by Kent Hrbek
Plan in Place
We knew we had a good team when we arrived at spring camp. It was a different feeling than ’87. Even though we had some key offseason additions in ’87, everything that happened that summer seemed like a surprise. In ’91, it was more like we knew we had put together a team that was going to be good. It was a much more planned feeling in ’91, and that feeling kind of stuck with us all the way through the year.
The new guys were great, not only on the field but in the clubhouse. I felt like I had an immediate bond with Jack because we were both Minnesota boys. You could feel that. You had to because Jack was pretty quiet and didn’t say a whole lot. But just his presence made a difference. If there’s anybody you want on the mound in a big game, it’s Jack. I think he had a tremendous impact on our clubhouse, especially our younger pitchers, like Scott Erickson.
Chili Davis is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in the game. I didn’t know a thing about him until we signed him, and he just fit in with our crew. He didn’t come in wearing a halo like he was here to help save us. He came in with the attitude that he was trying to fit in, and laughed and joked with the rest of us.
It was almost like the front office was looking for guys like that, because Pags was the same way. He came from New York, so he had that Yankee mystique. But he played hard, worked hard, sweated hard, and best of all hated the guys on the other team. Pags was a real competitor, and I liked that.
Different Feeling
It wasn’t the same kind of closeness that we had on the ’87 team. I don’t think anything could replace what we had that year because so many of us had broken into the big leagues together and grown up together. The ’91 team was a lot better than the ’87 team. In ’87, we were more raw, more guts, more bloody—a go-get-em type of lunch box group of players, a bunch of misfits who grew up together.
In ’91, we had more talent, and I always had that feeling that we had been put together to win. I just didn’t think that team should lose. I know I’d have been more upset if we hadn’t won it in ’91 than I would have been in ’87 because we just plain had a better team.
Here’s a trivia question: How many guys were on the World Series roster in both ’87 and ’91?
The answer: Seven—Kirby Puckett, Dan Gladden, Greg Gagne, Randy Bush, Gene Larkin, Al Newman, and me.
Up and Down
Winning the division didn’t come easy for us. And almost nothing came easy for me. We were under .500 in late May, and I was hitting under .250, which was about 50 points higher than I was hitting in mid-May. How bad was I at the start of the season? In mid-April, TK sent Al Newman up to pinch hit for me in the top of the ninth inning.
Newmie was a valuable backup infielder, but he’s never going to be known for his bat. In eight big-league seasons, he hit one homer. But he was a switch-hitter, which at the time meant TK thought he had a better chance of getting on base against a lefthanded pitcher than me batting left-handed.
The truth is, TK apparently had those thoughts quite a bit by then. By that point, TK had gone to platoon time, which meant I wasn’t playing all that much against left-handed pitchers. To this day I think he started platooning too much. He had a reputation as a manager for using his whole bench, and that’s fine and good. But you can overdo it.
The first part of my career when I walked into the clubhouse I never even looked at the lineup card. I was hitting cleanup, or maybe fifth against certain left-handers, and playing first base. But then it got to the point where I had to check the lineup card to see if I was playing. It seemed like the last few years I played, I never got into a stretch where I was getting a couple weeks of straight playing time. That’s one of the reasons I got tired of playing. It’s a huge mind-set change.
It almost got to the point that if we were going against a lefthanded pitcher, I assumed I wouldn’t be in the lineup. If we saw 10 lefties a month, I probably started against three of them. It wasn’t like TK ever sat down with me and told me the reason why. That wasn’t his style.
I respected the fact that it’s the manager’s job to determine who plays. But it pissed me off. I’d be driving to the park not knowing whether I was going to be playing or not. There were days I’d look at the card, see my name in the lineup, and be surprised and have to quick get in the frame of mind that I was playing. Baseball’s all about routine, and I started getting out of the routine.
Plus, I took some crap about being pinch hit for by Al Newman.
