by Kent Hrbek
No way was I prepared to start a career. Heck, the flight to Florida for Instructional League was the first time I’d ever been on a plane. I suppose it’s a lot like kids leaving for college their freshman year. You’ve got to get to know some people and take your mind off of home.
No matter where I played, I never forgot how much I wanted to get back home. I always had this thing stuck in the back of my mind: Boy, if I can make it to the big leagues, I’m going home. Who knows, if I had been drafted by another organization, maybe I’d never even have made it to the big leagues because I wouldn’t have had that same drive to get there.
Even though I was homesick that fall, I did love going to the ballpark. It didn’t take me long to realize that as jobs go, it wasn’t too bad to go to the ballpark in the morning and be done in time to head to the ocean for fishing in the afternoon. And, eventually, I learned how to wash my own clothes and feed myself, which has always been pretty important to me.
The two guys who probably pulled me through and helped me understand the game more than anybody right away were Gary Ward and my fishing buddy Johnny Castino.
Gary was a father figure for me. I think that’s probably why they had me room with him. It’s funny looking back. Gary was a black guy, and I had never spent any time with black folks. Not that that’s good or bad. It’s just a fact. There just weren’t many blacks in Bloomington back then. I think we had one black student at Kennedy High School.
But at the time, Gary was a seasoned minor-league veteran. He later came up and had a couple good years with the Twins. Back then, he told me how to do this and that and how to get ready for a game.
Johnny was more a peer, and I idolized him for the way he played the game. Despite the little fishing mishap off the jetty, I got through Instructional League. I don’t think anyone would have predicted they’d be naming baseball fields after me in Bloomington, but I made it.
On to the Minors
Next stop was my first minor-league spring training camp in Melbourne. That’s where I first met Tom Kelly, also known as TK, who would become my manager with the Twins. Our first meeting is something we’d both like to forget.
We were playing a scrimmage game after workouts, and I swung and fouled a ball off the third-base line. My cleats stuck in the dirt, and my leg didn’t turn on my follow-through. I felt something pop in my knee, and I fell down in the batter’s box. TK came running over to the field, and I grabbed his ankle because I was in terrible pain.
It turned out that my kneecap was dislocated. I hadn’t even played in a game yet, and they sent me back home to rehabilitate it. Nice start to my pro career.
If you’re keeping score, I’d pissed off the big-league manager, Gene Mauch, by slicing up my ankle fishing in the Instructional League and blown out my knee before the first game in spring training. I’m guessing Calvin Griffith was wondering whether he could get his $30,000 back about then.
I spent about three months at home rehabilitating my knee, and in late June, I headed to Elizabethton to play in half-season rookie league ball. I lasted 17 games before suffering the same injury. Once again, I was at the plate. I swung and hit a ball into the right-center field gap. But my knee popped, and I hit the dirt instead of heading to first base. My teammate, Brad Carlson, was on second, and I knocked him in. He touched home, stopped, looked down at me and said, “Yo, Hrbie, what the hell’s wrong with you?” I’m guessing Brad didn’t end up in medical school after his pro career ended.
Check out my stats in those 17 games: .203 batting average, one home run, and 15 strikeouts. Great first impression.
This time they sent me home, and I had surgery on the knee to tighten the muscles around the kneecap and keep it from popping in and out. At that point I was not as worried about my paltry numbers at Elizabethton as I was about getting my knee back together.
I never had any knee problems during my high school career. After the surgery, the Twins’ doctors and I talked about what might have been causing the problem. We decided that I should try wearing rubber cleats, not steel spikes like everyone else. The thinking was that the steel cleats were getting caught in the dirt and were somehow preventing my knees from turning on my swing. So the rest of my career I wore rubber cleats, kind of like a soccer shoe. Maybe it did have something to do with the steel cleats because it never happened again.
