Fire Gardy

I don’t have much to say about this afternoon’s game, other than that we have to win it. I think everybody knows that.

Myself, I’m knocking off work early to head home and watch the game. In case you were wondering, no, I do not feel guilty about this in the slightest. My boss was quite insistent yesterday that I fly back to Minnesota to catch both the Vikings/Packers game and then fly back on Wednesday after having watched the Twins/Tigers. I thought the whole endeavor was pretty absurd, and refused to participate. So yeah, I’m leaving work early. And I’m going to like it.

If you only have it in you to read one thing today, read this Metrodome eulogy by Joe Posnanski. It’s typically brilliant.

But that doesn’t mean the place lacks magic. Haunted houses have magic. When the Dome is filled, it’s the loudest park in baseball. And when it’s loud, crazy stuff happens here. Infielders drop fly balls. Baseballs bounce over outfielder’s heads. High line drives can get caught in the air conditioning and ride the air stream over the fence. Hard ground balls can scoot around fielders [like] Barry Sanders, and bounce off walls, and turn singles into triples. Centerfielders leap high against the wall and make remarkable catches.

Without doubt, the place can get crazy. And with the canvas up and 52000 people rocking in there, I fully expect some craziness this afternoon. And I fully expect it to be enjoyable, exciting baseball.

I wonder, though, how much people outside the Midwest really care about this game. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that whichever team is unlucky enough to win this playoff game will be summarily destroyed by the great Yankees, and isn’t that what’s really important?

Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus essentially sums up the way they feel about this game over on the east coast:

Not to put too fine a point on this, but these aren’t good baseball teams. One of them is going to get into the tournament, and once there they’ll have no worse than the six- or seven-percent chance that is the floor for any team in this format, but I’m hard-pressed to remember two postseason candidates worse than this. I’d take any of the teams that stumbled into the tournament, or even the barely-over-.500 Padres, over the current versions of the Tigers and Twins. The drama has been nice, but it’s entirely an example of the tallest-midget situation you will occasionally get when you carve 30 teams into six sub-groups. Were it not for the unbalanced schedule and interleague play, there’s an excellent chance we’d be looking at a sub-.500 team in the postseason.

I was going to write some sort of tirade about this, but I decided against it. I wrote a couple different versions, and can’t decide if any of them are worth posting. But one of them* might look like this.

* Oh, okay, so if we changed the schedule so the Twins and Tigers no longer get to play against their weaker divisional rivals (presumably the Yankees and Red Sox would still get to play against the Orioles and Blue Jays, and the Angels would still get to play against the A’s and Mariners … what was Sheehan trying to say?), then they might have a different record! And if they didn’t get those free wins against the National League, they’d have fewer wins! Because the Twins and Tigers beating the tar, again, out of the National League is damn good proof that the AL Central is the worst division in baseball and that anyone who plays in it has no god damn chance in the playoffs. Why would anyone waste their time watching a dramatic Game 163 when they can instead scoff and watch, um, The Way The World Turns or whatever the hell else you’d watch on a Tuesday instead of The Only Game That’s On Today.

But yes, I think we can all agree that it’s good that I didn’t go on that ill-advised tirade.

So sure, this game might mean nothing to a fancy New York baseball fan, with his suspenders and shiny leather shoes, and possibly one of those translucent green visors … yes, this is the image I want to project of these pricks whose sensibilities are so finely tuned that they’d turn up their nose at the only pennant race in the league, that have been screaming for a month that they don’t care about this and there’s no race, and that have finally just come out and said that neither the Twins nor Tigers are as good as the fucking Padres. You’re damn right they’re wearing visors.

But, anyway, while it apparently means nothing in New York, it means a whole lot here. It means everything. It’s the Metrodome’s rotted corpse sticking its hand up through the soil, rising from the grave just one last time, its crowd filling your ears and rattling your bones.

Hopefully the Dome isn’t quite ready to go off quietly.

