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Home > Baseball > MLB Teams > Minnesota Twins
Minnesota Twins
Baseball is an outdoor sport in which a pitcher pitches a hard, fist sized ball to the hitting area of a batter. The batter hits the hard ball with a tapered, smooth, cylindrical bat made up of wood or metal. The batsman scores by running counter-clockwise within the four markers called the bases arranged at the corners of a diamond. Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from similar games such as softball.
When the American League expanded in 1961, Calvin Griffith seized the opportunity to move his Washington Senators to what he hoped would be a better region. The Senators franchise filled the gap left by his action, placating the congressmen who insisted on a franchise in Washington. Griffith was not happy with Washington as a baseball town and thought that the neighborhoods away from the Capitol were waning away. In Minnesota, the team was renamed as the Twins for Minneapolis Saint Paul, the Twin Cities.
Griffith may have been stingy with his money than other owners, but he was always a good judge of real talent. With Tony Oliva and Rod Carew joining the likes of Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison, the Twins won their first AL, American League pennant in 1965 and won successive division titles in 1969 and 1970. His fiscal policies were not working in the free agency period when other owners began to bid competitively for free agents. Minnesota was damned to lose a lot of its good players, sooner or later. Griffith certainly was not going to substitute them by signing free agents himself.
After 10 years of losing teams and reducing attendace, he sold the franchise in 1984 to local banker Carl Pohlad. At last the Twins revived to the talent, which Griffith had signed like Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Kirby Puckett, and Frank Viola. Minnesota astounded the baseball world in 1987 with its first World Championship.
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