August 15, 1981: Twins overshadowed by the past

A forgettable year for the Minnesota Twins, 1981, stands out in that it was the final season of Metropolitan Stadium. Even a finale couldn’t be properly planned for the ballpark, which opened in 1956 and was used by the minor-league Minneapolis Millers until the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota.

A game on June 11 drew some curious onlookers, just in case this was the final game because major-league players were scheduled to go on strike the next day. At the time, no one was sure if they would return that season.

At the time of the strike, the Twins had already seen manager Johnny Goryl fired (in May) in favor of the feistier Billy Gardner, but had regardless settled into seventh and last in the American League West Division with a record of 17 wins and 39 losses.

One game was planned – an annual Old Timers event, which the Twins announced would take place on Saturday night, August 15, regardless of whether the regulars were back or not for their scheduled game against the Seattle Mariners. As it turns out, they were.

The strike was settled with barely a week to spare, and the season resumed. A split-season format was adopted, calling for division winners from the first half (before the strike) to be matched against the champions of the second half in each division. Minnesota celebrated a “reopener” on August 10 in beating Oakland before more than 15,000 fans, only the fourth crowd of more than 10,000 at the Met that season.1

But the promise of a look at stars of the past drew 17,831 for a pregame exhibition that featured future Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew and Tony Oliva, Zoilo Versalles, Bob Allison, Earl Battey, Mudcat Grant, Cesar Tovar, Jim Perry, Bernie Allen, Jerry Kindall, Al Worthington, Frank Quilici, Don Mincher, Dick Stigman, Rich Reese, Ted Uhlaender, Dave Boswell, and Camilo Pascual from the 1965 pennant winners as well as Gardner, Bob Gebhard, George Thomas, Charley Walters, Tom Lundstedt, Mike Poepping, Greg Thayer, Chuck Nieson, Lenny Green, Jim Lemon, Fred Bruckbauer, Bill Dailey, and batboy Mark Stodghill.2

The chance to see revered players make their last romp on Met Stadium turf was the highlight for many, especially when the game that followed produced its share of lowlights.

Twins starter Brad Havens was a promising rookie with 17 innings under his belt, a respectable earned-run average of 3.71, and zero wins against two losses. Seattle started veteran Glenn Abbott, an original Mariner (1977) with two 12-win seasons in his past but in 1981 only an occasional starter with a current record of one win and four losses. Offensive fireworks were nonetheless not to be expected; the Mariners ranked 11th in batting average in the 14-team league, while the Twins were a notch lower at 12th and on their way to posting, at .241, the lowest team home batting average in their 21 seasons in Minnesota. The Twins averaged 3.44 runs per game in 1981, third worst in the majors.

A single and a double – by the eight and nine hitters in Seattle’s order – gave the visitors the first run of the game, in the third. The same dynamic duo, center fielder Joe Simpson and shortstop Jim Anderson, who combined for six hits in eight at-bats in the game, produced Seattle’s second run in the fifth on another single and double, the latter a routine fly to center lost in the gray sky by Mickey Hatcher. Two additional Mariners singles to start the sixth finished Havens’ night, Seattle’s third run scoring on a subsequent double-play grounder off reliever Fernando Arroyo.

The Twins knocked Abbott out in the sixth, loading the bases with one out, but Hatcher’s liner behind second base off rookie left-hander Bryan Clark was grabbed by Anderson, who stepped on second for the double play.

Seattle picked up an unearned run in the seventh, and two singles and a walk chased Arroyo in the eighth, when the final two runs were plated. Clark, meanwhile, finished up the Mariners’ four-hit shutout, concluding a game played in the tidy elapsed time of 2 hours and 17 minutes.

The Twins moved, for better or worse, into the Metrodome in Minneapolis to begin 1982, which would be still drearier. The full schedule would be played, and the Twins embarked on a full-fledged youth movement, sending veterans Roy Smalley and Butch Wynegar to the Yankees in separate deals in April and May, and going on to lose 102 games. The help that would eventually propel them to the surprise championship of 1987 had already started arriving before 1981 ended, however, as Kent Hrbek, Tim Laudner, and Gary Gaetti made their debuts. Meanwhile, with the club moving to its downtown ballpark from suburban Bloomington, the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune were playing nice about the disappointing season, but sports columnist Patrick Reusse of the St. Paul Dispatch felt fully able to swing away at the team and its owner, Calvin Griffith.

On the following Monday, after the Twins had finished losing four of five games at home to also-lowly Seattle, Reusse commented in his column, “It has taken the Griffith organization 21 years, but it has presented Minnesota … with the genuine article, the product that symbolized the Griffiths in Washington: Our very own, authentic, last-place team … The only reminders this weekend (of the past Twins contenders that the old timers played for) were the line drives off the bat of Tony Oliva and the anticipation when Harmon Killebrew came to the plate. … Oh, yes, this team used to be that good. The words to describe it now are more appropriately inscribed on the walls of public lavatories. … the absence of the Twins for two months really was the only bonus of this wet, dreadful summer. … ”3

The uninspired effort of August 15 included such reviews as:

Billy Gardner: “We looked like horsepoop.” (Probably not his exact words).

Mickey Hatcher: “I know I played with my head up my butt.” (Also perhaps not his precise verbiage).

“We Want Killebrew!” (A chant heard from fans in the right-field stands in the ninth inning).4

The Twins, though they finished the year with the worst overall record in the division, still were given permission to print World Series tickets, as the split-season format kept them in the second-half race into the final week. They weren’t mathematically eliminated until September 30, when they lost to the Kansas City Royals, perhaps appropriately in the final baseball game at Metropolitan Stadium.

Postscript

Why include this uninspiring example from Metropolitan Stadium’s last season in a collection of its most memorable games? The author was part of a contingent of members who, earlier that day, had attended the first Minnesota gathering of Society for American Baseball Research members. From such modest roots came the organization’s model regional organization, the Halsey Hall Chapter of SABR.

Sources

retrosheet.org

Notes

1 The other crowds in five figures to that point were on Opening Day, for a Sunday doubleheader in late April, and for a game against Milwaukee just before the strike.

2 “Names of Ex-Twins at Old Timers Game,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 16, 1981: 8C.

3 Patrick Reusse, “It was a Weekend to Try to Forget the ’81 Twins,” St. Paul Dispatch, August 17, 1981: 5B.

4 Jay Weiner, “Twins Lose to Seattle: Fans Call for Harmon,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 16, 1981: 8C.