1 comment

A few notes before the tiebreaker game tomorrow

• MLB finally decided to change their lame coin toss rule.  As you all know since we beat the Tigers in the season series we will play at the dome.  That is excellent news.
• I attended both the saturday and sunday games.  My friends and I had a few beverages before and during the saturday game, and afterwards decided to wait around and harass Patrick Ruesse, he got upset and had us removed from the stadium.  It was most excellent.
• Both Blackburn and Pavano pitched on short rest and came up big.  Pavano wasn’t great, but he was good enough.  Especially when Jason Kubel outscored the entire Royals team.  With two swing of the bat. He is probably my favorite Twin.
• Scott Baker will start for the Twins tomorrow afternoon.  The Tigers will be tossing Rick Porcello.  I’m glad we have Baker going.  He has been our best pitcher since about May, so I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have.  Blackburn maybe since he has come up big down the stretch.  Baker needs to stay efficient with his pitches and not be out by the 5th because of a high pitch count. 
• While I would have liked to play the tiebreaker today, having a day off is nice so the bullpen can be rested.  Hopefully we don’t need them to pitch too many innings.
• I read somewhere that the Twins are trying to get a white out going at the dome tomorrow.  Everyone wear white and bust out your homer hankies. Its October baseball.  Or Rocktober, if you will.

No comments

So the Twins are probably out, after last night’s demoralizing loss to the Tigers, when Carl Pavano was finally smacked around by a Tigers lineup that probably should have been getting to him all along. And now, while we’re all feeling down about it, and we’re all dreading the upcoming offseason — offseasons in Minnesota are always too long, with varying levels of hype but a consistently minimal amount of action.

But in the wake of The Sano Signing,* perhaps change is afoot with the Twins organization.

Another key: Twins ownership stepped up. Jim Pohlad was said to be as excited as anyone with the organization when told about Sano. “Let’s go get him,” Pohlad said.

Seems to me that’s pretty promising; if the owner gets excited about winning and is willing to spend money to do it, things could finally get interesting around here.

* Yes, I am going to call it The Sano Signing, and I’m going to do it because I see it as a turning point for the organization. Miguel Angel Sano may well crap out. He may actually be 20 years old right now. It might turn out that he’s not capable of getting around on a 95 mph fastball, or can’t pick up a breaking ball. Calling it The Sano Signing is not about getting excited about Sano himself. It’s about getting excited about the aggressive new stance of the Twins’ front office. Yes, it’s a risk. But it’s a risk the Twins took. Now we get to hope that they take more risks, and that some of them work out.

A little while back, Reusse complained bitterly that the Twins were still hanging around; he posited that it would have been better if the team had fallen far enough behind that they could be sellers rather than buyers, and that they needed to restock the farm system at the expense of the present, and that he didn’t want to have to care any more. Many fans agreed with him, as they seem to do for some reason (why else would he still have a column?).

But while the Twins were buying, they were clearing a few guys out of their farm system. Some of them hadn’t been around long, others were banging on the door of the majors, and others weren’t but had been around long enough that they needed to be protected from the Rule 5 draft.

Meanwhile, they were quietly changing directions in anticipation of reloading the system, perhaps with a different kind of player.

A couple weeks ago, they let go of Cliburn, the Rochester manager; they said the organization was moving in a different direction.

There hasn’t been much additional information about that since, but today’s article about Sano had this bit in there:

The Twins, looking at their minor league system, realized that they had a lot of players who, on the 2-through-8 scouting scale, would end up as threes or fours.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that that might have something to do with the change in direction, and with letting Cliburn and others go — perhaps the Twins felt there are guys within the minor leagues who value these 2’s and 3’s too highly, and it’s preventing more talented players from rising (or even entering the system in the first place). Maybe Cliburn was one of them.

Yes, the Twins are probably out of it now. They “contended” until the final week of the season, and while that’s no consolation prize, it did at least give us a full summer of baseball. And now, maybe they’re shaking things up a bit.

That’d be a good thing.

No comments

Game one of the Twins-Tigers doubleheader will start at 11am central time today.  Since I am at work I will only be following the gamecast, but feel free to follow me (@Robert_Short) and sirsean (@sirsean) on twitter to read any thoughts we have on the game.