Difference Maker
It’s fair to say I probably didn’t make a good first impression on our new hitting coach, Terry Crowley. I ultimately turned things around and had a decent season (.284, 20 homers, 89 RBIs), and my power numbers would have been better had it not been for a variety of injuries.
Crow deserves a special mention, not so much for what he did for me, but for the effect he had on several guys. I wasn’t a guy who spent a lot of time with hitting coaches or studying pitchers or watching video. I always had the attitude “Full mind, empty bat; empty mind, full bat.”
The worst thing about my slump was the advice that came from so many different people. The two people who probably helped me most over the years were Rick Stelmaszek, because he had seen me for so many years, and my mom. There were several times my mom would suggest something, I’d try it, and it worked.
I was always changing stances. I’d use one for as long as it felt comfortable, then switch to something else. I’ve got a huge poster in my “Twins room” at home, and my elbow is way up. I remember exactly when that picture was taken because it was right after my mom told me to keep my elbow up. I tried it, and it worked for a while. When it stopped working, I dropped my elbow.
I know Crow helped a bunch of guys, and I had a lot of respect for how hard he worked. He was down in what we called “The Hole”—a batting cage under the Dome stands—with players every day, working on swings. Mike Pagliarulo and Randy Bush were always down in The Hole with Crow.
I think it’s fair to say that Crow was the best hitting coach we had. I hate saying that because the guy he succeeded was Tony Oliva. I just think it was difficult for Tony to teach guys how to hit because he was such a natural.
One time in Seattle, John Moses asked Tony how to hit the pitcher we were facing. Tony looked out at the pitcher, then he turned to John and said, “I don’t know. I never faced him before.” And he was serious. Put a bat in Tony’s hand and even then he’d have walked up to the plate and hit the guy. But he had a hard time explaining why or how to players.
Tony’s standard line was: “See the ball. Hit the ball.” It worked for him. Crow was a little more in-depth with his approach. He was the first hitting coach we had who really worked with the team on hitting. And as the summer went on, Crow’s work paid dividends.
Picking Up
There was never any panic about our slow start. There seemed to be a confidence about that club, where we knew we were good and it was only a matter of time. The time came when the calendar flipped over to a new month. On June 1, we started a 15-game winning streak.
I honestly don’t remember a whole lot about the streak itself, other than I started hitting better, and Scott Erickson basically won every time he started a game. Scotty was another one of the young guys, picked in the same 1989 amateur draft as Knoblauch. Scotty joined the club mid-way through the 1990 season and made an immediate impact.
In ’91, he had one of the most dominating stretches I’ve ever seen (11–0 from April 25 though June 24). He won 20 games for us in ’91, despite battling arm problems from before the All-Star break on. The guy had a nasty, nasty sinkerball. I didn’t even want to play catch with him because of the stuff he had.
We called him Superman, since he looked like Superman—a big, good-looking guy. He was quiet, but he had a little edge to him. In that respect he was a little bit like Knoblauch.
I do remember that our streak reached 15 by sweeping a three-game series at Cleveland. Baseball players are by and large prett
y superstitious, and by the time we reached Cleveland, that’s how our club was. We sat around and drank beer from a keg in the clubhouse after the first game, and because we didn’t want to change anything, we did it after each game of the series.
That kind of thinking was pretty common in our clubhouse. When we started winning home games in the 1987 postseason, Tom Kelly, who was very superstitious, kept the same home jersey on every day. TK chewed tobacco at the time, and he had stains all over the front of it, and the jersey just plain stunk. But I guess he figured that was a small price to pay for a winning streak.
Of course, when it came to what to do in Cleveland, our options were rather limited. Bill Sheridan, the visiting clubhouse guy in Cleveland, was one of the nicest guys in the league. But he didn’t have much to work with. Cleveland had the worst clubhouse in the league and the worst spreads. Some days you’d come in and there’d be doughnuts that looked like they had been around since Babe Ruth played.
Bill’s standard fare was a keg of beer and pizza. He always had pizza out. And you could count on the keg being tapped because Bill always did that early, so he could get some for himself.
