Minnesota Twins

The Minnesota Twins are a professional baseball team based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Twins are a member of the Central Division of Major League Baseball's American League. From 1982 to the present, the Twins have played in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
The "Twins" name originates from Minnesota's Twin Cities area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. They are sometimes called "the Twinkies" by fans and media (though not by the club), a two-syllable play on "Twins" inspired by the snack cake of the same name. Many fans despise this name, and consider it to be disparaging to the team.
One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1901. Then the Washington Senators (not to be confused with the Washington Senators that were enfranchised in 1961 as a replacement and eventually became the Texas Ranger), the team moved to Minneapolis in 1961, then based in Metropolitan Stadium.

Team history

Washington Senators: 1901 to 1960

For a time, from 1911 to 1933, the Washington Senators were one of the more successful franchises in major-league baseball. The team's rosters included Hall of Famers Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin, Bucky Harris, Heinie Manush and one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Walter Johnson. But the Senators are remembered more for their many years of mediocrity and futility, including six last-place finishes in the 1940s and 1950s.

A losing start for a charter franchise
When the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, the new league placed a team in Washington, a city that had been abandoned by the National League a year earlier. The Washington club, like the old one, would be called the Senators.
The Senators began their history as a consistently losing team, at times so inept that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charley Dryden joked: "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League." The 1904 Senators lost 113 games, and the next season the team’s owners, trying for a fresh start, changed the team’s name to the Nationals. But the Senators name remained widely used by fans and journalists, and the team later restored it as the official name.

The ‘Big Train’ arrives
Whatever the name, the club continued to lose, despite the addition in 1907 of a talented 19-year-old pitcher named Walter Johnson. Raised in rural Kansas, Johnson was a tall, lanky man with long arms who, using a leisurely windup and unusual sidearm delivery, threw the ball faster than anyone had ever seen. Johnson’s breakout year was 1910, when he struck out 313 batters, posted an earned-run average of 1.36 and won 25 games for a losing ball club. Over his 21-year Hall of Fame career, Johnson, called the “Big Train,” would win 417 games and strike out 3,509 batters, a major-league record that would stand for more than 50 years.

New stadium, new manager
In 1911, the Senators’ wooden ballpark burned to the ground, and they replaced it with a modern concrete-and-steel structure on the same location. First called National Park, it later would be renamed after the man who was named Washington manager in 1912 and whose name would become almost synonymous with the ball club: Clark Griffith. A star pitcher with the National League’s Chicago Colts in the 1890s, Griffith jumped to the AL in 1901 and became a successful manager with the Chicago White Sox and New York Highlanders. In 1912, with Griffith taking the Senators’ helm and Johnson winning 33 games, the Senators posted their first winning record: 91-61, good for second place behind the Boston Red Sox. The next year, 1913, was Johnson’s best yet, 36 victories and a minuscule 1.14 ERA, and the Senators again finished second, this time behind the Philadelphia Athletics.
Starting in 1916, the Senators settled back into mediocrity. Griffith, frustrated with the owners’ penny-pinching, bought a controlling interest in the team in 1920 and stepped down as field manager a year later to focus on his duties as team president.

1924: World champions
In 1924, Griffith named 27-year-old second baseman Bucky Harris player-manager. Led by the hitting of Goose Goslin and Sam Rice and a solid pitching staff headlined by the 36-year-old Johnson, the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees.
In the World Series, the underdog Senators faced John McGraw's New York Giants. Despite Johnson losing both his two starts, the Senators kept pace to tie the Series at three games apiece and force Game 7. In the ninth inning with the game tied 3-3, Harris brought in Johnson to pitch on just one day of rest – he had been the losing pitcher in Game 5. Johnson shut out the Giants for four innings, and in the bottom of the 12th, a ground ball bounced over Giant third baseman Fred Lindstrom’s head, scoring Muddy Ruel with the winning run. The Washington Senators were world champions. Some called it the greatest World Series Game 7 ever … until 1991.

