One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be.
Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst.
So begins what is possibly my favorite piece of baseball writing of 2024.
It's tempting to say that right now is even worse. But really it's not a competition: yesterday was a continuation of last summer which was a continuation of 2023's decision to cut the money spent on players at the single point in the last 20+ years that it was most justifiable to increase it significantly. Which arguably is just a continuation of Minnesota only having a baseball team because a billionaire was racist -- the team used to be owned by a guy who literally said "I'll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when I found out you only had 15,000 Blacks here."
There is no ethical consumption under MLB.
But the specific family of billionaires that owns the Twins has intruded as unwelcomely as all billionaires into my life in the last three years or so. When they got Carlos Correa I was excited for what it implied: received wisdom my whole life had been that
the Twins don't spend big money on big contracts -- especially long contracts, and that's what Correa wanted.
From the moment the Twins signed him in 2022, it was understood that he'd opt out at the end of the season and be off to the kind of big free-agent contract that an elite shortshop deserves.
Twins fans could dream, but those of us who've been around a while know better. The Twins had never signed a big free agent.
It was expected that the Twins would work hard on a deal and scrape together all their pennies and make...the second- or third-place offer compared to whatever Correa eventually took. What the Twins front office would be proud of or anxious about, a record-breaking offer for them, was going to fall far short. They know their place and it's not in the top tier.
It's still nowhere near the top tier of course. Having Correa is no guarantee of success -- after all, the Twins didn't make the playoffs with him in 2022 -- but the stability that both Correa has and that the team has to build around can't hurt.
But most of all, I just really hope that the narrative around the Twins can change now. It can certainly never be said again that they don't sign big free agents.
And they did get to the playoffs that year; even finally winning a playoff game and eventually a playoff series, before the bottom dropped out in Target Field against the hated Astros.
In the offseason of 2023 I read a Joe Sheehan piece that explains the centrality of billionaires' personalities to North American sports so well even friends who don't care about baseball can appreciate this. He's talking about John Fisher, the notorious owner of the decision to move a baseball team out of Oakland to a very uncertain future.
The biggest accomplishment of John Fisher’s life was the moment of his birth, to the co-founders of The Gap. He went to Phillips Exeter and Princeton and Stanford, and then became president of a family investment company. He bought a piece of the Giants with family money, and he later bought the A’s alongside Lew Wolff. The next dime he earns that isn’t in some way related to his surname will be his first. Gaining sole ownership of the A’s in 2016, Fisher proceeded to run the team down in an effort to extort a publicly-funded mallpark and real-estate boondoggle from Oakland. Having only gotten commitments for $425 million in funding and $500 million in reimbursements to that end, Fisher worked out a deal for less than half of that in Nevada. Thank goodness for rich parents.
The thing about great wealth is that it allows you to define your own life. The destitute, the poor, the great mass in the middle, even people of moderate or considerable success are all, to one degree or another, dependent upon others. I’ve made a nice little career, and the list people to whom I’m indebted runs deep into three figures. I’ve been knocked around by industry trends and bad luck and outright malice. I have not had complete control, and I doubt very many of you reading this have, either.
The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure. With the sort of wealth people like Seidler and Fisher are born into, you can do anything you want with your life, and in doing so, you can determine how people regard you.
So the Twins' owners drastically cut the money they were willing to spend on players at the worst possible time. I can't put it better than the Twins Daily writer linked above:
The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.
And basically that same point was made at the end of the most recent episode of the Twins podcast I like, which I listened to over lunch. Today they were talking about how the team's disappointing performances the last four years out of five have led to clearing out much of the team (an MLB team's "active roster" is 25 players. The Twins were expected to trade 4-6 of theirs, which would be a lot. They traded ten). But the business/financial guys in the front office got promotions last year, and the manager stayed. The decision-makers are all still in place. The owners are in the process of trying to sell the team (which might be causing a lot of this chaos), but after a false start in the spring there's been practically no development in that since. Their grandfather bought the team for $40 million in the sixties; they won't sell it for less than $1.7 billion.
The Twins traded not just half their pitchers (which are half the team!) but notably also Carlos Correa, this leader of the team, symbol of the future I hoped for back in early 2023. That optimism admittedly hadn't worked out for him -- with injuries the last two years and just a weirdly terrible performance this year, especially for a shortstop who'd been considered elite (I think sometimes about how little we've heard about the quartet of elite shortstop free agents that year: him, Xander Bogaerts, Dansby Swanson and...who was the fourth one?? was it Trea Turner? well this helps illustrate my point).
It's not lost on me that they traded Correa back to the team he used to play for. Where he was notorious in being part of a cheating scheme in 2017 that still gets him booed in some places (I saw it happen in Seattle just the other week) but which none of the players really suffered meaningful consequences for and they're still in the books as winning that World Series (the photo on the Wikipedia page, of them in Trump's Oval Office, is just a whole bunch of people who did not get where they are by playing fair!).
I look back over the writing I've quoted here...
The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure.
...
In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.
And I think about whether happy baseball teams are all alike -- good pitching good hitting good defense -- but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. Looking at what the Twins traded away, and what little they got back in return in these trades, it's looking like they're not expecting to compete next year either and the one after isn't looking great either.
The last time the Twins' future looked as bleak as it does now, I was like 12 and I didn't know about billionaires. Now I know who to be mad at. And as they cause wildfires in Canada rather than dent their oil and gas profits, kidnap and deport people, keep me from getting to my grandma's funeral or the State Fair or even just a game at Target Field, and otherwise advance fascism in the U.S. and around the world... now I know who to be mad at.
And I'm mad that I can't even have baseball as a little bit of escapism.
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cosmolinguist