Don’t get me wrong: Beer and pizza are right up there on the top of my favorites. But it really didn’t compare with, say, Sherm Seeker’s ribs at the Dome or the buffet meals in the clubhouse in Anaheim.
But I probably have as many memories from the Cleveland clubhouse as any in the big leagues. Long before the winning streak, there was a night where Gary Gaetti, a couple other guys, and I were so frustrated by our losing ways that we sat in the Cleveland clubhouse and basically polished off an entire keg of beer by ourselves.
Moving On
After winning our 15th straight game in Cleveland, we packed up and headed to Baltimore. The streak ended in the first game of the series when the Orioles scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth off our closer, Rick Aguilera, to win 6–5. It’s kind of amazing to think how close we were to winning 20 straight because we won our next four games.
By the end of June, my average was back up over .280 thanks to a hot stretch (.359 batting average for the month of June), and we were in first place in the AL West. We ended up cruising to the division title.
We had more pitching depth on that team than any I’ve ever been on. Erickson, Morris, and Kevin Tapani gave us a Big Three (54 combined victories). Plus we had a great bullpen, with Steve Bedrosian, Carl Willis, and Terry Leach as set-up men and Rick Aguilera as our closer.
I can’t say the year was quite as smooth for me. It was one of those years where I was always batting injuries and ended up playing only 132 games.
My most prominent injuries that season included: a strained hamstring in early May, a bruised right shoulder diving for a catch in mid-June, a sprained right ankle on July 1, and, finally, an injured left shoulder in early September after colliding with Mike Pagliarulo chasing a pop-up. At least I didn’t get hurt chasing a clubhouse kid around the locker room.
Hey, even a finely tuned machine falls apart once in a while.
Diversion
I took up a new hobby in the early 1990s: horse racing. Tom Kelly always loved the horses and dogs. As a kid he’d trained trotters in New Jersey and that love of the racing animals just stuck with him. Late in 1990, he talked Jimmy Wiesner, our equipment manager, and me into becoming partners and buying a horse.
We named our little company “Domeboys.” The picture on the back of the racing silk was a horse holding a bat in his mouth. It was kind of cute, if I do say so myself.
We bought our first horse, Verbatim’s Pride, for $8,000. All three of the wives immediately became attached to the horse and were going out to the stable, petting him and feeding him carrots during the day.
The first race we entered him in was a $16,000 claiming race, which basically meant that anyone who wanted to buy any of the horses entered put in a $16,000 claim and the horse was theirs. Verbatim’s Pride finished third or fourth, and right after the finish, TK came up and said, “We just got claimed.” Of course he had to explain it to us, and as soon as he did, all three of the wives started crying. But TK, Wiesy, and I were thinking that this was pretty easy money. We doubled our purchase price in about a week.
So, of course, we bought a couple other horses. And it’s fair to say we never again achieved the financial success we did with our first venture. Green Luck never won a race, Lark’s Charm had two wins, and our fourth horse, Albell, had a couple wins and was good enough to enter in a race at Santa Anita.
But overall, I’d guess that we lost money after that very first race. I did get an education. I learned that horses need a drug called Lasix when they suffer from nosebleeds. And that they eat a lot. And that they get hurt about as often as I did. And when they’re hurt, they don’t run, and when they don’t run, you can’t make any money. But they do continue to eat and go to vet appointments.
Sport of kings? I don’t think so.
The Domeboys lasted about three years. After that, I was happy to live vicariously through TK’s dog kennel at Hudson. He named a bunch of dogs after me: Hrbek’s Heidi, Hrbek’s Jeanie, Hrbek’s Slam, among others.
To this day I still enjoy watching the dogs race. As far as the horses go, it was fun to stroll the backside as an owner and be a part of it for a while.
