Where Are the Black Fans at Twins Games?
Sports columnist Charles Hallman looks at the lack of Black fans at Twins home games, even in a season when the team had the most Black players in the American League. Be The Change MN’s Melissa Dickman and Dr. John Baker call for deeper outreach in North Minneapolis, Hallman revisits the long-criticized “Minnie and Paul” logo and the late Dr. Charles Crutchfield III’s push to change it, and Twins officials Eric Hudson and Matt Hodson acknowledge slow progress while pointing to winning as the biggest draw.
Second of two parts
If you run into a Black fan or two at a Minnesota Twins home game, it’s a rare sight indeed.
At the team’s final home game of the 2026 season, we saw a group of four Black fans. Two of them agreed to speak with us on the condition of anonymity.
The woman said it was her first baseball game in person this season, and she was bothered that the big video board didn’t show any Black people during the game. The man added, “It was a nice environment,” but neither would commit to returning for a game next season.
Minnesota finished near the bottom of the American League in attendance, averaging more than 21,000 fans over [81] home games and drawing at least 1.7 million for the season. Those figures aren’t broken down by race, but it’s a safe bet that Black attendance at Twins games is scant.
Drawing Black fans to baseball has been a longstanding problem, even this year, when the Twins had the most Black players (five) in the American League. When a Black fan is spotted, they stand out like a sore thumb.
“If you want the community to come,” the team must do better outreach, Melissa Dickman of Be The Change MN told the MSR during the Twins’ annual inclusion event at the ballpark Sept. 24. “I think the big thing is going into the community. The kids generally don’t know about baseball, especially in our community in North Minneapolis,” she said.
Be The Change MN Founder Dr. John Baker praised the Twins for bringing a group of Minneapolis grade school students to the ballpark earlier this season. “They brought the kids for a read-along, brought them down to the dugouts, fed them and really treated them like future Twins fans,” Baker said. “I think we need to do more like that with our families and our students to get more (fans), especially people of color, interested in baseball.”
Personally, it still bothers me whenever I’m at Twins games to see the 50-foot sign in center field showing two white men shaking hands, the “Minnie and Paul” logo the team has used since 1961. I wrote about the antiquated symbol in 2020, during the so-called racial awakening the area and the country experienced after George Floyd’s murder.
The late Dr. Charles Crutchfield III held an informal Facebook poll a couple of years earlier and found that 85% of the estimated 150 respondents wanted a modified logo and 12% wanted something new. Only 3% didn’t want any changes.
“It would be nice to look at that scoreboard and see Kirby Puckett, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew and Torii Hunter,” Crutchfield, a longtime Twins dermatologist and season ticket holder, said at the time.
Eric Hudson, the Twins’ senior director of community engagement and inclusion, told the MSR, “I remember the conversation that we had with Dr. Crutchfield.”
Are there any Black Twins fans? How many of them knew the team had five Black players?
“I thought it was a very cool thing that we played in the Field of Dreams game (Aug. 13 against Philadelphia), and counting the designated hitter, five of our 10 starters are Black players,” said Matt Hodson, the Twins’ director of business communications. “I hope baseball gets back to somewhere that is a norm rather than something that is basically wow.”
Hall of Famer Dave Winfield wrote in his 2008 book “Dropping the Ball” that baseball must do better to attract and keep Black fans. “Charles, the best way I tell people, I say read my book,” he told me. “I made a lot of recommendations … 18 years ago, and people are still talking about it today.”
“I do see things changing a little bit slowly,” Hudson added. “Not as fast as we would like, but slowly.”
But as Hodson pointed out, winning brings fans of all races to the ballpark, and the Twins missed the postseason for the third straight season. Their last playoff appearance was in 2023.
“The most important way to filling the ballpark now is we need to win,” he said.
Finally …
Twins designated hitter and first baseman Josh Bell made this year’s All-Bro Team on MLBbro.com.
Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.
Copyright © Charles Hallman