A Step Back
WHATEVER OPTIMISM WE GENERATED IN 1984 evaporated quickly the following season when we lost nine of our first 11 games. You could almost hear the fans saying, “Same old Twins.” We did put together a 10-game winning streak at the end of May to get over .500, but that proved only temporary. We lost 10 straight at the end of May and never got back over .500.
If you’re looking for someone who symbolized that season, try a young left-handed reliever named Tom Klawitter, better known as “The Klaw.” Now, on a legitimate pennant contender, The Klaw wouldn’t have been considered the answer to your left-handed relief problems. He’d pitched in Class-A ball the year before and should have been in camp getting a little experience.
But The Klaw quickly worked his way into the team’s bullpen plans, which should have been a clue for us that we might not be ready to be a serious contender. Plus, RD—Ron Davis—was back as closer after the demoralizing final week in Cleveland in ’84.
It seemed like we always had some phenom in spring training who would put up fantastic numbers and we’d give him a shot in the majors. That was the state of our pitching staff back then.
Klaw became something of a cult hero during spring training, with the help of our manager. When Billy Gardner walked out to the mound to signal him in, he’d put his hand in the air and make a claw sign. That was kind of a fun thing to do.
Klaw seemed like a nice guy. We were asking him to make the jump from A ball, but some guys do it. I had done it myself. But The Klaw didn’t make it. The start of the ’85 season was his one and only in the big leagues, mostly because he walked 13 in 9⅓ innings. I think he had a little “light standarditis,” as Rick Stelmaszek used to call it. The light towers seem taller, and a lot of people get more scared and nervous. We saw a lot of that in those years. You’d see minor leaguers with great talent, but when they got to the majors, they didn’t have something. Maybe part of that was the makeup of our team, because most of us were still so young, we really didn’t have anyone to lead the way when a young guy started struggling.
In terms of experience and age, left fielder Mickey Hatcher was one of our veteran leaders. Hatch played the game hard and got the most out of his ability, but he was a little off the wall to be a father figure to struggling youngsters. One day in Oakland he settled under a towering fly ball, and we’re all thinking, “Good, there’s another out for us.” Then his knees started shaking, and he dropped to the ground, like he had fainted. Of course, he didn’t catch the ball. They took Hatch in for a brain scan, but I guess the old joke that the scan showed nothing applied to what they found in Hatch’s brain. None of the players were too concerned awaiting the test results because some of the guys knew that Hatch had been out the night before and had a little too much to drink. We figured, correctly, that he was just dehydrated and got dizzy trying to track that fly ball.
That’s the way things went for us back then.
Goodbye Billy
Our failure to build on ’84 cost Billy Gardner his job. I hated to see him go, although I’m not sure I ever knew Billy real well. He was the nicest guy in the world, and he probably did as well as anyone could with the talent on hand. We had the core group of guys who had come in together as rookies in ’82, but beyond that, it seemed like there were guys coming in and out all the time, and we had no idea who we’d have on the team the next week.
I had a hand in Billy being fired because I struggled big time the first two months of 1985. I was hitting .211 at the end of April and then .249 when Billy was fired in mid-June. It was probably the toughest two months hitting I’ve ever had. I know I put on a face at the ballpark to try not to show things were bothering me. But that ate at me. There was a newspaper article in 1986 where Jeanie talked about that period, saying: “After a game last year, the first thing he’d say was, ‘I’m not going to let it bother me.’ But a half-hour later he’d be asking me, ‘Jeanie, what am I doing wrong?’ He’d always be going over videotapes of himself batting, trying to figure it out.”
Jeanie wasn’t misquoted, let’s put it that way. I did struggle. I think it might have been easier for me if my dad had been alive. He’d watched me play since I was a little kid, and when I needed someone to talk to about hitting, he was the guy. As the years went on, I talked more and more baseball with my mom. A couple of times, she made suggestions in my stance that I tried. And a couple times, they worked. But during 1985, I missed having my dad to talk to.
The best thing I learned from Billy Gardner was the same thing I learned in high school from Buster Radebach: The game has to be fun. Play it hard, play to win, but have fun.
Billy got canned in June when we were 27–35 and was replaced by Ray Miller, who had built a name for himself as the pitching coach with Baltimore. Hiring Ray seemed like a good idea for a team that needed to upgrade its pitching. And we did play .500 ball after Ray was hired in ’85, so some people thought we were headed in the right direction.
But in the end, Ray’s stint with the Twins didn’t turn out a whole lot better than The Klaw’s. Ray got canned late in the ’86 season with our record at 59–80. Ray never did solve our pitching problems, and he didn’t build much of a rapport with the everyday players. I liked Ray as a person, but as a manager, he really didn’t do much to build any chemistry in the clubhouse. Plus he put a ban on fishing when he told us to stay out of the sun. I just don’t think he thought that one through. Did that mean you shouldn’t be playing in the backyard with your kids because you could get sunburned?
Ray was a guy who liked being a manager, if you know what I mean. He liked sitting in his manager’s office, talking to the media about the game. Even while he was the manager, the guy who was working the clubhouse, getting to know the players and building relationships, was Tom Kelly.
TK was named the interim manager when Ray was fired. The choice for a permanent manager dragged out for months during the offseason. We had a young general manager, Andy MacPhail, who was in TK’s corner. But our owner, Mr. Pohlad, appeared to favor a more veteran manager like Jim Frey, who had been the manager of the Chicago Cubs.
