by Kent Hrbek
One For Pods
Johnny Podres was the pitching coach for the Twins in ’81. I don’t think it’s any secret that Pods liked to have a cocktail or two. He was one of the games great characters and made quite a tandem along with our manager Billy Gardner, whom most people just called Slick. What a pair. Talk about funny guys with dry senses of humor.
When you walked by Pods on your way to the bat rack, he’d frequently slap you on the leg, give you a goofy look, and say, “Got something goin’ on tonight, Hrbie? Whatcha got goin’ on?” Then he’d wink at you and laugh. I loved Pods.
As I headed to the bat rack in the 12th inning of my first big-league game, Pods hit me on the leg and said, “Hey, kid, it’s getting kind of late. I’m going to need a cocktail pretty soon. Hit one out of here, will you?” I remember him saying that like it was yesterday.
Well, believe it or not, I went up and hit one out off George Frazier, who would later become a teammate of mine with the Twins. I got back to the dugout, and Pods was just sitting there with a great big smile. He’s probably loved me ever since, because I got Pods out in the big city.
About the time I got to first base, I looked out to right field and saw Reggie’s No. 44 with his back turned, watching the ball. It hit between the two fences and bounced back onto the field. I thought maybe Reggie was going to save it for me, but he picked it up and tossed it into the stands. Oh well. There’s some Yankee fan out there who has my first big-league memento. But I’ve got the memory, and that’s enough.
I got my first taste of the media that night. I walked into the clubhouse and there was a pile of people around my locker. I just wanted to get out of there, get back to the hotel, and start calling everyone at home.
The whole significance of the night didn’t really hit me until the year was over. I played my first game at Yankee Stadium, starting at first base where Lou Gehrig once played. And my dad was at home dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease. That night, I was just living in the moment, trying to figure out how to get a hit off a guy like Tommy John. Trying to prove to the Twins that I deserved to be there. But as the years went on, that night became more and more special to me because of my dad.
Back then, as I left Yankee Stadium, all I could think about was getting back to Met Stadium and playing my first game at home. I knew my family and friends would be there to watch.
Ouch
You could say that my home debut was a little less memorable than my major-league debut. It was memorable because I got to go in the Met clubhouse for the first time and play on the field where I’d watched the Twins as a kid. We’d go to 10 or 12 games a year, and mostly I’d go to watch Tony Oliva hit the baseball.
Tony to me was one of the greatest hitters who ever lived and would be in the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t blown out his knee. It’s pretty neat that Tony and I both have our Twins numbers retired as members of the team’s Hall of Fame, along with Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, and Kirby Puckett.
You couldn’t have seen that one coming from my first game at the old Met. It had been raining most of the day, and the field was wet. I don’t think we even took batting practice. I did stretch, for those who are wondering, but it didn’t help. Early in the game I reached for a low throw at first and blew out my hamstring. Of course, I didn’t want to leave the game. My parents were there, and I had a ton of friends out in the left-field stands.
Tickets weren’t too hard to come by. The Twins were 41–68 that season, which was shortened because of the strike. I tried to hit one more time after feeling my hammie tear. I think I swung at the first pitch, hit a fly to center, and could barely jog down the first-base line. That was it. I was out of the game.
Afterward, all my friends came up and wanted to know what happened. They didn’t know I had blown out my hamstring. All they saw was me hitting a fly to center, jogging to first, and then leaving the game—end of story for that night.
High school rival Timmy Laudner joined me on the Twins in late 1981. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Greeting Friends
I missed the next two weeks before I was able to get back in the lineup. That home run in Yankee Stadium was the only one I hit that year in 67 at-bats. And I only batted .239, which wasn’t very Tony Oliva-like.
But the final month of ’81 was memorable for a lot of other reasons. Before the year was out, the Twins had called up a couple buddies of mine. Timmy Laudner, my old high school rival, came up from AA after hitting 42 homers at Orlando. Timmy was a catcher, not a center fielder like he had been at Park Center High. And the Twins called up G-Man, Gary Gaetti, from the same Orlando ball club.
