You never know when you’re going to have a Minnesota Twins moment.
Once again my son and I found ourselves in the Centralia/Chehalis area of Washington state — which, by the way, is known as the Twin Cities of Lewis County — visiting an antique store. The store owner had stack upon stack of old Sports Illustrated magazines, so I began to flip through them. About four issues deep I hit gold: There, in an April 1983 issue, was a story about the Twins by a young Gary Smith.
I can tell that Smith, now widely recognized as one of the best sportswriters to emerge from that magazine, hadn’t quite developed his voice as he later would with stories such as “Damned Yankee,” a story that was so moving I had to put it down because of my racing heartbeat. Still, he gives us an unvarnished and sad look at Griffith, estranged family members, if one can say that, and a franchise caught between nowhere and nowhere. The Twins were terrible in 1982 and they weren’t much better a season later.
Our first image of Griffith is the man leaving work for the day.
“He drives to his suburban Minneapolis apartment and there mixes himself two vodka and tonics. “I try to keep it to two.” He gets out the cocktail rye bread and spreads it with cheese and maybe a little taco sauce.
“When the rye and cheese are gone, he takes a steak or an Italian dinner from the freezer and cooks it. After dinner it’s time for the 10 o’clock news. Then it’s time for bed.
“You’re right,” says Griffith, the 71-year-old owner of the Minnesota Twins. “It’s no fun for me, alone in that apartment.”
Later, we revisit some familiar territory: his reputation as a stingy owner, the controversy in Waseca, Minnesota, and his life growing up as the nephew and later adopted son of Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators.
“Each night the old man would come home from Griffith Stadium, light a Robert Burns cigarillo, pour one ounce — always just one — of Old Grand Dad, take a one-hour nap, play an hour of cribbage with Calvin and then pull out a notepad and talk baseball.”
Calvin, we learn, isn’t nearly as close to his own children.
“He rarely speaks to his son and his only grandson. He rarely sees or hears from his two daughters, Corinne and Clare.
“At home my father was — well, remote might be too harsh a word,” says Clare. “Then he’d walk into the stadium and become a showman. I accepted that his whole life was at the ball park. But I wonder now what we all saw through our different eyes when I see how strong the feelings have gotten about him in our family.”
“He’s alienated from everything he should be cherishing right now,” says Griffith’s older sister, Mildred.”
The story ends with former Twins reliever Ron Davis winning a salary increase to $475,000 in an arbitration hearing, much to Griffith’s displeasure.
“If I had to pay him that much money for the whole year, I know deep down in my heart that I would die a slow death,” he says.
Davis gets in a shot at Griffith, too.
“Put him in an old folks’ home.”
Extra innings…
-Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: The Twins have hired a former hitting coach to be the new hitting coach.
Matt Borgschulte, a former hitting coach in the Twins’ minor league system, including at Triple-A St. Paul in 2021, has rejoined the Twins after spending the past few seasons with the Baltimore Orioles, according to MLB.com.
How much does one credit him for the Oriole’s recent success? Well, I guess he deserves some credit, although the Birds have had a number of high draft picks in recent years. Still, Baltimore had the No. 2 run-scoring offense in the American League last season.