Most Twins fans know the career arc of Tony Oliva, whose Hall of Fame candidacy will be decided by the Golden Days Era Committee on Sunday. He was an elite pure hitter who could put bat on ball on any type of pitch and hit it hard. It didn’t have to be in the strike zone either; he might drive a pitch a foot off the ground like a golfer hitting a tee shot, or hacking at an inside pitch and get good wood going the opposite way.
 
Beginning in 1964, Oliva’s bat ranked with the best for eight seasons before knee injuries left him playing essentially on one healthy leg. Although his power was significantly compromised after blowing out his knee diving for a ball in the in June 1971, Oliva, the pure hitter that he was, still batted .283 over his final three seasons—more than 20 points higher than all AL hitters over those three years (1973-75).
 
When he was healthy, Oliva hit for average and power. He won three batting titles—1964, 1965, 1971—in an eight-year stretch in which only Roberto Clemente, Pete Rose and Lou Brock averaged more hits per game:   
 
MOST HITS PER GAME (1964-71)
(minimum 3,000 PA)
1.31  Roberto Clemente
1.27  Pete Rose
1.24  Lou Brock
1.23  Tony Oliva
1.19  Curt Flood
 
Over those eight seasons, Oliva averaged 22 homers a year, a respectable total in a very pitcher-friendly era, but he wasn’t a classic slugger. He drove pitches to all parts of all fields and led all major leaguers in doubles. He ranked third in total bases, and Hall of Famers hold down most of the top 10 spots on the leaderboard.  
 
MOST DOUBLES (1964-71)
278  Tony Oliva
266  Lou Brock
257  Pete Rose
254  Carl Yastrzemski
246  Billy Williams
241  Hank Aaron
229  Brooks Robinson
222  Vada Pinson
222  Rusty Staub
214  Frank Robinson
 
MOST TOTAL BASES (1964-71)
2,601  Billy Williams
2,542  Hank Aaron
2,356  Tony Oliva
2,288  Lou Brock
2,287  Dick Allen
2,267  Ron Santo
2,249  Roberto Clemente
2,244  Carl Yastrzemski
2,223  Frank Robinson
2,214  Pete Rose
 
Oliva slugged .507 in those eight years and ranks 10th on a list that features eight Hall of Famers and Dick Allen. Oliva and Allen were the Rookie of the Year winners in 1964, and both fell a single vote short of Hall induction the last time the Golden Days Era Committee met.
 
Falling short of 2,000 hits stands out when the shortness of Oliva’s elite years is considered. The truth is, the Hall has plenty of members who failed to reach 2,000 hits since the end of the dead-ball era: Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Ralph Kiner, Hank Greenberg, Monte Irvin, Roy Campanella, Phil Rizzuto, Tony Lazzeri, Mickey Cochrane, Lou Boudreau, Gabby Hartnett, Rick Ferrell, Freddie Lindstrom, Travis Jackson, Hack Wilson, Earle Combs and Chick Hafey.
 
Oliva collected 401 hits in his two full seasons prior to suffering his knee injury in June 1971, a month shy of his 33rd birthday. Despite his age, he had been at his best those two seasons, and better health might have produced at least a few hundred more hits and bigger power numbers.
 
Oliva probably was cheated of a few years on the front end of his career as well. Only one scout worked Cuba in that era and players living much beyond Havana were rarely discovered. Oliva grew up on a remote farm near the west coast of the island—far from Havana—and he was nearly 23 when he was discovered by a former Washington Senators prospect who was from Oliva’s province.
 
So many of the great pure hitters of his era were on major league rosters by the time they were 21. By that age, Al Kaline, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Reggie Jackson and Rod Carew were regulars. Because of lack of coaching in Cuba, Oliva’s defensive skills were so raw that he needed three minor league seasons before he emerged to win the AL batting title and Rookie of the Year Award in 1964 at age 26. 
 
The lost time at the start of his pro career was something beyond Oliva’s control, much like Robinson, Doby, Campanella, Irvin, Satchel Paige and many Black stars lost years because the game was segregated—something beyond their control. That comparison of circumstances may not sell voters, but it seems likely that Oliva may have lost at least a few hundred hits at the start of his major league career by virtue of where he was born. 
 
That first batting title was followed by a second in 1965, making Oliva the only major leaguer to ever lead his league in hitting in his first two seasons. The third came in 1971, making him one of only 17 Hall of Fame-eligible players to have won three batting titles in the modern era. Fifteen are in the Hall; only Oliva and Bill Madlock are not.
 