By now Gary and I were already friends after playing a whole year at Wisconsin Rapids and suffering through a summer under Rick “Stelly” Stelmaszek. We were pretty much instant friends in the minors. I just liked Gary’s attitude. He was a guy who had no fear.
Gary hit a home run off Charlie Hough in Texas in his first big league at-bat. Everyone in the dugout was clapping, saying, “Way to go.” Not me. I was screaming and hollering like a little kid.
The game was on.
CHAPTER SIX
A New Era
Home is a Dome
My rookie season in 1982 found us moving from outdoor baseball at the old Met to the Metrodome. Over the years, the buildings had been the target of a lot of abuse, and I understand all that. I understand it better now as a fan than I did when I played.
Back then, we were all excited to be moving into a new building. It was something brand new, and we were all so young we thought it was great. Of course, even for us, reality sank in pretty quickly.
The first thing we learned was that the turf was harder than a rock. Then we learned there was no air-conditioning, and it was like playing in a sweatbox. And we soon learned the fans weren’t going to sit in a sweatbox and watch bad baseball.
We had more than 52,000 fans show up for our first game in the Dome, which we lost 11–7 to Seattle. The next night we had 5,213 fans show up to watch us win our first game in the building, 7–5. We had a lot of crowds like that the first year. Let me tell you, when you put 6,000 fans in that building, you can hear what the fans are saying. In an outdoor ballpark, the sound gets dispersed. In the Metrodome, it just stayed in there and resonated. You could hear a guy say, “Hey, I’ll have a couple hot dogs and a beer” while you’re out there trying to play the game. Do you know how hard it is to focus when the guy behind you at first base is ordering a beer and a hot dog?
When you look back at old videos from the early ’80s, compared to now, you realize how empty and stark that stadium was. Not only empty stands—we had no signs, advertisements, or billboards. It was like we were playing in a warehouse. At least now there’s a little activity, a little atmosphere.
We also quickly learned that the roof had a few faults . . . like caving in during heavy snow. It caved in during the winters of 1981 and ’82, which were no big deals for us. We would read about it in the paper and just kind of chuckle. Then the same thing happened early in the 1983 season. We had a game scheduled against the Angels that night.
Gary Ward was staying with Tom Brunansky and me in Richfield until he could find an apartment for the season. Nobody planned too far ahead when it came to housing back then because you didn’t know whether you’d be packaged in a trade or whether some minor leaguer would hit .400 in spring training and be tabbed as the next phenom and take your job. So guys roomed together the first few weeks until they had some sense of security.
Anyway, Wardo wanted to borrow my truck that morning because I had four-wheel drive. A couple hours later, I got a phone call.
“Hrbie, I’m stuck.”
I said, “Wardo, you’ve got four-wheel drive and only eight inches of snow. You should be able to plow right through it.”
And he said: “No, I’m really stuck man.”
At about the same time, we got another call saying that the roof had collapsed, and we were going to get the day off. We took off in
Bruno’s car to get Wardo out of his snowdrift. When we got there, we learned Wardo was stuck because he didn’t know how to lock the hubs on the truck, which you used to have to do to get it in four-wheel drive. As soon as I locked the hubs for him, Wardo drove off through the snow. Bruno and I decided to drive down to the Dome to get a look at it. We walked in to look at the field, and there was a big puddle from dripping snow behind second base.
Of course, that really wasn’t unusual back in those days because the roof leaked quite often. You’d have people watching indoor baseball, getting wet in their seats. It was kind of funny to look up and see water dripping down and a bunch of fans get up and move out of their section, just like they would during a downpour at an outdoor ballpark.
Maybe the weirdest night we ever had in the Dome was on April 26, 1986, against the Angels. A severe thunderstorm with winds of 80 miles per hour moved through Minneapolis late in the game, and it ripped a hole in the roof over right field. It was spooky because the lights were swinging from the ceiling and the roof was flapping. They stopped the game for nine minutes, and then we were able to finish, which wasn’t exactly a good thing for us.
