by Steve Rushin
Two weeks later, Carew was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated, posing on the latter with Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400, thirty-six years earlier. That summer was a brief moment in the national spotlight for the Twins, and my hometown, and the ghost of Duke Ellington. And then it passed. By July, “Sir Duke” had yielded its number one spot in the Top 40, stepping aside for the disco juggernaut of “I’m Your Boogie Man”—and, though we didn’t yet know it, making way for the modern age.
Carew was the league’s Most Valuable Player but fell twelve points short of .400. The Twins reverted to form, finishing in fourth place in the American League West, 17½ games behind the Kansas City Royals. All through that season, and the next—when the Twins won only seventy-three times—the unsinkable Ronnie Newman played “Satin Doll” in a jazzy, jumpy style, a joyous carnival calliope for 787,000 paying customers.
At the end of that season—on September 28, 1978, with his team in Kansas City, nineteen games behind their opponents—owner and general manager Calvin Griffith spoke to the Lions Club in Waseca, Minnesota. In his remarks, as reported by Minneapolis Tribune writer Nick Coleman, who was in attendance, he called Carew a “damn fool” for accepting “only $170,000” to play for the Twins.
He disparaged newlywed catcher Butch Wynegar—who spent too much time, in Calvin’s estimation, chasing his bride around the bedroom—and several other players by name. But then every player in baseball was lesser than Carew, who had sewn up his seventh American League batting title that weekend. And then, fatefully, Calvin Griffith was asked at the Lions Club if he would ever again move the franchise that his father had owned in Washington.
Six years after Clark Griffith died in 1955 and bequeathed the Senators to him, Calvin had moved the team to Minnesota. “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota,” Calvin told the Lions Club audience that evening in Waseca. “It was when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ball games, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. It’s unbelievable. We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”
The Twins were still in Kansas City for the season’s final series when the remarks were reported to the players. Carew declined to comment. But he spoke the following day, the final day of the season, and also as it happened his thirty-third birthday. “I will not come back and play for a bigot,” Carew said. “I’m not going to be another nigger on his plantation.”
And he didn’t return, departing for the Angels before the 1979 season, which is the season I joined the Twins, at age thirteen, with “Satin Doll” leaking through the sealed door of the walk-in freezer of the main commissary behind home plate, my front left tooth halved by a thrown baseball, so that I resembled the hockey players that my brothers had scissored out of Goal magazine and taped to a wood-paneled wall in our basement.
In the days after Griffith’s Lions Club speech, Wynegar called the sixty-six-year-old owner a “damn fool.” Dan Ford demanded a trade and joined Carew in Anaheim, where Disco Danny had the best year of his career, driving in 101 runs in 1979. I was largely oblivious to the social upheaval at the Met—high as I was on grill gas, Red Man, and the commissary’s FM radio pumping out Supertramp and REO Speedwagon.
But a cultural shift was taking place. Players were asserting their independence, and brooking no bullshit on matters of race. Latin players—or American players with Latin surnames—did not want to hear “The Mexican Hat Dance” played on an organ every time they came to bat, no matter how jaunty the rendition.
Once literally in a lofty position—the organ loft at Chicago Stadium loomed over the audience like a weather system—the organ was falling from its place of prominence. In the first years after the Twins moved indoors to the Metrodome in 1982, Ronnie Newman played from a pit beneath the playing surface and watched the games through a periscope, “Satin Doll” emerging from the subterranean lair like a Bond villain.
The notes would drift up to my own lair, in a concession stand at the Metrodome, where I worked for a single season, my father rolling the odometer forward by one year on my birth certificate so that I appeared to be eighteen, old enough to sell beer.
From my window in that stand, I could gaze longingly at the press box door. It was only thirty feet away, just across the concourse, a fast-flowing river of people that seemed uncrossable to a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer. I had no earthly idea how to get from this stand to that one, from roller grill to keyboard.
