by Kent Hrbek
So we heard a lot of questions that spring like, “Are you worried this is your last year together?” or “Do you feel pressure to produce this year to keep the nucleus intact?”
I guess in our hearts all of us knew it was put-up or shut-up time. We were a small-market club, we’d been together for a while, and it was time to win, if we were ever going to win. But honestly, other than reporters asking us about this possibly being our last year together, I never thought about it. That would be negative thinking, and like I said, my mind just doesn’t work that way.
Of course, sometimes people wonder just how my mind does work.
The Snub
One of those times came when the All-Star team was picked for 1987. We were leading the AL West by two games at the break, and when they announced the AL team, we had one player—Kirby Puckett—selected as a reserve.
I’ve always been a guy who speaks his mind, and I felt we didn’t get any respect. One pick. That’s all the Twins ever got in those years, one pick. It didn’t matter if you had two guys having great years, we just got one pick.
So I said I didn’t want to go to any more All-Star Games. And I stuck to my guns. I played in the All-Star Game as a rookie in ’82 and never went to another one. Whether me saying I didn’t want to go was the reason, I don’t know. And I really don’t care. My goal when I started playing was not to make the All-Star team. My goal was to win the World Series.
I never saw the All-Star Game as that big of a deal. When I played, it was an ego thing to go. Now it’s big money because players get bonuses for being selected to the team. I went to one, got to swing the bat once, and popped out. Big deal. It didn’t mean that much to me then, and it doesn’t mean much to me now.
Sure, it’d be nice to be considered an All-Star if you were picked by your peers. But as long as the fans are picking, it’s off-the-wall. The guys who get picked are the big names who always get picked, or the guys who play in the big cities.
The File Caper
The amazing thing about winning the division in ’87 was that we did it with just two quality starting pitchers: Bert Blyleven and Frank Viola. We spent most of the year trying to piece together a starting rotation and had 12 different pitchers start games. Les Straker emerged as our No. 3 starter, although he had only an 8–10 record and 4.37 ERA.
Our front office tried just about everything to fill out the rotation, including mid-season trades that brought us veterans Joe Niekro and future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. They were a bit past their prime, combining for a 5–14 record and a 6.39 ERA. But Joe gave us one of the seasons most memorable moments during an August 3 start at California.
Most people remember the video clip: the ump, Steve Palermo, went to the mound to check out possible scuffing of the ball, and as Joe pulled out his back pocket, a file flew out. Joe ended up getting tossed out of the game and suspended for scuffing the ball.
Joe did scuff the ball, but not with a file. In fact, I could never figure out why Joe got kicked out for having a file in his pocket. Does anyone really think he pulled a file out on the mound and started sanding the ball? Of course not. But the real story never came out. Joe was scuffing the ball, but it was with a little piece of sandpaper that he had superglued to the bottom of his palm on his glove hand. No one ever knew it was there. When an ump looked at Joes hands, he’d hold the top of his hands up, then quick flip them over and back. You could never see the little flesh-colored piece of sandpaper on his palm.
I actually knew something was up the whole game because every time I’d catch the ball for the final out of an inning, the ump would ask for the ball. They usually don’t do that and instead let you just roll it back to the mound. Well, one inning when I got back to the dugout, the first base ump was walking down the line and showed the home plate ump the ball. I went over to tell Joe, who was sitting in the runway sharpening his nails with the file. He did that between almost every inning to give him a better grip on the knuckleball that was his bread-and-butter pitch. I told him to be careful, and his response was like, “Oh, sure. OK.” He wasn’t going to listen to me, a kid who’d been in the league for about five years.
Joe ended up having some fun with it, going on the David Letterman Show wearing a belt sander. Joe was really a neat guy, and it was a shame when he died unexpectedly in 2006. To me, Joe and Steve Carlton were like grandfathers on the team. I went out for dinner with the two of them one night in Detroit, and the chance to listen to their stories and talk baseball was something I’ll never forget.
Puck’s Big Weekend
The season itself was a roller-coaster. We had a great home record, but for some reason, we couldn’t seem to win on the road. We had a five-game lead over Oakland in mid-August. Then we went on the road and lost six straight at Detroit and Boston. On the night of August 28, we’d lost nine of 10 games and were in a virtual tie with the A’s for first place (66–62 for Oakland, 67–63 for us).
The next two games at Milwaukee belonged to Kirby Puckett. We beat the Brewers 12–3 and then 10–6. Puck was 10-for-11 with seven runs scored and six RBIs. He was 6-for-6 in the second game.
By the time we left Milwaukee, we had a one-game lead that we never relinquished. A lot of people point to Puck’s weekend as the key point of the season. It was certainly one of the key points and one of the greatest hitting weekends I’ve seen. But I have a hard time pointing to any one thing as a key in ’87 because that was a team with an incredible amount of unsung heroes.
We went crazy when we clinched the AL West Division title in Texas in 1987. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Our middle infield combination of Steve Lombardozzi and Greg Gagne never received much credit, but they were as important as anybody. This will surprise some people, but to me, Lombo was the best second baseman I ever played with. He was better defensively than Chuck Knoblauch, I think. Gags was a better shortstop than a lot of people think, but he never got any recognition.
