On the west side of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome is a plain, rectangular structure fronted with a bank of ticket windows. Most ticket buyers probably don’t even notice the writing on the door at one end, announcing that this blocky little annex also is the entrance to the executive offices of the Minnesota Twins. Those who do might not even believe it—certainly the real front office is elsewhere, and more glamorous.
Wrong. This is, in fact, where Twins President Dave St. Peter comes to work every day. The plain surroundings suit him; he is a pretty plain guy. In shirt sleeves and a nondescript necktie, St. Peter looks like what he is: a fellow from Bismarck, North Dakota, who started with the Twins in 1990 as an unpaid intern and worked his way up the ladder in an organization where slickness doesn’t count for much. When he became team president in 2002, St. Peter was just 35, one of the youngest presidents in Major League Baseball.
He has a reputation around town for authenticity. This is due in part, but only in part, to his rise through the ranks. “He’s like the Rocky Balboa of baseball executives,” says St. Paul Pioneer Press sports columnist Charley Walters. “He started from the bottom and went to the top, and he deserves it. I don’t think there’s anybody who knows Dave St. Peter who doesn’t root for the guy.”
More than the Rocky angle, however, it is St. Peter’s forthright manner that lends him unusual credibility. Ask a question, however loaded, and you tend to believe his answer.
For instance, why should taxpayers build stadiums for professional sports teams with billionaire owners and multimillionaire players? For the Twins, the issue became moot in 2006, when the state legislature approved a .0015 percent Hennepin County sales tax (three cents on $20) to underwrite almost three-fourths of the $522 million cost of the new ballpark currently rising in Minneapolis and due to open in time for the 2010 season. But while the question is now academic, St. Peter still hears it.
He hears it again on a late-December day in a conference room down the hall from his office, with the retired jerseys of Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek hanging on the walls. His justification boils down to the familiar argument that sports teams—the Twins, in particular—are civic assets in a sense that other businesses are not. “Baseball is more than a game,” he says. “It’s central to the fabric of the quality of life in this region.”
There is nothing surprising about a sports executive claiming to speak for the humble fan on behalf of an arrangement that happens to benefit his bottom line. The only surprise is this: As St. Peter talks about the Twins and the new stadium, he is spinning, sure. But the impression grows that he isn’t just spinning.
