The Nicest Guy in Baseball

You want to talk Torii Hunter? “We love Torii Hunter. Torii Hunter probably meant as much to the Twins organization as any player in this era. To many folks, he was the face of the franchise. We offered Torii a significant amount of money to continue to play here.”

The Twins offered Hunter a three-year contract for $15 million a year. The Angels got him with a five-year contract for $90 million—$18 million a year. “It was never about the annual revenue,” St. Peter insists. “I think we probably could have figured out $18 million a year.” No, the issue was time. Tying up $90 million for five years for a player who will be 37 at the end of that period would not have been “a good baseball decision,” he says. “I don’t know anyone who really follows the Twins and seriously thinks we should have paid Torii $18 million a year for five years.

“It isn’t just math. Most people on the outside think we sit here with a [fixed] player budget and just fit pieces into that budget. That isn’t how it works. We’re trying to make good baseball decisions. And we’re not operating in a one-year vacuum. We need to keep an eye out toward 2009, 2010, 2011 . . . . It’s money, it’s time, it’s scouting, it’s the skills of the player, it’s injuries—all of those things factor in.”

The new stadium is expected to add $40 million a year to the team’s revenue, and St. Peter promises that some of that money will swell the payroll pot. But he already is trying to manage fan and media expectations about when, and by how much, the pot will grow. To those who insist that the Pohlads should open the family wallet today to ensure that a pennant-contending team moves into the new facility in 2010, he says: “Everybody expects our payroll to take this big jump now. It won’t. 2010 revenues aren’t going to be there until 2010.”

What’s more, St. Peter says, “We aren’t ever going to be a team that has the luxury of covering our mistakes with payroll. What I mean by that is, just because we have the new ballpark, I don’t think there’s a responsibility to overpay for players . . . We’ll always have a finite amount of dollars to spend, whether that’s in the Metrodome or in the new ballpark, where the pie will get bigger.”

Don’t Call It Small

Uh oh. You know where this is headed: a speech about how the Twins are still a small-market organization. And now that the team has the subsidized stadium it’s been crying for since 1997, fans mustn’t expect that much of the added revenue will actually go toward player salaries.

But no, St. Peter rejects the small-market excuse outright. “Minneapolis–St. Paul is not a small market, and we’re not a small-market team,” he says. “We’re an underperforming mid-market team.” And the reason for that financial underperformance, he adds, is the Metrodome.