Goodbye, Twins

By Lawrence Henry
web posted November 19, 2001

When I was in seventh grade, the Washington Senators moved
to Minneapolis and were renamed "The Twins," for the Twin
Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A pal of mine, impressed that I was studying Spanish, asked me
how to say "We want the Twins to win" in Spanish.

"Deseamos El Twins ganar," I said. (Hey, I was in seventh
grade.)

Bad Spanish or no, the sentiment was widespread. After a
childhood spent rooting for major league ballteams hundreds of
miles away, like the Milwaukee Braves or the Cleveland Indians,
I was going to get to root for a team of my own.

I recall this now because the owners of major league baseball
met two weeks ago and decided to "deconstruct" - oops, no,
that's not the word - "contract" baseball by two teams. Buy 'em
out, at $250 million per. Get rid of them. Prime candidates
include the two new teams in Florida, the Montreal Expos, and
the Minnesota Twins.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Does anyone remember how bad
the old Washington Senators were? "First in war, first in peace,
last in the American League."

My baseball excitement shortly got an unbelievable boost. My
dad, who ran the advertising department for a chain of suburban
newspapers, came home one day and told us he had hired
Harmon Killebrew's older brother, Gene, to be a columnist for
the papers. Gene proved to be a witty and graceful writer. And
Dad had done a favor for the Killebrew family. Gene had had
personal troubles (I know what kind of troubles, but won't say
here), and Harmon had always worried about him.

My father and mother used to visit Gene and his wife in the
basement house they rented. Basement houses were finished,
roofed basements, left that way and rented out by the builders till
the whole house could be finished above - not uncommon in the
midwest in those days. My sister and I waited in the car while
Mom and Dad went in, carrying a couple of kitchen chairs and a
Bible.

Harmon and Elaine Killebrew became our friends. Harmon
Killebrew came to dinner at our house, always dressed in a
jacket and tie, propping his enormous forearms on our dining
room table. We got to go to the ballpark just about whenever
we wanted to, and to sit with the players' wives and families
behind home plate. We found out what the guys on the team
talked about. Harmon was bewildered that the fans would boo
Twins outfielder Bob Lemon. "I don't understand it," he said.
"He's the nicest guy in the world."

And we got to see Jim Kaat pitch a no-hitter. Still a young man,
Kaat had not yet adopted the no-windup delivery that saved his
later career. He mowed down his opponents, the then-Kansas
City Athletics, in methodical fashion, through six and two-thirds
innings. With two outs in the seventh, he walked a batter on a
three-two count, for what would be the only blemish on a perfect
game.

The stunningly beautiful woman sitting in front of me - you know
what major league ballplayers' wives look like - threw down her
handkerchief in disgust and said, "Shit!" It was about the most
thrilling thing I had ever experienced.

At least until the ninth inning, when Kaat got the last two batters
to pop up in foul territory outside first. Vic Power caught both
popups as he always did, with one hand, most unusual in those
days. Kaat had done it.

The Kansas City Athletics are gone, morphed into the Oakland
As. Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, is gone. It
was a dignified, no-nonsense ballpark, much like Milwaukee's
County Stadium, which is gone, too. Where Jim Kaat pitched a
no hitter now stands the Mall of America. The Twins play in a
downtown park called the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome,
"like playing inside a Hefty bag," as Garrison Keillor has said, a
plastic dome eponymously held up by hot air.

Harmon lives in Florida these days and works as a broadcaster.
I don't know what happened to Gene. My Dad died in a Leisure
Village in 1985. His newspapers were eventually sold to a
conglomerate. My grandmother, a Bible-thumping teetotaler,
used to like to sit behind a man with a good cigar at the ballpark.
They don't let you smoke in ballparks any more. Instead, they
play painfully loud rock and roll and try to make the whole
experience as much like TV as possible.

What has happened to baseball is not so much a matter of too
much this or too much that. It's simply the pursuit of too much.
The worship of the endless "more" winds up at zero, when
nothing is worth anything any more. So major league baseball's
owners will pony up half a billion dollars to buy out and dissolve
two teams.

It fits. Unfortunately, it fits.

Lawrence Henry is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com