Somehow Oliva’s stature in the game seems to have slipped over the years. In the nine of the 10 years that Oliva was on the BBWAA ballot along with Bill Mazeroski, he finished ahead of the longtime Pirates second baseman. Likewise, in 11 of the 12 years that Oliva and Ron Santo were on the ballot together, Oliva topped the longtime Cubs third baseman. Both Maz and Santo have been inducted by the Veterans Committee.  
 
“Tony belongs,” Harmon Killebrew told me in a 2009 interview. “You look at certain players who don’t have the stats necessary to get in the Hall of Fame, but during the period they played, they were a dominant player or pitcher. To me, that’s a criterion. Tony was a dominant player in his era. Three batting championships and just over a .300 lifetime average. Just a great, great hitter. He was the best offspeed hitter that I’ve ever seen.”

​

​June 29 is a significant date in Tony Oliva’s career—marking the anniversary of a career highlight as well as a career low point. The more memorable moment came first on this date in 1969, when Tony and the Twins were in Kansas City playing a four-game set against the expansion Royals. 
 
On that day the Twins and Royals squared off in a Sunday afternoon doubleheader at old Municipal Stadium. After collecting two singles and a double in the opener—a 7-2 Twins loss—Tony O capped the twinbill by going 5-for-5 and leading the Twins to a 12-2 victory. It was Oliva’s fourth five-hit game and this time he collected each hit off a different Royals pitcher.
 
Although Oliva finished a triple shy of the cycle, he stroked two home runs and a 410-foot double that just missed clearing the wall in left-center field for a third homer. The biggest blast was a towering three-run shot in the second inning. It sailed over the right-field upper deck and onto Brooklyn Avenue outside Municipal Stadium.
 
Kansas City starter Dave Wickersham had given Oliva trouble when he was a mainstay with the Tigers during the mid-1960s, but on this occasion, Tony O turned on a slider for the longest ball he ever hit in the major leagues. Wickersham had “a little slider, a little sinker,” remembers Oliva. “I don’t know how he got me out so easy. There’s always someone who’s got your number. He had my number … but that day I smoked that ball.” As a prolific breaking-ball hitter who usually found sliders to his liking, Oliva finally teed off on Wickersham, one pitch after the Royals righthander had put the red-hot hitter on his backside with an inside offering.
 
“Tony got up and hit it out the stadium,” recalls Rod Carew. “There’s a house up on a hill in right field. This lady came out and was waving a towel because the ball hit the house.” Royals officials left the stadium to measure the home run’s distance and determined that it traveled 517 feet. The ball—only the 13th to clear the right side of Municipal Stadium since the Athletics had departed Philadelphia for Kansas City in 1955—was retrieved and returned to Oliva.
 
His power display came just days after his 31st birthday. It was an age when players often began their decline, but Tony O was still an elite run producer. He topped 100 RBIs for the first time in his career that summer and did it again in 1970—a two-year stretch in which he batted .317, slugged .505 and led the American League in both hits and doubles twice.
 
Oliva was having his best season yet in 1971 when, on June 29, he suffered the devastating knee injury that sabotaged his career. The Twins were in Oakland, and in the ninth inning of a 5-3 Twins win, A’s left fielder Joe Rudi sent a soft, sinking liner to right field. Oliva charged the ball as it tailed toward the foul line, debating whether to dive for it. He almost never dove for balls, but this time, at the last second, he left his feet in an effort to record the out. His right foot slipped as he lunged forward and he landed hard on the knee. He got up, retrieved the ball and threw it into the infield, but soon after the knee began swelling and he couldn’t stand on his feet. 
 
The knee eventually required two surgeries. He returned from the second procedure in 1973 and never played the field again—serving as a designated hitter for the rest of his career—and the power that had fueled his terrific start in 1971 was gone. 
 
When he went down on June 29, 1971, Oliva was batting .375 and slugging .654—easily leading the league in both categories—and his 18 homers had him on course to set a personal high. He managed to come back for a stretch that season—before he underwent the first surgical procedure—and still won his third batting title (.337) and also topped the AL in slugging with a .546 mark while playing 126 games. But playing on one healthy leg the rest of his career, he never again was the same hitter.

PHOTO: Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
—From “Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend,” now available in paperback. It can be ordered at your favorite local bookstore or Amazon.com.

​Today is supposed to be Opening Day, but the Twins won’t be squaring off against Oakland this afternoon as MLB and all of us work to flatten the curve of COVID-19. So, instead, let’s take a look back at Opening Day 1961, when the Twins played their first game after the Griffith family moved the franchise from Washington, D.C. to Minnesota.
 
The Senators had struggled to finish in the first division of the American League over the 15 previous seasons—and expectations were low heading into 1961—but the franchise’s fortunes had begun to turn just prior to departing the nation’s capital. Homegrown talents Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison blossomed into premier sluggers, and Camilo Pascual and Jim Kaat became effective starters around which to build a pitching staff. In a key trade a year before the move to Minnesota, Griffith dealt power-hitter Roy Sievers, in his mid-30s and soon to decline, to the Chicago White Sox for two promising young players, catcher Earl Battey and first baseman Don Mincher. 
 
