The baseball owners voted for contraction, and my Minnesota Twins are probably the leading candidate for extinction.
World Champs in '91, gone in '01. Sad.
Commissioner Selig said he didn’t have any particular teams in mind, but it’s a good guess that the Twins will be gone.
I grew up watching the Twins. Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Camilo Pascual, Zoilo Versailles, Rich Rollins, Earl Battey, Bob Lemon, Bob Allison, Don Mincher, Rod Carew, Bert Blyleven, etc. I remember Knothole Days at the old Met Stadium. I saw Mickey Mantle play there.
I was in the Dome when the Twins came back from Detroit after clinching the AL championship. I suffered, then exulted, when the Twins won 2, lost 3, and then won 2 to win both of their World Series championships.
sigh
We had a good year, mostly. I’m just sorry it was the last. We’ll sure contribute some good players to the dispersal draft, though.
They are also kicking around the names of some other teams. If it goes through, I think the Expos are goners. But the second team might well be the Marlins.
I was listening to sports radio this morning, and the commentators had a lot to say about Minnesota as a good market for baseball. I hope, for your sake, that the Twins stay.
Say it ain’t so. I’ve been a Twins fan since the days you mentioned. I used to live in Orlando where they held their spring training. Saw thwm play at Tinker Field many times. They have a wonderful history in professional baseball.
The Twins were tossed around early in the season as candidates for contraction, along with the Expos (who are probably gone), the Marlins, and the Devil Rays (one 1998 expansion team wins the Series, the other is eliminated. Totally. That’s irony.) However, the fact that the Twins came close to winning their division and had much higher attendance this year made them kind of fall off the list whenever it was brought up. It’ll probably be the Expos and Marlins, giving us 14 teams in each league again.
The one wild card in this is that the Twins owner, the forever-may-he-be-damned Carl Pohlad, was probably one of the owners that voted for expansion because he knows he can pocket about $250 million as a result of contraction, and that’s more than anyone would pay for the team.
I can’t help wondering if our Twins would be such a prime candidate had they not fallen apart after the All-Star break, but kept up their winning pace instead…?
This has nothing (or, at least, not much) to do with the performance of the team or the attendance stats. It has to do with the fact that Minnesotans refuse to buy billionaire Carl Pohlad a brand-new stadium when the old one is barely 20 years old. It didn’t help that he started asking for a completely publicly-financed stadium at a time when the team’s standings were in the toilet. Here they are now, threatening contraction when the nation is at war and entering a recession. Feh. I think that most Minnesotans are pretty soured on the whole deal. I know I am.
Perhaps with all the expansion that MLB has done lately, they have realized that they don’t have enough “threat” cities–cities that they can threaten to move teams to if things don’t go their way. Minnesota called that North Carolina bluff, after all. With the Twins out of the way, they can tell other cities, “You’d better do as we say, or we’ll move the team to Minneapolis! Or, even worse, we’ll contract you, too!”
I was a big Twins fan up until the 1994 strike, and then I lost interest big time. I kind of wish I’d been able to make it to a game this year, though.
Rysdad, are you going up the the Metrodome this week to pick up one of those “collectable” 2002 schedules? Hmmm, I could put it with my ball from the 1994 World Series…
First, my condolences if MLB takes away the Twins.
Second, You hit Pohlad on the nose. This is just one more step in his continuing legacy of screwing people. This after all is a man who got his start foreclosing on Family farms in the Great Depression. Hell has his seat all polished up and waiting at the Devil’s right.
For the cripes sake the Twins drew almost 2 million and baseball is going to let Pohlad fold them…
Fold Tampa…they had less than 4000 in attendance for Cal Ripken’s last game.
Montreal is just a given. Sorry Expo fans.
I am not a Minnesota fan in general, being from across the border, but the Twins were/are a class organization other than their owner.
“The Minnesota Twins announced Tuesday that outfielder Torii Hunter and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz have been named to the 2001 American League Rawlings Gold Glove Team.”
Ironic, ain’t it? Two of the nine best gloves in the AL, with respective batting averages of .261 and .306, they’ll look real good in the dispersal draft.
Tamex,
I’ve got an original homer hanky, the Wheaties box, and t-shirts from both World Series wins. I don’t think I’ll get anything else.
I seriously doubt the Twinkies are gone. Too many fans, too much history.
And the Rangers? ::eek::
As someone who’s family has had 4 season tickets on the first row right next to the visitors warm-up circle since the construction of the original stadium, you’ll see a rant in the pit like no other should that anusfact begin to gel.
As someone who lives in the Twin Cities area, I must respectfully disagree. Not that the Twins don’t have great fans and good history, but frankly Bud Selig and his owner cronies couldn’t give rat’s ass about history or a team’s fans. For them, it’s how much money do the Twins make for us next year? Never mind that fact that they finished second in their division this year. For the first team in ten years, the Twins were THE STORY in this area. To disband this team, a team full of young, low-paid, quality players who are on their way up, is to me unconscionable.
And if you’ve decided that Montreal and Minnesota can’t support Major League teams, what about relocation? When the leagues expanded four years ago, if Phoenix and Tampa Bay were #1 and #2 on the expansion market list, weren’t there #3 and #4 options? Shouldn’t those markets be considered for relocation? Couldn’t Las Vegas, Portland, or Washington, DC support major league teams? Hell, New York could probably support a third team better than any other market could support one. St. Louis could probably add a second team. But oh, that’s right, Bud, I keep forgetting that without those big markets without major league teams, your existing teams without shiny new taxpayer-paid stadiums can’t blackmail their fans with threats of moving. This is the real reason the Twins will be contracted–Pohlad threatened to move the team to North Virginia unless he received a new stadium. The taxpayers didn’t blink, and Pohlad’s threat was revealed for the empty, hollow threat it was–North Virginia was in no way a viable option for the Twins. It’s not that the Twin Cities isn’t a viable baseball town. It’s that the Twin Cities refuse to purchase a new stadium for the Twins, which doesn’t fit into Bud’s idea that all major league teams must have brand-new, state-of-the-art stadiums to sell themselves with.
I haven’t really been following this story as it developed. As an outside observer (and not much of a baseball fan), I’m wondering: is anyone eating crow on having just expanded so recently? Shouldn’t they be? Seems like an incredible waste of effort and resources to add teams and stadiums just to pack other one up and fold em a few years later. Is someone red-faced and sheepish? Anyone?