Blackburn vs Procello.  The Twins need to win this game to set the tone.  As all of you have read the Twins need to win at least 3.  Do that and we are tied heading into a weekend series at the dome against KC, while the Tigers play the white sox in Detroit.  If we win all 4 we will have a commanding 2 game lead with 3 to play.  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, one game at a time, etc. etc. 

Go Twins!

No comments

The Twins have 11 games remaining.  8 are on the road.  We finish up in Chicago tonight, then head to KC for the weekend.  Followed by a 4 gamer in lovely Detroit.  We sit 2.5 games behind the Tigers (the odd game will be made up Thursday, when we are off and the Tigers play at Cleveland), but we do kind of control our own destiny.  If we just keep winning we will win the division. That has to be comforting for the players.  While it would be nice for Detroit to give us some help by losing, it isn’t necessary.  If we can go into Detroit less than 4 games back and sweep them, we take the lead and head home to play KC.  Obviously, winning 11 straight games starting tonight will be difficult, it isn’t impossible.  We also don’t NEED the Tigers to lose to anyone other than us.  Oddly, Detroit is in the same boat. 

Manship’s poor outing last night was disheartening as his spot is due up at least once more.  On the broadcast last night Dick mentioned possibly using Liriano in that spot next Sunday.  Baker, Pavano, Blackburn, and Duensing have all been encouraging lately so hopefully they can carry that momentum into their next starts.  I’m sure Gardy will do some rotation shuffling with one off day left for him to work with. 

Mathematically the Twins have a 25.8% chance of making the playoffs, which makes us the only team alive in the AL race.   While the Yankees are the only team to have locked up a spot, the Angels and Red Sox are pretty much there.  Both the Twins and the Tigers are very flawed teams, but we are making September interesting. 

In the immortal words of Al Davis: Just Win, Baby!

No comments

This week saw the Twins set their season high winning streak at five games — by sweeping the lowly Royals and taking the first two from the Orioles, all at home, a truly impressive feat, to be sure — before dropping the final game of the Orioles series because, inexplicably, they couldn’t score any runs against Jeremy Guthrie. That guy was on my fantasy team for a while, and believe me: he sucks. But today is an offday, and on offdays I don’t dwell on the failings of the previous day. Instead, I try to avoid dwelling on how much I hate offdays by thinking about random, useless stuff all day long! So here are your useless offday thoughts to tide you over.

The Ballpark

Time is winding down to the end of the season, and the exodus from the dome. Everyone, of course, is excited about the new stadium. It’s going to be great, they tell us. Real baseball, played really outdoors. The team will have more money, so we can feel really great about the fact that the Pohlad family will be getting larger, sweeter profits* while they don’t actually spend the money on acquiring more players.

* Paid for by our ticket money, and our hot dog money, and our tax money. Well, your tax money. I don’t live there.

Are you as excited as I am?

Shockingly, Rob Neyer is pretty excited about the possibility of the Twins sucking once they don’t have the dome any more. He points to an article by Steve Aschburner that talks about the new stadium, but raises the issue that the Twins have enjoyed a significant home field advantage:

For all its affronts, though, the Metrodome hosted moments that Target Field will be hard-pressed to duplicate. The Twins, through the All-Star break, had gone 1,193-1015 in the monochrome building since it opened, including a 372-243 home mark since manager Ron Gardenhire took over in 2002. They have won six division titles while calling it home, with two AL pennants. Their World Series titles both owed much to the Dome, from its alien feel for St. Louis (1987) and Atlanta (1991) to the deafening crowd noise; the Twins won all eight Series games played in the Dome and lost all six on the road.

I’m pretty sure quite a bit has changed about the dome since the World Series victories decades ago, including the height of the baggy, the ground rules regarding the speakers, the bounciness of the ground, the actual surface of the grass, and probably some other things I’m forgetting. So I wouldn’t bring up anything that happened that long ago. That said, the fact that they’re 178 games over .500 since 1982 and that includes being 130 games over .500 since 2002 says to me that the Twins have had their best, strongest home field advantage during the Gardy Era. So maybe all those changes have helped the Twins.

