The Nicest Guy in Baseball

Even if Twins President Dave St. Peter is finessing an answer—and given the team's personnel changes and the stadium costs, he has topics to finesse about—he sounds sincere and straightforward. That's because he is sincere and straightforward.

April 2008 | by Jack Gordon

Minnesota Twins President Dave St. Peter and friends.

Photograph by John Mowers

The Long Climb

St. Peter left the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks in 1989, a few credits short of a degree in public relations. He completed the degree by correspondence after moving to the Twin Cities, where he landed a six-month internship in media relations with the Minnesota North Stars pro hockey team. There he met his future wife, Joanie, who at the time was the hockey team’s assistant public relations director. The couple now lives in Eden Prairie with three preteen sons.

“People say you’ve got to know somebody to get your foot in the door of professional sports,” he says, explaining the North Stars internship. “I knew nobody. But I had a solid résumé coming out of college. I didn’t just rely on academics.” At North Dakota, he had volunteered for three years as an assistant in the university’s sports information office. He also worked as a copy aide in the sports department of the Grand Forks Herald. “I still have great passion for newspapers,” he says. “I can’t get enough newspapers.”

That may help to explain St. Peter’s popularity among Twin Cities reporters. Walters isn’t his only admirer. Star Tribune sports columnist Jim Souhan gives him high marks both for believability and for media savvy. St. Peter is a rare bird, Souhan says, in that he doesn’t expect all Twins coverage to be positive and doesn’t hold grudges when it isn’t.

“A lot of people in professional sports want to be covered as if they were a high school team—their butts kissed every day and never a bad word said about them,” Souhan says. “But we’re not a PR firm, and we’re not the marketing arm of the Twins or the Timberwolves or whoever. It’s nice to deal with somebody who gets that.”

When the North Stars internship ended, St. Peter grabbed another with the Twins, beginning in February 1990. Five months later, team officials made him an offer. “They said, ‘We have good news and bad news,’” he recalls. “The good news was, they wanted to hire me on a full-time basis. Well, great—health insurance, benefits, a paycheck, all of those things.” The bad news was that the job wasn’t in the marketing department, where he wanted to be. Instead, they asked him to manage a retail outlet in Richfield that sold Twins merchandise.

He took the job and ran the shop for a year and a half. As a retail manager, he was wildly successful—mainly, he says, because the Twins happened to win the 1991 World Series. “Sales went absolutely through the roof,” he recalls.