RandBall: Plenty of billionaires in the sea for Twins; a Vikings-like Gophers game

Back when Carl Pohlad bought the Twins in 1984, Forbes reported there were a dozen billionaires in the entire United States.

True, you didn’t have to be a billionaire to afford a baseball team back then; Pohlad bought the Twins for only $44 million (about $133 million now, adjusted for inflation).

But it’s pretty much a prerequisite now to owning any “big four” men’s pro team, given that every franchise in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL has a value of at least $1 billion (and in some cases many billions more).

The Twins, who are up for sale, are valued anywhere from $1.5 to $1.7 billion, depending on where you look.

That said, it also seems you can’t fall out of a tree without hitting a billionaire these days.

There are so many that it’s hard to get an accurate count, though Forbes says that worldwide there were more than 2,700 people with a net worth of at least $1 billion in 2024.

And if you aren’t a billionaire today, you might be a meme coin away from becoming one tomorrow.

All of that is a long way of saying: Relax, Twins fans. Yes, Justin Ishbia is reportedly out of the running to buy the team. Yes, he was the only publicly identified obscenely wealthy person in the mix, though he came in a paltry 667th place on Forbes' real-time tracker of U.S. billionaires as of Monday with a net worth of $5.1 billion.

But there are plenty of billionaires in the sea, as Patrick Reusse and I talked about on Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

Just because we haven’t heard about them in connection to the Twins doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

One might even wake up tomorrow, decide that owning a baseball team during a time of TV uncertainty might not be the wisest investment and plunge ahead anyway because “what the heck, it would be fun.”

Most of us can’t fathom having that kind of money, but more and more people do have that kind of money.

The Gophers generated some enthusiasm with a recent sweep of the Los Angeles road trip vs. USC and UCLA, garnering a strong crowd at Williams Arena to welcome in the lowly Nittany Lions.

After starting the Big Ten season 0-6, the Gophers had gone 6-3. Could they make some sort of miracle run?

And of course, just when they convinced people to believe … they came back to Earth with a 69-60 loss.

It was a script we have seen Minnesota teams follow before, but none quite so expertly as the Vikings. The Purple have pulled it off too many times to count, most recently at the end of this season.

The Vikings, by the way, finished stuck on 14 wins this season — the same number the Gophers have now.