Tales from the Minnesota Twins Dugout

by Kent Hrbek

  All right, I’ll admit it: Basically, I just wanted to sit around and do nothing whenever I felt like it. I certainly didn’t want to be a hanger-on in baseball. I didn’t like those guys when I played because to me they just took up space. Let some kid have a chance. I’m sure if I’d have wanted to keep playing, there would have been some team that would have picked me up and shoved me out there a couple more years.

  No way that would have compared to what I experienced in retiring. The first thing I did when I retired was buy a 30-foot camper trailer and haul it down and park it at a campground at Lake Elysian south of the Twin Cities where my in-laws and friends had been going for years. I’m sure people wondered why we didn’t buy a million-dollar home on Gull Lake or some other prestigious area. But that campground was where our family and friends were, and that meant more to us than owning some fancy place.

  I just liked the atmosphere of that campground. I walked from fire to fire, drinking beer, telling stories and listening to the Twins on the radio. That’s living. I’d been there before, at the end of seasons, and I knew just about everyone in the campground. After I retired, we spent a lot of time there, and to this day the camper is still parked there.

  The other thing I did the summer I retired was get together with a bunch of my buddies and rent a house boat for a fishing trip on Rainy Lake up by the Canadian border. That was something I’d always wanted to do, but I’d never had a chance because of baseball.

  Raising Money

  I could keep busy when I wanted to. For the first several years, Jeanie and I were still heading a charity golf tournament for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, something we had started doing while I was still playing. It was basically us, along with three or four others, organizing the event. I made a lot of the phone calls and spent a lot of time on the computer because I wanted to be hands-on.

  If someone asked who was in cart 3A, I knew who it was. I had been to enough golf tournaments where you ask who was in 3A, and they didn’t know they had a 3A. Running the tournament could have been a full-time job, and about three years ago, we decided to go a different route.

  Doug Mientkiewicz had hosted a fishing tournament, and when he left, we took that over. It’s a little more up my alley than golf. Between the two of them—golf and fishing—we’ve raised about $4 million for ALS, which is something we’re proud of. It’s always been important to me to fight ALS because it claimed my dad at such a young age. I’ve tried, over the years, to stay involved with ALS and with Bloomington. And, of course, the Twins.

  I’m also employed by the Twins as a special assistant, which basically means I lobbied for the new stadium and shook a bunch of hands. Kind of following in the footsteps of Tony Oliva again.

  New Venture

  About a year after I retired, a friend of mine, Eric Gislason, a TV reporter I had met playing for the Twins, asked if Ed ever thought of doing an outdoor show. I told him it sounded fun, but it also sounded like a lot of work, and I just wanted to retire.

  It took about eight years for Eric to bring the subject up again. It sounded a little better this time. He had some people lined up interested in doing the camera work, so the basic structure was there. I talked to Jeanie at the time, and she encouraged me to give it a try. The show was Kent Hrbek Outdoors, which ran from 2006 until 2010. We filmed about 17 shows a year, and were on network TV in most Minnesota markets, plus several others in the Upper Midwest. We even had a station in Oregon that carried the show.

  Eric Gislason and I started up our outdoor show called Kent Hrbek Outdoors. Courtesy of Kent Hrbek Outdoors

  I enjoyed it, because it’s a different kind of work than going to the ballpark and putting on a jock and spitting tobacco.

  I’m not a big book learner, but it gave me a chance to learn a few things about the TV industry, and I found it to be interesting. I even learned some of the ins and outs of selling, and watched them edit and put the show together. When you’re part of a small production company, you learn to be a jack-of-all-trades.

  Eric and I planned the shows and set up trips, and I got a lot of the guests lined up through contacts I made playing ball.

  Over the years we had on Joe Mauer, Bobby Knight, Ron Gardenhire, Minnesota governors Tim Pawlenty and Jesse Ventura, South Dakota governor Mike Rounds, plus several former Vikings like Wally Hilgenberg and Mike Morris.

