A New Era
Home is a Dome
My rookie season in 1982 found us moving from outdoor baseball at the old Met to the Metrodome. Over the years, the buildings had been the target of a lot of abuse, and I understand all that. I understand it better now as a fan than I did when I played.
Back then, we were all excited to be moving into a new building. It was something brand new, and we were all so young we thought it was great. Of course, even for us, reality sank in pretty quickly.
The first thing we learned was that the turf was harder than a rock. Then we learned there was no air-conditioning, and it was like playing in a sweatbox. And we soon learned the fans weren’t going to sit in a sweatbox and watch bad baseball.
We had more than 52,000 fans show up for our first game in the Dome, which we lost 11–7 to Seattle. The next night we had 5,213 fans show up to watch us win our first game in the building, 7–5. We had a lot of crowds like that the first year. Let me tell you, when you put 6,000 fans in that building, you can hear what the fans are saying. In an outdoor ballpark, the sound gets dispersed. In the Metrodome, it just stayed in there and resonated. You could hear a guy say, “Hey, I’ll have a couple hot dogs and a beer” while you’re out there trying to play the game. Do you know how hard it is to focus when the guy behind you at first base is ordering a beer and a hot dog?
When you look back at old videos from the early ’80s, compared to now, you realize how empty and stark that stadium was. Not only empty stands—we had no signs, advertisements, or billboards. It was like we were playing in a warehouse. At least now there’s a little activity, a little atmosphere.
We also quickly learned that the roof had a few faults . . . like caving in during heavy snow. It caved in during the winters of 1981 and ’82, which were no big deals for us. We would read about it in the paper and just kind of chuckle. Then the same thing happened early in the 1983 season. We had a game scheduled against the Angels that night.
Gary Ward was staying with Tom Brunansky and me in Richfield until he could find an apartment for the season. Nobody planned too far ahead when it came to housing back then because you didn’t know whether you’d be packaged in a trade or whether some minor leaguer would hit .400 in spring training and be tabbed as the next phenom and take your job. So guys roomed together the first few weeks until they had some sense of security.
Anyway, Wardo wanted to borrow my truck that morning because I had four-wheel drive. A couple hours later, I got a phone call.
“Hrbie, I’m stuck.”
I said, “Wardo, you’ve got four-wheel drive and only eight inches of snow. You should be able to plow right through it.”
And he said: “No, I’m really stuck man.”
At about the same time, we got another call saying that the roof had collapsed, and we were going to get the day off. We took off in Bruno’s car to get Wardo out of his snowdrift. When we got there, we learned Wardo was stuck because he didn’t know how to lock the hubs on the truck, which you used to have to do to get it in four-wheel drive. As soon as I locked the hubs for him, Wardo drove off through the snow. Bruno and I decided to drive down to the Dome to get a look at it. We walked in to look at the field, and there was a big puddle from dripping snow behind second base.
Of course, that really wasn’t unusual back in those days because the roof leaked quite often. You’d have people watching indoor baseball, getting wet in their seats. It was kind of funny to look up and see water dripping down and a bunch of fans get up and move out of their section, just like they would during a downpour at an outdoor ballpark.
Maybe the weirdest night we ever had in the Dome was on April 26, 1986, against the Angels. A severe thunderstorm with winds of 80 miles per hour moved through Minneapolis late in the game, and it ripped a hole in the roof over right field. It was spooky because the lights were swinging from the ceiling and the roof was flapping. They stopped the game for nine minutes, and then we were able to finish, which wasn’t exactly a good thing for us.
We had a 6–1 lead with two outs in the bottom of the eighth when the storm hit. The Angels scored six runs in the top of the ninth off Frank Viola and Ron Davis to win 7–6.
Welcome to my world.
Fixing the Problems
As the years went on, those kinds of things didn’t happen anymore. They eventually installed air-conditioning and figured out a way to plug the leaks in the roof. In fact, over the last 20 years, the Dome has been pretty good. Well . . . pretty good compared to the early years.
Of course, it is what it is. And it isn’t your traditional baseball stadium. I’ve seen it all, including Dave Kingman hitting a towering pop fly that went through one of the ventilation holes in the ceiling and never came down. I’ve seen high pop-ups bounce off the lights, which according to the buildings ground rules puts the ball in play no matter where it might have been heading.