Well, I shouldn’t say that. Gags got attention every time our training staff would do the body fat tests. I used to say that Gags had this chicken skin. You could take his skin and just pull it out until you could hardly believe how far it came. He used to measure about four. I always had the highest, about 19. No one told me the low score won. But that was always Gags, with that chicken skin, the thick eastern accent, and the smile with those big old teeth of his.
There wasn’t a better player than Puck on the team, and that weekend was unforgettable, but that weekend didn’t win us the division. It’s almost fitting that Lombo broke a 3–3 tie with an eighth-inning single the night we clinched the division with a 5–3 win at Texas. Lombo had a ton of big hits down the stretch.
We won it as a team of 25 guys. Twenty-five guys who loved to burn shoelaces and put shaving cream in telephones. That’s what made us what we were in 1987.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Postseason
AFTER WE BEAT TEXAS, WE SPRAYED champagne and beer for the first time as major leaguers. And then we promptly went out and lost the final five games of the regular season, which had people wondering about the importance of momentum in the postseason. The answer: no importance whatsoever. All we proved down the stretch was that its tough to play with a hangover.
Most people overlooked us at the start of postseason because of our record. But that record was largely due to our inability to fill out a five-man rotation. When we got into the playoffs, we had Bert Blyleven and Frank Viola as our one-two punch, with Les Straker as No. 3. Because we didn’t need a No. 4 or 5, we were a much better postseason team than we were during the regular season.
We showed it immediately, beating the Tigers two straight at home. Gary Gaetti hit a pair of homers in the first game, and we rallied from a 5–4 deficit with four runs in the bottom of the eighth to win 8–5. In the second game, I homered off Jack Morris in the fifth inning, which helped Bert Blyleven pitch us to a 6–3 victory.
We learned those two games that we were going to have on
e of the greatest postseason home-field advantages in baseball history. I can still remember the feeling I had walking downstairs to go onto the field for Game 1 of the playoffs. The place was electric. And once the game started, the noise was so incredible it made the hair stand up on the back of your neck. I was so jacked up to play in that atmosphere that I didn’t even feel like my feet were touching the ground when I ran out to first to start the game. I had never heard anything like the noise in the Dome those first two games, and I’m not sure anyone else in baseball ever had, either.
True to our regular-season form, we went to Detroit for Game 3 and promptly lost 7–6 when Pat Sheridan hit a two-run homer off Jeff Reardon in the bottom of the eighth. Reardon showed me something after that game when he walked out of the trainer’s room to talk with reporters. He could have sat in there icing his arm and blown everybody off. But Term was a stand-up guy.
All year Tom Kelly had been telling us to take it one game at a time, don’t get too hung up on worrying about the future. That became ingrained in us, and when we lost Game 3, it was just one game. Don’t get too high, don’t get too low—that was another one of his sayings. We came back and won Game 4 behind Frank Viola 5–3 and took the series with Blyleven beating the Tigers 9–5 in Game 5.
The Homecoming
After we celebrated in the Tiger Stadium clubhouse, we got on a charter and headed back to Minnesota. They announced on the flight back that there was going to be a little celebration at the Dome, and they wanted us to bus down there. I’ll be honest: None of us were too excited when we heard about it. We were all tired, and we wanted nothing more than to get in our cars and go home and get some rest before the World Series. But it was mandatory, so what are you going to do?
The first estimate we heard on the flight was that 5,000 people might be there. By the time we landed they said traffic was building around the Dome, and there might be 10,000 people, maybe even 15,000. By the time we were onboard the bus to the Dome, they told us there would be 20,000 people. The ride from the airport to the Dome is about 10 miles, and by the time we were halfway there, there was already traffic congestion. We looked around at each other and couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, but we were starting to get a pretty good idea.
They ended up sending a police escort out to meet us, which was a good thing because the traffic around the Dome was crazy. There were people jamming the sidewalks as we pulled into the back loading dock of the Dome. That allowed us to go in the back security entrance and enter the field together through a huge door in the back of the Dome that looked like a giant garage door. The door opened up, and I don’t think any of us were prepared for what we saw.
That whole building was packed. And we heard there were more people out on the sidewalk who couldn’t even get in. We walked in and the stands were a blue haze—I don’t think anyone was monitoring the no-smoking ban in the Dome—with Homer Hankies everywhere. We looked at each other in amazement, all of us thinking the same thing: “What the hell is going on here?” We got out on the field, and I looked over at G-Man, and he was balling his eyes out. A bunch of guys had tears in their eyes. It was kind of an ad-lib night, with a few speeches, but mostly fans cheering and us waving. Joe Niekro flipped open his back pocket, and a file flew out. At least he wasn’t wearing his belt sander, although had he been given the chance to swing by his home he probably would have.
There are a lot of guys on the team who rate that as one of the most special memories of the entire season, including the World Series. We had more than 50,000 people show up for an impromptu nighttime celebration. I’m not sure you’ll ever see anything like that again. We were kind of like a small town experiencing something for the first time. It’s probably what it’s like in a little northern Minnesota town when the high school is going to its first state hockey tournament.