On April 11, 1961, the Twins made their debut at Yankee Stadium against the defending American League champions. The 1960 season had ended with Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hitting a ninth-inning walk-off home run in Game 7 of the World Series against the heavily favored Yankees, who would start the new season with Ralph Houk taking over as manager for Casey Stengel. The Yankees returned a powerful lineup built around Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill Skowron, Elston Howard and 1960 American League MVP Roger Maris. For the 1961 opener, staff ace Whitey Ford was on the hill to start New York’s AL title defense. It wouldn’t be an easy assignment for the Twins.
 
Minnesota manager Cookie Lavagetto, who moved from Washington with the club, called on Cuban-born Pedro Ramos to start Minnesota’s inaugural game. Ramos had already made quite a first impression on Twins fans. With Cuban-U.S. relations quickly deteriorating that spring, the flamboyant and outspoken Ramos livened the final days of spring training by announcing to the world that he might return to his homeland to fight Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government. Days later, he was still in the United States and settled for taking on the Yankees.
 
This was the Opening Day lineup for the Twins’ debut:
 
Zoilo Versalles, SS
Lenny Green, CF
Harmon Killebrew, 1B
Jim Lemon, LF
Bob Allison, RF
Earl Battey, C
Reno Bertoia, 3B
Billy Gardner, 2B
Pedro Ramos, P
 
Ramos and Ford worked quickly through six scoreless innings. Killebrew drew a two-out walk in the first inning to become the first Twin to reach base, and his leadoff single in the fourth was the first Twins hit. The Yankees generated their only threat in the second, aided by a two-base error by Lemon in left and a walk to Tony Kubek, but with runners on the corners and two out, Ramos induced Ford to ground out to Bertoia at third to end the inning.
 
Leading off the seventh with the game still scoreless, Allison jumped on a 1-0 curveball from Ford and drilled it into the left-field seats—providing the Twins’ first run and home run. Battey then doubled to left and Ford walked Bertoia before Ramos stroked a single to center to score both baserunners. With the Twins up 3-0, Ford’s day was done. 
 
Bertoia popped a two-run homer off the Yankees’ Ralph Terry in the eighth, and the Twins closed out the scoring in the ninth when Killebrew scored Versalles on a sacrifice fly in the 6-0 win. Ramos went the distance, scattering three hits and a walk, and fanning five Yankees—including Mantle twice. Soon after, Ramos announced that he intended to keep his day job and took himself out of the running for war duty. “I’m a baseball player,” he quipped, “not a fighter.”
 
It was a surprising debut, even more surprising in hindsight. The 1961 Yankees won 109 games and Ford, who took the Opening Day loss, lost only four times all season in a league-leading 39 starts. The southpaw finished 25-4 with a 3.21 ERA.
 
Twins wins against the Yankees were hard to come by in those early years in Minnesota. The Yankees won their second of five straight AL pennants in 1961, and the Twins went 25-46 against them in their first four seasons. Finally, in 1965, when the Twins replaced the Yankees as AL champs, they reversed their losing ways against New York.

​Fifty years ago this month, Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew was named the American League MVP. He was honored for a career year in which the Twins won the first American League West crown in 1969, finishing 97-65 in Billy Martin’s lone season as manager. 
 
That summer Killebrew matched his career high of 49 homers, his league-leading total in 1964, to take the sixth and final home-run title of his Hall of Fame career. His 140 RBIs, 145 walks and .427 OBP were league-leading numbers as well, and all three were single-season highs for the 33-year-old veteran. Rod Carew won his first of six batting titles that season—and stole home seven times under Martin’s tutelage—and with Killebrew taking the home-run and RBI crowns, they shared the Triple Crown.
 
The 1969 season marked the fifth time Killebrew was among the top five vote-getters in MVP balloting, and this time he finished on top. In a 2010 interview, Killebrew took his typically modest tact about winning MVP honors: “We had César Tovar leading off. Carew was with us then. Tony (Oliva) hit third most of the time. We flip-flopped back and forth against left and righthanded pitching. He had a great year. I drove in 140 runs and people said, ‘Man, that's a lot of RBIs.’ I said it should have been 240 with all those guys on the bases.” 
 
Modesty aside, Killebrew was a clutch hitter in so many key situations; he slugged .686 in 217 plate appearances with runners in scoring position. He was at his best against Oakland, the Twins’ stiffest competition in the AL West race. In 18 games against A’s pitching, Killebrew batted .435, pounded 11 homers, scored 19 runs and drove in 34. 
 