Here I am in my first minor-league uniform when I played for Rookie League Elizabethton in 1979. Nice curls, huh? Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
But from that point on, my knees ached, along with most of the rest of my body. My whole career it seems like something always ached—ankles, shoulders, knees, everything hurt. I had wrist problems from jamming my hands when I slid. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. I learned to deal with it as part of the job.
Overall, though, things took a turn for the better after the second surgery. I went back to spring training in 1980 at Melbourne, started doing pretty well, and got sent to the Wisconsin Rapids, a Class-A farm club. I thought that was a great deal, because it was less than four hours from home and also had a bunch of good fishing lakes. At that point I was thinking that life is pretty good. I soon learned otherwise.
Tough Love
Enter Rick Stelmaszek, Wisconsin Rapids manager. Stelly was barely older than we were, but he was the toughest, roughest kid I ever met in my life up until then. He was a South Chicago guy from the baddest part of town—I think they made that song up about him. I wasn’t too fond of him back then, which is putting it mildly.
Now, I look back and realize that Stelly was just trying to make me a better player, even if I couldn’t see that at the time. Stelly wasn’t a guy who spent a lot of time worrying about whether his players liked him.
I remember there were a couple games we had a tough time fielding the ball in the infield, which isn’t surprising in minor-league parks because the balls take some weird bounces. Well, Stelly had a plan to get us more familiar with those bounces. He had all the infielders go to our positions, lie down on our stomachs, and he hit us grounders so we could watch the way the ball bounced. Now I’m not talking average grounders. He hit rockets at our heads, and we had to put our gloves up in front of our faces to protect ourselves.
My birthday is May 21, near the start of the season for us. I had a little birthday party and ended up falling on my face, busting up my chin and forehead, and cutting my lip. It happens when you’re 20. I still have a scar on top of my lip from that one. You can probably tell I’d had a little too much to drink at my own party. So the next day when I got to the ballpark, I went in to see Stelly and said, “Hey, I’m in pretty rough shape today.” Stelly looked up at my face, with all those cuts and bruises, saw my bloodshot eyes, and said: “You’re in there for nine of the finest, kid.” True to his word, Stelly made sure I played the entire game.
Of course, Stelly went on to be the longest tenured coach in Twins history. He was at 26 years in the big leagues in 2006. I had him as a coach with the Twins my whole career. And I’ll tell you something: He’s a puppy now compared to what he was like back then. As I said, I didn’t like the guy much when he was my manager. Stelly passed away in 2017, and I can honestly say I came to love the guy because I look back and say, “This guy taught me a helluva lot about baseball.” I think that’s why he coached in the majors as long as he did. I’m sure there are a lot of scientists or mathematicians who hated their high school science and math teachers but look back and say they’re the reason for where they are today. I feel like that about Stelly.
The Trip
My career got on track that summer with the Wisconsin Rapids. I batted .267 with 19 homers and 76 RBIs in 115 games and walked more (61) than I struck out (54). I played in the all-star game, and I think my home-run total was up there with anyone in the league.
It was also the summer I became friends with Gary Gaetti, who, as the years went on, became my closest friend in baseball.
I met G-Man at Elizabethton the year before,
but I wasn’t around long enough to get to know him too well. Besides, Gary was already married, and when you’re there for as short a time as I was, you don’t really get a chance to know the married guys.
In the spring of 1980 we were both sent to the Wisconsin Rapids. I got there early to find a place to stay. The day of our first game, we were all wondering, “Where’s G-Man?” Well, he drove from Melbourne with his wife, and on the day of the game, he pulled into the parking lot. He had this old pickup, his wife, Debby, sitting next to him, and all their belongings in the back covered by an old sheet that was flapping away in the wind. Gary, as he usually did, looked all scruffy because he’s a guy who can grow a full beard in about half an hour. I watched that truck drive into the lot and I was thinking, “These people look like the Clampetts.” Welcome to the minor leagues.
