I hadn’t seen or heard anything about this in any of the “usual” online sources for Twins’ news that I read rather religiously (doesn’t mean it wasn’t there… I may have missed it), but Peter Gammons had this little nugget in his mlb.com report on the Twins:
“… regardless of the weather, the Twins will realize a significant bump in revenues with their new park. They’re about to sign a new radio and TV deal.
‘It’s not quite a Seattle deal,’ said one club official, but another says it will put the Twins within ‘the top 8-10 revenue teams,’ giving them a higher payroll than the Dodgers.”
Seriously? Although I guess maybe the whole soap opera revolving around the divorce of the Dodgers’ owner might be inhibiting the Dodgers’ payroll and, if so, maybe it’s not as big a deal as it sounds. I just assumed the Dodgers probably were one of the $100+ million payroll clubs.
I suppose it’s foolish to hope this new TV/radio deal will mean I’ll actually be able to watch/listen to Twins games in Eastern Iowa.
In any event… now that they’ve got this TV/radio contract pretty much ironed out, maybe they can make some progress on another contract issue of significant interest to the fan base.
UPDATE: Those of you who actually live in/near the Twin Cities probably can opine about the reliability of “Common Man”, but Jesse over at TwinkieTown posted a link to Common’s podcast in which he claims to have a source with a “family member with the Twins” who says a Joe Mauer contract agreement will be signed by Sunday. Eight years @ $22 mil per year plus a couple of option years. Sounds a bit like one of those “friend of a friend of a friend who has a sister who dates the janitor” kinda things to me… but who knows? We can hope, anyway.
my guess on the tv/radio deal: the Twins extend their contract with AM1500 for 3 more years (they recently went to an all sports format) and the TV side of thing is probably another 3 years with a little more money flowing to the Twins, and maybe a few more games on My29. A radical shift would be to put games on KSTP owned channel 45, to tie into the radio (they already carry some Wolves and Wild games and St. Paul Saints games on Saturdays during the summer). The Twins on FSN are highly rated (something like the 6th best in the country. Up there with NESN and YES networks)
As for Common…its hard to take him serious. He makes up most of bits. But he’s broken a few stories in the past, he is good buddies with Mark Rosen and not that it counts for anything, does voicework for Mauer Chevrolet