TWINS TRIVIA is hopefully a fun and informative site that will help you to better enjoy the Minnesota Twins and their wonderful history. “History never looks like history when you are living through it” – John Gardner, former Secretary of Health
The temperatures might be below zero and there is about 8″ of snow on the ground here in Minnesota but the boys of summer will be reporting to spring training camps all across Florida and Arizona on February 17, just about a week away. But once again in 2021 things will not be like they always have been when it comes time for the pitchers and catchers to report, we are still battling COVID-19 and we have less than 10% of the United States vaccinated.
A few days ago MLB proposed that spring training and the regular season be delayed a month and that a 154 games schedule be played versus a 162 game schedule and that players would get their full pay but the MLBPA shot that down. So this morning MLB in agreement with the MLBPA came out with the following health and safety protocols for 2021 season.
I have had some serious web site issues here at twinstrivia.com with my site provider the last six weeks or so that I hope have finally been resolved and life at twinstrivia.com goes on, at least I hope it does. It all started when my site provider decided they would go through some server migrations and my number so to speak, came up on December 16. After a two day outage they finally got my site up and running but it was slower than molasses in Minnesota in February.
After at least 16 calls and God knows how many hours on the phone over six weeks all I got from them was that they “might” have some server issues that they are working on but they had no idea when things would be resolved. They kept telling me to hire an engineer and redesign my web site, a site that was running fine until they decided to do a server migration. I was so frustrated I was ready to give it up and close down Twinstrivia.com after 15 years of blogging.
As we start a new year in 2021 and hope to get the COVID-19 pandemic behind us and head out to Target Field to watch the Twins play ball I wanted to share a list of former Minnesota Twins players and people associated with the Twins that passed away in 2020. We lost some great ones.
Pinch-hitter extraordinaire Julio Becquer was born in La Habana, Cuba on December 20, 1931 and passed away on November 1 at the age of 88. Originally signed by the Washington Senators he appeared in 419 games for them between 1955-1960 before playing in 57 games for the Twins in 1961 and in one game in 1963. Becquer goes down in Twins history for hitting the Twins first pinch-hit grand slam home run and as the first “position” player to pitch in a Twins game.
Carroll Hardy was born in Sturgis, South Dakota on May 18, 1933 and passed away at the age of 87 on August 9th. An amazing athlete, he earned ten letters as a Colorado Buffalo in football, baseball and track. While in the Cleveland Indians farm system he played in the NFL with the San Francisco 49’ers in 1955. He played major league baseball as an outfielder with the Indians, Red Sox, Colt .45s and finished his career with the Twins in 1967 primarily as a pinch hitter appearing in eleven games. In 1960 he became a trivia question for the ages when he became the only player to ever pinch-hit for Ted Williams.
Julio (Villegas) Becquer was born in Havana, Cuba on December 20, 1931. The 88 year-old Becquer passed away in Hopkins, Minnesota on November 1, 2020.
Becquer batted and threw left handed and was 5’11” and about 178 lbs. Julio attended the University of Havana and was signed to play for the Washington Senators as a free agent prior to the 1952 season by super scout Joe Cambria who was famous for signing numerous Cuban players. After spending 1952-1954 in the minors, Julio got his first call to the big leagues in late 1955 but in 1956 he was back in the minors.
Sid Hartman a Minnesota legend and Minnesota sports columnist, radio personality and an old-school home team booster who once ran the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers and achieved nearly as much celebrity as some of the athletes he covered died at the age of 100 on October 18, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sid was born in Minneapolis on March 15, 1920. His Father, Jack Hechtman, was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States at age 16, changing his name to Hartman after he arrived. Sid Hartman’s mother, Celia Weinberg, immigrated to the United States from Latvia at age nine. Sid grew up in a Jewish family in North Minneapolis and by the age of nine was selling newspapers.
