Thank you, thank you very much

2020 will be my 14th year of blogging about the Minnesota Twins and their history as Twinstrivia.com albeit on a couple of different platforms. I started my blog to have something to do that I would enjoy after my retirement from Norwest/Wells Fargo in April of 2007 where I worked in IT for 38+ years.

I have been a baseball fan since back in the late 50’s when I fell in love with Topps baseball cards and listening to Milwaukee Braves baseball on what was considered high tech back in those days, a RCA transistor radio. I can’t tell you how many 9V batteries I burned through listening to Braves games after I went to bed and then falling asleep and waking up the next day to a dead battery. Back then batteries were not cheap (no alkalines back then either) and money was scarce for a ten year old. Thank God I could earn some money returning empty pop bottles for a nickel a bottle.

The Washington Senators relocated to Minnesota and became the Minnesota Twins after the 1960 baseball season and now I had a home team to cheer for. I have followed the Minnesota Twins ever since. I left the farm I grew up on and joined the Navy after graduating from high school and had the greatest adventure of my life. How else does a boy that had never left the state of Minnesota get to see the world, get paid for it and grow up at the same time? However; my time in the Navy from 65 through 68 kept me from following the Twins and baseball. First off we were just too plain busy and of course there was no Internet back then. I subscribed to the Sporting News which was “baseballs bible” at the time but that arrived 2-4 weeks after it was published and often it got “lost” on its way to me. I missed the 1965 World Series season and maybe the greatest pennant race in American League history in 1967. In 1969, I was a civilian again and in Minneapolis and following baseball again, but then the Twins and owner Calvin Griffith threw me a curveball that really “pissed” me and thousands of other Twins fans off, they fired manager Billy Martin. I don’t know Billy Martin from a hole in the wall but I loved to see him manage baseball games and I became one of those Twins fans that decided to boycott the Minnesota Twins. I quit going to games, stopped reading about, listening, and watching Twins games on TV for about two years before I got over that tantrum and started following the Twins again.

Fast forward to the 90’s and the Minnesota Twins were playing bad baseball, stuck in the Metrodome that they hated and fans were staying away in droves. The talk was that the Twins were going to move to Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and who knows where else.

I had always been a fan of Twins history and I had kept lots of notes over the years pertaining to the Twins so I decided that with the Twins looking to leave I would write a book about the history (short as it might be) of the Minnesota Twins. I decided that a book about Twins trivia would be the easiest way for me to go and since I had to self publish it I enlisted the help of Bob Pile who was a long time baseball fan and had worked in advertising and PR. Pile had come from the east coast where he worked in advertising for Hamm’s Beer and was a good friend of Herb Carneal. I ended up publishing my book Twins Trivia in the spring of 1968 and had a lot of fun with that. Twins President Dave St. Peter was very helpful allowing me to sell the book at the Twins stores (long gone) and let me set up a table in the Metrodome and sell my books with a percentage going to the Twins Community Fund. I certainly didn’t make the Twins Community Fund rich and I never recovered all the money I spent getting the book published but that too was an adventure. The book ending up leading me to build this web site.

This long story leads to this. I just wanted to say thank you to all of you that stop by this site and check in with your comments. The site is intended to be a Twins historical web site but it also has my thoughts and comments on a regular basis. I consider the This Day in Twins History pages to be the “crown jewel” of the site. The site has 450 pages and there is lots of cool and interesting information on this site and new stuff is being added everyday. 2019 saw the site get a record amount of visits and traffic has increased every year but one since I started the site. We will see how long we can keep this going and I hope all of you keep stopping by and maybe even telling your friends about it. Thank you and have a wonderful and safe New Year!