For the season, he delivered 20 game-winning hits in a 97-win season. One of those game winners was not typically Harmon-like.
 
At Met Stadium on April 19, with Ted Uhlaender on second base and Oliva on first and the score tied, Killebrew secured a 6-5 walk-off victory by beating the “Killebrew shift” with a single through the right side of the infield. Teams sometimes moved their second baseman to the left side of the infield with the pull-hitting slugger at the plate. So, Angels second sacker Bobby Knoop was in no position to field Killebrew’s grounder, which moved the Twins atop the AL West for the first time. “How about that Killebrew,” Twins reliever and clubhouse humorist Bob Miller said after the game. “He’s a regular Nellie Fox.” 
 
Killebrew was more Fox-like by stealing a career-high eight bases under Martin. Killebrew was more impressed, however, that he played in all 162 games after rehabbing from a career-threatening injury the previous winter. 
 
“1969 was my best year,” Killebrew said 40 years later. “I don’t know why because 1968 is when I got hurt in the All-Star Game and I missed half the season (with a ruptured hamstring muscle). Some of the doctors said I was through playing, that I wouldn’t recover. I worked really hard that winter and came back and had the best year I ever had in baseball. Why? I don’t know.”
 
—From an upcoming book, tentatively titled “The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins” 

​The year before Tony Oliva won the American League batting title as a rookie in 1964, he headed to Triple-A Dallas-Fort Worth after tearing the cover off the ball in spring training. He was upset when he didn’t make the Opening Day roster, and he soon discovered there were two unanticipated occupational hazards playing for that Triple-A club.
 
The team owned its own plane, a DC-3 aircraft, which had been in vogue in the 1940s. This particular plane had seen better days by the time Oliva, César Tovar, Sandy Valdespino and their teammates were flying between Triple-A destinations in the mid-1960s. Smooth flights were rare, with a few trips more alarming than others.
 
Oliva recalls two or three hair-raising flights that summer, including one between Dallas and Seattle, which had players wondering if they weren’t living out their final minutes. One of the plane’s engines developed a problem, and as the decrepit DC-3 sputtered, the pilots warned passengers that an emergency landing was a distinct possibility. The flight crew managed to land the plane without incident, but the white-knuckle affair had the young men contemplating their mortality with every turbulent hiccup and dip in altitude. 
 
Even with both engines working properly, Valdespino says the players called the plane “the Knuckleball” for the way it danced and darted in the air. Even getting back on solid ground could generate anxiety, as one touchdown in particular took the phrase “hard landing” to new heights.
 
“I remember a time we were flying to Oklahoma City,” Oliva recalls. “We hit the runway so hard that the plane took off again. We had to go around and get in line to land again.” Jim Rantz, a promising pitching prospect in the early 1960s who went on to oversee the Twins’ minor league system, shared many of those scary airborne moments as Oliva’s teammate, including the crazy carom on the runway in Oklahoma City. 
 
“It was, like, five in the morning, and the explanation was that the pavement was blacktop and it was so hot that the heat made the plane bounce,” Rantz explains with a heavy dose of skepticism. He notes the plane had more issues than overheated pavement. Weight was often a concern, and luggage and cargo had to be distributed evenly to keep the Knuckleball on course. Despite that concern, the players played a key role in the balancing act.
 
“The DC-3s were a plane where the tail sits almost on the ground,” Rantz recalls. “When you got on, you had to walk uphill. When the luggage rack would get filled up in the tail, the 25 players would make a human conveyor belt and we’d have to pass the equipment up the aisle to the front luggage. So we helped load the plane.” Whether it was a matter of weight or its distribution—or simply the age of the plane—Rantz says the DC-3 always struggled to gain altitude once it was in the air. 
 
“I remember when we had to go to Denver,” says Lee Stange, who mostly pitched for the Twins that summer but made eight starts for Dallas. “We couldn’t get over the mountains, so we used to go in between them. That Denver flight was the scariest one to me. I’d sit up front behind the pilots. You could see the mountains coming at you.”
 
Before long, Oliva and Valdespino had to all but drag Tovar onto the plane for a road trip. Oliva remembers a time after that hellish Seattle flight when Tovar, approaching the plane, got down on his knees and pleaded, “Oh please, oh please, I got three kids in Venezuela. I don’t want to get on that plane!” Oliva often was at Tovar’s side at takeoff. 
 
“A lot of times, Tony and César, you’d see them sitting in the back,” remembers Rantz. “They’d have the blankets over their heads when you’d take off, and they’d have it for the whole flight until you landed … I would get a little nervous when the copilot would come down the aisle and it’s the middle of the night. He’s got his flashlight and he’s leaning in front of you, looking at the wings. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m just looking to see if we’re picking up any ice on the wings.’ Yeah, that’s not a comforting feeling.”
 