We realized right away how hard the turf was. After a couple weeks, whenever a teammate would get a base hit to the outfield, we’d all be yelling, “Bounce.” We learned that every now and then a routine one-hop single would bounce over the outfielder’s head, and we realized that could be a home-field advantage for us if we could somehow anticipate it. One night, Tim Teufel hit a 150-foot Texas Leaguer to right field that Harold Baines charged. The ball bounced over Baines’ head, and Teufel got a three-run, inside-the-park homer to give us a 3–2 victory over the White Sox. I don’t think “bounce” is a term that would have ever been used at any other ballpark, but it became part of our vocabulary.
Another word that I’m pretty certain is peculiar to the Dome is “baggie,” which is what everyone calls the large rubber fence in right field. I always thought they might figure out a way to make that a wooden fence, but no, it’s always been the “The Baggie.” It’ll always be part of the building, which maybe isn’t so bad because it’s unique. But then a lot about the Dome is unique.
I’ve seen more lost balls against the ceiling than I can count, most of them by opponents. I’ve always worried that someday, someone is going to get hit in the head by a high fly, and it’s either going to kill him or end his career.
We beat the Yankees 8–6 in a game on May 7, 1985, in which four of our runs could be attributed to balls being lost in the Dome’s lights and roof. Billy Martin, the Yankee manager, went nuts after the game, saying, among many other things, “This park should be barred from baseball.” The next day, George Steinbrenner released a statement saying: “If I wanted my players to be ping-pong players, I would send them to China to play the Chinese National Team.” The Yankees played the second game of the series under protest, which angered our manager, Billy Gardner. Billy told the press he might protest on our next visit to Yankee Stadium, saying: “If one of my players loses a fly ball, I’m going to say he lost it in the Big Dipper.”
Overcoming Home Field
Overall, I think you’d have to say the Twins have done an incredible job of fielding some pretty good teams lately despite having a low budget and having played in the Metrodome until 2010.
The Dome’s clubhouse had never been expanded, which meant the team had to store a lot of stuff in crates out in the hallway. You walked downstairs in the Dome and it looked like a pigsty. You compared the Dome’s clubhouse and hallways to the new, modern stadiums and it was a joke. And yet the Twins were in the playoffs four of five years between 2002 and 2006, which I think is a real credit to manager Ron Gardenhire and his coaching staff, plus Terry Ryan and the front office. They were able to keep the game fun and players optimistic despite the surroundings.
Having said all that, I don’t want to make it sound like I hated playing in the Dome. In fact, I loved playing in the Dome. Those early years I was just happy to have a uniform on and be playing in the big leagues.
Then we started building memories, and the place really did become home. You don’t have to live in a mansion to be happy in your home. I hit the first two home runs ever in the Dome during an exhibition game against the Reds before the 1982 season. And then, of course, we won World Series Game 7 in both 1987 and 1991 at the Dome. So I’ve got a gazillion memories of that building.
The Twins built a new outdoor stadium that opened in 2010. Overall, I always thought that it was going to be great for the ball club and the fans, although I’ve talked to people who live a few hours away and they worried about driving in and having a game rained out. But that’s part of the baseball experience to me.
As a fan, I really looked forward to the new stadium. But at the same time, I knew it was going to be weird to know that when I walk in, I’ll never have set foot on the field as a player. It’ll have no personal memories for me. My memories are going to be locked in a domed stadium that was torn down to make room for the Vikings’ new stadium.
Slick and Pods
I guess the polite way of putting it would be to say we were colorful during my early years with the Twins: we weren’t too good; we played in a Dome; and we had quite a cast of characters, starting with Slick and Pods—manager Billy Gardner and his pitching coach Johnny Podres—and of course, Calvin Griffith, who owned the ballclub.
When your manager and pitching coach share a room at the Super 8 Motel during homestands, you know you’re not playing for the Yankees. Slick was, and still is, married to the former Miss Connecticut, but she stayed out East raising their kids. I guess that said something about how Slick perceived his job security managing one of the youngest and lowest payroll teams ever to walk onto a big-league field. Slick used to joke about waking up next to Pods when he had Miss Connecticut waiting for him back home. Maybe that made him the perfect guy to manage us, because the prospect of getting fired wasn’t all bad. I mean, who would you rather wake up to in your room: Miss Connecticut or The Pod?
