MINNEAPOLIS -- The Twins made not one but two major moves regarding their ownership Wednesday.
In an anticipated announcement, the club introduced three new limited partners who are buying into the club that has been owned exclusively by the Pohlad family for more than 40 years. It was also announced that Tom Pohlad will succeed his brother, Joe, in day-to-day oversight of the organization, as well as replacing his uncle, Jim Pohlad, as the franchise’s control person (pending MLB approval).
The Pohlad family began exploring a sale of the Twins in the fall of 2024, but in August of this year the family announced that instead it would maintain majority control while also taking on new investment. Those investments have been finalized, and the new partners in the club are Glick Family Investments, George G. Hicks and Craig Leipold. Leipold is best known to Minnesotans as the owner of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild.
"It’s been 14 months of a lot of uncertainty for this organization and most importantly for our family and for the fan base,” Tom Pohlad said, “And so we’re happy to bring this to a close and begin the work going forward to re-engage this community in Twins baseball.”
The investments leave the Pohlad family as the primary owners of the club, but Tom Pohlad confirmed Wednesday that they will also help pay down the significant debt that the Twins have accrued over the past five years.
"I don't want to get into how much of the team was sold and who is responsible for what,” Pohlad said. “I would say it was an amount that we were happy with and an amount that aimed to achieve our primary objective, which is to put this organization onto better financial footing, if you will. So with these proceeds, we're able to pay off a significant amount of debt, and that will allow us to reinvest in this team when the time is right."
In his first public appearance as the primary representative of ownership, Pohlad acknowledged that the club feels a need to rebuild trust from a fan base that has been frustrated in recent years.
“It’s undeniable that we haven’t won enough baseball games, the financial health of the club has been put in jeopardy, and we’ve got a fan base that has lost trust in us as owners and, as a result, this organization and the direction it’s headed,” he said. “So we think that, with the conclusion of the transaction, now is the time to put new leadership in place and to have a renewed sense of energy, a renewed sense of focus, a different level of accountability, and ultimately a clear direction on where we’re taking this organization.”
Pohlad did not directly address what the club’s payroll for 2026 will be, though he reiterated that the front office will not be required to trade high-salaried players in order to add to the 2026 roster. He described the team’s 2025 Trade Deadline sell-off as a necessary change in course to move toward having a “championship-caliber” roster, and suggested that as the team gets closer to that standard, investment in player payroll could go up.
“We didn’t have the team last year that we thought was capable of winning a championship,” he said. “The roster moves we made were a recognition that we need to rethink how we put a championship-caliber team on the field. That work begins this year. We’re laying the foundation for ultimately what we hope will be a nucleus that can be a championship-caliber team and that warrants a championship-level investment.”
In the meantime, he acknowledged that he saw the importance of not engaging in a full rebuild along the way.
“There was probably an argument to tear the whole thing down, get as much value as you can for our players, and really kind of put an emphasis on two years from now or three years from now,” he said. “And on paper, yeah, maybe that makes sense. But you can’t just look at things on paper. We owe the fan base something; we owe our veteran and star players something; and we owe this organization something. And that something is hope. And I think that’s the needle that we’re trying to thread this year.”
The change in ownership structure is actually two separate moves. One was Tom Pohlad’s replacing Joe Pohlad as the overseer of club operations. The other was melding that role with the role of control person, which is the person who represents a club in its dealings with the league and other owners.
Tom Pohlad said that it was only within the last month that he began to entertain the idea of moving into the role. He had had very little involvement in the baseball team previously, other than helping to manage sale and investment discussions.
“I think our structure at the ownership level was unique, to some respects,” he said. “I think that was a function of the transition that we were going through as a family, from second to third generation. And it was always Jim’s intention to eventually hand over MLB responsibilities to a third-generation family member. I think, particularly over the last 14 months, we had three family members playing roles with respect to the Twins. … And that worked for a time being, but going forward to not have one point person is not in the best interest of the organization. Inefficient from a decision-making standpoint. I think we owed it to the fan base, to MLB, and to our employees.”