We had a 6–1 lead with two outs in the bottom of the eighth when the storm hit. The Angels scored six runs in the top of the ninth off Frank Viola and Ron Davis to win 7–6.
Welcome to my world.
Fixing the Problems
As the years went on, those kinds of things didn’t happen anymore. They eventually installed air-conditioning and figured out a way to plug the leaks in the roof. In fact, over the last 20 years, the Dome has been pretty good. Well . . . pretty good compared to the early years.
Of course, it is what it is. And it isn’t your traditional baseball stadium. I’ve seen it all, including Dave Kingman hitting a towering pop fly that went through one of the ventilation holes in the ceiling and never came down. I’ve seen high pop-ups bounce off the lights, which according to the buildings ground rules puts the ball in play no matter where it might have been heading.
We realized right away how hard the turf was. After a couple weeks, whenever a teammate would get a base hit to the outfield, we’d all be yelling, “Bounce.” We learned that every now and then a routine one-hop single would bounce over the outfielder’s head, and we realized that could be a home-field advantage for us if we could somehow anticipate it. One night, Tim Teufel hit a 150-foot Texas Leaguer to right field that Harold Baines charged. The ball bounced over Baines’ head, and Teufel got a three-run, inside-the-park homer to give us a 3–2 victory over the White Sox. I don’t think “bounce” is a term that would have ever been used at any other ballpark, but it became part of our vocabulary.
Another word that I’m pretty certain is peculiar to the Dome is “baggie,” which is what everyone calls the large rubber fence in right field. I always thought they might figure out a way to make that a wooden fence, but no, it’s always been the “The Baggie.” It’ll always be part of the building, which maybe isn’t so bad because it’s unique. But then a lot about the Dome is unique.
I’ve seen more lost balls against the ceiling than I can count, most of them by opponents. I’ve always worried that someday, someone is going to get hit in the head by a high fly, and it’s either going to kill him or end his career.
We beat the Yankees 8–6 in a game on May 7, 1985, in which four of our runs could be attributed to balls being lost in the Dome’s lights and roof. Billy Martin, the Yankee manager, went nuts after the game, saying, among many other things, “This park should be barred from baseball.” The next day, George Steinbrenner released a statement saying: “If I wanted my players to be ping-pong players, I would send them to China to play the Chinese National Team.” The Yankees played the second game of the series under protest, which angered our manager, Billy Gardner. Billy told the press he might protest on our next visit to Yankee Stadium, saying: “If one of my players loses a fly ball, I’m going to say he lost it in the Big Dipper.”
Overcoming Home Field
Overall, I think you’d have to say the Twins have done an incredible job of fielding some pretty good teams lately despite having a low budget and having played in the Metrodome until 2010.
The Dome’s clubhouse had never been expanded, which meant the team had to store a lot of stuff in crates out in the hallway. You walked downstairs in the Dome and it looked like a pigsty. You compared the Dome’s clubhouse and hallways to the new, modern stadiums and it was a joke. And yet the Twins were in the playoffs four of five years between 2002 and 2006, which I think is a real credit to manager Ron Gardenhire and his coaching staff, plus Terry Ryan and the front office. They were able to keep the game fun and players optimistic despite the surroundings.
Having said all that, I don’t want to make it sound like I hated playing in the Dome. In fact, I loved playing in the Dome. Those early years I was just happy to have a uniform on and be playing in the big leagues.
Then we started building memories, and the place really did become home. You don’t have to live in a mansion to be happy in your home. I hit the first two home runs ever in the Dome during an exhibition game against the Reds before the 1982 season. And then, of course, we won World Series Game 7 in both 1987 and 1991 at the Dome. So I’ve got a gazillion memories of that building.
The Twins built a new outdoor stadium that opened in 2010. Overall, I always thought that it was going to be great for the ball club and the fans, although I’ve talked to people who live a few hours away and they worried about driving in and having a game rained out. But that’s part of the baseball experience to me.