Slick was one of the funniest guys I ever met. Problem was he talked in this thick East Coast accent, and most of the players were able to understand only about half of what he said. But that half was pretty funny. I don’t know that I ever had a serious, heart-to-heart with Slick. Every time he talked to someone, he’d end the conversation with a joke that didn’t always make sense. He was always telling stories.
He also kept the game simple. I don’t think Billy was a strategist like Tom Kelly. Of course, part of it was I didn’t understand the game as well as I did after playing in the majors for a few years. By the time Tom Kelly had become our manager in 1987, I could look at him in the dugout and he’d make a little signal, and I knew I’d have to move off the line or whatever it was. That didn’t happen with Billy. I’d look in the dugout and have no idea what was going on, other than I knew Pods wanted us to win as quickly as possible because it got him into the night.
We got hold of a video of the final game of the 1955 World Series when Pods, pitching for Brooklyn, beat the Yankees. After the last out, Pods jumped all over the mound, then leaped into Roy Campanula’s arms. We’d always ask Pods to show us that last pitch. And he always would. He’d throw a pretend pitch, then start jumping up and down in the air. And he’d always add: “Boy, we had some cocktails that night.”
Rick Stelmaszek joined up with Slick and Pods at the start of the 1981 season, which made for quite an interesting group of leaders. Stelly became more like Slick and Pods as a coach than the rough and tough Chicago guy he had been as manager at Wisconsin Rapids, which was a good thing for all of us. We were a group of guys that needed humor, not ground balls hit at our heads.
Rick Stelmaszek was one of the toughest guys I ever met as my manager at Wisconsin Rapids. He mellowed as a Twins coach, becoming a close friend. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Class of ’82
Although we had no way of knowing it at the time, we had six rookies on our 1982 team who would be the cornerstone of the ’87 World Series champions: Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Tim Laudner, Randy Bush, Frank Viola, and me. We’d have had another player on that list, but Jim Eisenreich had the misfortune of being unable to control a nervous twitch that was later diagnosed as Tourette syndrome.
Jimmy was the Opening Day center fielder for us in ’82, and he could flat-out hit. He was a country kid from St. Cloud, Minnesota, which gave us three starters from Minnesota, along with me and Lauds. None of us knew what was going on with Jimmy, other than he’d go into these terrible twitching episodes and have to leave the game. It was sad to see what happened to him in Boston when the fans got to him by yelling insults. He started to twitch and ended up running off the field to catcalls.
Jimmy tried playing for us three straight years. The guy had talent. Calvin told reporters that Eisenreich “was doomed to be an All-Star.” The Twins thought it was a nervous disorder, which turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Calvin sold his contract to the Royals for $1, thinking his career was over. Jimmy got the proper diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, went on medication to control the twitching, and ended up playing 15 years in the big leagues with a career batting average of .290. He played in the 1993 World Series with the Phillies and won the World Series with Florida in 1997. So it turned out well.
The same could not be said for many of the players who were my teammates in the early to mid-’80s. We had a revolving door for pitchers, most of whom have long since been forgotten, except by those of us who called them teammates. One of the starters on the ’82 team was Al Williams, a big right-hander who was a Nicaraguan freedom fighter during his offseasons. At least that’s what we heard. Al was pretty spooky, and you didn’t mess with him. If you said anything to Al that he didn’t think was funny, he’d just say, “I’ll get you.” So no one said much to him.
We also had Terry Felton, who lost 16 straight games with the Twins, including going 0–13 in ’82. I just couldn’t figure that one out because he had some really nasty stuff. I’d face him in spring training games, and the guy had one of the best breaking balls I’d seen and a nasty fastball. Terry handled it well. He had a great sense of humor. Even during the bad times, Terry would joke around. One night we were at the apartment Brunansky and I rented in Richfield, and we heard a thump thump thump. It was Terry sliding down the basement stairs on his butt, having a good time. But he just couldn’t win. It’s not like he went out to lose. I had the feeling the guy could throw a no-hitter every time he went to the mound.