No one on the team liked to fly the Knuckleball. Lefthander Gerry Arrigo, who pitched parts of four seasons with the Twins, refused to even set foot on the aircraft. Oliva says Arrigo showed up for his initial team flight, vomited before boarding, and went home instead. 
 
“I didn’t like to fly to begin with,” Arrigo says. “When they started weighing the players at the airport, that was it, I went home. I went back to Amelia, Ohio, and stayed there for a week or so. They called me and wanted to know why I went home. I told them why, and I said, ‘I’m not going to fly on that plane, period. Send me to a bus league if you want.’ So they sent me to Charlotte, and I played in the bus league there. I only played about 10 games and I was sent back to Minnesota.”
 
Another less-threatening but unavoidable hazard of playing in Dallas was the requirement to dress the part of a Texas rancher while on road trips. The players, traveling in Western clothing, leather boots and 10-gallon hats, were quite a sight walking through airports. Oliva could only laugh when he first saw Valdespino and Tovar, his Latin friends, in their Western duds. Valdespino says Tony O, amused by the getup they were forced to wear, called the trio the Black Cowboys. 
 
 
—From “Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend”
 

While Washington and Houston square off in the 2019 World Series, several teams are shopping for new managers. For this Minnesota Twins fan, it comes to mind that 50 years ago, while the New York Mets were shocking the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series, the Twins were in search of a new skipper after club owner Calvin Griffith had fired first-year manager Billy Martin. 
 
Martin’s first pink slip came after directing the Twins to a 97-65 finish and a berth in the first American League Championship Series. The Twins had improved by 18 wins after a disappointing 1968 season, as Martin restored the aggressive approach that he brought to the club as their third-base coach during their run to the 1965 World Series. 
 
In 1965, Martin had made the Twins multidimensional by running more, forcing opponents to react. The Twins had mostly been sluggers when Martin arrived, but soon began executing the hit-and-run and running wild, stealing or taking the extra base. When the owner turned to Martin in 1969, he hoped his new manager could use a multidimensional offense to again breathe life into his team.
 
Martin was a gambler in the dugout. Rod Carew, Tony Oliva and César Tovar had the green light to run if they thought they could steal. Oliva said that if an attempt failed, Martin did not second-guess the decision to run as long as the player was hustling and playing hard. Trust ran both ways. Jim Kaat said a player could question or stand up to Martin, and he appreciated that the skipper would hear him out. Players respected that, and Martin’s approach inspired them to give their best. 
 
That spring, players found that Martin as a rookie skipper was just like Martin as a coach. Fundamentals were emphasized and practiced in camp, and Martin was on the field long before workouts or exhibition games began, giving instruction and working on the little details with young players. “The thing I think that he was best at was trying to keep the guys from making little mistakes,” Harmon Killebrew said of Martin in 2010. “He was really big on fundamentals and the little things to win games. He knew as much about the game as anybody that you want to be around.” Martin also urged veterans to make adjustments to gain an edge, encouraging Killebrew to occasionally hit the ball the other way, Carew to master bunting, and Oliva to abandon his spray approach and focus on pulling the ball to right field in RBI situations. 
 
Despite Martin’s reputation as an excitable boy—and he had to be excited by his first major league managerial gig—spring training 1969 was orderly and quiet. Still, he was planning some excitement for once the meaningful games began. In spring camp, he tutored Carew in the art of stealing home. Carew says Martin taught him to time a pitcher’s delivery and start for home from a walking lead when he knew he could make it safely. The student mastered beating a pitch to the plate, stealing home seven times in 1969—one short of Ty Cobb’s single-season record. 
 
Carew tied a big league mark by stealing three bases in one inning against Detroit on May 18, and Tovar also stole home that afternoon. After Tovar opened the third inning by beating out a slow roller to shortstop Mickey Stanley, Carew drew a full-count walk. They executed a double steal to move into scoring position, then both stole home to score two runs on one infield single and five stolen bases. 
 
“Billy would try stuff only high school coaches would try. He loved to pull off the unexpected play,” said Frank Quilici, who was on the 1965 club, played under Martin in 1969, and later became the Twins manager. In what he dubbed one of those high-school maneuvers called by Martin, Quilici stole home on May 4. He led off third base and Ted Uhlaender was on first with the White Sox’ Tommy John on the mound and rookie pitcher Dick Woodson at the plate. Uhlaender lingered off base long enough after a pitch to coax a throw to first from White Sox catcher Duane Josephson. As soon as the ball left Josephson’s hand, Quilici headed home. He slid past Josephson and beat the belated tag to score the game’s first run in a 4-3 come-from-behind victory.
 