The next spring, I climbed in my Ford pickup truck—paid for with the money I got from the Twins because no way was I going back to school—and headed to Melbourne for spring training. I was figuring I would make the AA team at Orlando—seemed logical to go from Class A Wisconsin Rapids to AA after a good year—and it was going to be great because I would have my pickup truck with me in Florida for the whole summer. Plus, I knew G-Man was going to be on that team, along with Tim Laudner, my old high school rival.
It was all perfect, except for the fact that TK, the manager at Orlando, came up to me two days before the other Class-A team, Visalia, was supposed to break camp. TK told me, “Hrbie we’ve got some bad news. We’re going to keep Shane Hallberg to play first base at AA because he’s older and has been around longer.”
So there I was in Melbourne, Florida, with a four-wheel-drive pickup, and I’ve got to be in Visalia, California, in three days to meet the team. What are you going to do? I jumped in and started driving.
Fortunately, Scotty Madison, a catcher who later spent some time in the big leagues with the Tigers, decided to ride along with me. That was a big advantage, since I was still pretty green when it came to traveling. Heck, I’d never even seen most of the country that we were about to drive through.
Scotty went to Vanderbilt University, and I’m told he could have been the mayor of Nashville because he knew everybody in the whole county, and a whole lot of other places as well. The first night, we stayed in Tallahassee, where he was from originally. Then we drove until we were hallway across Texas and slept on the side of the road because Scotty didn’t know anybody in the middle of Texas, which was a little surprising. The next night, we stayed with the dean of Arizona State University, who was a friend of Scotty’s family, and we got up the next morning and made it the rest of the way.
The next day, we opened the season in Visalia. When you’re young, you don’t even think about being tired. Now I’d be thinking, “What the hell did I do that for? I’m beat.” Back then, it just seemed like one more adventure. But looking back, I’m awful glad I had Scotty with me.
California Dream Season
We had an awesome team at Visalia. We had four guys with 100 RBIs and were running away with the league title. Guys like Scotty Madison, Jim Weaver (who they called Dream Weaver), Jimmy Christensen, a pitcher named Paul Voigt, and I had great seasons. And Dick Phillips was a veteran manager who let us go out and play. After a year of Stelly, that was a welcome change.
But there were some tough times off the field, and not just because it was the summer. I learned my dad had ALS. I think I was making maybe $500 a month, and I had to wire home for money a couple times. I was living with a kid named Kevin Williams, and we lived off fried egg sandwiches because bread and eggs were about as cheap as you could go. One day I came home from the grocery with a dozen eggs and dropped them on the kitchen floor. I almost started crying. There was my dinner for the next week, and I had no money.
We learned to make do. That included beer, which by then had become a favorite beverage of mine. One night we pulled into the stadium at Reno early for batting practice, and several full beer kegs were sitting outside the door of the stadium, waiting for the concession crew. My buddy, Rick Austin, who we called Woofie, was a catcher on the team. We saw the beer kegs and told Woofie to empty out his catchers bag, put a keg in, and hide it in the back of the bus. We got back to Visalia that night and had a nice party. The beer was a little foamy from the bumpy ride back, but we made do.
Woofie was the kind of character you met in the minors. We lived together for the short time I was in Elizabethton, then roomed together the next year at Wisconsin Rapids. Stelly gave him the name Woofie. Rick had one speed, which was forward.
He was a stocky, short-fingered, muscular guy. He had a cup of coffee in the Twins major-league spring training camp one year because we needed extra catchers with all the pitchers throwing.
I spent a lot of time with him those first three years, and when he didn’t make it to the majors, it was tough. It’s a funny thing looking back at those days in the minors. You’d see some guys you thought were awesome, and they never made it to the bigs. You’d see other guys who you didn’t think had a shot, and they ended up having long careers.
When the writing was on the wall for Woofie, I think he had a pretty good head about it. Life went on. You learned that in the minors. And Rick was one of those guys who, if he made $500 a month, wouldn’t have a pot to piss in or if he made $500 million, wouldn’t have a pot to piss in, either. Woofie would spend it, no matter what he made. That was the Woof Dog.