Maybe the team is just better now than it was during the 90s. Is that possible? Neyer?

Teams that play in freaky ballparks — the Twins, the Rockies, the Red Sox, the Padres — tend to have larger-than-normal differences between their home and road records. This might be a home advantage and a road disadvantage, as was the case for many years for the Rockies. I don’t see why it has to be, though. My guess is that whatever home advantage the Twins lose in their home ballpark, they will not gain by playing better on the road.

Or it’s because the organization tends to model its players and its roster in a particular fashion because of the features of their home park. If you have a really fast infield and rock hard ground, you’re going to want a bunch of slap-hitting speedsters* in your lineup to take advantage of that … and that’s what the Twins have done over the years. Conversely, if you have short fences and long grass and wind that carries the ball you’re going to want a bunch of lumbering sluggers who put the ball in the seats … and that’s what the White Sox have done.

* At least that’s what you might think you want to do. The point is that this is what the Twins have, in fact, done. And that I’m giving them the opportunity to blame the dome for it. We’ll see what they do in the next 2-4 years to reshape the roster to better fit the new environment.

So the Twins will lose their “dome field advantage,” but many teams have an advantage at home (all of them, actually), so is it really that unthinkable that the franchise won’t be crippled by this move?

If that’s the case, they’ll have to play better — fundamentally better — just to stay roughly where they’ve been, record-wise. That’s a tall order, but of course their new ballpark is supposed to bring higher revenues and the related ability to compete financially with their competition.

It’ll depend on the actual environment of the new stadium, of course, but the Twins will have to change their roster to try to match what they’ve got. If the ball travels well, they’re going to want to ditch all their fly ball pitchers for ground ball pitchers and replace the ground ball hitters with fly ball hitters. Of course, Neyer would probably consider this “fundamentally better” baseball, and would say he was right all along. Fine. But it’s just going to be a natural process of fitting your roster to your environment.

In the end, everything probably comes out in the wash. But nobody should pretend the organization won’t lose something when it finally leaves that big old barn of a building.

Hopefully it loses a bunch of enmity from the press, who have always been annoyed that they have to travel to the untamed wilderness of Minnesota in the first place, and positively angered by the Metrodome. Beat writers will probably rave about the new stadium. Of course, Rob Neyer will continue to write bi-weekly screeds about how the Twins have no fucking business being in the major leagues, and should just send all their good players to a real team like the Red Sox.

But what really gets me is that everyone just naturally assumes that Target Field is just going to be a generic cookie cutter stadium plopped out of the same mold of a dozen others, and that the Twins won’t have a new, natural home field advantage. Everyone always gets annoyed when a new stadium has contrived “quirks,” like the crazy ass walls at Citi Field that serve no purpose but to mess with outfielders. Old stadiums had quirks because of limitations and constraints of the plot of land they were dealing with — and in case nobody noticed, Target Field is located on a lot way too small for a stadium, and is nestled between a factory and a river. It has a big ass limestone wall in right field.

Who’s to say that these constraints won’t lend themselves to some actual quirks in the new stadium that the Twins can take advantage of? Nobody knows what’s going to happen with that limestone wall. Will balls hit it and bounce unpredictably, rewarding left handed pull hitters? Imagine if every time Morneau smashed one off the baggy, it careened wildly in an unknown direction. Conversely, what if it bounces straight, and a line drive against it can fly all the way back to the infield? These are unanswered questions, but the fact that they’re there means there very well could be some home field advantage for the Twins next year. Don’t tell Neyer, he might hurt himself trying to figure out another fancy and backhanded way to say “the Twins suck.”

Third base

During the offseason, one of the glaring holes on the team was third base. With Punto “entrenched” as the shortstop, third would be manned by a mostly pathetic Buscher/Harris platoon, which would have been pretty inadequate both offensively and defensively. The main opportunities for upgrade were Casey Blake, Mark Derosa, Ty Wigginton, and Joe Crede.

