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
Historically the Minnesota Twins have not had a lot of pitchers that were strikeout pitchers. I was curious as to just how many times a Twins pitcher has struck out 15 or more in a single game. Turns out that a Twins pitcher has accomplished this feat just six times in 9,095 games from 1961-2017 and no Twins pitcher has done it more than once.
If you look at the entire American League during the time period of 1961 to current the leaders are Nolan Ryan with 23 such games, Randy Johnson with 17, Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens with 10 and Sam McDowell with 6, no one else had done it more than three times.
Today we are going to take a look at former Twins third baseman Ron Clark. This Texas cowboy was born Ft. Worth, Texas back in 1943, a few years before me but not many. In high school he did it all, played football, basketball, track and of course baseball, unlike today when young kids focus and specialize in one sport and play it year around.
Toughness was one of the hallmarks of the young Texan. As a youth he spent a lot of time around the rodeo circuit, and was well acquainted with riding the horses himself. He notched 104 victories in 111 bouts as a Golden Gloves boxer. He wore cowboy boots, Stetsons, and Western clothes, and spoke with a Texas drawl.
Clark was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies in the spring of 1961 as an amateur free agent (the draft didn’t begin until 1965) after graduating from high school and started out with the Class C Bakersfield Bears working his way up the big league ladder. Apparently his .202 average in just 39 games didn’t impress his organization because according to today’s baseball Bible which is the B-R website, Clark was sent to the Los Angeles Angels in some unknown transaction prior to the 1962 season and then a year later the Angels sent him to the Minnesota Twins before the 1963 season. Clark played for the class A Wilson Tobs in 1963 and hit .301 earning him a short stay with the AA Charlotte team. Clark spent 1964 and 1965 with AA Charlotte. In 1966 Clark moved up another rung to AAA Denver which was managed by Cal Ermer and played well enough to earn a September call-up to the Twins.
Ron Clark
Ron Clark’s big league debut took place at Met Stadium on September 11, 1966 as a pinch-runner in the eighth inning for Harmon Killebrew but that didn’t end well as he was thrown out at the plate. The Twins beat the Baltimore Orioles that day 11-6 so all is well that ends well. It wasn’t until his fourth game for Minnesota that Clark was able to step to the plate with bat in hand and that took place at Yankee Stadium I against Fritz Peterson as a pinch-hitter for pitcher Jim Ollom. With the Twins down 2-0 and runners on first and third, Clark hit a deep sac fly to center that scored the Twins first run in a game that the Twins would eventually win 5-3. In his fifth and final big league game in 1966 Clark entered the game as a replacement for Killebrew at third base with the hometown Twins beating the Tigers 12-1 and singled off George Korince.
Clark was never able to win a big league job full-time with Minnesota and was sold to the Seattle Pilots in July 1969. Clark was mentioned in Ball Four, Jim Bouton’s classic memoir. Commenting on a game in which Clark collided with Boston slugger George Scott and needed 13 stitches in his lip to repair the damage, Bouton called Clark a “tough, gutty ballplayer” and wrote that he “has a baby face, two tattoos on his arm, smokes big cigars — and when he has thirteen stitches in his lip he drinks beer out of the side of his mouth.”
The Pilots became the Brewers in 1970 and Clark was traded to Oakland and then moved on to Milwaukee and Philadelphia before making his last big league appearance in September of 1975. Ron Clark coached, managed and scouted for numerous teams until 2014 when this baseball lifer decided to retire.
Make sure that you read Frank Quilici‘s account of a near tragedy while Clark was with Charlote 1964 andwas hit with a batted ball in the Sporting News below.
The Minnesota Twins had a pretty good team back in 1970, good enough to win 98 games and finish first in the AL West under skipper Bill Rigney. The team was either in first or second place all year long and was never more than a game out of the lead. The Twins were beaten (pretty badly) three games to none in the ALCS against the Baltimore Orioles for the second year in a row.
L-R We have Dave Boswell, Jim Perry, Jim Kaat and Luis Tiant posing for a photo during spring training 1970 in Orlando. Bert Blyleven was part of that starting rotation but for some reason is not in the picture. Credit: Getty Images – Bruce Bennett
The Twins top pitcher was Jim Perry who led the league with 40 starts completing 13 of them and won a league leading 24 games which earned him the American League Cy Young award after the season ended. In addition to the above pitchers, only two other Twins pitchers started games that season, Bill Zepp and Tommy Hall. The Twins pitching ranked second in 1970.
I have run a Fantasy baseball League under Yahoo for the past 10 years and this year the “League of 10,000 Lakes” has several openings. The players in this league have played together for many years and it is serious and stiff competition. We are looking for a few serious competitive players to join us in this free auto-pick draft league. If you want to join us, drop me a line at jjswol@twinstrivia.com and I will put the names in a hat and draw two or possible three names to join our league.
