2024: Joe Pohlad is the first Pohlad to occupy an office at Target Field. He is still more of a listener and asker of questions than a decider, but he is clearly transitioning into an active leadership role with the team. “I don’t needle or create distractions,” he notes. “I like to collaborate.” 2023 was the first season in his new role, and his influence could be felt in refreshed team logos and iconography, among other areas. He believes the leadership transition and reorganization of baseball operations that took root in 2017 is now mature. “Our expectation to win is greater; the bar is higher,” he says. The cloud on the horizon is not yet having a TV partner for the ’24 season and the attendant inability to estimate revenues (believed to be nearly $55 million last year).
2016: After spending several years learning the baseball business under Twins president Dave St. Peter, Bob Pohlad’s son Joe has moved over to a management role at the family’s growing media holdings, which include GO 96.3, BringMeTheNews and the newly purchased radio frequency at 95.3 FM. Insiders suspect the younger Pohlad will eventually land back on the baseball side of the family businesses, but they credit him for leading the move to 96.3’s more youth-oriented programming and await the synergies he is able to develop with an audience that baseball and radio have been hard–pressed to lock down.