  I also got Torii Hunter, although I don’t talk a lot about that one. Torii’s the closest we’ve come to a disaster. He stumbled and almost fell out of a boat fishing in southern Minnesota. That’s all I needed, to bring Torii into the clubhouse with a broken ankle. I’ve already been down that road myself as a player.

  Highlights

  As you might guess, I’ve had some great experiences filming Kent Hrbek Outdoors. I’d have to say the best trip was in the summer of 2005 when we went fishing in Alaska. The fishing was fantastic, but the scenery of the country was about 90 percent of what made it so special.

  The most unique trip was to Finland with the Rapala fishing people to tour their home base in Finland. Of course we found time to do some fishing there, too, and it felt a lot like fishing in northern Minnesota.

  Mostly, were looking for good stories to tell. I watched The American Sportsman with Curt Gowdy as a kid, and I loved it. I’m not saying that’s what our show is, but we try not to be the typical fishing show. I’m not sitting in a boat telling people how to catch bass, or what bait to use. We’re telling stories about the people we’re with.

  The best stories we’ve done, to me, involve kids. I thought we had a real good show about a camp in South Dakota for kids who are deaf. The camp is funded by proceeds from pheasant hunters, and it’s a great use of the money. It was really fun to see the smiles on the kids’ faces at the camp, getting a chance to swim and fish. To me, that’s the kind of story we like to tell. Something with an outdoors theme that’s heartwarming.

  We’re always on the lookout for stories that are a little offbeat. I thought one of the cool stories we did was to go ice fishing on Mille Lacs with Eddie Lyback. His mom and dad started renting ice houses for fishing on his end in 1954. All they do is ice fishing, nothing in the summer.

  Eddie’s mom, Phyllis Lyback, who is now 86, is still up there. She wrote a book a few years ago called 50,000 Holes—great title for a book about ice fishing. The book is about their experience running the business since moving up from Minneapolis years ago.

  You never know where ideas are going to come from. We just did a story that came off an email from a guy named Karry Kyllo in Grand Forks. He said he loved to catch catfish in the Red River and wanted to know if we’d like to come up and give it a try. We had no idea who the guy was. He could have been a serial killer who was going to wrap the anchor around our legs and throw us in. He turned out to be a great guy, and I learned a ton about the Red River and catching catfish.

  It’s kind of funny now, I’ll get more people who come up to me and say they watch Kent Hrbek Outdoors than say they remember me as a Twin. I’m sure they remember baseball, but the first thing most people mention is the TV show.

  Time Well Spent

  I honestly can’t say that I’ve missed baseball. If I’ve missed it, it’s only been a little bit, and that’s mostly when the playoffs roll around. That’s when I start remembering how special 1987 and 1991 were, not only for our team but for the entire Midwest. But watching sunsets, whether it’s in my backyard or fishing on a lake, has been everything I hoped it would be.

  Even the first year I retired, I didn’t have any feelings that I had made the wrong decision. I went to spring training that first year with Jeanie and Heidi, but I didn’t spend a lot of time at the ballpark. I did stuff with my family, like regular people do when they go to Florida on a family vacation. We went fishing, sat by the pool, and basically did whatever we wanted to.

  I don’t want to make it sound like a hardship, but baseball is tough on families. From the middle of February until the end of September—and
into October if you’re lucky—you’re never around for family functions. You miss family weddings, birthdays, graduations, and just regular get-togethers. I’m certainly not saying that ballplayers don’t get compensated for it, but I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on basically not being able to be a part of your family for about nine months a year.

  Still Around

  I’m still a huge Twins fan, and I’ll always be proud of what the Minnesota Twins accomplished when I played. I’ve been a fan of the club since I was a kid, and now I’m a fan again.

  I’ve had people ask me if I’d ever be interested in coaching or teaching kids how to hit, and the answer is no. Coaching would be right back to the travel and the commitments and missing family time and sunsets.

