I always think of Tony Oliva and Neil Armstrong on this date. July 20 is Tony’s birthday and the anniversary of Armstrong stepping down onto the lunar surface before a worldwide television audience in 1969. The day Armstrong uttered those immortal words as he set foot on the moon was Tony’s 31st birthday.
 
More than just the first man on the moon made it an atypical birthday. Nearly a week earlier, on July 14, Tony had a 14-game hitting streak after a Minnesota Twins win over the Chicago White Sox, but felt ill that night. Soon he had a 104-degree fever and bumps had broken out over his entire body. He had come down with chicken pox, probably contracted from his infant daughter Anita.
 
So, on Apollo 11’s historic day, Tony was home recuperating from the chicken pox. The virus took its toll, as it often does on adults. Weakened by fever, he lost eight pounds and needed 10 days to simply feel well enough to return to work—longer to get his strength back.
 
Another unfortunate side effect was that Tony was forced to sit out the 1969 All-Star Game during his downtime. It was the first All-Star Game without him since his major league arrival in 1964. He had appeared in five straight All-Star games, and it took chicken pox to end his bid to match Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio for consecutive All-Star appearances to start a career.
 
Despite a short slump following his return on July 24—the same day Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean—Tony finished the 1969 season at .309 with a league-leading 197 hits and 39 doubles. He powered 24 homers, and for the first time in his career he recorded 100 RBIs. He quietly had a great year playing alongside 1969 AL batting champion Rod Carew and 1969 AL MVP Harmon Killebrew.
 
On this July 20, I wish Tony all the best on his 79th birthday.
 
 
This story appears in “Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend.”

Fifty years ago this week, with frustration and anger running high in African American neighborhoods, racial violence erupted across the country.
 
It began in Newark, NJ, where tensions boiled over from racial profiling and police brutality, as well as the lack of jobs, job training and affordable educational opportunities. In a two-square-mile area of central Newark, plagued by rampant unemployment and poverty, rioting broke out. Clashes with police escalated the violence, leading to 26 deaths, 1,200 injuries and extensive damage to local businesses over five days of rioting.
 
After the National Guard helped restore order, more troops and tanks were required a week later in Detroit, where 43 were killed and 1,200 injured in six days of urban warfare. Angry African American residents looted businesses and set fires that destroyed 200 buildings.
 
Violence erupted across the country—in Cleveland and Cincinnati, Buffalo and Birmingham, Louisville, Nashville and Wichita. For black communities that increasingly believed they lacked political representation to address their concerns, their anger caught the nation’s attention.
 
Anger and violence erupted along Plymouth Avenue in Minneapolis on July 19, 1967. With the Newark conflict still front-page news, trouble started in downtown Minneapolis at the annual Aquatennial Parade and moved up Plymouth later that evening.
 
A large crowd began throwing rocks into stores and businesses on the street, then vandalizing and looting them. Ten shops between Penn and Humboldt Avenues were set on fire during the night, and two---Silver’s and Knox Food Market at Plymouth and Morgan Avenue—were burnt to the ground. Firebombs were tossed near the home of a Minneapolis alderman and several cars were overturned.
 
“The scene that night on the street was nightmarish,” Minneapolis civil rights activist Harry Davis told Iric Nathanson, author of Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City. “The stench of the smoke was oppressive. The heat was intense enough to break display windows, exposing the stores to looting.”
 
Roughly 60 police officers with helmets and shotguns were positioned along Plymouth. Their orders were to disperse crowds without going on the attack or pursuing massive arrests, an approach that seemingly kept the violence from escalating much beyond the avenue.
 
A few businesses along Plymouth, including the Peoples Baking Corporation and Hi-Hat Café, were firebombed the next day, igniting another wave of fires. Crowds also set cars afire, hurled rocks at police cars, and street violence led to two shootings and two beatings. Governor Harold LeVander called on the National Guard, and 600 guardsmen were on Minneapolis streets by nightfall.
 
Despite daily 90-degree temperatures, tensions cooled considerably the following day, dampened by the National Guard’s continued presence and heavy hailstorms. No outbursts were reported once the guardsmen were on the scene.
 
Compared to the violence and destruction in Newark and Detroit, the Minneapolis disturbance never grew into a full-scale riot. The Minneapolis Tribune credited the police for minimizing the scale and damage of the two-day confrontation: “There was no shooting, no club-swinging to produce the usual pictures of bashed and bloody heads, no police rush upon the crowd.”
 
The Minneapolis disturbance, no matter how small, destroyed a large piece of the community’s infrastructure. Low-cost housing, social services and government offices, and the Fourth Precinct police station have filled a few gaps, but the Plymouth Avenue neighborhood continues to struggle to this day.
 
Despite the myth to the contrary, the truth is few Americans climb economic classes. It is a nearly impossible task for the poorest. President Lyndon Johnson launched his “war on poverty” in January 1964, a response to the dramatic rise in American poverty in the late 1950s.
 
In 1959, according to federal statistics, more than one in four American children lived in poverty. Men without a college education, people of color, families headed by women, and the elderly often struggled to make ends meet. Nearly 21 percent of American families lived below the poverty line. With African Americans lacking the same opportunities as white Americans, 54.9 percent of black families were poor.
 
The “war on poverty” had taken a backseat to the Vietnam War by 1967. Today, 50 years later, once again one in four American children live in poverty. Nearly 30 percent of disabled Americans are poor. In all, more than 40 million Americans live below the poverty line at a time Congress refuses to make the minimum wage a livable wage and hacks away at the safety net for poor Americans.
 
Today’s rural poor and inner-city poor have one thing in common: they lack political representation in Washington, where few voices speak for them. If poverty rates continue to rise as millions of American families lose health insurance or adequate coverage—moving closer to some of the dreadful makers at the end of the 1950s—how will they make themselves heard? At what point does anger boil over?
 
