SABR 42: Dave St. Peter opening remarks
Minnesota Twins president Dave St. Peter delivered the opening remarks at SABR 42 on Thursday, June 28 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here are some highlights:
On Minnesota’s baseball tradition
- “The Upper Midwest is a great home for baseball and we’re carrying on a tradition that dates from the turn of the 20th century — the Gophers and Millers and the Negro Leagues, the St. Paul Saints, and the Minnesota Twins. I think our region had been questioned as a great baseball area and you don’t see those questions anymore. Target Field has broken all those myths.”
On the stability of the Twins
- “Our biggest reason for team success is that our ownership allows the baseball people to make the baseball decisions. They try to hire the best baseball people they could, starting with Andy MacPhail. We’ve had two field managers dating back to 1986. Tom Kelly was here for such a long time, he’d be in the Hall of Fame if he’d managed in New York. We’ve had the same farm director for 25 years. We know who we are and we don’t try to be anyone else. We have to develop players. We’re never going to make it in free agency. It’s fundamental to every team, but development has to be our bread and butter.”
On the development of Target Field
- It took us 10-plus years to get the approval for a new ballpark. We did some things and I’m very thankful we did the amount of research we did. We were very interested in right-sizing the ballpark and the pricing. This ballpark is avery urban experience. Twenty to 25 percent of our fans come by light rail transit and that’s in a city where there isn’t much transit infrastructure. It’s in the heart of the entertainment warehouse district. Like in Denver with LoDo, we’ve seen a big resurgence in the building of bars and businesses. In terms of the ballpark, it is the anti-Metrodome. Nothing points to a 50-yard line. It’s natural grass and I think that’s been therapeutic for Minnesota. It’s open air. History tells us that someday we’ll have Opening Day snowed out, maybe even a World Series game. I actually get more arguments about the heat now with people wanting to know where the air conditioning is. It’s a very intimate field. We took about an 8-acre footprint parking lot and created a 12-acre ballpark on it by building up and outward.”
Listen to Dave St. Peter’s speech, with an introduction by Halsey Hall Chapter president Brenda Himrich, below:
To download the MP3 file, click here (56 minutes, 25 MB)
For more stories and photos from SABR 42, visit SABR.org/convention.
Originally published: June 28, 2012. Last Updated: July 27, 2020.