Tin Foil Hat: What If the Pohlads Don’t Actually Intend to Sell the Twins? - Twins - Twins Daily

Oct 17, 2024

With one of the best farm systems in all of baseball, could the 2024 Detroit Tigers be a blueprint for future versions of the Minnesota Twins? Could exploring a sale of the team just be a ploy until the next wave of prospects are ready? Get your tin foil hats on and let’s dive in!

Recently, I reviewed the 2024 Detroit Tigers and noticed that they have just three players who are under guaranteed contracts heading in 2025. Despite a total payroll south of $100 million, the Tigers came within one game of the American League Championship Series – a series the Twins haven’t experienced since 2004. In fact, the 2024 Tigers share some pretty stark similarities with what the 2026 version of the Twins might look like:

This is why I think this year's Tigers could provide a blueprint for the roster construction of a future Twins teams. As of right now, the 2026 Twins have roughly $70 million guaranteed to Byron Buxton, Carlos Correa, and Pablo López, while the rest of the roster could be composed of pre-arbitration and arbitration-eligible players – just like the 2024 Tigers. Self-imposed payroll restrictions aside, this isn’t an outlandish strategy, as we hope that Royce Lewis, Brooks Lee, David Festa, and Zebby Matthews are mainstays by 2026 and current top prospects like Walker Jenkins, Emmanuel Rodriguez, and Luke Keaschall are ready to contribute. So where does the news that the Pohlads are exploring a sale of the team fall into this? Got your tin foil hat ready For this exercise, let’s liken buying a Major League Baseball organization to buying a house. When you’re ready to put your house on the market, are you going to invest heavily into it? Unless your investment gives you a large return, say finishing the basement, it’s very unlikely. Remember when you thought it was a good idea to convert the garage into a bedroom? Well maybe undoing that will add some value back into the house. I mean, Minnesotans like their garages for winter. And to buyers with money to spend, what’s more attractive than a selling point like: “Sure, it needs some TLC, but that means YOU get to customize the house to your liking!” Prior to the Pohlads' big announcement, it was already widely assumed that the Twins' 2025 payroll would remain pretty similar to the 2024 payroll. While we weren’t anticipating another reduction in payroll, we also weren’t expecting the Twins to “finish their basement” in free agency, and any increase in payroll would come naturally, from arbitration-eligible players. Now that the Twins are allegedly for sale, it’s all but a lock that there will be no significant investment into the team this offseason. Moreover, while it’s all speculation at this point, our very own Cody Christie suggested "turning the bedroom back into a garage" by trading Pablo López to clean up the books. Not only would this make the organization look more valuable from a dollars perspective, but it would provide a new owner the opportunity to customize the team to their liking. While it would be hard to blame the Pohlads for standing pat and selling López, what if that’s just a ploy to make it to 2026? What if the Pohlads have little intention of selling, unless they’re swept off their feet? But instead, they have the positive PR from last week's announcement, which gives them a built-in and viable excuse for not investing in the team again this offseason. It also gives them an out if they do decide to trade an “expensive” player. What if they can just wait it out until 2026, when they have only $70 million committed to the payroll, or less if they “fix their garage,” and they can get away with a payroll around $130 million under the guise of promising, young talent? If I'm being honest, those are dots that are a little too easy to connect, even without my tin foil hat on. It wouldn't be good news, per se, and it's a needle they'd be trying to thread--after all, arbitration will make Lewis and company more expensive between now and then, even if they do stick around. But it wouldn't be the first potential team sale recently to turn out to be a slight head fake, and it would buy the maligned owners some time. Maybe the Pohlad family is rich enough even to buy that precious commodity.

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