as little money as they want. Currently, the Twins’ payroll is projected at $107 million for the 2026 season, which is 26th out of 30th in spending in the league. This is absurd when you think of how much money the Pohlad family has and how little they are actually spending. The Los Angeles Dodgers projected payroll is just around $400 million and is the highest in baseball. The Tampa Bay Rays spend the least amount of money at $73 million in projected payroll. Many baseball fans argue that a salary cap would fix the problem of teams essentially being “pay to win,” but that is not entirely true. While the Dodgers have won back-to-back championships, the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in projected payroll right now, won the American League Central division in 2025 but lost in the first round to division rival Detroit Tigers, who are currently 10th in payroll in 2025. Personally, I don’t think a salary cap will ever happen in the MLB, but a salary floor of some sort would be nice, along with strict signing deals, because teams have too wide of a range with how much money they spend.
The Pohlads have no excuse to try to be right with this. Hard-core and even casual Twins fans are angry, and it shows. In the first 2 series at Target Field, the average attendance was 17,422, which is currently 27th in the league. I went to a total of three games in the opening weekend with the “Twins pass,” which gets you standing room tickets to every game for $229 for the entire season. This is still one of the best, if not the best, deals in sports to try to get people to games, which is not happening at all. Going to games is a ghostown, and it is truly an embarrassment to the entire league. The Twins were on baseball memes across the internet for making football-type introductions on their broadcast with visibly hundreds of people in the stands. The attendance nightmare has been caused by no other than the owners themselves.
The final straw for Twins fans was when they had one of the biggest player salary dumps in sports history, trading 11 players on the active MLB roster, including some of the biggest stars in the league, with Carlos Correa, Johan Duran and Griffin Jax. Who did the Twins get in exchange for these stars? Realistically, no one who will ever touch the big leagues. At this point, the Twins were only 5.5 games out of the American League wild card spot and could have definitely competed for it if they had held onto most players. Ultimately, the Twins finished with a record of 70-92, which was the 4th worst in the entire league.
Going into the 2026 season, the team’s payroll reached projections of around $107 million, down almost $30 million from 2025. Signings were extremely underwhelming, with noticeable players Josh Bell, Gio Urshela and Liam Hendricks, who are all way out of their prime. Minnesota’s front office has always tended to sign old players who were good more that ten years ago, such as Carlos Santana, Billy Hamilton, Chris Archer and Andrelton Simmons. The strategy of ‘Moneyball’ is often associated with MLB teams signing under-the-radar players that they can sign for cheap. This has ultimately worked; even with awful attendance and ridiculously low hopes going into the season, the Twins started the year off right with the best record in the American League after two weeks of games.
Outside of the front office, attendance in Minnesota was at an all-time low in late 2025, mainly due to how bad the team was, but in protest of the Pohlad family, giving them pressure on them to sell the team. Early in the offseason, going into 2026, the Pohlad family announced they were looking for a buyer of the Twins for an ownership change in the upcoming season. Fans finally felt free and ready for new ownership to take over after years of hardship with the Pohlads. This all collapsed when the Pohlads sent a message on the Twins’ social media, saying they wouldn’t be selling the team.
On behalf of many Twins fans, I can say we truly want the team to succeed. We want to show up at Target Field to enjoy a ballgame in the summer, but right now, we ultimately can’t do that. Vibes at Target Field are absolutely atrocious. When one of the best pitchers in the league, Tarik Skubal, starts a game, you shouldn’t have an attendance of around 10 thousand. It is an embarrassment to the league, the fans and every worker at Target Field who has to sit around for three hours doing absolutely nothing. I have also had several instances of people chanting “Sell the team” or just verbally trash-talking the team and the owners. The workers’ response to this has been to silence all of it. One sign was taken by a cameraman, a group of college kids was asked to be quiet when being “too negative,” and chants have ultimately been silenced.
2026 attendance has been awful, and the thousands of fans at games are on the verge of being kicked out for spreading an opinion. No swearing, no hate, just people who have bought a ticket to a game to support the team. There is also a video of Tom Pohlad calling a fan “classless” for wearing a “sell the team” hat. They have no clue how much the city actually cares about this team. The thousands of people at the game were all cheering for the win, and the Pohlads seemingly ripped the fans. So, to the Pohlad family, if you don’t care about the fans, which we know you don’t, sell the team.
