OK, first things first. My predecessor at TwinkieTown, RandBall’s Stu, would occasionally do a post called a Hosken Powell Memorial Link Dump. Stu uses humor, and what made the title funny is that Hosken Powell, although not a particularly memorable Twins player, was not dead. He was alive and well. (I did a Glen Powell Memorial Link Dump at a movie site to poke fun at the unremarkable film actor.)
It’s not funny if he actually passed away! And former Twin Hosken Powell died last year, at the too-soon
age of 70. His obituary says he was a beloved family man and devoted member of his faith community.
So we need a new un-memorable Twin with a fun name, and I’m picking Brian Dinkelman. Who is quite well! He’s gonna manage the Saints this season. On to the rest of the links:
This is from last year. Royce Lewis likes to have kids sign HIS hat, rather than the other way around. I think that’s cool. The kids probably think it’s cool, too, although they’d probably rather have a Lewis-signed hat. It’s better than nothing!
From Defector, about how the sports media are treating gambling scandals like they’re no big deal. Because sports media has sucked ever since Behind the Lines was canceled. Maybe before then, too.
Not baseball, but Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr had some strong words in support of the people of Minneapolis in January. And so did terrific baseball writer Craig Calcaterra.
ProPublica on how team owners use their teams to write off taxes. They do this by using tax deductions that are intended for factory owners and the like. The owner of the L.A. Clippers reported losses of hundreds of millions when the Clipppers were making hundreds of millions. And it’s all perfectly legal.
Along those lines, The American Prospect did a whole issue (February 2026) on how sports are screwing over fans, young athletes, pro athletes, everybody. Well, “sports” aren’t doing this, exercise is good for you. It’s business interests and team owners who are doing it.
One way, as we’ve discussed, is through pushing sports gambling on people. Not just adults. Kids. Gambling addiction is rising with kids, and fast. And among adults, gambling is heavily targeting minority populations.
Another way is by private equity getting involved. If you’re not familiar with the term “private equity,” it’s firms which offer larger-than-normal financial returns to large investment funds. Sometimes they deliver those larger-than-normal returns, sometimes they don’t. But in almost every instance, when private equity buys something, they are going to find the maximum way of extracting short-term profit from it. So, when private equity buys the nursing home your grandma’s in, don’t think the owners are going to pay more to hire better staff! It will be the opposite of that!
In short, all you parents will be happy to hear that private equity has been getting BIGTIME into youth sports. Training facilities and camps and such for kid athletes, I’m sure prices will go down and quality go up!
They’re also bloodsucking off high-school/college players. How do they do it? Find an athlete who’s from a poor background, and offer the youngster money up front for a percentage of ALL their future earnings. If they become a star, the company hits the jackpot.
Fernando Tatis signed such a contract when he was 18, after a two-minute phone call with an attorney the company (Big League Advantage) had provided. Now Big League Advantage claims it has 10% of Tatis’s future earnings, forever.
Tatis’s legal team is countering that, legally, by giving Tatis said upfront money, BLA was acting as a lender who expected to collect interest. And BLA is not licensed as a lender. The case is pending.
Oh, and private equity is offering colleges upfront money for a piece of future college sports revenues, too. Including public universities. So taxpayer money will end up in private equity hands.
Nothing new there! After all, that’s what the stadium game’s all about! And now 20% of billionaires own a sports team, and they ALL want more taxpayer money. Fancier stadiums mean more expensive tickets! A major reason why the cost of attending games keeps going up, up, UP!
Field of Schemes writer Neil deMause, who knows more about the subject than anybody, wonders if the upcoming MLB CBA negotiations will affect the stadium game. Because one thing that teams do to get stadiums/renovations now is claim they need them because they are “losing money.” (They aren’t, but MLB teams, aside from Toronto, are not required to make their financial information public.) Since increased revenue sharing is being discussed, and perhaps a salary cap tied to overall league revenue (that’s how the NBA and NHL do it), these things could require teams to open their books. Making it harder to plead poverty.
OTOH, if there was real revenue sharing in MLB, like there is in NFL, this means teams could move to places like Green Bay and still expect to make a profit! Right now there’s a limited number of relocation targets which would be more profitable than a team’s current home. Revenue sharing makes the destination’s population matter less, although MLB teams play a heckuva lot more games then the Packers do. (So think less Green Bay, more Oklahoma City.)
In any case, Cullen Jekel at Royals Review is certainly right in saying that if the 2027 season is lost because of negotiation difficulties, even if the problem is 75% on the owners and 25% on the players, fans will blame… the players.
Jekel won’t say why, but I will. Because a lot of sports fans are idiots, and think that owners must be smart businessmen to have gotten so rich; this is not true. (They either started rich or got lucky on some business bets and they have no conscience and do not care about anything more than instant profit; this is why they are rich.) Idiot sports fans don’t understand why the athletes who create 90% of a sport’s value should get half the revenue. I’ve heard idiots say “name one other job where workers share the profits with owners?” Um, those used to be called “union jobs,” they worked pretty well (with some exceptions) until they were beaten down by decades of business investment in politics. And, let’s face it, some sports fans are idiot racists who resent “ethnic” people getting paid well “to do a job I’d do for free.”
In the recent WBC, some players on the American side wrapped themselves in pure jingoistic glory to celebrate the nation’s latest imperial misadventures. This embarrasses them and their country in front of the rest of the world. But I’m used to it. The same thing happened in every major American sports league in 2002-2003. And in 1991-1992.
So, I’m pretty down on bigtime professional sports leagues in America right now! (Bonus misery: my former hometown Portland TrailBlazers are soaking taxpayers for $600 million bucks… on behalf of a new owner who made his bazillions in predatory auto loans.) Everything in sports just keeps getting worse and worse each year, there’s no end to it. So why am I still a Twins fan?
Answer: I’m not. I’m a fan of the cool players in that uniform and the neat fans I meet on this site. Those players, and especially you TTers, are still fun. You’re the smart sports fans; you know better than to sit in the bar yelling “the Pohlads need to sell the team.” You know that while the Pohlads are certainly bad, there’s no guarantee a new owner will be better; they might very easily be worse.
Along those lines, I promised a VIDEO! So here it is. Call it a metaphor for the Twins’ current ownership situation. It’s a car I saw outside a local store some time ago:
It’s not that the Pohlads are the problem (although they are ONE problem). It’s not that baseball is completely messed up (although there are many things wrong with the state of the sport). It’s that professional sports, overall, are messed up. And I don’t know if they will get better.
Will I ever be a fan of the Twins, or any sports team, again? The way I used to be? It’s possible. But things sure would have to be different. So let’s end on some links which aren’t bummers.
Not everything in that Prospect issue was depressing. Here’s an article about how WNBA players are angling for better pay… and looking to the history of baseball’s Marvin Miller as they do it.
There’s some publicly-owned teams which are doing well… and not just “publicly-owned” like those fans who buy miniscule pieces of the Packers in order to get on a decades-long wait list for tickets. I mean “publicly owned” as in the city or municipality owns them, and any excess profits go to funding city services. The Rochester Red Wings are one such team.
Johan Santana was in Twins’ training camp with his son.
Finally, another training camp story, which like the Lewis one is a year old. Eduardo Julien and Jorge Alcala were almost hit by a flying car in Florida. Not the kind of “flying car” that was in Back to the Future. The bad kind. It’s a happy story because they didn’t get squishified!
There! I’ve dumped a bunch of links I’ve been saving in a phone “notes” file for awhile. See you soon for Twins gamethreads! And thanks, always, for reading/commenting here. It’s appreciated more than you know!
