In a surprising twist, the Pohlad family, the longtime owners of the Minnesota Twins, announced that it planned to explore a sale of the team after 40 years of family ownership.

The family reached the decision this summer after “months of thoughtful consideration,” Twins executive chair Joe Pohlad said in a statement last week.

Here’s five things to know about a potential sale of the Twins:

The Twins aren’t expected to leave

The Twins have relocated once in their history, moving from Washington D.C., where they were the Senators, to settle in the Twin Cities in 1961.

In the late ‘90s, Carl Pohlad, who bought the team in 1984, nearly sold the Twins to a North Carolina businessman, who would have relocated them to Charlotte. A few years later, the Twins were nearly contracted.

So, fears that Twins fans have about potential relocation make sense, especially if they end up being sold to a buyer from out-of-state. But the Twins aren’t expected to go anywhere anytime soon.

They are halfway into 30-year lease at Target Field with the Minnesota Ballpark Authority, which reads, in part, “The Tenant shall not vacate or abandon the Ballpark at any time during the Term,” which a Twins source said would eliminate the relocation conversation.

“We truly respect and cherish what the Twins mean to Minneapolis, St. Paul, the great state of Minnesota, and this entire region,” Joe Pohlad said in the statement. ” It’s our objective to find an ownership group who all of us can be proud of and who will take care of the Minnesota Twins

The sale process should take at least six months

The Pohlad family has hired Allen & Company, an investment bank with a well-established history of facilitating sales of sports organizations, in one of the first steps of the process.

Expect things to be relatively quiet publicly over the next few months as potential new buyers start expressing their interest and the process gets underway behind the scenes.

Interested parties would then need to go through MLB’s application process for approval by the league to gain access as a perspective owner about a team’s financial information, an industry source explained, before conversations can really start. That could take four to six weeks.

From there, multiple other hurdles would need to be cleared before a sale is finalized, including a full vote of team owners in which the new buyer would need at least 23 of 30 votes.

While plenty of people may express interest once they hear a team is for sale, the source said the number of serious candidates in cases like this usually winds up being between 5-10. The whole process typically lasts at least six months, sometimes up to 12, the source added.

Not every owner exploring a sale ends up selling team

In August 2022, owner Arte Moreno announced he would explore a sale of the Los Angeles Angels, the team he has owned since 2003. By January 2023, after going through the beginning of the process, Moreno decided to pull his team off the market, citing “unfinished business.”

Something similar happened with the Washington Nationals, who began exploring a potential sale in April 2022 and ended their search for a new owner earlier this year.

Recent team sales have fetched more than $1 billion

Very few Major League Baseball teams have been sold lately.

The most recent team to switch hands was the Baltimore Orioles, who sold earlier this year for $1.725 billion to a group headed by David Rubenstein. It was the third-most an MLB team has fetched in a sale.

Other recent sales have included the New York Mets ($2.475 billion) in 2020, Kansas City Royals ($1 billion) in 2019 and Miami Marlins ($1.2 billion) in 2017. The Twins were most recently valued by Forbes in March at $1.46 billion, listed as the 21st most-valuable team of 30.

Pohlads are among longest-tenured owners

The Twins were last sold in 1984 to Carl Pohlad for an estimated $44 million.

Carl’s three sons — Jim, Bill and Bob — eventually took over upon his death in 2009, with Jim assuming responsibilities as the control owner, a role which he remains in to this day. In 2022, Joe Pohlad, Jim’s nephew, took over as the team’s executive chair, the third generation to run the team, a rarity among sports ownership.

Only the New York Yankees (1973) and Chicago White Sox (1981) have been led by the same ownership group for longer.