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Carl Pohlad: Teams
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The revenue-sharing deal that Pohlad reportedly helped Selig to devise has been very good to the Twins. In fact, one could almost say it was tailor-made for a franchise operated the way Pohlad has since run the Twins. Pohlad’s club received $19 million in revenue-sharing payments from the other teams in 2001, while maintaining a payroll in the $24 million range. (The year before, Twins’ revenue-sharing receipts actually exceeded the team’s $16 million payroll.) If those numbers seem askew—wasn’t the idea of revenue-sharing to help raise the payrolls of cash-poor teams?—be advised that the Selig/Pohlad revenue-sharing system does not require owners to invest shared revenue in their payrolls. The plan ... allows also-ran franchises to pocket the stipend and treat it as a payoff for fielding a sub-par team to show up and get knocked around by the rest of the league. And that’s exactly what the Twins and Expos appear to have done in recent years.
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In some ways, Pohlad could be worse than Burns. At the Springfield Power Plant, the employees range from incompetent to downright idiotic and dangerous. If the heartless Burns cared at all about his community, he'd shut down the plant immediately. But Pohlad is in a different situation. His employees are not incompetent. In fact, his employees have his team sitting at the top of their division with a very comfortable lead.
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The relationship between Pohlad and Selig dates back to Pohlad’s mid-1980s purchase of the team. “They’re very close, professionally and personally,” says one former baseball executive who asked not to be named. “It’s been said that the revenue-sharing plan that Selig pushed through in ’93 or ’94 was largely Pohlad’s idea. He’s very influential with Selig. [Twins president] Jerry Bell once said Carl was Bud’s best friend. They speak on the phone every weekend for an hour or two.
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On October 4, 1997 Pohlad announces an agreement with North Carolina businessman Don Beaver to sell the team if the Minnesota legislature does not vote to build a new stadium by the end of November. Beaver signs a letter of intent to buy the team.
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In 1997, Pohlad said he was going to move the Twins to sell the team to a new owner who'd move them to, of all places, Greensboro, North Carolina. The public assumption was that the whole story was a bunch of B.S.: that is, because the public wouldn't build him a stadium, he was going to move the team to N.C., to a market 1/3 the size of the Twin Cities, where the local public didn't want to spend money on a stadium? Come on.
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In his statement Wednesday, Pohlad said offers for the team would be reviewed by Minneapolis lawyer Ralph Strangis. Pohlad said his objective is to receive “fair value under circumstances that include a satisfactory new stadium resolution.”
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