We were always searching the scrapheap for pitching help those early years. In 1985, we found Steve Howe, who had been one of the game’s top relievers, but he then ran into a lengthy series of drug problems. The guy was left-handed and he was breathing, so we took a shot. He had a little baggage, and we found it. He went AWOL after appearing in a few games, and that was it.
Then there was Juan Agosto, a little left-hander we picked up in 1986. Word was he was into voodoo stuff. I didn’t get close enough to find out. All I know is that he was a different cat.
The guy who epitomized our pitching problems in those years was Ron Davis. We picked up RD the first week of the ’82 season in a multiplayer deal with the Yankees, and RD was supposed to solidify our bullpen. It didn’t quite work out that way.
That deal did, however, bring us a young shortstop named Greg Gagne. He was sent to the minors after the trade but made it to the big leagues for his first cup of coffee the next season, and he was a starter on both our World Series championship teams.
We traded veteran Roy Smalley and a young pitcher named Gary “Truth” Serum to the Yankees in the deal. So even though we got RD and spent years trying to make him a closer, getting Gagne made it one of the best deals in Twins history.
Fighting Words
We lost 102 games in ’82, which is the most any Twins team has ever lost. The funny thing is, we never thought of ourselves as being that bad. Losing didn’t seem that hard, I guess, because we were young, trying to play in the big leagues, and get our feet wet. Still, we had this air about us. We weren’t afraid of anybody.
I think even some of our teammates were surprised by that. Roy Smalley was one of the Twins’ few veterans when I was called up in 1981. A couple years later, he looked back at his first meeting with Gaetti and me while talking to a Minneapolis reporter. I think what he said is pretty accurate and tells a lot about our frame of mind back then.
“They were the most different rookies I’d ever been around,” Smalley said. “I’d never seen anything like it. Here was Hrbek, up from A-ball, and Gaetti, up from AA, and they’d walk around on the field like they had the jobs and there wasn’t anything to it . . . I’m not saying that with any rancor. I used to laugh about it. They were brash and confident, just like they are now.”
I think that air might be why we ended up having some bigtime brawls in those early years, especially with Milwaukee and Detroit. I used to hit the crap out of Milwaukee, and I think that was one of the things that agitated the Brewers. Harvey Kuehn, their manager, used to stand on the top steps of the dugout screaming at me: “We’re going to throw one right down the middle, Hrbek. See if you can hit this one.”
The Brewers at the time were the best team in the American League, winning the Series in ’82. They had a bunch of guys who had come up through their system, like Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Jim Gantner. And they had some real power hitters in Cecil Cooper, Gorman Thomas, and Ben Oglivie.
I think, in a way, we saw ourselves in them. We were young and scuffling, but we were going to learn the game together and someday be like the Brewers. I think from the Brewers’ perspective maybe we were a little too cocky in that belief and didn’t show them the respect they figured they deserved.
The first big brawl started when our center fielder, Bobby Mitchell, slid hard into second and took out Yount. I guess maybe they thought Yount shouldn’t be treated like that. Well, a couple innings later, one of the Brewers basically veered into the outfield to get our shortstop, Lenny Faedo, and knocked him into next week. I was standing on first watching, and the next thing I know, the whole Brewers dugout was running toward me, and I was heading toward right field.
My mom and grandmother were at the game, and my mom told me later that my grandmother turned to her and said, “I sure hope Kent didn’t get hurt.” Well, they beat the hell out of me. I can still remember Ted Simmons on top of me, punching on me. There was a picture of me in the paper the next day after the fight. I’m carrying one shoe, my hat is off, and I’ve got no glove. I wasn’t even mouthy to the Brewers. They just didn’t care for me.
We had problems with the Brewers right up to 1987. We had a brawl that year, too, when they threw Joe Niekro on the ground and hurt his shoulder. That was the tail end of our fighting years with the Brewers.
We might have been losing games, but there were signs that things were going to turn someday. I hit .301 with 23 homers, drove in 92 runs, and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting to Cal Ripken. G-Man hit 25 homers, and Brunansky hit 20. Not bad for rookies. Problem was: We continued to hold tryouts, trying to find pitchers who could get anybody out. One guy who showed some promise was Viola, although he had to learn on the job like the rest of us, going 4–10 with a 5.21 ERA in his first major-league season.