I think part of what made it special was that Twins fans had watched the core of our team grow up together. They’d watched us lose 102 games as rookies and watched us lose a whole lot more games than we won over the next four seasons. We literally grew up before our fans’ eyes. And I think there was a special bond that two of the starters—Timmy Laudner and myself—were native Minnesotans. If you live in New York or Chicago, you probably wouldn’t understand that. But we’re a little provincial, a little small town, in stuff like that. There’s nothing like being “one of us.”
The other part that made it special was that we had a chance to be a part of Minnesota sports history. Minnesota had been to the 1965 World Series and lost to the Dodgers but hadn’t been back since. The old Minneapolis Lakers had won a bunch of NBA titles in the 1950s, but that was before the NBA became big-time. The Vikings had lost four Super Bowls under Bud Grant. Minnesota sports fans were starting to develop an inferiority complex. We had a chance to be the first Minnesota team to ever win a major sports championship. And our fans were ready.
Prelude to a Grand Slam
I can condense the first five games of the World Series against St. Louis pretty quickly: We won the first two at home, then went to St. Louis and got swept in three games. It was the typical pattern for us: Win at home, lose on the road.
Games 6 and 7 of the Series were so memorable that the first five games were pretty much overshadowed. That was certainly the case for me. I didn’t do much at the plate, but then I didn’t do much against the Tigers in the American League playoffs, either. I was 3-for-20 against Detroit and 4-for-17 in the first five games against the Cardinals, which left me on the wrong side of .200 for the postseason.
I can’t say we felt a real sense of urgency coming back to the Dome for Games 6 and 7. That might sound a little dumb because we knew if we lost one more game, we were done. But we were coming home to the building where we’d played so well all year, and we just had a confidence that things were going to be OK.
Having said that, I think most people still figured we were the underdog. We had Les Straker starting in Game 6. Les was a 28-year-old rookie who had never pitched in a setting like this. Not only that, but the day before his start he told reporters that he had never started on three days’ rest as a professional, and that his right elbow was hurting. That angered Tom Kelly, who had a pregame shouting match with the local reporter who wrote the Straker story. It didn’t help when the reporter told Kelly that the same story had appeared in every major daily in America. TK wasn’t overly fond of a lot of local media, and a lot of the local media felt the same way about him. It was a tenuous relationship at best, and this time, TK felt he’d been made to look bad. Turned out the reports on Straker were pretty accurate. Les lasted three innings, and we were down 5–2 entering the bottom of the fifth.
But all year it seemed like if we needed a two-run homer, someone would step up and hit a two-run homer. This time it was Don Baylor, who we picked up in late August to give us a right-handed power hitter off the bench. Don hadn’t hit a home run as a Twin until he hit a two-run shot in the fifth to tie the game. A couple hitters later Steve Lombardozzi singled in the go-ahead run for a 6–5 lead.
The Grand Slam
We had a chance to take control of the game in the bottom of the sixth when we loaded the bases with one out. But Tom Brunansky popped out against Bob Forsch for the second out. The Cardinals brought in veteran lefty Ken Dayley to face me.
I hadn’t been hitting for crap the whole postseason. When you’re struggling like that, Randy Bush would always tell people to swing hard, just in case you hit it. But when I looked toward the dugout at the plate against Dayley, Kelly was making an “S” sign across his chest. Everyone knew what that meant: Don’t try to be Superman. Just get the bat on the ball.
That’s probably as much as anyone was hoping for, since I was 1-for-14 in the Series against lefties as I came to the plate to face Dayley. As I stepped into the batter’s box, I told myself that if the first pitch was a strike, I was swinging. It was, and I did.
My grand slam in Game 6 gave us the momentum we needed to beat the Cardina
ls. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Dayley threw me a fastball, and I was lucky enough to get my bat on the ball and hit it 439 feet over the center-field fence for a grand slam. That was by far the biggest home run I ever hit.
I still think it might have been one of the most special home runs anyone ever hit, for the simple reason that I hit it playing for the Minnesota Twins. That at-bat was what I’d dreamed of since I was a little kid. I hit that home run a million times for the Twins in my backyard playing Wiffle ball. And now I had done it for real, for the team I grew up watching. There aren’t a lot of stories like that.
To this day, people stop me on the street to tell me where they were when I hit my Game 6 grand slam. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
I still have people stop me and tell me what they were doing the night I hit that grand slam. One guy told me he was at his wedding reception, and I pretty much put a stop to the wedding dance because everyone was gathered around a TV in the bar, and the whole place went nuts. Another guy told me he was out driving his tractor in South Dakota and can still remember standing up and cheering. Things like that I still get all the time.
That home run gave us the momentum, and we went on to an 11–5 victory and a showdown Game 7.
After the Slam
My buddy Wade Boelter was at Game 6, and he and his wife, Natalie, and Jeanie and I went out after the game. I’ve known Wade since junior high, and we were the best man at each other’s wedding. And now he and his wife live down the block from me. We left the Dome about 7:30 that night and stopped for dinner at Fletchers on Lake Minnetonka. Jeanie and I ate at Fletchers quite a bit because I was still living on the lake at the time.