Minnesota Twins to be put up for sale by Pohlad family

The Minnesota Twins will be changing hands as the Pohlad family, which has owned the organization since 1984, has decided to sell the organization. The news was first reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and confirmed by MLB.com.

Twins chairman Joe Pohlad said in a statement that the family had made the decision earlier this season, but that now was the right time to tell the world.

Businessman Carl Pohlad purchased the team in 1984 from the Griffith family, which had owned the team since its inception as the Washington Senators in 1919 and moved the club to Minneapolis in 1961. Under the Pohlad family’s leadership, Minnesota won the World Series in 1987 and 1991 and moved from the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to Target Field in 2010.

Pohlad, who died in 2009, twice attempted to sell the club during his time as owner before passing the team on to his children. In 1997 he made efforts to sell the team and have it relocated to North Carolina, but those efforts fell through. In 2001, with a struggling team and one of the worst stadiums in baseball, Pohlad offered to sell the club to MLB for $150 million and have the team contracted.

While Minnesota has not made it back to the World Series since the days of Jack Morris and Kirby Puckett, the club was a staple of the AL playoff picture in the early 2000s, making the postseason six times between 2002 and 2010. But the Twins only advanced beyond the American League Division Series, which was the opening round at the time, just once — falling to the Angels in the 2002 ALCS.

That early 20th-century success came as the team was one of the lower payroll clubs in MLB. As home-grown stars — and eventual AL MVPs like Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau — developed and the club moved into the new stadium, the team increased spending, but the success of the early part of the century wasn’t replicated. Minnesota went through some lean years in the 2010s, making the playoffs just once from 2011 to 2018.

Heading into the 2024 season, Forbes pegged the Twins as the 21st-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $1.46 billion.