Everybody ran with Martin calling the shots. The 32-year-old Killebrew, who had never stolen more than three bags in a season, stole two in one inning on June 4 and finished with a career-high eight in 1969. Killebrew also led the majors with 49 homers and a career-best 140 RBIs. At season’s end, he claimed the American League’s MVP Award. Martin also made the astute move of returning 33-year-old Jim Perry to the Twins rotation that summer, and both he and Dave Boswell won 20 games for the first time.
 
For the Twins, the 1969 season ended with the power-laden and pitching-rich Baltimore Orioles sweeping the ALCS. Soon after, Martin was fired. The news shocked Twins players and fans. The intense outcry by fans was immediate. Telephones rang incessantly for days at Metropolitan Stadium. Angry callers also flooded the switchboards of the sports departments of local newspapers, and Griffith was hung in effigy on the University of Minnesota campus. Fans grabbed up more than 10,000 bumper stickers imploring the Twins to “Bring Billy Back.” Thousands of Twins fans swore off the team—a common retort for years after Martin was gone.
 
Martin’s dismissal, however, wasn’t a complete surprise to newspaper writers. The stubborn owner and combative manager were never a match made in heaven. In announcing the firing, Griffith cited Martin’s propensity to ignore organizational policies and guidelines—and undoubtedly several incidents contributed to the final outcome. One was an angry mid-May confrontation between the manager and farm director George Brophy regarding the minor league assignments of Twins prospects Charley Walters and Bill Zepp. Martin took his beef to the press instead of Griffith, who forced his manager to apologize to Brophy.
 
Then there was Martin’s brawl with Boswell in August at the Lindell AC bar, a small hole in the wall not far from Tiger Stadium in Detroit. It began after Martin called out the pitcher at the bar for not running his required laps earlier in the day. An angry Boswell stormed out of the bar and tussled with teammate Bob Allison, who had tried to calm down the righthander, and Martin came outside and entered the scuffle. Both Martin and Boswell claim the other threw the first punch in their rumble, and some say that Martin had some help in the fight. The specifics of that alcohol-fueled altercation were hazy, and the protagonists are now gone, but the seven stitches Martin needed in the knuckles of his right hand and the nearly 20 stitches required to sew up Boswell’s facial wounds were there for all to see.
 
The fray also put a sizable dent in Boswell’s wallet, as Griffith fined him $500 for the incident. Martin didn’t get off scot-free either. Although he wasn’t asked to open his pocketbook, the skipper drew the owner’s wrath and inched closer to cementing a one-and-done tenure in his first big league managing assignment.
 
The final straw might have been Martin’s decision to start Bob Miller in Game 3 of the ALCS. The righthander had excelled as a reliever and spot starter, and Martin cited his pitching as “one of the main reasons” the Twins won the AL West title. Griffith favored using Kaat, who had won two of three starts and posted a 1.80 ERA facing the mighty Orioles that season. When Miller didn’t complete two innings in an 11-2 loss in the ALCS finale, the second-guessing began immediately in postgame interviews. “What if Miller had won today and what if Kaat had started and lost?” Martin retorted angrily at one point. Someone asked Martin what he thought the Twins needed to produce a better result in 1970. A new manager, he said, with a straight face.
 
That’s what the Twins got, as Griffith fired Martin during the Mets-Orioles World Series. It was Martin’s first pink slip, but it wouldn’t be his last in a 16-year managerial career that produced two AL pennants and a World Series title with the New York Yankees.

​The man with the warm, gold-toothed smile—who I still see standing in the batter’s box, legs spread far apart as he drove pitches all over the ballpark—turned 80 today. “Happy Birthday!” to Twins legend Tony Oliva, who retired 42 years ago. He was one of the game’s great pure hitters., and his ability to center the bat on the ball didn’t simply go away when he quit playing. 
 
I’ll celebrate Tony’s 80th by sharing a segment from “Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend”:
 
As a coach for the World Series-winning teams in 1987 and 1991, Oliva introduced a new generation of Twins to a unique Cuban import. It’s made of mahogany—“we call it mahogwa,” he notes—a dark dense, heavy wood not normally associated with baseball. But when he traveled home after his first trip back to Cuba in 1973, Oliva was carrying a bat cut from mahogany. And the bat had a name: this bat was called “Thunder.” 
 
“It’s a Cuban wood that brings back some memories,” says Oliva, who explains that he and his father and brothers sometimes made bats from whatever kind of wood was available. A bat from mahogwa was not unusual in Cuba, though none were quite like Oliva’s bat. “Thunder is a little bit heavy,” he admits.
 
