On this day 50 years ago, Dean Chance, the Twins’ marque offseason pickup to front their rotation, allowed three first-inning runs to the expansion Washington Senators. He allowed just a single and two walks the rest of the way, however, to claim his third win in three starts.
 
Chance, the 1964 Cy Young Award winner who turned his back to the hitter before uncoiling with a devastating fastball-slider combination, had been roughed up by the World Series champion Baltimore Orioles two weeks earlier in his Twins debut. Then he ran off seven straight wins in eight starts to help keep the Twins afloat during a stumbling start in April and May.
 
When the 6-foot-3 righthander shut down the California Angels, his former teammates, for his seventh straight victory on May 20, the struggling Twins improved to 14-16. Chance had half of his team’s wins. He broke up what could have been a couple of lengthy losing streaks, and without him the Twins might never had managed to crawl into the 1967 American League pennant race.
 
With the Angels, Chance was famous for his playboy ways with teammate Bo Belinsky. Together they caroused after games, partying in the same circles as Frank Sinatra and Hollywood types. Occasionally they found trouble, which spurred the question: who was a bad influence on whom? The Angels pointed the finger at Belinsky and traded him in 1964, two years before Chance was moved to Minnesota.
 
With the Twins, the 25-year-old Chance connected with another free spirit, 22-year-old Dave Boswell. The master of the head-scratching malaprop, with an ability to mimic various animal and insect sounds, Boswell once had a team bus driver searching under the seats for a cricket. The confident, quirky righthander with an offbeat take on nearly everything was one of the characters of the game.
 
Boswell and Chance were frequent targets of Twins reliever Al Worthington, a deeply religious man who encouraged both pitchers to attend his Sunday morning prayer meetings. Chance always politely declined, but when Worthington told him that Baltimore Colts football star Mike Curtis would be a guest speaker at the next meeting, he said he would attend if he woke up in time. Worthington made sure of that, wrote longtime sportswriter Jeff Miller in his account of the 1967 season, Down to the Wire. He offered to provide a wakeup call, noted Miller, so Chance was there:
 
“Chance arrived and saw Boswell, each silently responding with looks that said, ‘What are you doing here?’ During the meeting, Worthington asked everyone to bow his head. He then noted that everyone in the group had sinned, and those who needed help should raise their hands. After the meeting ended, Boswell came straight over to Chance and shook his hand. Chance was puzzled, and Boswell explained: ‘Those hypocrites. When the guy asked if anybody there needed help, I peeked. Dean, you were the only guy in the room that had his hand raised.’”
 
After a disappointing 1966 season for the Angels, Chance regained his touch with Minnesota in ‘67. He won 20 games for the first time since his Cy Young season three years earlier, tossed a no-hitter and one-hitter, and was critical to the Twins’ success in one of the wildest pennant races in American League history.
 
Chance demonstrated that he was back on April 28, 1967, the day he defeated the Senators for his third straight win. That same day, however, the boxing career of world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali took a stunning downturn.
 
That day Ali and 25 recruits were to be inducted into the Army at the U.S. Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston. They filled out paperwork and took physicals, but when the recruits lined up to take the symbolic step forward into the armed forces as their names were called, Ali, who might have been assigned a non-combat role, refused. He wasn’t taking the easy way out.
 
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” Ali told a Sports Illustrated reporter in the days before he was to report for induction. “If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my own people, they wouldn’t have to draft me. I’d join tomorrow.”
 
The antiwar movement had been underway for more than two years by then, but Ali, already a polarizing figure for his immodest manner and for joining the Nation of Islam, became the first high-profile American to refuse induction. On June 20, 1967, in Houston, Ali was sentenced to a five-year jail term and fined $1,000 for draft evasion.
 
A string of appeals kept Ali out of prison until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971, ruling that the Justice Department had never provided a reason for denying Ali’s conscientious objector exemption. Still, he had paid a substantial price for refusing induction.
 
An hour after Ali declined to take that symbolic step into the Army, before he had even been charged with a crime, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license. Soon after he was stripped of his title. He was forced to surrender his passport, meaning that he couldn’t generate income by fighting overseas, and was targeted for constant FBI surveillance as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been. He didn’t box for nearly four years, losing his peak years as a boxer and millions of dollars in income.
 
