After two disappointing seasons, a lackluster offseason, and a serious setback in spring training, the Minnesota Twins are about to open their 2026 Major League Baseball season. The club starts with a pair of road series in Baltimore beginning this Thursday, March 26, followed by a series in Kansas City before coming home to host their American League rival, the Tampa Bay Rays. The home opener at Target Field in downtown Minneapolis runs from Friday through Sunday, April 3–5.
The club will be trying to overcome two consecutive losing seasons (finishing 20 games below .500), the bypassing of major game-changing free agents, and the season-long injury to ace pitcher Pablo López. But had it not been for a few words in a real estate deed seven decades ago, it might have been a different team (the New York Giants), in a different league (the National), and at a different venue—a ballpark built near a swampy tract just west of Minneapolis in St. Louis Park.
Here is the “would have, could have, and perhaps should have” of that spring 70 years ago this week.
Realty Restriction
For nearly three decades, from 1982 until 2009, the Twins played at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis after moving from their original home at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. The club had relocated to Minnesota from Washington, D.C., where they were known as the Senators, in 1961. But Major League Baseball almost arrived five years earlier.
Long before the Metrodome and Target Field were conceived, a new stadium was envisioned in an underdeveloped swampy area near the intersection of Highway 12 (now I-394) and Highway 100 in St. Louis Park. The ballpark concept was part of an attempt to lure the New York Giants to relocate to Minneapolis, where they had operated a minor league team for years known as the Millers.
Playing at the antiquated Nicollet Park in South Minneapolis, the Millers were the breeding ground for Giants stars like Willie Mays. Mays “tore up” the minor leagues in just over a month in 1951 before being called up to the parent club, helping the Giants win the National League pennant in a miraculous comeback before falling to the New York Yankees in the World Series.
In 35 games with the Millers, Mays hit .477 with 8 home runs, 30 RBI, and 38 runs scored.
The Giants won the National League pennant that year, and Mays won NL Rookie of the Year.
The land sought for the proposed Giants stadium was encumbered by a covenant in a 1949 deed that restricted the sale of food or liquor on the property, except in connection with baseball games or recreational events. This restrictive covenant was placed by the prior owner, who ran an upscale nightclub and dining facility north of the site called “McCarthy’s.”
Despite the baseball exclusion, the covenant deterred the Giants, who feared complications in using the site for various purposes. Simultaneously, the Brooklyn Dodgers were eyeing the lucrative California market. Desiring a West Coast partner for travel and scheduling, the Dodgers convinced the Giants to ditch the Minnesota site. The Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, while the Dodgers headed to Los Angeles.
Clause Curtailed
More than two decades later, a successor owner of the St. Louis Park site sought to overturn the clause barring food and liquor sales to construct the commercial sites that now make up the West End. In the 1979 case Matter of Turners Crossroad Development Co., the Minnesota Supreme Court struck down the restraints, ruling the covenant no longer had value.
The court noted that the original purpose—protecting McCarthy’s from competition—was moot, as the restaurant had long since closed. It also pointed to a Minnesota statute limiting such land-use clauses to 30 years.
The Contraction Case
The litigation over the deed was a precursor to a bevy of other stadium battles, including the “contraction case” two decades later. In that “Super Bowl” of Minnesota stadium litigation, Judge Harry Crump enjoined the Twins and MLB from eliminating the club (and the Montreal Expos) through contraction.
In Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission v. Minnesota Twins Partnership, the court required the club to complete its lease at the Metrodome, relying on the “public interest.” That ruling led to the legislation for Target Field, which opened in 2010 and has since hosted the Twins, the Gophers, and countless concerts.
Covenant Concerns
The restrictive covenant that impeded the Giants 70 years ago was part of a larger genre of legal property restraints in Minnesota. The most significant involved racial and religious restrictions on residential real estate, which began around 1911 and were enforced in South Minneapolis and suburbs like Golden Valley and Edina.
While the U.S. Supreme Court initially upheld these in the 1926 case Corrigan v. Buckley, it famously overturned that stance in 1948 with Shelley v. Kraemer, ruling that while private parties could agree to such clauses, the courts could not legally enforce them.
In 2019, the state legislature enacted a law—further amended in 2025—allowing homeowners to remove these restrictive clauses from their deeds. This generated the “Just Deeds” project, a collaborative effort to assist homeowners in dispensing with these discriminatory markers.
Baseball is famously a “game of inches.” But 70 years ago, as the New York Giants contemplated a move to Minneapolis, it was a game of words in a deed.