When the Twins were on the road, I watched them play on our basement TV and wrote game stories on my mom’s Royal typewriter. You had to strike the keys hard, as if trying to ring a bell on a carnival midway. Which is exactly what I was doing, the bell of the carriage return ringing at the end of every line.
Three years after I graduated from college, as a young baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, the Twins made the 1991 World Series and I covered it. I was living in New York, but when the Series was in Minneapolis, I stayed in Bloomington, in the house I grew up in. When the Twins won Game 7 against the Braves, late on a Sunday night at the Metrodome, I returned to that house and wrote the story for SI, in the same basement where I used to compose Twins stories on my mother’s Royal typewriter. And all through that sleepless night, ears still ringing from the crowd noise, they rang with something else, too: “Satin Doll,” and the unforgettable carriage return of my mother’s Royal.
Ronnie Newman was still playing for the Twins that year. In 1977, “Satin Doll” was a nostalgic nod to the 1950s. By the 1990s, it had become a nostalgic nod to the 1970s.
By the late ’70s, when Ernie Hays was playing “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” for the Mad Hungarian in St. Louis, entrance music had become a novelty. By the late 1980s, when Indians reliever Ricky Vaughn was bursting out of the bullpen to “Wild Thing” in the movie Major League, walk-up music had become common in the Show. By the time the Twins and Braves were contesting that 1991 World Series, the majority of ballpark music was recorded: contemporary hits—pop, heavy metal, and hip-hop—booming over the PA system.
Newman played “Satin Doll” until 1998, when he was finally driven out by the tyranny of the compact disc. He was making $98 a game at retirement, a $48 raise on his starting salary in 1977. In two decades, he played “Satin Doll” 1,775 times, in as many consecutive games, without a sick day, but that summer of ’98 ballpark organs were playing their own funeral recessional. Trevor Hoffman, the San Diego Padres’ indomitable closer, began entering games to AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” whose opening gongs whipped the crowd into a diabolical state of excitement. The entrance quickly became known as “Trevor Time.” Everyone wanted his own signature song.
In Boston, John Kiley had already retired, in 1989, after four decades at Fenway. Jane Jarvis was retired after fifteen years with the Mets, having previously played for the Milwaukee Braves. Nancy Faust played forty-one years with the White Sox before retiring in 2010, Ronnie Newman twenty-one years with the Twins before he left the stage. They were all—in the words of the home run call—going, going, gone.
The Dodgers eventually found their West Coast Gladys Goodding, in the form of two women: Helen Dell in the ’70s and ’80s, Nancy Bea Hefley in the ’90s and noughties, forty years between them at Chavez Ravine, the way Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda managed for forty-four years between them. But then the Dodgers had a special reverence for organs and the women who played them.
To everyone else, the organ had become quaint. Even parks that retained them reduced their time to pre- and postgame interludes, players and spectators preferring the new tradition of walk-up music. In 1999, following the success of “Hell’s Bells” in San Diego, Yankees closer Mariano Rivera began emerging from the bullpen at Yankee Stadium to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” signaling—in the final year of the last millennium—lights out to hitters, but also to ballpark organists.
At the same time—in the last decade of the t
wentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first—new ballparks were being built to resemble old ones, or what we think the old ones must have felt like, but never did. In 2009 the Mets opened Citi Field, with an enormous rotunda meant to invoke the tiny one at Ebbets Field, done in that ballpark’s red brick and limestone. The rotunda gave way to those deep-green seats that evoked the Polo Grounds.
But even nostalgia has its limits. So the club abandoned the Ebbets aesthetic at the bathroom doors, installing 725 toilets, 374 of them for women and 351 for men. Two hundred and forty of these were eco-friendly waterless urinals. The Mets would never have to move for want of adequate plumbing. O’Malley lived to see the irony of the National League team in New York making its home in a place called Flushing.
The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). Like other “-algias”—neuralgia comes to mind—it was coined as a medical affliction, homesickness so acute as to cause physical anguish. I felt something resembling that in 2010, when my hometown Twins moved into Target Field, their new ballpark, and played outdoors in Minnesota for the first time since their last game (and mine) at the Met in 1981.
