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.