“I don’t think anybody could have possibly swung it except for Tony, because Tony was so strong in the hands and forearms,” insists Rick Stelmaszek, who spent 32 years coaching in the Twins organization and was part of Tom Kelly’s staff in both 1987 and 1991. “That was his baby. Yeah I know Thunder.”
 
As the club’s hitting coach, Oliva says he brought Thunder to the Metrodome in 1987 at a point when the club was struggling offensively. The bat was illegal for major-league play, but he encouraged players to hack away with it during batting practice. So the players had a little fun and took their minds off their batting woes. 
 
“It’s the most dense piece of wood,” recalls Tim Laudner, 1980s Twins catcher and clubhouse cutup. “The bat was green and it was probably a 35-, maybe 36-inch bat. That’s bigger than the bat I used, and it had to weigh anywhere from 38 to 40 ounces. It was just a monster piece of wood.”
 
Twins hitters took their cuts with Thunder with mixed success and good humor. By then, Oliva, nearly 50, could not swing Thunder like he used to, but Laudner says his hitting coach could still put a good swing on the ball when coaches took batting practice. Laudner remembers Tony O “one-hopping the baggie at the Metrodome. Just hanging out these line drives and giggling like a school girl.”
 
Did Laudner ever use Thunder? “I couldn’t pick it up,” he quips. “I got a hernia just looking at it.”

The poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” is the lament of a New York Giants fan after witnessing a Giants rally die with a double play turned by the Chicago Cubs’ Hall of Fame infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance. The sad refrain of “Tinkers to Evers to Chance” lives on to this day, 108 years after it appeared in the New York Evening Mail on July 12, 1910.
 
Eighty years later and 28 years ago today—on July 17, 1990—the Minnesota Twins provided their own less-rhythmic answer to Franklin Pierce Adams’ poem. On that day, facing the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, Gaetti to Newman to Hrbek was the magical call on two triple plays. On both plays, third baseman Gary Gaetti fielded a hard-hit grounder at the bag, rifled a throw to second baseman Al Newman, who pivoted and completed the triple-killing with a throw to Kent Hrbek at first. 
 
No team had executed two triple plays in a single game before--or since--but equally amazing was Gaetti’s prediction of the first one. In the fourth inning, with Wade Boggs on third, Jody Reed on second and Carlos Quintana on first, Gaetti told Boggs the Twins would be turning three. 
 
“I said to him, ‘Wade, a 5-4-3 triple play is coming up right here,’” Gaetti said after the game. “Go ahead … ask the umpires … ask Wade. Wade even tipped his hat to me when he came out the next inning.” Boggs later confirmed Gaetti’s account. 
 
The victim at the plate? Tom Brunansky, a critical, middle-of-the-order hitter for Minnesota’s 1987 World Series championship club. And remarkably, the Twins weren’t done yet.
 
In the eighth inning, Boston again threatened, with Tim Naering at second and Boggs at first. Naering and Boggs were running on the pitch when Reed hit a ball sharply right at the third-base bag, and Gaetti, Newman and Hrbek worked to perfection again with Reed out at first by several steps.
 
“I put the hit-and-run on so we wouldn’t hit into a double play. So we hit into a triple play,” lamented Boston skipper Joe Morgan. But Morgan’s Red Sox won the game, 1-0, a typical outcome for a Twins team that lost 88 games and finished dead last in the seven-team American League West in 1990 before going worst to first and winning another World Series in 1991.

​The Minnesota Twins family lost an icon when Frank Quilici passed away on Monday. There wasn’t a role for the Twins—player, coach, manager and broadcaster—that Quilici couldn’t handle, and he did so with a warm, engaging manner that made him instantly likeable. 
 
As a player, the former infielder shares a major league record by collecting two hits in a single inning—both off Dodgers Hall of Famer Don Drysdale—during the 1965 World Series. He became a coach in 1970, when Bill Rigney managed the Twins, though former skipper Billy Martin was Quilici’s key influence when he became the team’s skipper in the early 1970s. At a time the club’s veterans were aging and a rebuild was underway, the affable Quilici was the face of the franchise. 
 
Quilici became one of my favorite former Twins when I began the Tony Oliva project. Very early in the process of talking to Twins from the 1960s, I sat down with Quilici at the Metrodome. Not only was he an entertaining storyteller, he also showed interest in what I was doing and offered to sit down with me again while I was in town for interviews. 
 
We met for breakfast and our chat carried into lunch time. He gave me hours that day, providing a wealth of information on Oliva and life with the Twins of his era. It was the perfect jumpstart for the project, and I’ll forever be indebted to this Chicago native, who grew up on the city’s South Side and entertained me as much with his stories of postwar Chicago as he did with 1960s Twins history. 
 
His baseball stories are probably more interesting here, so here’s a few he shared while I wrote the Oliva book.
 
