Late Innings

Today was a busy day in baseball. I’ll touch on some of the other stories tonight, however I wanted to chime in with this interesting news item. Twins’ owner Carl Pohlad died today. He was 93 years old.

Pohlad was incredibly wealthy, listed in Forbes as the wealthiest baseball owner in sports. He was also #114 on the Forbes 400 for 2007. Granted with all of his assets, the Twins had a low payroll for many years. And everyone in the media dumped on him because of this.

I wanted to chime in on this, especially since this has been going on for about a decade now. However in all fairness, there’s only so much money that can be thrown at one team. When the team’s only drawing 16,000 fans a game, it doesn’t make sense to have a 100MM team payroll.

I didn’t know Pohlad personally, however the attacks on him by the press were unfair. He donated graciously to charity, and was an avid fan of baseball. He gave what he could to the Twins, however people tend to forget that baseball is a business. And the contraction rumor about him only infuriated many others, especially after he then put the team up for sale. But then again, the Twins at that time were not a marketable product.

Any ways long story short, the Twins have a new stadium coming, an incredible farm system, and with a good decade of winning baseball, things couldn’t be any brighter for the Twins. Yet many are still complaining about the Twins and their small payroll. To say it for the final time, the Twins are not a large market franchise. When you have teams in New York competing for the “best pitcher in the universe” (that is Johan Santana), small market teams cannot afford him. Still Pohlad did and contributed what he could to keep the Twins a competitive franchise, as evidenced in recent extensions to Mike Cuddyer, Justin Morneau and Joe Nathan. Baseball lost a fine owner and a great capitalist today, and he will be missed.