Building a winning tradition
The Senators repeated as AL champs in 1925 but lost the Series to Pittsburgh. After Johnson’s retirement in 1927, the Senators endured a few losing seasons until returning to contention in 1930, this time with Johnson as manager. But after the Senators finished third in 1931 and 1932, behind powerful New York and Philadelphia, Griffith fired Johnson, a victim of high expectations.
For his new manager in 1933, Griffith returned to the formula that worked for him in 1924, and 26-year-old shortstop Joe Cronin became player-manager. It worked. Washington posted a 99-53 record and swept to the pennant seven games ahead of the Yankees. But the Senators lost the World Series to the Giants in five games.

Back to the second division
The Senators sank all the way to seventh in 1934. Attendance plunged as well, and after the season Griffith traded Cronin to the Red Sox for journeyman shortstop Lyn Lary and $225,000 in cash (even though Cronin was married to Griffith’s niece, Mildred). Despite the return of Harris as manager in 1935-42 and 1950-54, Washington remained mostly a losing ball club for the next 25 years, contending for the pennant only in the talent-thin war years of 1943 and 1945.
In 1954, Senators scout Ossie Bluege signed a 17-year-old ballplayer from Payette, Idaho, named Harmon Killebrew. Because of his $30,000 signing bonus, league rules required Killebrew to spend the rest of 1954 with the Senators as a “bonus baby.” Killebrew bounced between the Senators and the minor leagues for next few years. He became the Senators’ regular third baseman in 1959, leading the league with 42 home runs and earning a starting spot on the American League All-Star team.

Looking west
Clark Griffith died in 1955, and his son Calvin took over the team presidency. He sold Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington and leased it back, leading to speculation that the team was planning to move, as the Braves, Browns and Athletics had all done in the early 1950s. After an early flirtation with San Francisco, by 1958 Griffith was courting Minneapolis-St. Paul. The American League opposed the move at first, but in 1960 a deal was reached: The Senators would move and would be replaced with an expansion Senators team for 1961. The old Washington Senators became the Minnesota Twins.

The Washington Senators in popular culture
The longtime competitive struggles of the team were fictionalized in the book The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the legendary Broadway musical and movie Damn Yankees. The plot centers around Joe Boyd, a middle-aged real estate salesman and long-suffering fan of the Washington Senators baseball club. In this musical comedy-drama of the Faust legend, Boyd sells his soul to the Devil and becomes slugger Joe Hardy, the "long ball hitter the Senators need that he'd sell his soul for" (as spoken by him in a throwaway line near the beginning of the drama). His hitting prowess enables the Senators to win the American League pennant over the then-dominant Yankees. One of the songs from the musical, "You Gotta Have Heart", is frequently played at baseball games.

Minnesota Twins: 1961 to present
The "Minnesota" designation, instead of "Minneapolis" (the Twins were the first professional baseball team to be named for a state rather than a city), comes from the fact that the team is intended to represent the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul (and, presumably, the entire state). This fact is reinforced by the stylized TC logo originally worn on their caps, and by their mascot, TC Bear.
The name "Twins" derives from the popular name of the region, the Twin Cities. It was unusual at the time to name a professional team after a whole state. Later, the Texas Rangers, Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks, and the California Angels—now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim—would follow their lead, as would teams in other sports. However, the original "Twin Cities Twins" TC logo was kept. The cap was abandoned in 1987 when the Twins adopted their current uniforms. By this time, the team had become established enough that it could place an "M" on their caps without offending St. Paul. The "TC" logo returned to one version of the home uniforms in 2002, as did the team's original cartoon logo: two large twins representing Minneapolis and St. Paul shaking hands over the Mississippi River, which runs through each of the two cities.

