Bob CollinsThanks to three forgettable games in Baltimore, today’s home opener for the Minnesota Twins is being met with all the excitement of prune juice.
What happened to the Twins?
Let’s go back to the day a land acquisition deal was reached to build a new baseball stadium for the local nine.
“It’s a fair document, and it will allow the Twins to be competitive in Minnesota, and to build a world-class outdoor ballpark.”
That was Twins president Dave St. Peter.
In its pitch for a new stadium, the Twins made this claim:
The incremental revenues generated by a new ballpark should help stabilize the franchise and provide the team with additional resources to be competitive.
Did it work? MPR colleague Bill Wareham has analyzed the relationship between stadiums and a team’s on-field success and found only two teams were worse at it in the second year of a stadium — and all the revenue that goes with it — than the Twins.
The good news is that one of the teams that was worse at parlaying a new stadium into success was the Detroit Tigers, who did nothing after their stadium opened in 2000, but who are now among the league’s big spenders and best teams.
This puts the Twins on track for considerable success 10 years from now.