Blake’s contract demands were way too high, and he went to the Dodgers. Bill Smith claimed the price to trade for Derosa was too high, so we missed on him. It was down to Wigginton vs Crede.

Wigginton was coming off his breakout season, having posted a 128 OPS+ and basically mashing the ball — Crede was coming off back surgery. Before the season, I figured Wigginton could be worth 3.0 wins, and Crede could be worth 1.9 wins (Crede’s worth was pushed down by injury risk, and Wigginton’s was probably buoyed by his strong 2008). So when the Twins claimed Wigginton wanted “Blake money” and decided to stop talking to him, I didn’t have a huge problem with it until he signed with the Orioles for Mike Lamb money. Once again, Smith looks like a liar, or an incompetent boob.

But … we have the benefit of hindsight! How have these two third baseman fared this season, and should the Twins regret this decision?

Wigginton: 91 G, .259/.306/.387, 8 HR, 33 RBI, 28 R, 40 K, 19 BB, -0.5 WAR Crede: 88 G, .229/.293/.421, 15 HR, 48 RBI, 42 R, 52 K, 29 BB, 1.9 WAR

So, yes. They’ve both seen somewhat limited duty, Crede’s due to a state of perpetual almost-injury, and Wigginton’s due to ineffectiveness. Personally, I’d rather my players be ready to play every day, but given the choice between being out because you’re hurt and being out because you suck, I think I’d have to go with hurt. Right? Gleeman’s take* on Crede’s state of “injury” this season:

Despite having to accumulate plate appearances to make money Crede has played in just 88 of 126 games, and the amazing thing is that he’s been out of the lineup 30 percent of the time without spending a second on the disabled list. Instead he’s missed 3-5 games every couple weeks, leaving the Twins to play with a 24-man roster for long stretches while essentially being “day-to-day” for five months.

Anyway, it looks like Crede’s got the advantage everywhere except in making contact and drawing walks. Overall, he’s been worth 2.4 wins more than Wigginton, which is huge, and points to the Twins having made the right decision between these two guys. (I’ll leave out whether it was good to let it get to that, but whatever.)

* By the way, I am amused that Gleeman’s article is titled “Twins getting what they paid for with Crede,” yet he doesn’t mention what they’re paying him or what he’s been worth, and doesn’t address value or cost in any way. Anyway, he’s right. Crede is guaranteed $2.5M with incentives that could push it to a total of $7M. So far this year, he’s produced $8.4M worth of value. Despite the low batting average, the lack of walks, and the nagging injuries, the Twins have actually gotten more than they bargained for when they signed Crede. Plus there was that walkoff grand slam!

Of course, Crede probably won’t be back next season, and we’re going to have to find another 3B option. Hopefully it’s Danny Valencia, and hopefully Valencia actually turns out to be good. Because the Twins have really, really struggled with that position lately.

Not coincidentally the Twins rank 11th in the 14-team league with a measly .695 OPS from third base, which is nothing new for them. Corey Koskie was Minnesota’s third baseman from 1999 to 2004, hitting .280/.373/.463 with 52 extra-base hits per 500 at-bats, but since losing him to free agency five years ago Twins third basemen have ranked 10th, 13th, 14th, 11th, and 11th in OPS among AL teams.

Who would have thought that replacing Corey Koskie would prove to be so impossible?

30 comments

Well, these last two games have been great.  I can’t remember the last time the Twins had a comeback win.  Let alone two in a row against a playoff caliber team.  I didn’t think it was possible. 

It was great to see Baker get out of several jams, although it would have been better if he didn’t get into said jams in the first place, but whatever.  We could have been down by way more than four runs.

In other news, I was reading LaVelle’s post game wrap up and found this little gem:

Funny…there was a memo on Gardy’s desk before the game talking about how hard umpires are working to get calls right and that managers should understand that. Hah!

