Perspectives: Baseball’s back: How Giants almost came here

The Minnesota Twins are beginning the 2026 baseball season this week — Thursday, March 26 to be precise — hoping to overcome the past two disappointing seasons.

After beginning  with a pair of series at Baltimore and Kansas City, the club will have its opening day for the 17th time at Target Field in downtown Minneapolis the following  Friday, April 3, starting a weekend series against  American League rival Tampa Bay Rays.

But it might have been a different team (the transplanted New York Giants) in a different league (the National) and at a different venue (a ballpark built near a swampy tract in St. Louis Park) had it not been for a covenant in a deed that impeded that club from moving here from New York City 70 years ago.

The start  of the baseball season provides an opportune occasion to review the legal issues that affected the prospective relocation of the New York City ballclub as well as other litigation concerning sites where the Twins have played in their 65-year history, and other, more odious, property restrictions.

Deed deterrent

For nearly three decades from 1982 until 2009, the Twins played at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Before that, the club played at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, where it had moved in 1961 from Washington, D.C., shedding its former moniker, the Senators.

But long before the Metrodome and Target Field were ever conceived, a new stadium was envisioned a few miles outside of downtown Minneapolis. It was envisioned for an underdeveloped swamp near the intersection of then Highway 12 (now Highway 394) and Highway 100 in St. Louis Park in the mid-1950s, the ballpark proposal was part of an attempt to lure the then New York Giants to relocate to the Minneapolis area, where it had operated a minor league team for years.

The land set aside for the proposed stadium was encumbered by a covenant in a 1949 deed restricting the sale of food or liquor on the property except in connection with baseball games or other recreational events. It was placed in the instrument by the prior owner of the land who owned a nearby nightclub across Highway 12.

Despite the baseball exclusion, the covenant deterred the Giants from moving here, fearing complication in using the place for various purposes. As the suburban site became less appealing, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Giants’ New York City based National League rival, was eyeing the large and lucrative California market, facilitated by jet airplane travel, to bring Major League baseball west of the Mississippi, where it had not been played since its inception before the turn of the century.

Desiring a West Coast partner for team travel and scheduling purposes, the Dodgers, committed to going to Southern California and convinced the Giants to ditch the Minnesota site.

The Giants did so, moving in 1958 to San Francisco, where it has played at various ballparks, along with the Dodgers moving to L.A. at that time.

“The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.”
Baseball owner Bill Veeck (1914-1986)

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“These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America.”
Singer Jimmy Buffet (1946-2023)

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“You should enter a ballpark the way you enter a church.”
Pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee (1946- )

Restaurant row

More than two decades later, long after the Giants had bypassed Minnesota and moved to San Francisco, a successor owner of the St. Louis Park swamp sought to remove the restriction on the sale of food and liquor in order to construct eateries and bars in the area, where they now proliferate in a mini-restaurant row.

In Matter of Turners Crossroad Development Co., 277 N.W.2d 364 (Minn. 1979), the Minnesota Supreme Court struck the restraints on grounds that the “covenant has no further value and cannot be enforced.”

The court noted that its original purpose of protecting the former owner from hospitality competition was moot since with the post-World War II nightclub/restaurant across the highway, an establishment known as “McCarthy’s,” had long since gone out of business, replaced with a couple of other restaurants and then supplanted by commercial structures. It further pointed to Minn. Stat. §500.20, subd. 2, which limits such restrictive land use clauses to 30 years, although the court did not rely upon that measure because it was not necessary to the decision that the covenant no longer was germane. But it did, as a matter of guidance, deem that statutory restriction to be constitutional.

Stadium suits

The belated litigation over the restrictive deed provision was a precursor to a bevy of other baseball stadium litigation here.

The Metrodome itself, which the Twins left in 2010, was the source of its share of litigation.

In Lifleau v. Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, 270 N.W.2d 749 (Minn. 1978), the court upheld the statute creating the Metropolitan Sports Commission which constructed the Metrodome. The court ruled that the law, which imposes a 2% on-sale liquor tax, constitutes a permissible “public purpose in light of the important part that professional sports plays in our social life.” Other litigation efforts to doom the Dome failed, too, in ensuing years.