  As far as teaching hitting, I think I’d be lousy at it. For as long as I can remember, I could hit. I never really had to work at it. In that sense, I was a lot like Tony Oliva, because it came natural. How do you teach that? I’d probably be better teaching kids how to golf, because that’s something I had to work at to become halfway decent.

  When it comes to being involved in baseball, I’m perfectly happy being a special assistant for the Twins. When the club wants me to make an appearance or help out, I’m happy to do it. The Twins have been great keeping people like Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, and me involved with the club. I don’t think many other organizations have tried as hard as the Twins to mix their history with the present.

  To me, the No. 1 guy—Mr. Twin—is Tony Oliva. He’s kept his home in Bloomington all these years and has always been around the club in some capacity. He’s at the ballpark every night, shaking hands and talking with fans. And you can tell by the smiles that he loves it as much as the fans.

  Whenever I look at Tony, it reminds me that the game is more than what you see on the field. It’s about the friendships and the characters that you meet along the way.

  Tony grew up in Cuba, and to this day he still has a hard time with the English language. While I played, Rick Stelmaszek was always writing down Tony-isms, and there were some great ones, many of them involving the telephone, which always was a challenge for Tony’s grasp on English.

  Tony would call the eight o’clock number, instead of 800. One time in New York, Tony got a call in the clubhouse before the game from someone that Tony had promised to leave tickets for but had forgotten to do it. Nobody left more tickets than Tony. We could hear Tony on the phone: “Yeah. Yeah. OK. All right. I sorry. OK.” And when he hung up the phone he turned around and said, “Who was that?” He forgot to ask the name of the guy who called. So he walked around the clubhouse muttering to himself, “Who was I talking to? Who was that?”

  That was classic Tony. What a character.

  There are plenty of characters in baseball—enough of them to have kept me laughing for 14 years in the big leagues.

  The Future

  I can’t say I know exactly what my plans are for the future. We talk about a lot of things. Maybe we’ll pack up someday and move west. I’ve always loved the Black Hills area, and I’ve never spent a lot of times in the mountains further west.

  It sounds ideal, except for one thing: I don’t know if I could ever leave Minnesota. My family is here, my friends and so many of my memories. I don’t know if I could ever leave all that behind.

  And I still love the involvement I have with the Twins, going to the ballpark when I want to and visiting with people. It’s been exciting to see the team move into the new ballpark, Target Field, in 2010. I’ll never get to play there, but there’s going to be a couple World Series banners, and my number is going to be hanging on the outfield wall, right alongside Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett, and Tony Oliva.

  Not bad company.

  The one thing I know is that my friend and agent, Ron Simon, has made it possible for me to live out my dreams. I always told Ron that when I retire, the two things I want are to be able to go through the McDonald’s drive-thru without worrying about paying for my order, and when I’m done eating to be able to get a dozen minnows to go fishing with.

  If I can keep doing that the rest of my life, I’ll be happy.

  Epilogue

  I’VE HAD A LOT OF GOOD things happen to me the past seven years, since we last updated this book. The Twins erected a statue of me at Target Field in 2012 right outside the back entrance of the stadium bar that bears my name. My daughter, Heidi, graduated from high school and enrolled in college. I’ve become a regular at the Twins’ January fantasy camp in Fort Myers, Florida. And in 2017, the club held a 30-year anniversary celebration for our 1987 World Series championship team at Target Field.

  That was kind of a strange weekend, which I’ll get to.

  I’ve always said the ’87 championship team was really special because it was the first major championship for Minnesota professional sports history. Yeah, I know the Lakers won a bunch of NBA titles in the 1940s and ’50s, but that was before professional basketball became what it is today.

  Other than being Minnesota’s first big title, ’87 was special, I’ve always thought, because we had a group of guys—Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Tim Laudner, Randy Bush, Frank Viola, and myself—that came up together as rookies in 1982 and were together when we won in ’87. When I say we came up together, I mean we played together in the minor leagues, we got our butts kicked when we broke into the big leagues—102 losses in 1982—and went through the ringer together in a lot of other ways.