When I traveled to Target Field in its inaugural season, and approached the $522 million ballpark on foot, I was met first by a bronze statue of Rodney Cline Carew. It had none of Carew’s lightness of touch—it was heavy, leaden, not the wisp that was Rodney Cline at the plate—and omitted the bulge from his front cheek, the Red Man wrapped in bubble gum. This was no doubt intentional, Carew having quit chewing after finding a growth in his mouth in 1992, and enduring a reported $100,000 in dental work. A baseball tradition brought by farm boys to the big leagues a century earlier was emphatically uncool in the twenty-first century.
Not far from Carew’s statue was another one, of Calvin Griffith in a business suit, holding a baseball in his upturned right hand. The baseball was both emblem of his life’s work and object of his greatest trauma, when fans celebrating the ’24 World Series win in Washington overwhelmed the young batboy and made off with his horde of horsehide.
Still farther outside the stadium, 520 feet from home plate, stood an enormous sculpture of an old fielder’s glove, rising up in greeting, the way my grandfather’s catcher’s mitt seemed to reach for me from its grave of packing peanuts. The 1,500-pound glove at Target Field was every bit as ancient, from the benighted age before the Wilson A2K, when every glove resembled the Hamburger Helper mascot. Its index finger was connected to the thumb by a narrow bit of webbing, as if waving heavenward to Bill Doak. As I passed, a family of four nestled comfortably into its pocket for a picture.
Passing into Target Field through Gate 29—another homage to Carew—fans filed past concession stands selling water for $4 a bottle and beer for $7.25. Calvin Griffith would have found this scarcely believable, and his father even less so.
On June 29, 1941, after Griffith Stadium had run out of soda during a doubleheader against the Yankees—the temperature nearly one hundred degrees, before a full house of thirty thousand, with DiMaggio hitting safely in his forty-first and forty-second consecutive games to break George Sisler’s American League record—fans complained that rogue vendors were selling ice water to Senators fans. Owner Clark Griffith denied the very possibility that his vendors would take advantage of fan thirst in this way, shaking down customers for water at $0.10 a glass on a hot summer day. (It wouldn’t have been the first robbery of the day. That same afternoon, between games of the twin bill, is when DiMaggio’s beloved Betsy Ann bat was stolen from the Yankees dugout.)
But a brief investigation by Griffith revealed that his vendors had indeed exploited the day’s heat: Ice had been sold for a quarter, ice water for a dime, lukewarm water for a nickel. The owner fired the vendors, apologized in the press, and the scandalous practice of charging for water ceased immediately. If it also planted a seed in the owner’s head—sports fans will pay for just about anything, and one day owners will charge $4 for bottled water—he never said so publicly.
At Target Field, Jacob Ruppert would have stared in slack-jawed wonder at the various brands of beer on offer, thirty-four different varieties, dispensed in concession stands and luxury boxes, at seats, and in two stadium pubs. Men drinking there would be deprived of the communal experience of that ballpark staple, the trough-style urinal, which doesn’t comply with local building code. But no matter. In one of those stadium pubs was a ballpark organ, with Sue Nelson at the wheel. She apprenticed with Ronnie Newman at the Metrodome, and took over his scaled-back duties in 1998. A dozen years later, the organ was making a small comeback, in a minor key, recalling that distant time when the only woman in the park was the organist.
On this night, though, half the crowd was composed of women, and more than half the restrooms. Of the 667 toilets, 401 of them were in ladies’ rooms. There were, separately, dedicated spaces for nursing mothers, though the Twins allowed fans to BYOB when it came to baby bottles.
The team’s Clubhouse Store was a Danny Goodman dream sprung to life, 4,800 square feet of retail space open daily, whether the Twins were home or not. Goodman’s prophecy of fifty years earlier—“I think eventually we’ll have full-scale shopping centers inside the parks”—had come to pass.
