The Minnesota Twins say they aren’t for sale, and Tom Pohlad has been eager to leave that message hanging in the air.
After the Pohlad family spent about 10 months exploring a sale, they took the club off the market in August 2025 and instead brought in limited partners to help deal with the franchise’s heavy debt while keeping majority control. That move eventually put Tom Pohlad in the chairman’s seat, and at the end of the 2026 season he insisted the family’s plan was not to start over.
“I can’t say that my enjoyment in the role is the sole reason for how long we intend to be owners, but I can tell you that we’re long-term oriented,” Pohlad said. “We’ve got big goals and a lot of work to do, and it’s going to take some time. We are in this for the long haul.”
He sounded even more energized when he followed it up.
“We are reenergized, for sure,” he added. “After a trying two years and that sale process, I’m frankly surprised at how energized we are, to be honest with you.”
That is the public stance. But a report from Pioneer Press columnist Charley Walters has thrown a wrinkle into the picture.
“A sale of the Twins to the New York-based global investment firm Varde Partners, which has an office in Minneapolis and in 2025 became a Twins limited partner to help the franchise out of $500 million in debt, is said to be heating up. Varde Partners reportedly manages $15 billion in assets.”
The key detail is that Värde Partners is not coming out of nowhere. When the Pohlads reworked the ownership structure in 2025, they didn’t just shelve a sale and move on.
They brought in investors, including Värde co-founder George Hicks, Glick Family Investments and Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold. Those minority partners helped reduce the team’s roughly $500 million debt, and the transaction reportedly valued the Twins at about $1.75 billion.
That setup gave the Pohlads what they wanted at the time: control, relief from debt, and a stronger financial base. But it also means any future move by Värde would come with a head start.
The firm already has a stake in the team, already knows the finances and already has ties inside the ownership group. It isn’t trying to learn the landscape from scratch.
The market around MLB has also changed fast. When the Pohlads explored a sale, the reported asking price was $1.8 billion. Since then, the Padres were sold in 2026 at a reported $3.9 billion valuation, and the Angels then topped that when Stan Kroenke agreed to buy them at an MLB-record $4 billion valuation.
That doesn’t turn the Twins into a $4 billion team by default. Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and every franchise has its own realities.
Still, the direction of the market is hard to miss. If the Pohlads ever wanted to revisit a sale, the timing would look a lot better now than it did when they were wrestling with debt, local media revenue concerns and uncertainty about the team’s financial outlook.
There’s another layer, too: baseball’s labor situation. MLB owners are scheduled to lock out players on December 1 if there’s no new collective bargaining agreement, and the biggest fight is over the league’s push for a salary cap. The MLB Players Association has pushed back hard on that idea, while MLB has also proposed a salary floor.
For the Twins, that could matter a lot. A salary cap would restrain the biggest spenders, but a salary floor could force low-payroll teams to spend much more than they do now. And if the league’s economic system starts looking more predictable, that could make franchises more appealing to buyers.
So are the Pohlads secretly selling the Twins? There’s no hard proof of that.
The public signs point the other way, and Tom Pohlad has been saying the family is committed for the long haul. But Walters’s report is enough to keep the question alive, especially with Värde already inside the ownership structure and MLB valuations climbing.
Maybe the Pohlads really do mean what they’ve said. Or maybe they’ve simply set the table for a much bigger deal if the right offer shows up. If that’s the case, Värde is already close enough to make the next step a lot easier.
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