The Big News
By far the most important thing to happen to me during the 1991 season came on an off-day in Seattle in early August. We had been on a long road trip and flew up from California after a game on August 7. Jeanie had called me in California and said she’d like to meet the team in Seattle, and it was always great to have her join me on the road. She loved Seattle, so I figured she was coming out to eat some seafood, walk the wharf, and shop at Pike’s Market.
We made dinner reservations at Cutter’s, which looks out over the Sound. Before dinner, she gave me a present, wrapped up in a little box. I opened it up, and inside was a pacifier. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I’m able to put two and two together and get four. I was going to be a daddy.
Jeanie and Heidi visit me on the field at the Dome during happier days for our family, long before Jeanie and I got divorced. Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins
Wow. That’s still all I can say. That gave me everything in life I’d ever dreamed of. I had gotten married, and now we were going to have a family. Plus, I’d already played on a World Series winner for my hometown team. What else was there?
I think that might have been the first time it entered my head that I had three years left on my contract, and maybe I’d finish that up and call it a career. I had other things to do with my life. Little did I know my family life would change so much in retirement.
The Celebration
After our hot stretch in June, we just steadily pulled away. We had an eight-game lead on September 1, and when we clinched the pennant, we still had an eight-game lead over the White Sox with seven games left to play.
The day we clinched the pennant was about as nontraditional as you can get. We entered the day with a magic number of one, but lost at Toronto 2–1 in the final game of a three-game series. We didn’t know what the White Sox were doing when we climbed onto two team busses and headed to Hamilton to catch our charter flight. Fortunately, I was on the bus with our manager, Tom Kelly.
Thanks to this new modern technology—the cell phone—our traveling secretary, Remzi Kiratli, and Kelly were able to listen to the final outs of the White Sox 2–1 loss to Seattle. We couldn’t hear the cell phone, of course, but we knew what had happened when TK stood up in the aisle and yelled: “Boys, boys, congratulations. You’re the champions of the Western Division.” With that, we became the first team in modern time to go from last to first in a single season.
How many major leaguers have clinched a title on a bus? The guys on the second bus heard the news on a delayed basis when their driver received a call from his dispatcher, who had received a call from the driver of our bus. Funny to think about that now, because not everyb
ody was carrying a cell phone back then.
The second bus pulled alongside ours on the Ontario freeway, and we looked out the windows at each other and gave thumbs-up signs. Inside our bus we exchanged hugs and high-fives, and then returned to our seats for the rest of the 30-minute drive to the Hamilton airport. It was pretty subdued, compared to the rowdy celebration we had in the Texas clubhouse after winning the division in ’87. We didn’t get to celebrate as a team until we all got off our busses at the airport. And that amounted to about 10 minutes of backslapping.
But we didn’t get cheated. We flew from Hamilton to Chicago for the start of a series against the White Sox, and when we got to the hotel Remzi told us we had a party room reserved. I’m not going to name the hotel, because we did some damage. We were grown men playing a little boys’ game, and that night, we let the little boys out.
A lot of it was pretty juvenile stuff, looking back. But it had been a long summer, and the chances to celebrate in this game come few and far between. I remember we broke some tables, jumping up on them, and wrestling. I don’t know who did it, but someone had a pair of scissors that ended up in Bedrosian’s hands, and he started snipping peoples ties off.
That wasn’t enough for him, and pretty soon he was sneaking up behind people cutting their sport coats up the back. Chili’s clothes got cut up real good that night, and his ride up the elevator became something of a legend. A couple people sharing the elevator looked at him—a black guy with his clothes all cut up—and got scared, thinking he was a bum off the street. What they didn’t know was that Chili was a major-league ballplayer, and one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.
The Postseason
If you’re a baseball fan, you know the highlights of our 1991 postseason. After beating Toronto in the ALCS, we played in what most people still say is one of the greatest World Series ever, beating Atlanta in seven games. It’s a Series remembered for Kirby Puckett’s 11th-inning home run in Game 6 to give us a 4–3 victory and Jack Morris’ 10-inning shutout for a 1–0 Game 7 victory.