Tax topics also have been litigated in baseball-related lawsuits in Minnesota. In Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission v. County of Hennepin, 478 N.W.2d 487 (Minn. 1991), the court held that a state statute exempting from property taxation space in the Metrodome leased by the commission to the Twins and Vikings did not violate equal protection or the “single subject” clause of the Minnesota Constitution. The court deemed the use of the facility “inherently and functionally limited to two major occupants,” the Twins and Vikings.

The Twins failed to convince the tax court that its novelty items should be exempt from the Minnesota sales and use tax. In Minnesota Twins Partnership v. Commissioner of Revenue, 587 N.W.2d 287 (Minn. 1998), the tax court rejected the Twins’ contention that novelty items that are distributed to fans who pay taxable admission charges constituted “purchase for resale” and even not taxable to the Twins because they were given without charge to fans who bought tickets for the games. The court held that the items were subject to the sales and use tax because the Twins “did not resell the ticket stock and novelty items to game attendees, but instead gave the items away.”

Contraction case

But those cases pale in significance compared with the Metrodome “contraction case,” in which the Court of Appeals upheld a ruling of Hennepin County District Court Judge Harry Crump enjoining the Twins and Major League baseball, with the acquiescence of the Twins, eliminating the club and one other, the Montreal Expos, in what was termed “contraction.”

In the “Super Bowl” of Minnesota Stadium litigation, the judge required the club to complete the final season of its 20-year Metrodome lease based on the “five factors” of the Dahlberg Brothers v. Ford Motor Co., 272 Minn. 264 and 137 N.W.2d 314 (1965), heavily relying on the “public interest” in prong to maintain a team here, which the Court of Appeals affirmed in Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission v. Minnesota Twins Partnership, 638 N.W.2d 214 (Minn. Ct. App. 2002). That ruling, which the Supreme Court declined to review, led to the legislation and construction of Target Field which opened eight years later and has housed the Twins — and occasionally the Minnesota Gophers baseball team, a couple of college football games, music, concerts, and other events for double that duration.

Covenant considerations

The restrictive covenant that underlined the Twins covenant litigation that impeded the Giants from moving here 70 years ago this spring was one of the genre of legal property restraints in Minnesota. The most significant ones restrict sales of residential real estate on racial, ethnic, or religious grounds. They date back to around 1911 in this state.

An obscure and unenforced state law in 1917 barred them, but they continued in informal use. Several years later in Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a racially restrictive covenant was legally binding and voided a sale to a Black family in Washington, D.C., which led to a surge in those devices.

But in 1948, the high court overturned that case in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), which held that while private parties may agree to abide by them, the clauses could not be legally enforced under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

In 1953, the Minnesota Legislature outlawed new restrictive clauses in Minn. Stat. §507.18, but left pre-existing ones intact. Nine years later, the Human Rights Act, Minn. Stat. §363.02, prohibited housing discrimination based on race six years before the Federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601, did the same across the nation. Then, in 2019, the state Legislature enacted Minn. Stat. §507.17, amended six years later, to allow homeowners to remove those restrictive clauses from existing deeds, generating a “Just Deeds” project by governmental entities to aid homeowners in dispensing with them.

These covenant cases are worth recalling as the home plate umpire gets ready to shout “Play Ball” to begin the 2026 baseball season this week.

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PERSPECTIVES POINTERS

San Francisco Giants vs. Minnesota Twins

Giants in San Francisco:

Year Established: 1958

All-Time Record: 5,555-5,202-6

National League Pennants: 6 (1962, 1989, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2014)

World Championships: 3 (2010, 2012, 2014)

Hall of Famers: 5 (Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Gaylord Perry)

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Twins in Minnesota:

Year Established: 1961

Stadiums: 3 (Met Stadium, Metrodome, Target Field)

All-Time Record: 5,106-5,183-8

American League Pennants: 3 (1965, 1987, 1991)

World Championships: 2 (1987, 1991)

Hall of Famers: 7 (Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett, Bert Blyleven, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, Joe Mauer)

Marshall H. Tanick is an attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer, Njus, Tanick, Linder & Robbins, PA.