The Minnesota Twins and Target Field are lucky to be one of the common denominators in your community.Twins Baseball delivers life moments on an exciting stage promoting the cultural strength of your neighborhood—even if you don’t happen to be a baseball fan.We innovate on that stage every day with heart, hustle, passion, and fun!

Evaluating Human Performance 

Any business advertising innovation today will highlight a growing dependency on data analytics to focus strategy. While terminology and paradigms change over time, this has always been the case with baseball.

Baseball statistics are a great example of our need to measure and satiate our fascination with human capacity. New measurement tools bring new perspectives.

Historical data stores from standard baseball statistics are dwarfed by the amplified data fidelity delivered by high-tech MLB ballparks, where multiple sensors guarantee measurement accuracy because they are fine-tuned with lidar.

While our internally developed scouting system acts as a responsive conduit communicating opinion and decision, those opinions and decisions continue to be informed in new dimensional ways—ways that require visual model exploration and a growing need to compute against an expanding array of massive and often extemporaneous data sources.

The Business of Baseball

The next time you are at Target Field, imagine the sections, rows, and seats as elements in an interesting database. What types of questions would you ask of such a database?

Would your answers enable you to organize and enhance the game experience for what turns out to be a physical manifestation of multiple social networks?

In the early 1990s, Twins leaders took charge of the fundamental core of our business by purchasing the source code for a venue ticket system developed on an IBM AS400.

Today’s digital ticket offers fluid opportunity and operational flexibility.

Coding with modern languages and frameworks, we build feature layers on top of existing third-party digital ticketing platforms to present unique experiences to Twins Fans.

High Tech Fan Experience

Think of Target Field as a multimedia sentient being brought to life by robust converged, cellular, and Wi-Fi networks that are utilized by state-of-the-art systems.

These systems enable the consumption of data and large-scale and highly produced video content for the benefit of 40,000 of your closest friends.

We pioneered many innovative ticketing features and in a few short years, we were one of the first teams in professional sports to sell tickets digitally on a new thing called the Internet.

The real value of that business decision was what we culturally learned while developing a growth mindset that empowers our direction today.

Synchronously, digital tickets are scanned, amazing food is being purchased, life moments are shared over mobile social media, virtual reality home runs are being hit, babysitters are being called, and the game is being broadcast to your neighborhood.

The trick is to introduce new capabilities by tying together disparate systems and to not get in the way of the human reasons that we should enjoy the game together.

In 2018, the Twins were a Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA) Techne Award finalist for writing an application that combined existing multicast video capabilities (IPTV) with other content into an outdoor drink rail touch enclosure for control by individual fans.

Target Field: Greenest Ballpark in America

In celebration of Earth Day 2019, the Minnesota Twins announced LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Gold recertification.

Target Field is also the nation’s first sports venue to earn three levels of LEED certification through Arc, the state-of-the-art digital platform that uses real-time data to help benchmark, measure, and improve sustainability performance.

“The Twins organization’s commitment to LEED demonstrates a tremendous amount of green building leadership within the world of professional sports,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, president and CEO, US Green Building Council (USGBC).

“Target Field is a prime example of how innovative technology and sustainable solutions can create a better experience for everyone who steps foot in this stadium.”

Your Community

Off the field, the Minnesota Twins work to inspire your community through active and innovative business partnerships, through multiple associations like MHTA, and through efforts like the Twins Community fund: www.mlb.com/twins/community/fund.

To plant the seeds of technology innovation, we leverage our brand to spark the super-human power of curiosity in the minds of young people discovering STEM careers. For example:
mnstateitcoe.org/sparcs-for-young-women-in-it/.

It is important that you also think about innovation as it relates to socially propagating new thought growth in Minnesota. The young minds you inspire will be next to Innovate Minnesota.