**Quilici and Oliva began their professional careers together in 1961, playing in Wytheville, Virginia. Quilici, who had been an All-American shortstop at Western Michigan University, knew instantly that Oliva was special. Hitting came easy to the Cuban native and he had a terrific arm, but Oliva had had so little formal coaching that catching flyballs were an adventure. 
 
“He would be coming in on a ball and I would be going out for it,” Quilici recalled as a wide grin crossed his face. “He would be yelling in Spanish, and I still don’t know what he was saying. All of a sudden, he’d go ‘Whoa, whoa!’ and the ball would drop 10 feet behind him. He overran it every time. So, when I heard him yelling, I would circle him sometimes. If the ball was up in the air far enough, I could actually catch it. He’d say, ‘Gracias, gracias!’”
 
**When Quilici came to camp with the Twins for the first time, he imagined a career playing shortstop for the club. At some point in camp, he got his first look at Zoilo Versalles, a defensive whiz at short who was just 21 years old and on the verge of having a promising rookie campaign for the Twins. It was an aha moment.
 
“The Twins told me that they didn’t think I could play shortstop in the big leagues, so they wanted me to move over to second base,” said Quilici. “Of course, I was a little cocky until I went to spring training and saw a guy working out at shortstop. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And a teammate said, ‘Zoilo Versalles.’ I said, ‘Where’s second base?’”
 
**Quilici, outgoing, funny and always comfortable in front of a crowd, worked a few comedic routines with Oliva, playing up the English-Spanish language barrier to entertain crowds on the annual Twins Caravan that crossed the Midwest during the winter months. Quilici would tell Caravan crowds that he and his teammates had been teaching Oliva some basic English. When Quilici asked Oliva to explain what he had learned, Tony responded with: “Please… thank you… ham and eggs… girls… cars… money… girls… money… girls.
 
In another routine, Quilici asked Oliva a lengthy question in English, to which Oliva responded with a lengthy answer in Spanish. After explaining that the crowd didn’t understand Spanish, Quilici asked Oliva to respond in English. Quilici again asked the long-winded question, to which Oliva, after a lengthy pause, simply answered, “Yes” or “No.”
 
The answer is yes, we’ll miss you, Frank.

​Last week Tony and Gordette Oliva celebrated 50 years of marriage. They had married on January 6, 1968, in the bride’s hometown of Hitchcock, South Dakota, some 350 miles west of the Twin Cities.
 
The weather that day was eerily similar to what Minnesotans have experienced over the last two weeks. Temperatures had plummeted below zero, and the blizzard of the season raged when roughly 75 people gathered for the ceremony at Hitchcock Methodist Church. Unable to have his Cuban family there, Tony had invited a few Twins teammates, but the extreme weather kept them away.
 
Perhaps the wedding day conditions were a fitting tribute to a relationship that overcame great odds. They could barely communicate when they first met in spring 1964. Playing for the Twins, Tony lived in the Hotel Maryland in Minneapolis. Gordette still lived in Hitchcock, and their long-distance relationship via the telephone began awkwardly and grew slowly with neither understanding more than a dozen words of the other’s native language.
 
They soon realized, however, that they had much in common. Both bride and groom had grown up on family farms with a large contingent of brothers and sisters. Gordette had seven siblings, including her twin Gordon; Tony had nine brothers and sisters. Both had daily chores on the farm, a labor-intensive operation that required a contribution from everyone in the family. At the same time, they enjoyed the simple pleasures of farm life.
 
Looking back through the decades, chance moments can take our lives to places we could never anticipate—and that was certainly true for Tony and Gordette.
 
The couple met when Gordette stayed at the Hotel Maryland as part of her senior class trip. Her graduating class of 26 toured the local Ford plant, visited the Foshay Tower—then the tallest building in the Twin Cities—and took in a Twins game. Several Twins lived in the hotel, and the out-of-town visitors collected autographs in the lobby. Tony gave her and a few of her classmates a tour of downtown Minneapolis in his new car, and there was a final meeting before Gordette and Gordon returned to Hitchcock.
 
“When we were going to split, he asked me for my telephone number,” Gordette recalled. “I looked at my brother and I said, ‘I’m not sure, but I think he’s asking me for my telephone number.’ And Gordon said, ‘What’s the difference? He’s probably not going to call you anyway.’ So I gave it to him. And lo and behold, he called.”
 
“We laugh about it now,” Gordette said, adding that they still joke about the what-ifs all these years later. What if he hadn’t asked for her phone number? What if she hadn’t given it to him? What if he had never called?
 
He did, she did, and he did. And 50 years on, I wish Tony and Gordette all the best. Happy Anniversary!
 
 
These stories and more appear in “Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend.”