In a season-ending interview with the Star Tribune, Joe Pohlad telegraphed ownership’s intentions for the offseason and the 2026 Twins more clearly than ever before. “The goal is to win a World Series,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with some pain in the short term.”
Pohlad is obviously not referencing next season when he talks about attempting to win a World Series. Instead, he’s referencing some vague future state where the Twins are a legitimate championship contender, something they’ve been unable to accomplish in the entirety of his adult life. And he’s dangling that vague future state as the payoff that will justify the short-term (more accurately: indefinite) pain that fans have only begun to experience.
“At some point you gotta look at yourself and be like, ‘You know what? We’ve gotta try something different.’ And not everybody’s going to like it,” Pohlad shared. “You’ve gotta own it. Fans are going to be upset. They’re going to say what they’re going to say. And you gotta keep moving forward, and trust that you’re making the right decision.”
For starters, “you’ve gotta own it” is a hilarious statement from an ownership figurehead who has scarcely made himself available for comment while his franchise has devolved into a disastrous state. So is “we’ve got to try something different” as he continues to stick with the baseball leader who architected this abject failure. But in his usual tone-deaf and cryptic terms, he’s said enough.
I’m glad Joe Pohlad trusts that he’s making the right decisions, while giving fans no reason whatsoever to share that trust. He’s asking us not to believe our eyes. As reporter Reid Forgrave wrote in the Star Tribune article, “it’s worth noting: 2023’s excitement was based on a team that won a wild-card series, not a World Series. That resurgent team only had the 11th-best record in baseball — a fringe playoff team, not a bona fide contender.”
This was intended, I guess, to sort of reflect ownership’s higher aspirations, but instead it underscores how short they’ve repeatedly fallen. That “fringe playoff team” was the pinnacle of their success in the Target Field era. It was the culmination of six years of team-building under Derek Falvey, who now gets to start over after firing the manager he hand-picked.
The Twins have one 90-win season in the last 15 years, despite playing in one of baseball’s softest divisions. They’ve lagged competitively with payrolls that, to the faint credit of the Pohlads, have been pretty reasonable by the standards of a mid-market MLB franchise. (In fact, they’ve invested enough to put themselves heavily in debt, forcing outrageous actions like a massive payroll cut coming off a playoff breakthrough, if you take their word for it. (I don’t take their word for it.))
Now we’re being told it’s time to pull back those investments. More right-sizing. “Baseball is all about finding that right balance between patience and striking when the moment is right,” Pohlad said, in the aftermath of squandering a historic moment. You don’t have to read between the lines much to see what that means for next year. Patience. Pain.
Okay, fine, that’s how it goes, if you believe in the model of a rebuild — predicated on low-cost rosters full of young developing players, taking their licks and filtering out on the way to constructing a quality team. It’s worked before. The Twins do at least appear to have a worthy long-term centerpiece in Walker Jenkins. You just have to wonder what this “short-term pain” means for the people involved who don’t have the luxury of patience.
Pablo Lopez and Joe Ryan are in the primes of their careers, two years from free agency. Why would they want to play for a team that keeps trending downward offensively and defensively, and is openly not trying to contend? The same question, unfortunately, goes for Byron Buxton, with some rumblings that he could be compelled to waive his no-trade clause after all.
The idea of this team’s lack of commitment to winning becoming so intense that it shatters Buxton’s loyal resolve … it’s grim. That turn of events would somehow take the state of affairs with this franchise to an all-new level of shame. As someone who counts Buxton as probably their favorite player of all time, I’d find it pretty tough to care much about the 2026 team. I know I’m not alone.
But I guess it’s just the “short-term pain” that we all have to deal with as a trade-off for putting our faith in the people who got in this situation to begin with. If Buxton and Lopez and Ryan all exit this offseason, at least we can take comfort in the knowledge that Joe Pohlad wants to win a World Series someday.