​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.