Um, what?  Gardy should understand when an ump blows a call because they are trying?  That is bogus.  If an umpire gets a call wrong he should be held accountable.  I’m not saying take the call back, but there should be some review process.  The powers that be (umpires union, Selig, whomever) should review these calls and if the ump did indeed get it wrong he should somehow be reprimanded.  Suspension, fine, something.  It should probably depend on how much that one call affected the game.  If Jones went on to hit a homer and the Rangers ended up winning, obviously more scrutiny should be placed on that botched strike call.

I also liked the point I saw in the comments section: pitch location is completely thrown out the window when appealing down the line.  What is with that.  If the ball is in the zone, call it a strike.  I’m pretty sure that pitch Jones “checked” his swing on was a strike anyway so why the appeal?  The homeplate ump needs to ring him up there.  End of story. 

At least we won the game, unlike that one in Oakland a few weeks back.  Another case of umps not being held accountable.  I think Gardy has said it before, but umpires need to be calling balls and strikes, safe or out, not inserting themselves into the game and affecting the outcome.  The “human aspect” of the game is the goddamn players not the umps.

1 comment

The Twins placed starting pitcher Francisco Liriano on the DL after last nights game.  He managed to give up 7 runs in 2 innings of work, telling Gardy he had “nothing left in the tank”.  Not sure if he is physically or mentally done, but its probably both.  He will be replaced with the always entertaining Phil Humber.  Great. 

The Twins have exactly two pitchers who I can count on to get outs: Guerrier and Nathan.  They don’t pitch early in the game though, so it doesn’t matter.  Baker seems to be coming around, but does it really matter?  If we have 4 train wrecks and one decent pitcher in the rotation will that really help us make up the defecit in the division?  I highly doubt it. 

The worst part is that we are wasting incredible seasons from Mauer, Morneau and Kubel (and to a lesser extend Cuddyer).  What reason does Joe Mauer have to stick around if we can’t surround him with the pitching we need to win.  I am in the camp that thinks he cares more about winning than the money (this may contradict something I have said earlier, but if you go back in the archives and look it up: fuck you).  How can the Twins upgrade their pitching this offseason?  It is clear there are problems in both the bullpen and starting rotation.  If Bill Smith takes the “well, our young pitcher will surely rebound from a bad 2009 and pitch well in 2010 so I won’t change anything” course of action, then he might as well book Joe a plane ticket to the east coast.  We have to open up the wallet and probably overpay for some pitchers.  It is damn near impossible to sign a good free agent player to a team friendly contract.  When the Yankees signed Burnett to that 5 year deal, they probably knew he was going to be bad for the last two, but that is just the price you pay for talent on the open market.  I don’t know what pitchers will be available this offseason via trade or free agency, but we need to take a good look at all of them.  I think we might have some bullpen answers in the system in Delaney and Slama, but as far as starting rotation?  There isn’t too much in the minors that we haven’t already seen.  Other than the Twins specialty, “projects to be a middle to back of the rotation starter at best, Phil Humber at worst”. 

What do you think the Twins can do to upgrade this offseason.  Or, if you are the optimistic type, what can they do over the next six weeks to make a playoff push?

14 comments

This has been the pattern for what seems like the entire season.  The Twins lose a few (usually badly) and the sky is falling.  Twins fans go into a panic.  They start buying tickets to JFK or Logan for Joe Mauer.  Then we win and the Tigers and White Sox lose.  Suddenly we are just four games back.  Everyone starts thinking “You know, that Liriano isn’t so bad”. 

I admit, I think this way too.  You’d be lying if you said you didn’t.  Thats why baseball is great.  You can seemingly turn things around in one day.  For better or worse.  In football you have to wait a week, sometimes two.

Now that we have waxed poetically about the greatness of baseball, lets get back to the issues at hand.  The Twins looked good last night.  Awesome.  But remember, it was against the Royals.  They simply aren’t good. One of the best things we can take from this is Liriano’s performance.  Yeah, he beat up on a mediocre lineup, but I think this will help his confidence immensely.  He needed a good start, who cares who it is against.

