Winning games won’t be enough. How the Twins can start to win back fans

Two days after the end of yet another disappointing Twins season, Derek Falvey, the club’s president of baseball and business operations, and general manager Jeremy Zoll met with more than a dozen local reporters in the barren Twins clubhouse at Target Field. Such post-mortems are standard in most baseball markets now, and this one featured Falvey and Zoll, casually dressed, sitting at a table with a Twins-themed portable backdrop behind them. 

Falvey and club executive chair Joe Pohlad fired manager Rocco Baldelli the day before, and much of the conversation focused on that. (Pohlad did not attend the press conference.) Then the questions turned to the club’s unsettled future, the byproduct of ongoing payroll uncertainty. 

Joe Pohlad told the Star Tribune in late September the club had amassed $500 million in debt, a figure much larger than previously thought. The Pohlad family had been exploring a sale of the club since last fall. But instead of selling, the Pohlads brought on two new minority investors, who are expected to help reduce the debt. That followed Falvey dealing 10 players off the major-league roster ahead of the July 31 trade deadline, saving an estimated $26 million in salary. 

Related: Analysis: Selling the Twins

It left the Twins with two 2025 All-Stars (center fielder Byron Buxton and starting pitcher Joe Ryan), two other reliable starting pitchers (Pablo Lopez and Bailey Ober), one good-hitting catcher (Ryan Jeffers) and a cast of disappointing/unproven/underperforming characters everywhere else. Fans took it out on the Pohlads by staying home the final two months. The Twins drew only 1,768,728 for the season, 11th in the 15-team American League and the fewest in a non-COVID year since 2000 at the Metrodome.

So how do the Twins win back their fans? I posed this question to Falvey that day, asking him to address it from a marketing and communications perspective, not a baseball one. Here’s what he said. (Fair warning: Falvey speaks in long, twisty paragraphs.) 

“We obviously didn’t perform, and we’ve got to go perform,” he said. “We’ve got to go be a team that wins more games than we have the last couple of years. 

“I don’t want to oversimplify it, but I do think this: Putting my business-side hat on, this is a great place to come be a part of, Twins baseball, and be a part of Major League Baseball, watch a baseball game. It’s a great experience here at Target Field. Every time anyone walks through the door, we hear that from our fans, day in and day out, no question. We hear it from all different types of fans that come from different perspectives when they come through the doors. That’s true, and that will remain true. I hope we continue to make that a key experience.”

I’ve heard similar things from other Twins executives: All we have to do is start winning again, and fans will come back. Nothing else required.

That’s the wrong answer. There’s no personal touch, no desire to reach out to the people you disappointed. 

Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me. There’s a distance and aloofness to this franchise that wasn’t the case when I moved to Minnesota in 2002. That 2002 team — with tons of personality, the Get-to-Know-Em marketing campaign and a regular-guy manager in Ron Gardenhire — connected with and energized fans who avoided the Metrodome for most of the post-1991 losing. The 2002 club even won a playoff series, before settling into a long string of postseason losses to the Yankees that drained much of the hope and nurtured much of the frustration from longtime fans. 

In the last decade or so, mainly since the departures of Gardenhire and former GM Terry Ryan, the Twins lost that connection to their fans. Now it’s all transactional, and that’s not good.

Here’s how the Twins can win those people back:

1. Hire a crisis communications firm

When fans with long memories go back decades to find ways to criticize the Pohlad family, you’ve got a problem no amount of bobblehead giveaways or foundation grants can solve. Seems like every time any Pohlad speaks publicly, even when they’re being honest, it backfires. That’s a major issue. 

So is this organization’s absurd secrecy. The Twins picked up Baldelli’s 2026 contract option before the season, never announced it even after The Athletic broke the story, and never confirmed it until Falvey was asked about it at the post-season press conference.

Then there’s a lack of real accountability. At his press conference, Falvey offered multiple versions of the usual this-will-keep-me-up-at-night business that makes a nice quote at times like this.

But moments later, he followed up with this: “I felt like this roster had a lot of talent on it that could go perform. It didn’t, collectively, perform to that talent level.”

Here’s what Falvey should have said: “We thought we had a contending team, but we were wrong, and that’s on me.” Clear, concise, on target. Instead, it came off as Falvey blaming the players and not the people who assembled the roster. Is that really the message you want out there?

Time to call in the pros. 

