Insider claims Joe Pohlad never wanted to sell the Twins

What exactly happened to make the Pohlad family pull the Minnesota Twins off the market and decide to maintain majority ownership while selling minority stake in the team? Insight from Aaron Gleeman, via the Gleeman & The Geek podcast, suggests that the Pohlads could've sold the club for around $1.5 billion.

"The only thing I will say, talking to some people, it's more clear than ever to me that they could have sold it. Like, they didn’t consider them good enough offers, but they would've received what would've been considered by the rest of baseball, market-rate offers : $1.4, $1.5 billion, something like that," said Gleeman.

The Twins haven't revealed who the two limited partners are, only to confirm that one is from the Twin Cities and another is from the East Coast. How much they paid to buy stake in the Twins is also unclear, but previous reports suggest the new partners helped the Twins pay down $425 million debt.

According to Gleeman, the Twins' might've received around $500 million.

"We speculated [that] Joe Pohlad didn’t want to give up the team. And this was a better scenario because they can get $500 million without giving control of the team, Gleeman said.

"But it's more clear to me than ever, asking around a little bit, that they absolutely chose this path of selling off chunks of minority ownership to get money to pay down the debt over selling the team. It wasn’t a situation where they could not get, you know, $1.5 billion for the team and so they pivoted. It’s a situation where they chose this path actively over that."

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Gleeman then alleged that Joe Pohald, who was promoted to executive chair of the Twins in late 2022, never wanted to sell the Twins.

"From their standpoint, it's great. Someone's giving you a whole bunch of money for not much in return, in terms of control of the team. But it does clarify some things, that [Joe Pohlad] wanted to continue running the team. I still think the description that is most apt is he views the Twins as his toy. I'm sure he would tell you that he views the Twins as his passion, or his life-long project," Gleeman said.

"More and more dots are being connected where it's like, he never wanted to sell this. He never wanted to give up control of this team."

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