The middle class is taking its lumps, too. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2016 that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 76 percent of all family wealth. The percentage has climbed from two-thirds of all wealth to more than three-quarters in the last 25 years. This transfer of wealth means both middle-class and poor families have seen their share of the pie decline in recent decades. The bottom half of the population now owns just one percent of the total pie.
 
 
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Baseball has a few links to these events. Tigers slugger Willie Horton, who grew up in Detroit’s Jeffries Projects, stepped away from the pennant chase after his team split a mid-July doubleheader with the New York Yankees at Tiger Stadium. Still in uniform, he stood atop a car on Detroit’s 12th Street and begged people to stop the violence and the destruction of what little infrastructure their neighborhoods had. His words mostly went unheard.
 
Look for more coverage of the 1967 Twins and the wild, four-team AL pennant race that summer, culled from the upcoming and 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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The 2017 MLB All-Star Game gets underway with the surprising Minnesota Twins trailing American League Central leader Cleveland by just 2.5 games at the break. Fifty years ago, the margin was the same for the 1967 Twins, who were expected to be contenders but looked like pretenders most of the spring.
 
The 1967 club used a 10-game winning streak at the start of July to ditch the .500 mark and kindle hope of a second-half pennant push. They had won 12 of 15 after closing the first half with a doubleheader sweep of the first-place Chicago White Sox on Sunday, July 9. In the opener, Jim Kaat, who started 1-7 but had turned his season around, hit a home run and pitched into the eighth inning of a 7-4 win to even his record at 8-8. In the nightcap, Dave Boswell pitched into the ninth of a 5-1 victory, inching the third-place Twins to just 2.5 game back.
 
The 1967 All-Star Game at Anaheim Stadium, decided by a 15th-inning home run from Cincinnati Reds star Tony Perez, was an appropriate way to set up a second-half dogfight between four American League clubs—one that went down to the final minutes of the season.
 
The White Sox led the Detroit Tigers by two games when the season resumed. As was their habit throughout the 1960s, the Sox were a light-hitting bunch that contended with strong pitching and defensive prowess behind it. Joe Horlen, a 19-game winner and the league ERA champion in 1967, led a strong rotation that included lefties Gary Peters, Tommy John and Jim O’Toole. Struggling reliever Wilbur Wood had joined the White Sox in an offseason trade, an addition to a deep bullpen anchored by Hall of Fame knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm. The 44-year-old Wilhelm, who convinced Wood to throw the knuckler exclusively, posted a stunning 1.73 ERA over 89 innings in 1967.
 
The Tigers had won 89 and 88 games the two seasons prior to 1967—good for distant fourth- and third-place finishes—but winning 91 games in ’67 kept them in the pennant race to the final out. Starter Earl Wilson, acquired in a trade with Boston in June 1966, was a key contributor. In his first full season with the Tigers, the 32-year-old righthander won a career-high 22 games under the tutelage of pitching coach Johnny Sain, who jumped to the Tigers in 1967 after the Twins fired him. Wilson teamed with Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and Joe Sparma in the rotation.
 
Unlike the White Sox, the 1967 Tigers had plenty of pop. Four Tigers connected on at least 20 homers during that memorable season—future Hall of Famer Al Kaline, first baseman Norm Cash, second baseman Dick McAuliffe and catcher Bill Freehan—and homegrown slugger Willie Horton drilled 19. That summer, at age 32, Kaline had his last great season, popping 25 homers and posting a .952 OPS.
 
At the break, the Twins and California Angels followed the Tigers in the standings, but the Angels didn’t stick around for long and the fifth-place Boston Red Sox emerged as the fourth challenger.
 
Boston was the dark horse. After losing 90-plus games three years in a row and finishing ninth in 1966, the rejuvenated Red Sox were six games off the pace at the break. Key to the turnaround was the club’s new skipper, Dick Williams, a no-nonsense, drill-sergeant type who was just 37 and had never managed in the majors.
 
At his introductory press conference, Williams announced the Red Sox would “win more games than we lose.” In the minds of most reporters present, that was setting the bar exceedingly high, bordering on nonsense. The Red Sox were a .500 club deep into June, an impressive improvement, yet not a reason to anticipate a second-half surge into one of the wildest finishes in American League history.
 
The fifth-place Red Sox opened the second half by splitting a twinbill with the Baltimore Orioles, then ran off 10 straight wins. The bats of Tony Conigliaro, Carl Yastrzemski and Joe Foy fueled the surge, and when the winning streak reached 10 via a July 23 doubleheader sweep of Cleveland, the Red Sox were 12 games over .500 and within a half-game of first-place Chicago.
 
Boston’s pitching seemed especially suspect, but 25-year-old Jim Lonborg, a Stanford grad who had foregone medical school to work atop a pile of dirt, broke through with a career year in which led the American League with 22 wins and 246 strikeouts. Gary Bell, who arrived from Cleveland in an early-June trade, won 12 games as Boston surged into contention.
 
Rookies Reggie Smith and Mike Andrews were productive for the young Red Sox, and second-year infielders George Scott and Foy improved on solid 1966 debuts. Conigliaro, local boy and fan favorite, was having a big year before he was struck on the left cheekbone by a pitch from Angels righthander Jack Hamilton in August.
 
The beaning ended Conigilaro’s season, but down the stretch, Yastrzemski repeatedly delivered in key situations. The man who had replaced Ted Williams in left field six years earlier was at his best, winning the Triple Crown by batting .326 with 44 homers and 121 RBIs. Over the final month, Yaz hit .417 with nine homers and 26 RBIs in 27 games. The Red Sox couldn’t have emerged as a top contender without him.
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, using material from my upcoming book, 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.