Aaron Gleeman leaves The Athletic after being asked to stop covering Twins

Credit: Matt Blewett-Imagn Images / The Athletic

Aaron Gleeman left The Athletic because the company wanted him to stop covering the Minnesota Twins. He had been doing it for seven years there and for more than two decades overall, and when given the choice between keeping the job and keeping the beat, he chose the beat.

Gleeman announced his departure on Monday and is relaunching AaronGleeman.com, the independent site where he started covering the Twins in 2002, before stints at Baseball Prospectus, NBC Sports, and, eventually, The Athletic, which he joined in 2019.

He is offering monthly ($8) and annual ($75) subscriptions and plans to bring the same level of access and coverage he had at The Athletic — clubhouse reporting, prospect rankings, mailbags, live chats — directly to readers without what he described as “corporate middlemen” between writer and reader.

“Covering the Twins for The Athletic was my dream job, in many ways,” Gleeman wrote. “But what I learned is that the ‘covering the Twins’ part is what made that true. And any job that wants to pull me away from covering the Twins, and scale back their overall coverage of the team, ceases being my dream job.”

As Awful Announcing noted when reflecting on The Athletic’s first decade, the local-first model that defined the company’s original pitch — every team gets a dedicated beat writer, serves the fans that newspapers are abandoning — gave way years ago to a national publication built around names and properties that drive subscriptions across geographies.