1960s: The Twins arrive in Minnesota
The Twins were eagerly greeted in Minnesota when they arrived in 1961. They brought a nucleus of talented players: Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison, Camilo Pascual, Zoilo Versalles, Jim Kaat, Earl Battey, and Lenny Green. The Twins won 92 games in 1962, the most by the franchise since 1933.
The Twins won the American League Pennant in 1965, driven by the exciting play of superstar sluggers Harmon Killebrew and Tony Oliva and flashy play of league MVP Zoilo Versalles. However, they were defeated in the 1965 World Series by the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games; each home team had won until Game 7, when Sandy Koufax shut out the Twins 2-0 in Minnesota. The Twins scored a total of two runs in their four losses, and were shut out three times, twice by Koufax. Although disappointed with the near miss, the championship drive cemented the team's relationship with the people of Minnesota. The Twins would wait 22 years to return to the World Series; they defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games in the 1987 Series.
In 1967, the Twins were involved in one of the closest pennant races in baseball history. Heading into the final weekend of the season, the Twins, Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, and Detroit Tigers all had a shot at clinching the American League championship. With two games left to play, the Twins and Red Sox were knotted atop the standings; moreover, the two remaining games each team had to play happened to be against each other. Unfortunately for Minnesota baseball fans, the Red Sox won both games and clinched their first pennant since 1946, finishing with a 92-70 record. The Twins and Tigers both finished a game behind, at 91-71, while the White Sox were three games out, at 89-73.
In 1969, Billy Martin was named manager. Martin pushed aggressive base running, with Rod Carew stealing home 7 times. The Twins won the American League West, led by Rod Carew (.332, his first batting title), Tony Oliva (.309, 24 HR, 101 RBI) and league MVP Harmon Killebrew (49 HR, 140 RBI). Unfortunately, the Twins were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the first American League Championship Series.

1970s: From first place to mediocrity
The team continued to post winning records through 1971, winning the first two American League West division titles. However, they then entered a decade-long slump, finishing around .500 for the next eight years. Tony Oliva and Rod Carew continued to provide offensive power, but Killebrew's home run production decreased and the pitching staff languished.
Owner Calvin Griffith faced financial difficulty with the start of free agency. While other owners had fortunes made in other businesses, Griffith's only income came from baseball. He ran the Twins as a family owned business, employing many family members, and had to turn a profit each season. Stars Lyman Bostock and Larry Hisle left as free agents after the 1977 season and prompted the trade of Rod Carew after the 1978 season.

1980s: Building a World Champion
In the early 1980s, The Twins fell further, winning only 37% of its games from 1981 to 1982. They had their worst season in Minnesota in 1982, with a 60-102 record, the worst the franchise had since the 1904 season (that team went 38-113). From their arrival in 1961 through 1981, the team played its games at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, a suburb south of the Twin Cities. The Mall of America now occupies the spot where the "Old Met" stood, complete with home plate and the seat where Harmon Killebrew hit a 520 foot home run. The 1982 season brought the team indoors, into the Metrodome, which is in downtown Minneapolis near the Mississippi River.
In 1984, Calvin Griffith sold the Twins to Minneapolis banker Carl Pohlad. In 1985, Minnesota hosted the All-Star Game at the Metrodome.
After several losing seasons in the Dome, a nucleus of players acquired during the waning years of the Griffith regime (Kent Hrbek, Tom Brunansky, Gary Gaetti, Frank Viola) combined with a few good trades (Bert Blyleven), intelligent free agent acquisitions (Al Newman, Roy Smalley), and a rising star in Kirby Puckett, combined to return the team to the World Series for the first time since 1965, defeating the Detroit Tigers (who won the World Series three years earlier) in the ALCS along the way. The dynamic play of the new superstars electrified the team and propelled the Twins to a seven-game victory over the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 1987 World Series.
The 1987 Twins set a record for fewest regular season victories by a World Series champion with 85 and a .525 winning percentage. This record was broken by the 2006 Cardinals, who won the World Series after going 83-79 during the regular season and a .513 percentage. While their 56-21 record at the Metrodome was the best overall home record for 1987, the Twins had an appalling 33-52 mark away from the Metrodome and they only won nine road games after the All-Star break.
The Twins won more games in 1988, but could not overcome the powerhouse division rival Oakland Athletics, even though pitcher Frank Viola won the Cy Young Award in that year. 1989 saw a decline in the win column though Puckett would win the batting title (1989 in baseball).