 “Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience,” Ali said of the attention he received for refusing to enlist. “And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. . . So what I did was for me, but it was the kind of decision everyone has to make.”
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, using material from my upcoming book, which I’ve tentatively titled: The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook. 
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Fifty years ago, in 1967, the Minnesota Twins engaged in one of the most dramatic pennant races in American League history. After the Baltimore Orioles had run away with the 1966 AL crown and swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, they weren’t a factor in a ’67 chase that came down to the Twins, the Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox.
 
The Red Sox, a surprise contender after losing 90 games in ’66, didn’t enter the fray until the second half. But with Carl Yastrzemski winning the Triple Crown and delivering the big hit all season under rookie manager Dick Williams, the Red Sox posted the league’s best second-half record and played for the pennant on the final day of the 1967 campaign.
 
The Twins also didn’t look like a contender, going 30-30 over their first 60 games. By then, the Summer of Love was underway. The rock scene had turned psychedelic, with the Beatles releasing their tour de force on June 1, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Jefferson Airplane had hits with “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” and radio playlists featured Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints,” Small Faces’ “Ichycoo Park” and Jimi Hendryx’ “Purple Haze.” San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury became the epicenter of counterculture life and the rock music world.
 
The Summer of Love was a long, hot affair for many American cities. That summer, racial violence erupted in Detroit and Newark, Cleveland and Cincinnati, Buffalo and Birmingham, Louisville, Nashville and Wichita—and on Plymouth Avenue in Minneapolis. Vietnam protests were on the rise as well, and the dramatic AL pennant race took place in these troubled times.
 
The Twins had plenty of trouble of their own in the early going. They struggled to score, and in a late-April stretch that carried into May, skipper Sam Mele watched his club commit 21 errors in 16 games. A run of mental errors was even more upsetting to Mele.
 
On April 21, in Detroit’s 12-4 romp over the Twins at Tiger Stadium, César Tovar singled to lead off the third inning. One out later, Tony Oliva sent a towering fly to right-center. Tigers star Al Kaline backtracked to the wall as Tovar, instead of going halfway to second base, retreated toward first in anticipation of a catch at the wall.
 
Both Oliva and first-base coach Jim Lemon watched the ball drop into Tiger Stadium’s upper deck, which hung over the playing field. As he rounded first base, Oliva suddenly heard Tovar shout in Spanish, “Don’t pass me on the bases!” It was too late. Detroit first baseman Norm Cash quickly alerted first-base umpire John Stevens, who had his back to the infield as he followed the flight of the ball. Tovar was allowed to score, but Stevens called Oliva out for passing his teammate.
 
Tired of his team’s mental mistakes, Mele fined Tovar for the lost run. The frustrated manager, fed up with his team’s play, held a brief team meeting during a seventh-inning rain delay and another after the game. Then the Twins lost five of their next eight.
 
Early on, a rare source of hope was 21-year-old rookie Rod Carew, the last great position player developed by the Twins in the 1960s. Owner Calvin Griffith sang the praises of the talented Carew in Florida, but Mele wasn’t going to give him the second-base job. He would have to earn it in camp and he did. Then he collected 34 hits in his first 100 at-bats, demonstrating the ability to make consistent contact in his earliest days in the majors. In addition to batting .340, Carew had driven in 13 runs in 28 games.
 
One of the Twins’ few April highlights was Carew’s ninth-inning RBI single on April 19, which gave them a 3-2 victory over Baltimore. The rookie jumped on a first-pitch changeup from O’s relief ace Stu Miller and drove it up the middle to bring home Ted Uhlaender.
 
The 39-year-old Miller, a masterful righthander with 23 wins and a 2.04 ERA in more than 200 innings over the two previous seasons, succeeded with an arsenal best described as slow and slower. Carew, who had faced Miller in a spring training game, already knew to wait on the veteran’s pitches.
 
“The first pitch came up like a big grapefruit, and I wasn’t taking any strikes with the bases loaded,” Carew said after delivering the game-winning run. His Rookie of the Year performance was off to an impressive start.
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, using material from my upcoming book on the Twins and the 1960s pennant races in which they participated. Like my author page on Facebook and you’ll get notifications when a new 1967 post is available, as well as other baseball news. 
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