With Park out of the picture and buyouts paid to Santana and Morrison, the Twins find themselves only with the contract-year commitments to Reed, Castro, and Pineda as well as the final payment due to San Diego for Hughes. This chart would have included $3 million in 2019 and $500,000 in 2020 for Park, but the Korean first baseman elected to forgo his guaranteed salaries in exchange for an outright release that permitted him to return to the Nexen Heroes for the 2018 season. This is quite possibly the funniest chart of any team in the series: the Twins have $0 guaranteed on their books beyond 2019. Not included above: a $12.85 million posting fee to negotiate with Korean first baseman Byung-ho Park prior to the 2016 season. That said, the Twins weren’t one of the clubs that blew past the league-imposed soft spending limits for international amateurs or North American draftees. The franchise’s wide vision also led them to give outfielder Max Kepler an $800,000 bonus out of Germany in the same 2009 class. The franchise’s marquee amateur signing was that of Miguel Sano, whose $3.15 million bonus in 2009 set a record for a foreign amateur at the time. While the Twins have never come particularly close to the luxury tax threshold, the team has made some major endeavors into the international amateur marketplace…and not just in Latin America. The days of Minnesota spending alongside the likes of Oakland and Tampa Bay appear to be a thing of the past. When his children took over and the club moved into Target Field, spending immediately increased in a meaningful way prior to a mini-rebuild in 2013-14. Spending under Carl Pohlad was consistently among the lowest in the league. The Twins spent a franchise record on payroll in 2018 and it wasn’t particularly close to the previous high water mark in 2011.
We’ll also use Opening Day payrolls as those better approximate expected spending by ownership. We’ll focus on a 15-year span for the Twins, covering 2005-18 for historical data as a means to understanding year 15: 2019. In the most useful cases, they show us both. And, of course, the value of examining historical payrolls is twofold: they show us either what type of payroll a team’s market can support or how significantly a given ownership group is willing to spend. With two years on the job and despite a surprise run to the American League Wild Card Game in 2017, Levine and Falvey have primarily focused on clearing the financial books to rebuild the roster in their image moving forward.īefore hitting the numbers, please recall that we use data from Cot’s Baseball Contracts, we’ll use average annual value (“AAV”) on historical deals but actual cash for 2019 and beyond, and deferrals will be reflected where appropriate. The front office also brought in Derek Falvey as chief baseball officer contemporaneously with Levine. The front office is headed by general manager Thad Levine, hired from the Texas Rangers following the 2016 season to resuscitate the Minnesota franchise after over a decade as assistant general manager in Texas. With the sparkling Target Field opening in 2010, it appears as though the team is married to the Pohlads and the Twin Cities for the foreseeable future. Pohlad’s son, Jim, succeeded his father as Chairman of the ballclub and the public face of the franchise. Banker Carl Pohlad purchased the team in 1984, passing it to his children upon his death in 2009. Today, we examine a club in one of baseball’s worst divisions that is nonetheless seemingly far from contention: the Minnesota Twins.ĭespite rumored relocation and contraction in the 1990s and early 2000s, Twins ownership has been impressively stable. If you have questions about financial information made available to the public and the assumptions used in this series, please refer to the Phillies piece linked above. Projected Arbitration Salaries For 2023Īs we kick off the eighth installment of this series, here are links to the previous team payroll projections:.
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