1990s: From worst to first to worst again
The Twins surprisingly did quite poorly in 1990, finishing last in the AL West division with a record of 74-88. 1991 brought breakout years from newcomers Shane Mack, Scott Leius, Chili Davis, and rookie of the year Chuck Knoblauch, along with consistently excellent performances from stars Hrbek and Puckett. The pitching staff excelled as well, with Scott Erickson, Rick Aguilera, and St. Paul native Jack Morris having all-star years. The Twins defeated the Atlanta Braves 4 games to 3 to win the nail biting 1991 World Series (which is considered by many to be the greatest of all-time). Game 6 is widely considered to be one of the greatest World Series games ever played. With the scored tied 3-3 in the bottom of the 11th inning, Kirby Puckett stepped up to the plate and drove the game winning home run into the left field seats to force a decisive Game 7. All three of the Twins' World Series appearances were decided in seven games, with the latter series ending in a dramatic 10-inning, 1-0 shutout by series MVP Jack Morris. 1991 was also the first time any team finishing last in its division the previous year advanced to the World Series, both the Twins and Braves accomplished the feat. In both this and the Twins' previous World Series appearance, the home team won each game, which had never occurred before. ESPN rated the 1991 World Series as the best ever played in a 2003 centennial retrospective of the World Series.
1992 saw another superb Oakland team that the Twins could not overcome, despite a 90-72 season and solid pitching from John Smiley. After 1992, the Twins again fell into an extended slump, posting a losing record each year for the next eight years: 71-91 in 1993, 50-63 in 1994, 56-88 in 1995, 78-84 in 1996, 68-94 in 1997, 70-92 in 1998, 63-97 in 1999 and 69-93 in 2000. From 1994 to 1997 a long sequence of retirements and injuries (including superstars Kent Hrbek and Kirby Puckett) hurt the team badly, and Tom Kelly spent the remainder of his managerial career attempting to rebuild the Twins. In 1998, management cleared out the team of all of its players earning over 1 million dollars (except for pitcher Brad Radke) and rebuilt from the ground up; the team barely avoided finishing in the cellar that year, finishing just five games ahead of the Detroit Tigers and avoiding the mark of 100 losses by eight games.
In 1997, owner Carl Pohlad almost sold the Twins to North Carolina businessman Don Beaver, who would have moved the team to the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro - Winston-Salem - High Point) area of the state. The defeat of a referendum for a stadium in that area and a lack of interest in building a stadium for the Twins in Charlotte killed the deal.

2000s: A perennial contender
Things turned around, and from 2001 to 2006, the Twins compiled the longest streak of consecutive winning seasons since moving to Minnesota, going 85-77 in 2001, 94-67 in 2002, 90-72 in 2003, 92-70 in 2004, 83-79 in 2005, and 96-66 in 2006. From 2002 to 2004, the Twins compiled their longest streak of consecutive league/division championships ever (previous were the 1924 World Champion-1925 AL Champion Senators and the 1969–70 Twins). Threatened with closure by league contraction in 2002, the team battled back to reach the American League Championship Series before being eliminated 4-1 by that year's eventual World Series champion Anaheim Angels. Their streak of three straight division titles, along with some bitterly fought games, have helped to create an intense rivalry with the Chicago White Sox in recent years, starting with 2000 when the Sox clinched the division at the Metrodome, and heating up especially in 2003, 2004, and 2005.
In 2006, the Twins came from 12 games back in the division at the All-Star break to tie the Detroit Tigers for the lead in the 159th game of the season. With the Tigers having won the season head-to-head by 11 games to 8, the Twins needed a Tiger loss and a Twins win in order to take sole possession of first place and win the division outright, and got both on the last day of the season, when the Tigers lost their third straight game at home to the last place Kansas City Royals in a 10-8 game in 14 innings. After their win against the Chicago White Sox, the Minnesota Twins and somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 fans watched the Tigers-Royals game on the Metrodome's jumbotrons. This is the first time in major league history that a team has won a division or league outright on the last day of the regular season without ever having had sole possession of first place earlier. The magical season came to a sudden end, however, as the Twins were swept 3-0 in the divisional championship series, while Detroit went on as a wild card entry, beat the Yankees 3-1 in their divisional series, and went on to play the A's in the league championship series. The Tigers would go on to sweep the A's 4-0 in the ALCS and lose the 2006 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals.
In the minds of many, the current Minnesota Twins seem to be a new version of the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s, a talented team that won their division many times, only to fall short in the playoffs, often losing in the divisional series. This was especially compounded when their bitter rivals, the White Sox, won the World Series in the lone year they won the division in 2005. Similarly, the Tigers, despite losing the division in 2006, managed to win the American League pennant. In contrast, the Twins, despite winning the division in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006, have only reached the American League Championship Series once, losing in the aforementioned 2002 ALCS. In 2007, the Twins went 79-83 and the 2001 Central Division champion Cleveland Indians, won it again in 2007. It ended a six-year winning-season run starting in 2001.