The Call
When Dick Phillips told me I was going up to play for the Twins, he told me not to play that night but to get home and pack up all my stuff so I could get out the next morning. What they did let me do was take a microphone before the game and speak to my teammates and the fans. I kind of made a mess of that.
I remember going out on the field, taking the microphone, and saying, “I hate to say it, but I’m upset leaving you guys here because we were going to win the league and the playoffs. Guys, go out and win this shit for me.” Well, everyone kind of went “Ohhhh, nooooo, get the microphone from him,” which they did.
By the end of the regular season, basically the whole team had gotten called up to another level, and Visalia didn’t win the playoffs. I felt bad about that, because when we were all together, it was a heckuva team.
But I wasn’t too sad to be leaving. I mean, I had achieved my biggest goal: I was heading home to play in the big leagues. It was surreal, being back at the apartment packing up to leave. The next day Dick Phillips gave me a ride to the airport. He said, “Kid, I’m going to buy you your first big-league cocktail,” which was nice, except it was 10 in the morning. Dick was known to pound a few. He had his cocktail, I had a beer, and then I got on the plane to New York City for the start of my major-league career.
CHAPTER FIVE
Welcome to the Big Time
Seeing Old Friends
It’s funny in baseball how things seem to go in circles. When I walked into the clubhouse in New York before my first game, about the first two people I saw were Johnny Castino and Gary Ward, neither of whom I had visited with since Instructional League.
I’d seen them from a distance in spring camp, but we were always on different fields. The A-ball guys don’t hang with the AAA guys. If you’re not good enough to be on their field, you don’t hang with them. There’s a pecking order in pro ball.
But that night in Yankee Stadium was like being back in the Instructional League with them. They gave me the best advice that anybody in this game ever gave me. Cas came over first and said, “Hrbie, it’s great to see you. Just remember this game is the same game that we were playing when we were together before. It’s still just baseball.” Then Gary came over and said, “Great to see you, man. I’m happy for you and proud of you. But just remember, this is the same game you’ve played your whole life.”
Right away, my mind was eased. I was 21 years old, never played a game above A-ball, and I was in Yankee Stadium. I’d never even been to a big-league ballpark other than old Met Stadium
to watch the Twins as a kid. I’d never been to New York City, period. But I took their advice to heart. This was the same game I had been playing since swinging at Wiffle balls in the Meyers’ backyard.
First Impressions
I wasn’t blown away when I first walked into Yankee Stadium. There was an aura, but the hallway leading to the clubhouse, and the clubhouse itself, had a low ceiling. I guess I expected bigger things. Of course, I hadn’t seen the field yet. And after talking to Johnny and Gary, I spent about two seconds putting my uniform on. I just wanted to get down onto the field, where I figured I’d feel more at home.
When I walked onto the field, I was in awe. One second I’m at Visalia playing in a stadium that today I can’t even remember the name of, the next thing I’m at Yankee Stadium. Yeah, the clubhouse in New York might have felt like a dungeon, but walking onto the field was different than anything I had ever experienced. This was “The House That Ruth Built.” You kind of felt like you were in the place where baseball had been invented. To this day, every time I walk into Yankee Stadium, I get that same feeling. It’s a different feeling than any other ballpark.
Tommy John was the Yankees’ starter that first game. I was 1-for-4 during the first nine innings, beating out an infield hit down the first-base line. Against a crafty lefty like John, I’ll take that. At least I knew I wasn’t going to be oh-for my big-league career.
One thing I remember from that game is Reggie Jackson getting to first base, looking at my name on the back of my uniform and saying, “How do you say that, kid?” Then he said, “Welcome to the big leagues, kid.” Pretty nice, from a guy of his stature.
Back home in Bloomington there were parties everywhere. My parents had a group of people over, gathered around the TV. And, as I later learned, a bunch of my high school buddies had parties going on too, watching the ballgame.