As a fan, I really looked forward to the new stadium. But at the same time, I knew it was going to be weird to know that when I walk in, I’ll never have set foot on the field as a player. It’ll have no personal memories for me. My memories are going to be locked in a domed stadium that was torn down to make room for the Vikings’ new stadium.
Slick and Pods
I guess the polite way of putting it would be to say we were colorful during my early years with the Twins: we weren’t too good; we played in a Dome; and we had quite a cast of characters, starting with Slick and Pods—manager Billy Gardner and his pitching coach Johnny Podres—and of course, Calvin Griffith, who owned the ballclub.
When your manager and pitching coach share a room at the Super 8 Motel during homestands, you know you’re not playing for the Yankees. Slick was, and still is, married to the former Miss Connecticut, but she stayed out East raising their kids. I guess that said something about how Slick perceived his job security managing one of the youngest and lowest payroll teams ever to walk onto a big-league field. Slick used to joke about waking up next to Pods when he had Miss Connecticut waiting for him back home. Maybe that made him the perfect guy to manage us, because the prospect of getting fired wasn’t all bad. I mean, who would you rather wake up to in your room: Miss Connecticut or The Pod?
Slick was one of the funniest guys I ever met. Problem was he talked in this thick East Coast accent, and most of the players were able to understand only about half of what he said. But that half was pretty funny. I don’t know that I ever had a serious, heart-to-heart with Slick. Every time he talked to someone, he’d end the conversation with a joke that didn’t always make sense. He was always telling stories.
He also kept the game simple. I don’t think Billy was a strategist like Tom Kelly. Of course, part of it was I didn’t understand the game as well as I did after playing in the majors for a few years. By the time Tom Kelly had become our manager in 1987, I could look at him in the dugout and he’d make a little signal, and I knew I’d have to move off the line or whatever it was. That didn’t happen with Billy. I’d look in the dugout and have no idea what was going on, other than I knew Pods wanted us to win as quickly as possible because it got him into the night.
We got hold of a video of the final game of the 1955 World Series when Pods, pitching for Brooklyn, beat the Yankees. After the last out, Pods jumped all over the
mound, then leaped into Roy Campanula’s arms. We’d always ask Pods to show us that last pitch. And he always would. He’d throw a pretend pitch, then start jumping up and down in the air. And he’d always add: “Boy, we had some cocktails that night.”
Rick Stelmaszek joined up with Slick and Pods at the start of the 1981 season, which made for quite an interesting group of leaders. Stelly became more like Slick and Pods as a coach than the rough and tough Chicago guy he had been as manager at Wisconsin Rapids, which was a good thing for all of us. We were a group of guys that needed humor, not ground balls hit at our heads.
Rick Stelmaszek was one of the toughest guys I ever met as my manager at Wisconsin Rapids. He mellowed as a Twins coach, becoming a close friend. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Class of ’82
Although we had no way of knowing it at the time, we had six rookies on our 1982 team who would be the cornerstone of the ’87 World Series champions: Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunansky, Tim Laudner, Randy Bush, Frank Viola, and me. We’d have had another player on that list, but Jim Eisenreich had the misfortune of being unable to control a nervous twitch that was later diagnosed as Tourette syndrome.
Jimmy was the Opening Day center fielder for us in ’82, and he could flat-out hit. He was a country kid from St. Cloud, Minnesota, which gave us three starters from Minnesota, along with me and Lauds. None of us knew what was going on with Jimmy, other than he’d go into these terrible twitching episodes and have to leave the game. It was sad to see what happened to him in Boston when the fans got to him by yelling insults. He started to twitch and ended up running off the field to catcalls.
Jimmy tried playing for us three straight years. The guy had talent. Calvin told reporters that Eisenreich “was doomed to be an All-Star.” The Twins thought it was a nervous disorder, which turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Calvin sold his contract to the Royals for $1, thinking his career was over. Jimmy got the proper diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, went on medication to control the twitching, and ended up playing 15 years in the big leagues with a career batting average of .290. He played in the 1993 World Series with the Phillies and won the World Series with Florida in 1997. So it turned out well.
