MLB secures Twins.com and now only two teams don’t have their matching .com domain.
Several top-flight sports leagues in the US have made domain names a priority for their teams, often at great expense. These domain names, often single-word .coms, allow fans easy access to content associated with their teams.
The league with the most success is Major League Baseball.
Rangers.com cost MLB a hefty $375,000, with a 2015 DomainNameWire article reporting that Rangers.com was the 28th team name the league had acquired in .com. Despite the proactive efforts to acquire domains, three names have eluded MLB for some time.
These include Giants.com, Rays.com, and Twins.com.
Recently, MLB has managed to secure one of those domain names, Twins.com. Twins is the team name for the Minnesota Twins, named after the Twin Cities area that includes Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The Twins.com domain name had, until recently, been owned by twins Durland and Darvin Miller, who have reportedly received offers of up to $750,000 in the past, although the lucrative offers were likely from the adult industry.
While the twins were open to selling the domain name, once even reaching out to the Minnesota Twins directly, MLB never managed to secure the domain name. According to Grantland.com, MLB made contact with Durland and Darvin Miller at one point in time, but the two parties couldn’t agree on a price.
However, talks must have reopened and progressed, as MLB is now the registrant of Twins.com.
According to available Whois information, Twins.com moved to MLB in mid-August 2022, with the domain name transferring from Network Solutions to a GoDaddy Corporate Domains account operated by MLB.
As of writing, Twins.com doesn’t resolve to a website, but MLB will likely redirect the domain name to MLB.com/twins, the official web page for the Minnesota Twins.
Now, just two domain names have escaped MLB’s clutches. Rays.com, the team name for the Tampa Bay Rays, hosts a Seattle seafood restaurant called Rays, while the San Francisco Giants team domain, Giants.com, is owned by the NFL and could be considered off the market forever.