After scrolling through the #Twins twitter feed last night, I noticed that many people were a little upset that both Guerrier and Nathan pitched last night in a “blow out” game.  Nathan hadn’t pitched in forever, so he needed the work.  Not using him enough is almost as bad as using him too often. A lot of people were clamoring for Manship and so was I (Go Irish!), but its not that big a deal.  If we only allowed Nathan to pitch in save situations he will have pitched something like 3 times since the all-star break.  How is that good for him?  I hate the save, and I really hate the role of “closer” in the sense that most AL managers use them.  If we are up by 4 in the ninth with a murders row coming up, do we want to be using someone like Brian Duensing, or Joe Nathan?  Its not a save situation you say?  Duensing it is.  That makes no sense to me, but I’m no big city lawyer (snaps suspenders).

Anyway, lets see if Pavano can have a repeat performance this afternoon.  A series win will be big here, especially since it looks like the Tigers can’t hang with the Red Sox.

3 comments

As we’re all well aware, the Twins’ time in the Metrodome is rapidly winding down. Finally, the Twins will be playing beneath bright blue skies rather than a marshmellow swastika. There’s been a lot of talk about how much more money will be available to the team once they’re in the new stadium — there have been plenty of complaints from the front office and the ownership over the years about how unfavorable their lease is and how signficantly it limits their ability to compete financially with other teams. How much more money, though, can the Twins expect?

I’ve frequently pointed out that the Twins are drawing really well this year — in the top 5 or 6 in both attendance and TV viewership — and are doing it in the 14th largest media market in the league. They should be generating a significant amount of revenue, and for some time I’ve been thinking that the front office is just complaining unnecessarily; they’re making plenty of money, and just aren’t being aggressive enough, or are valuing their profits more highly than they are the team’s success. It’s an easy trap to fall into, because it makes so much sense.

But it turns out that the Twins really do have a very unfavorable lease at the Dome; I’d assumed this for a while, and thought the money was going to the Vikings even when the Twins were the ones using the stadium. Instead, the beneficiaries of this lease are you chumps, the citizens of the state of Minnesota. According to some research by urban planner Judith Grant Long, analyzed by Baseball Prospectus’ Neil deMause, the Metrodome is the most public favorable stadium currently in existence.

The best deal, meanwhile, is an unexpected one: the much-maligned Minneapolis Metrodome, which turns out to have actually produced a $107 million profit for the people of Minnesota. It is, in fact, the only stadium in existence for which the public came out in the black.

That $107M began in 1982 and is in inflation-adjusted dollars, so it’s actually less than that in reality, but the point remains: the citizens of Minnesota have come out far better on the Metrodome deal than the Twins have, and far, far better than the citizens of any other state or city with a stadium — including those with “privately funded” stadiums.

government negotiators made sure to recoup their costs with a lease that guaranteed the public more than half of gross concessions revenues, one-quarter of stadium ad revenue, and 100% of parking fees. Even after paying for stadium operations and without collecting property tax, that still leaves the Metrodome as the singular case of a stadium that turns a public profit. (This may also help explain Twins owner Carl Pohlad’s incessant stadium demands* in the face of public disdain; notes Long, “Compared to the other owners, there’s no question why he’s a little peeved.”)

With the new stadium, those revenues will no longer go to the state, but will instead flow into the team’s coffers. It’ll probably make ownership happier, but it’s worth pointing out that we’re only talking about a few million dollars per year. It remains to be seen how much the team’s spending will increase. I anticipate it going up somewhat, but not game-changingly or anything.

* It’s worth pointing out that this article was written in 2005, before Carl Pohlad’s unfortunate passing and before the new stadium was agreed upon.

The most significant thing, I think, is that the fans keep coming out in droves and watching the games on television. If the Twins can start over-achieving their market-size, rather than under-achieving, it can only mean good things. And since I no longer live in Minnesota, the loss of the state’s income stream doesn’t hurt as much. (My taxes pay for the White Sox’s bloated payroll, thank you very much.)

No comments