  But we always seemed to remind ourselves that someday we could put it together and win. And that’s what we did. We accomplished our goal, and that was pretty special.

  Seeing everybody again—though technically 30 years later—made me feel as though we’d never left. Just as I would get done laughing and talking to somebody, somebody else would walk in and start telling another story.

  As great as all that was, the weekend was a rough one for me emotionally because my wife, Jeanie, wasn’t there. I should say she was technically still my wife at the time, but we were already headed toward a divorce. That’s the only downside I have to say about anything in my life: I’m not married anymore.

  It’s not something I ever wanted. It’s been hellish, being alone after 32 years. The only thing I got from her as an explanation was that she wasn’t happy anymore and didn’t want to be married. Yet I still did.

  Like I said, that’s been really difficult for me. Thirty-two years of coming in the door and saying “Hi, I’m home.” And now I come in and listen to the house creak.

  Heidi has been my savior through this experience. On her college summer break in 2018 she lived with me while interning with the Twins. To be able to see her at home, and then at the ballpark, has meant more than I can put into words.

  So yeah, a lot of recent changes, not all of them good.

  A NEW LOOK

  One big recent positive is that my overall health has improved. I always made a joke about not working out, or even stretching before games as a player.

  Torii Hunter, who came up to the Twins as a youngster at the end of my career, told a story on TV—he’s a part-time Twins announcer—that when he first met me I wasn’t stretching with everyone else out on the field. He came over and asked me why I wasn’t stretching. I told him, “Have you ever seen a horse race? Have you ever seen a horse stretch?” I was just getting ready in my own way.

  That kind of caught up with me in retirement. At one point I was up to 340 pounds, but some of that was caused by problems with my knee and foot that made it tough to even move. About four years ago I had a partial knee replacement, and I got my foot fixed, too. Before that, I couldn’t even play golf. I let myself go, and that’s my fault.

  After the surgeries, I started working out, playing golf again, walking around the ballpark. I got down to 275 pounds. I was a shell of my former self.

  But it didn’t help save my marriage. My wife just told me it was too late to make a difference in that.

  FAREWELL TO ST
ELLY

  I remember listening to Jim Thome’s Hall of Fame induction speech in 2018 when he talked about how many people were involved in his success. It’s amazing when you think about everyone who had a hand in what I did. For me, a guy like my agent, Ron Simon, took all the financial stuff off my mind and let me focus on baseball.

  On the field, Rick Stelmaszek and Tom Kelly were the two guys who were really important to me—TK for having enough confidence in me to stick me in the lineup everyday, and Stelly for preparing me in the minors. Stelly was my manager when I was 19 at Class A Wisconsin Rapids.

  I guess you could say I played by the seat of my pants when I first met Rick. I wasn’t exactly the model athlete. I certainly didn’t work out like guys do now, and I might have had a little too much fun at times. I really haven’t changed all that much—I’m still a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants guy.

  But Stelly got my career on track during our year together at Wisconsin Rapids. He was a huge part of why I got to where I did as a ballplayer. He was a tough guy from Chicago who didn’t take any guff from his players. He went on to be the longest tenured coach in the majors—one of the Twins coaches during my entire career with the ballclub.

  The truth is that I wasn’t that fond of him when I first met him in Wisconsin Rapids. But that changed as time went on, and I realized the impact he had on me. I was around him so much, I probably knew him better than anyone else I came in contact with in the game.

  Want to know how tough Stelly was? He had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2017 but still came to Target Field to throw out the first pitch of the season. We were just hoping he’d make it to the reunion later that summer, and he did. You could see at the reunion that Stelly was in rough shape. Some of the guys weren’t even sure who he was when they first saw him.

  But as soon as you sat down and started talking to him, it was the same old Stelly. Same old tough Chicago stuff that never left him. Still hard-core Stelly, and that was really cool. We figured he’d only be there for a few innings, but he gutted it out the whole night. He died a few months later.