Do the Twins make money? Above and beyond the team payroll, you have the front office staff, minor league system, properties and stuff like insurance/phones/uniforms and the ilk.

With an owner like Pohlad, you can deduct profits against losses in other businesses to pay less in taxes...and the book-keeping does wonders for the bottom line.

You also have to look at increased worth. When the stadium deal was signed, the Twins $$$ worth increased dramatically. It will increase again when the stadium is actually built.

Taking into account that the money Carl paid for the team he actually kept rolling over into debt/loans so his actual "cash" in the enterprise is not that great, but his debt services is more than he might like (although he doesn't, as a banker, want to loan money to himself...would actually play with someone else's money.)

The intrinsic value of a sports franchise is cross-over advertising, image in the community, contacts that you might make that increases the sales/viability of your other businesses.

Yes, you can't spend more than you make, thus you find other partners to pay those bills, too. Or investors. Or TV/MLB money.

The Yankees, truly, are supporting many teams at the expense of out-bidding other teams for players. If they actually paid $10 a year for a salary instead of $18-20, they would probably have to pay less out to other teams and still be able to retain these expensive players.

But the sport has a certain oneupsmanship, mine is bigger than yours, attitude. Baseball is a business, but is often run like a hobby. And like any hobby, you keep justifying your expenses with the dreamlike payout someday down the road.

They take in a large amount of money in baseball's absurd revenue sharing scheme, in addition to their own and nationally shared revenues.  

Let me speak to the revenue sharing system baseball has.  It's problematic for two related reasons: first, because it invites teams like Pittsburgh to not invest in their product, since they can make a yearly profit simply out of their share of shared and national revenue.  A system that rewards such a poorly run franchise with a profit is not a good system.  

The other problem is that it actively discourages ALL teams from making investments in their product, which might be the goal of MLB, but shouldn't be appreciated by fans.  It does this by forcing all teams to give up a significant percentage of their local revenue.  What this means is that for an investment in the team to make sense from a financial perspective, the expected return on that investment has to be significantly higher than it would be otherwise, since a lot of the ROI is going to other clubs in revenue sharing.

A better system would be to have teams put money into the sharing pool based on EXPECTED revenue, not ACTUAL revenue.  You would determine expected revenue based on market size, and perhaps a couple of other factors, but the bottom line would be that, regardless of how well the club does revenue wise, their contribution would be the same.  What this system would do is encourage teams to actually maximize revenue, because if they exceed their expected revenue, that money would be all theirs, and because if they fall short of expected revenue, they still have to pay based on the total expectation.  Shockingly, this would have the result of rewarding well-run, successful franchises.  Isn't that what we want?