I lobbied hard for TK. I thought he’d be perfect. I’d never played a full season for him as manager, but he had been our third-base coach, and he knew the players. Plus, he had managed Tim Laudner, Gary Gaetti, Randy Bush, and Frank Viola in the minors, and they each had a good relationship with him. Tom Kelly was already in our clubhouse, and he knew the personalities. Why go outside the organization when it’s going to take another half year to get to know the personalities?
TK finally got the job, which was a relief.
The Trade
Ray Miller did make one lasting contribution to the Twins: He moved RD from the closer’s role and was manager when RD was traded to the Cubs on August 13, 1986. There are some people who think that date was a turning point in Twins history. I don’t buy it. People wrote that RD was a cancer, and that was horrible.
RD had a heart bigger than his chest, and he was a great teammate. I’m not going to deny that he did things that got some people angry, like singing that damn tune, “Jimmy Crack Corn,” after a loss. He also was known to trade baseballs for bratwurst sitting in the bullpen in Milwaukee. I heard that, and I got a little angry because we’re out there busting our butts to try to win a game, and RD is eating brats in the bullpen. But you know what? If I had been out there in the bullpen, I’d have probably been eating brats, too, so I forgave him.
RD gave us everything he had, which when it came to closing games wasn’t enough. It got to the point where something had to be done. Miller took RD out of the closer’s role fairly early in the year, which basically left us without a proven closer. Keith Atherton, a veteran long reliever, led us with 10 saves that year. But there were games when Ray would have to turn to RD simply because he’d run out of pitchers.
The night before he was traded, RD lost an extra-inning game in California. RD’s ERA at the time was over 9.00, and things were so bad that night that he sat in front of his locker and cried. A reporter asked Miller if, despite the loss, he felt sorry for RD. Ray looked up and said: “Do you ever feel sorry for me? My future depends on a reliever who’s sitting in front of his locker right now crying.”
Well, that pretty much summed up the state of things. The next day, RD was traded to the Cubs, and I don’t think we reacted too well. The charter flight from California to Seattle turned into a party. People got a little goofy. Puck kind of started it by singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” as he got on the bus to the airport. And the singing continued for most of the flight to Seattle. Puck went nuts with it. People started laughing at Puck, and when Puck got the floor, he didn’t give it up. Harmon Killebrew, who was a TV analyst at the time, said it was the most bizarre thing he’d ever seen in baseball. He said it was like the team had been exorcized of a demon.
The way we acted, I can sure understand why Harmon thought that. I don’t think we did ourselves proud that night. I’ll always remember RD as a good teammate and friend and the guy who had the balls to clean fish in the trainer’s room.
MacPhail started putting his stamp on the club during that offseason with one of the best trades in team history. We sent Neal Heaton, a veteran pitcher, Yorkis Pérez, a promising young pitcher, and catcher Jeff Reed to the Expos for closer Jeff Reardon and catcher Tom Nieto. Three weeks later, we made another deal with the Expos to bring in veteran infielder Al Newman. All three helped us win the AL West in ’87, but the key, of course, was Reardon.
All of a sudden we went from having no proven closer to having Jeff Reardon, who had already established himself as one of the best in the game. Jeff was a National League All-Star in ’85 and ’86, and he saved 76 games those two years. So on paper, that was a deal that looked pretty good for us.
But the honest truth is I didn’t feel any different when February rolled around in 1987 than I did starting to think about spring training any other year. I got excited every offseason, and every year when I went to spring training I thought we were going to win. That’s just the way my mind works. Reardon was a great trade, but when we got Ron Davis from the Yankees in 1982, I got jacked up—we were getting a guy who was good enough to pitch for the Yankees.
I just always believed we could win. I loved the uncertainty of baseball because you never knew what could happen. Sometimes in baseball what looks like a minor deal turns out to be huge. Like the year we signed Kenny Schrom after he got released from Toronto, and he went out and won 15 games.
If you’re going to play this game, you have to have that kind of positive attitude. If you start getting down and doubting yourself or your teammates, you’ve got no chance. I used to have some killer batting slumps, and it’s natural that some negative thoughts start creeping in. But you’ve got to push them out because if you don’t, it will eat you up. If you dwell on it and think about it all day long, it can only make things worse.
And there were people that did. Scotty Leius, a third baseman with us in the early 1990s, always thought he was going to be released. Scotty was a heckuva player, but he was a worrier, and that might have prevented him from being the player he could have been. Another guy like that was Pat Mahomes, a young pitcher who had all the talent in the world when he joined the club in ’92. But you’d go to the mound and talk to him and he was scared to death. He’d look right through you like he couldn’t even see you. Here was a guy with as much talent as I’ve ever seen in my life—great arm, had a vertical jump like you couldn’t believe, a nice, sincere kid—and he was scared to death. You could tell on the mound that the doubts were creeping in, and he really didn’t believe he could do it. I guess his son, Patrick, the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, must be a little different.
I don’t know enough about the brain to know why some guys think that way and others are able to push their negative thoughts out. I just know I was lucky enough to be a guy who could push negative thoughts out. Maybe it came from having my dad die when I was 21. I’m not the only guy that’s happened to, so I don’t feel sorry for myself. What it taught me was to stay positive and enjoy today because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.
I’m the same way when I’m fishing. I’ve fished with people who, when we don’t get a bite for a while, will start talking about how the wind has changed and were not going to get anything today. Hey, you hold a cheeseburger in front of my face long enough and I’m going to eat it. I always figured fish were the same way. I figured I could make ’em bite if I held food in front of their noses long enough.
So when I went to spring training in 1987, it was no different than going any other year. I was excited, and I believed we were going to win. Of course, I’d been proven wrong before. Every year I’d played in the big leagues, in fact.