From a humble start selling newspapers on the street in 1928, he wrote about sports for the Star Tribune for the ensuing decades. At the age of 100 he was still writing three columns a week with his final one appearing on the day he died. According to a count by Star Tribune staffer Joel Rippel, Hartman produced 21,235 bylined stories in his career, from 1944 until the one that ran on C2 of Sunday’s Sports section. This, in addition to his various sports gigs on WCCO radio for 65 years and participating in a TV Sports panel for over 20 years.
Sid Hartman’s office
Sid was one of those people that everyone in Minnesota knew by just his first name, kind of like Kirby, Harmon, and Bud. Sid obviously led an interesting life in which he worked to the very end in a job that he loved. No many of us get to spend a life doing something we love to do. Having said that, he was also very good at what he did and he had an unbelievable work ethic. No one worked harder than Sid to get a story and he loved to be the first to break a story and there are numerous stories floating around about what he would do to make sure that happened.
Ron Perranoski a big league relief pitcher for thirteen seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and California Angels passed away at his Vero Beach, Florida home on Friday, October 2, 2020 of complications from a long illness, his sister Pat Zailo told the Associated Press on Saturday. “He was a ballplayer and he loved that life, he thrived on it,” Zailo said.
Since the Minnesota Twins started play here in 1961 they have played 9,451 games through August 31, 2020. The Twins obviously needed a starting or in recent times an opening pitcher for each of those games.
Sometimes the starts don’t go exactly as planned as the pitchers on the list included here can attest. If you watched one of these games you were probably saying “get him out of there” but did you know that you were watching something pretty rare? A Minnesota Twins starter getting pulled and sent to the showers before he hardly had a chance to work up a sweat doesn’t happen very often, as a matter of fact it hasn’t happened since 2012 when P.J. Walters was the unlucky victim. Just looking at Twins history, it has happened just 17 times in 9,451 games or in just .0017% of the starts.
If you take a closer look at the list you will see there are some pretty good starters on this list. One of these types of starts doesn’t always guarantee that the team would lose either, in four of the seventeen cases the Twins came back to win the game. In six of the seventeen cases shown here the starter didn’t walk away with the “L”.
If you want to check out some Twins historically bad starts in terms of runs allowed, I did a piece on that called “Historically bad starts by Twins pitchers” back on 2015 that you can also check out.
Carroll Hardy with his baseball memorabilia in 1986. Credit Jerry Cleveland/The Denver Post, via Getty Images
Carroll Hardy passed away on August 9, 2020 in Highland Ranch, Colorado from complications of dementia. Hardy was born in Sturgis, South Dakota and after graduating from high school attended the University of Colorado.
Carroll Hardy as Colorado Buffalo
As a Colorado Buffalo Hardy was a star in football, baseball and track. In football he scored a touchdown in his first carry as a freshman in 1951 and scored three touchdowns in his final game in 1954. When his collegiate football career ended he had rushed for 1,999 yards averaging 6.87 yards a carry which is a record that still stands. In baseball his .392 average tops the leaderboard to this day and in track he excelled in the 100-yard dash and high jump. Hardy was an incredible athlete earning 10 letters at Colorado.
Prior to the New York Yankee vs Washington Nationals game just a few days ago, (July 23) Major League Baseball had not played a game since the 2019 World Series ended, a span of 266 days, the longest baseball drought in major league history. COVID-19 has caused the Minnesota Twins to miss 105 games before they opened the season on July 24 in Chicago against the White Sox in a season like none of us have ever seen before.
The 2020 MLB season will be just 60 games long, a sprint and not a marathon like we are used too watching in a season that usually lasts 162 games. The changes in MLB this season are mind boggling starting with the fact that the games will be played with no fans in the stands. The Toronto Blue Jays can’t play their home games in Toronto. There is no minor league baseball in 2020. Sixteen teams will make the play-offs. Opening day rosters have 30 players, a couple weeks later they drop to 28 and then a couple weeks after that they drop to 26. No traveling announcers, they will work out of the home ballparks, official scorekeepers will do their work from home by watching games on television with some special feed links.