And yet, that captive audience had so much more to captivate it. The video scoreboard covered 5,757 square feet, capable of conveying 4.4 trillion shades of color. There was free Wi-Fi in the stadium, bringing instant replays and real-time box scores to my phone. Eventually, fans could post their own Twitter messages to one of the scoreboards from their seats. Some of those seats had wooden backs, made from ash by the Irwin Seating Company. And that ash was not the only Proustian callback to a vanishing past: After decades of infidelity at the Metrodome, the Twins had returned to the Schweigert hot dogs of Met Stadium, the pork-and-beef hot dogs of my youth, and theirs.
Of course, there were also Cuban sandwiches, empanadas, pork chops on a stick, walleye fingers, wild rice soup, and all manner of other culinary exotica. But the staples continued to thrive, and for five bucks, and three innings of nonstop nagging, a boy or girl could still get an ice cream sundae in an inverted batting helmet.
The opponent on this night was the Brewers, and they wore a sprig of barley on their caps, and the Budweiser roof deck in left field literally loomed over the proceedings, its red letters against the black sky like a sign from the heavens to drink. And yet nobody was throwing beer bottles. Indeed, there were no bottles to throw. The only aspersion aimed at the umpires was the sign on their dressing room door, labeled not only in English but in braille.
Those umpires were under greater scrutiny than ever before in their history. In addition to the usual TV and smartphone cameras, three dedicated cameras were permanently mounted in the stadium—indeed, in every stadium—and trained on their strike zone. Those cameras tracked the ball from the nanosecond it left the pitcher’s hand until it crossed the front edge of home plate. This information—including speed, trajectory, and location of the pitch, accurate to within one inch and one mile per hour—were instantly transmitted to a computer, and then onto thousands of other computers and television screens, for real-time second-guessing of umpires by both fans and the umpiring overlords at Major League Baseball.
This system, called PITCHf/x, was developed by the same company that gave televised football its great Edisonian innovation: the yellow line that indicates first downs.
So baseball’s retro craze had been tempered by the codependent revolutions of technology and statistical analysis. But as I found my seat, beer in hand, then rose for the national anthem—turning toward the flagpole salvaged from the Met—none of that was on my mind. For there, suddenly, was the field, gorgeous in contrasting shades of green.
Two and one-half acres of turfgrass had been cut from a farm in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and shipped overnight to Minneapolis, on nineteen refrigerated trucks, driven with the urgency of medical couriers transporting live organs for transplant.
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sp; “The history of every nation is eventually written in the way it cares for its soil,” Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936, and so it is with the nation of baseball. The first shovel in the ground at Target Field was a silver spade bolted to a Louisville Slugger.
The soil, more than 90 percent sand, was lovingly tended by Larry DiVito, though the Twins’ spring training home at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, Florida, was still tilled by eighty-year-old George Toma, who became a head groundskeeper as a seventeen-year-old high school senior in 1947, for the Indians farm club in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There, he studied under Cleveland’s head groundskeeper, Emil Bossard, who had begun his own career right here, in the Twin Cities, in 1913, as groundskeeper for the St. Paul Saints. In the century that followed—from 1913 in St. Paul to 2012 in Fort Myers—there was an unbroken line from Bossard to Toma, the Evers-to-Chance of Twins ballpark grass.
Bossard was the son of a Swiss plumber who immigrated to Minnesota in 1892 and opened a hardware store in St. Paul, where Emil was put to work. While delivering lumber to Lexington Park, the boy was recruited to fill in for an inebriated groundskeeper and remained for twenty-three years. In 1936, Bill Veeck brought him to Cleveland, where Bossard and his crew wore straw hats thrown onto the field by Indians fans celebrating home runs. They should have been wearing Indians uniforms, for Bossard’s crew accounted—by Veeck’s own reckoning—for a dozen victories a year.
When sinkerballer Bob Lemon pitched, Bossard softened the infield, saturating the dirt in front of home plate so that any ball driven into it would quickly die. When the speedy White Sox were in town, he loosened the dirt around first base, depriving runners of a fast start. Teams that played small ball found it difficult to bunt: The ball kept rolling foul, Bossard having peaked the base paths.