Colleague Howard Sinker, once a Twins beat writer for the Star Tribune, beat me to it in his weekly Sports Take newsletter, asking Jon Austin of J. Austin and Associates for his thoughts on saving the Twins from themselves. Austin offered some practical suggestions, including cheaper concessions, discounted parking and an annual live town hall with ownership. 

“Fans want a relationship, not a series of revenue-maximizing transactions that feel like a tax on their passion,” Austin told Sinker. 

Bingo.

2. Hire a fresh face to run business operations

As in, not a Minnesotan, and not someone promoted from within.

Look: Falvey’s a baseball guy, not a business guy. Asking a baseball guy to run the business side when he’s got a roster to rebuild is like hiring a plumber to wire a fuse box. You need someone with the skills to match the task. And let’s face it: Falvey was only keeping the business seat warm until the sale went through. The new owner would almost certainly bring in his own top executive (see: Timberwolves), so it made no sense to hire a permanent replacement for outgoing president Dave St. Peter.

Now, it does. The Twins should look for someone from a club in a similar market that’s doing it right, like Milwaukee or Colorado. The Rockies, with a horrible roster and deeply unpopular owner, still drew 2.4 million this season to see a 119-loss team that hasn’t had a winning record since 2018. The Twins haven’t drawn two million since 2019.

3. Don’t trade Lopez, Ryan, or Ober

We get it: Lopez and Ryan are both 29, they’re valuable trade pieces, and the Twins are rebuilding. And we get that Ryan second-guessed the club in September for letting Sonny Gray walk in free agency two years ago, the kind of frankness that usually gets someone traded.

Problem is, if you deal any of these three, you’re telling your fans you’re giving up on 2026, no matter how hard you try to spin it. That’s a great way to keep the ballpark empty in mid-summer.

If healthy (a big if), that trio gives the Twins the makings of a reliable starting rotation, especially if Simeon Woods Richardson builds on his encouraging finish to 2025. That might be enough for the Twins to contend in the AL Central, baseball’s weakest division. And wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?

4. Increase engagement with fans

Twins players, coaches and managers aren’t out in the community that much any more. That has to change.

Used to be, groups of current and former Twins traversed the Upper Midwest for ten or so days on Winter Caravan every January, meeting fans, telling stories and signing autographs. The 2019 Caravan was the last big one, with 45 stops in 38 towns across four states.

The Twins began cutting back Caravan in 2020, two months before the pandemic began. Last year’s lasted two days. 

Related: Same game, new strategy: Selling the Twins to a new generation

Baldelli wasn’t interested in making personal appearances, according to multiple Twins sources. That was unfortunate. He’s a genuinely decent guy who connects with people one-on-one, and isn’t offended by rude or leading questions. Last winter he handled several smart-alecks graciously at the St. Paul Baseball Old Timers Hot Stove Dinner — the only one of the ten Caravan stops where he appeared. 

It’s vital for the Twins to get new manager Derek Shelton and their most personable stars — Buxton, Lopez, Ryan and Royce Lewis — in front of as many fans as possible this winter, and not just at TwinsFest. Lopez made several well-regarded personal appearances late in the season while recovering from a shoulder injury, and he’s one of the keys to this. 

5. Hire an experienced TV analyst

Most of the rotating former Twins serving as television analysts are fine, to a point. We get that a team’s broadcasters want the club to win; that’s the case in every market. But the constant cheerleading, excuse-making and lack of professionalism on Twins broadcasts has grown tiresome. At least twice this season, viewers heard someone applauding in the TV booth. Both happened with fill-in analysts (Trevor Plouffe and LaTroy Hawkins). That’s got to stop.

Mets broadcasters Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez are the gold standard here, offering the perfect mix of strategy, storytelling, analytics, analysis and wise-guy humor. They clearly want the Mets to win, but there’s no hesitation critiquing plays and strategy when warranted. That’s what a sophisticated baseball audience expects. Twins fans deserve the same.

The solution? Hire an experienced analyst from outside the organization. 

Mark Grant, the longtime San Diego analyst and former major-league pitcher who teamed seamlessly with Cory Provus on a Roku Sunday broadcast in late August, probably can’t be lured from Southern California. I’d reach out to two former catchers — ex-Twin A.J. Pierzynski, the Fox Sports analyst, or John Flaherty, just let go by the YES Network in New York after 20 years calling Yankees games. Both are smart, forthright, and well versed in hitting, pitching and strategy — exactly what Twins Territory needs.

The post Winning games won’t be enough. How the Twins can start to win back fans appeared first on MinnPost.