Contraction
Over the past 10 years, the Twins have argued that the lack of a modern baseball-dedicated ballpark has stood in the way of producing a top-notch, competitive team, despite the fact that their current stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, played a crucial role in their championship seasons of 1987 and 1991. The quirks of the facility, such as the turf floor and the white roof, gave the Twins a huge homefield advantage (often referred to as the "Dome"-field advantage). Due to the structure of the stadium, the Twins won every one of their home games in their two World Series victories. Regardless, the Metrodome has often been considered inadequate mainly because of its relatively low income producing power and in the 1990s and early 2000s the Twins were often rumored to be moving to such places as New Jersey, Las Vegas, Portland, Oregon, the Raleigh-Durham area, and others in search of a more financially competitive market. The team was nearly contracted (disbanded) in 2002, a move which would have eliminated the Twins and the Montreal Expos, now the Washington Nationals, franchises. The Twins survived largely due to a court decision which forced them to play out their lease on the Metrodome.
In October of 2005 the Twins went back to state court asking for a ruling that they have no long-term lease with the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the owner of the Metrodome where the Twins currently play. In February 2006 the court did rule favorably on the Twins motion. Thus, the Twins were not obligated to play in the Metrodome after the 2006 season. This removed one of the roadblocks that prevented contraction prior to the 2002 season and cleared the way for the Twins to either be relocated or disbanded prior to the 2007 season if a new deal was not reached.

The future
For a long time, the Twins wished to move from the Metrodome to the site behind Target Center within the next half decade, claiming that the Metrodome generates too little revenue for the Twins to be competitive. In particular, the Twins receive very little revenue from luxury suite leasing (as the majority are owned by co-tenant Minnesota Vikings) and only a small percentage of concessions sales; also, the percentage of season-ticket-quality seats in the Metrodome is said to be very low compared to other stadiums, and the capacity of the stadium is far too high for baseball. However, attempts to spur interest and push legislative efforts towards a new stadium repeatedly failed prior to 2006. The Dome is thought to be an increasingly poor fit for all three of its major tenants (the Twins, the Vikings and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers football team). In fact, in addition , the Vikings also have a stadium proposal in various stages of development, and the Twins and Gophers are in the process of constructing their new stadiums.
On May 21, 2006, the Twins' new stadium received the approval of the Minnesota House of Representatives, with a vote of 71-61, and then received approval from the Senate, with a nailbiting vote of 34-32, after 4 a.m. on the second-to-last day of the 2006 legislative session. The bill moved on to Governor Tim Pawlenty, who signed it during a special pre-game ceremony at the HHH Metrodome on May 26, 2006 (the Twins played the Seattle Mariners that night) on what will be the first home plate installed in the new stadium.

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