Estimates say Minnesota Twins brought in $50-$70 million new revenue in 2010

10/8/10, ""There's a tremendous spurt in revenue here," said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College. ..."I would suspect you would have seen a revenue jump in the neighborhood of $50 million."

• But that's a conservative estimate, according to the number-crunchers at Forbes.

"Target Field, we estimate, will increase revenue for the Twins by at least $70 million," said Forbes editor Kurt Badenhausen, who works on the magazine's annual revenue and valuation rankings of professional sports teams.

• Last year, Forbes calculated the Twins had about $162 million in revenue. That was good enough for 16th place among the 30 major league baseball teams. Badenhausen said the Twins will be moving up several notches in the revenue ranking now."...

Field of Schemes wonders: "If the Twins are raking in so much money, couldn't they have built the damn thing themselves, instead of sticking local shoppers with a sales tax hike? Maybe, but keep in mind that stadium honeymoons typically don't last that long these days — 5-7 years at best, two or three if your team is lousy — and most of that new money (almost two-thirds, by my reckoning) comes from increased attendance, not increased ticket prices, so the bottom line might look very different a decade from now. Also, it's not clear whether the Forbes and Zimbalist numbers include the

• extra cash the Twins will have to kick into the league's revenue-sharing plan, which could knock down their windfall by about a third.

To really establish whether Target Field could have paid for itself, we'd need to see the Twins' books. Anybody have any friends at the Twins' insurance company?"

• 11/29/07, NY Times, Murray Chass: "In the last five years, the Twins have received an average of $20 million a year in revenue sharing, but their payroll has not increased proportionately. The aggregate increase in those five years has been $16 million."..."The Twins are not sharing the wealth"

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