Minnesota gives and takes

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- When it comes to pro sports franchises, Minnesota has won them, lost them and lured them back.

So the Twin Cities wouldn't be experiencing anything new if major league baseball decides to fold the Minnesota Twins.

Before Magic and Kareem ran "Showtime" in Los Angeles, George Mikan's Minneapolis Lakers were the original NBA dynasty. The Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999, not long removed from their days as the Minnesota North Stars, a beloved team in a state that adores hockey as much as Texas loves football.

Those stories eventually had happy endings: The Lakers were replaced by the Timberwolves, albeit decades later, and the Wild brought NHL hockey back to Minnesota last year.

Of course, it was just about 40 years ago that the state was crowing over luring the Senators away from Washington -- to become baseball's Twins. If the Twins fold, will Minnesota get a second chance with baseball, too?

"When the North Stars left, there were dire predictions of people bleeding in the streets," said Bill Lester, executive director of the Minnesota Sports Facilities Commission. "The sun came up the next morning, just like it always has. I think this would be different. I think it would be much more difficult to rebound from the loss of baseball."

Not the only city

The Twin Cities aren't alone in having trouble holding on to pro teams.

St. Louis lost the Cardinals football team, the Browns baseball team and the Hawks basketball team. New York lost baseball's Giants and Dodgers and basketball's Nets (although only to New Jersey).

Minnesota's pro sports history began in 1947, when Ben Berger and Morris Chalfen bought a struggling National Basketball League franchise, the Detroit Gems, for $15,000 and moved it to Minneapolis. No players were included in the purchase price.

They began building the Minneapolis Lakers, a club that later became part of the NBA. Led by Mikan, the team compiled six championships in seven years.

But the Lakers didn't have a real home, splitting their games among the Minneapolis Auditorium, the Minneapolis Armory and the St. Paul Armory. They eventually went West.

"They were low on the totem pole," Lester said. "If a circus came to town, they got bumped."

Owner Bob Short moved the team to Los Angeles before the 1960-61 season, and it would be nearly 30 years before pro basketball returned to Minnesota.

One is lost, one is gained

The year after the Lakers left, Minnesota lured football and baseball teams to play in Metropolitan Stadium.

Calvin Griffith delighted millions in the Upper Midwest -- and angered Washington Senators baseball fans -- when he moved the team to Minnesota after the 1960 season. By its second year, the Twins finished second in the American League.

Football caught on, too. Under coach Bud Grant, the expansion Vikings won 11 division titles in 13 years and went to four Super Bowls. These days, the Vikings dominate the state's sports scene.

The NHL reached Minnesota in 1967, when the league doubled its number of franchises to 12. George and Gordon Gund, who bought the North Stars in 1978, threatened to move the team in the late 1980s unless the sports facilities commission gave them $15 million to improve the team's arena. They never got the money and in 1990 sold the team to Canadian Norm Green, who moved the team to Dallas in 1993 after numerous financial struggles and a sexual harassment case.

Pro hockey's separation from Minnesota was painful. "Norm Greed" was scrawled on a concrete wall near the team's offices.

The loss of the North Stars also meant the end of the old stadiums that sat where the Mall of America is now. Met Center was demolished in 1994. Met Stadium was demolished in 1985, three years after the Vikings and Twins started playing in the cheaply built, multiuse Metrodome.

The Metrodome was only two years old when Calvin Griffith sold the Twins to Carl Pohlad in 1984. At a ceremony for the sale, Griffith, who loved baseball and was a bat boy and mascot for the Senators in the early 1920s, wept at the loss of a team he couldn't afford anymore.

Under Pohlad's ownership, the team won the World Series in 1987 and 1991.

No support for stadium

But in the last decade, Pohlad and the Vikings' owners have pushed for public money for new stadiums, saying they can't make enough money in the Metrodome to stay competitive. Taxpayers and state lawmakers, led by outspoken Gov. Jesse Ventura, have refused.

"If they want baseball in Minnesota, they might have to dish out some money, and if not, it's going to be a shame to see us go," Twins first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz said this week.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is one of only about a dozen areas with four pro teams, and some people think the market simply can't support that many -- and the buildings they need.

David Carter, a sports business instructor at the University of Southern California, said how many teams a market can handle depends on three things: a committed fan base, a corporate fan base and public subsidies.

Minnesota has had trouble with all three, Carter said. Teams haven't gotten money from taxpayers for new or improved stadiums and "the fan base has had the rug pulled out from under it so many times."

"That creates this recipe for being unstable," Carter said. "You've got a real mess on your hands."

Fans such as Ray Welter know it. His family has had season tickets since the Twins arrived in 1961, when his dad bought them. He went to the first and last games at Met Stadium, and was there for the Metrodome's first game.

"It's the grandkids that are going to be bummed," Welter said. "I've had my day."