Spring Training exhibition games start today with the Twins taking on the Minnesota Gophers in Ft. Myers and the Minnesota Twins made single-game tickets available for sale February 17 for all their home games. Tickets for Opening Day had been available for some time. I haven’t seen much chatter about Minnesota Twins ticket prices for 2018 so that can only mean one thing, it appears that Twins ticket prices have gone up once again. I bet that comes as a real shocker to most of you. When the team gets better the ticket prices go up but when the team goes in the tank prices normally stay the same from the previous year.
The Twins had five tiers of tickets in 2017 called extra value, value, select, premium and elite and that has stayed the same in 2018 but the number of games in each tier has changed slightly. This year there will be only 79 home games in Target Field as the two games that the Twins will play in Puerto Rico are officially Twins home games. The elite tier has only two games and the extra value tier has just four games (two in April and two in September). The middle of the road or select tier has 39 games, the premium tier has 18 games and the value tier has 15 games.
The Twins continue to use demand-based ticket pricing that they implemented in 2012 and that means that ticket prices constantly go up or down to a floor price based on demand for tickets for that game. Some people call this variable or dynamic ticket pricing and is used by a number of teams but what ever you call it, it means digging deeper in your pocket for a ticket. Some folks look at it as scalping your own tickets. The floor price is based on the price of a season ticket for the same seat.
The Twins made a very nice addition to their starting rotation when they acquired pitcher Jake Odorizzi from the Tampa Rays for minor league shortstop Jermaine Palacios yesterday. Odorizzi, 27, has a career 3.83 ERA in 129 appearances (126 starts) since 2012 and he has struck out 643, walked 232 and allowed 101 homers in 705 1/3 innings. The 21-year-old Palacios played shortstop for A ball Cedar Rapids and High A Ft. Myers in 2017. Most of the experts had Palacios ranked somewhere between the 20th and 30th best Twins prospect. Palacios is known more for his hitting than he is his fielding
Jermaine Palacios
This will be the fourth big league organization for Odorizzi who was a first round pick by the Brewers in 2008 but was traded to the Royals in 2010. The Royals traded Odorizzi to the Rays in 2012. Odorizzi will make $6.3 million this year and can become a free agent in 2020.
I love baseball and I love gardening. There is nothing in this world that tastes better than a freshly picked tomato off the vine on a warm summer day. There was a lot of fun at Met Stadium back in the early 60’s and some of it was not on the diamond. In today’s world we take too many things too seriously and neglect to stop and smell the roses tomato’s. We forget sometimes that baseball was meant to be a game but over the years it became a business. We don’t have the “characters” in baseball anymore like we once had and players work at the game year-around. I miss the game of baseball the way it used to be but baseball is still a great game no matter what. Here is a fun column by Dick Cullum about the Metropolitan Stadium tomato growing contest. Maybe they should come up with something similar now that the Twins are playing outdoors again. Sounds like a great marketing gimmick to me.
This clipping is from the June 24, 1964 Star Tribune.
Here is what Amanda Fiegl wrote on Smithsonian.com back in March of 2008 in her article called “Tomatoes in the Bullpen”. Obviously she never heard of what went on at Met Stadium.
Greenest Bullpen Shea Stadium, Queens, NY: Home of the Mets
Shea is a place of many firsts. When it opened in 1964, it was the first stadium capable of hosting both baseball and football events. The Jets stopped using it in 1984, and soon the Mets will too, with the new Citi Field set to open next year.
Shea was the site of the longest extra-inning doubleheader in baseball history (10 hours and 32 innings, against the San Francisco Giants) in May 1964, and hosted the Beatles’ first U.S. outdoor stadium show a year later. It also hosts some uninvited guests–The New York Times reported in 2007 that a colony of several dozen feral cats lives at the stadium, sometimes making surprise appearances on camera. In the one YouTube-celebrated instance last season, a startled kitten popped out of a tarp being unfurled by and even more startled groundskeeper.
But Shea has another unique claim to fame as well–the majors’ first bullpen vegetable garden. The tradition is said to have started with a few tomatoes planted by bullpen coach Joe Pignatano in 1969, which groundskeepers turned into a full-fledged garden in later years. By 1997, the corn and sunflowers in the Mets’ bullpen grew so high that the visiting Phillies actually complained that the greenery obstructed their view of warm-ups. Now, teams including the Red Sox, Braves and Detroit Tigers also have bullpen gardens.
Over the years 69 players have played 10 or more games at third base for the Minnesota Twins. Gary Gaetti has far and away played the hot corner more frequently and any other Minnesota Twin. To qualify for this list you must have played at least 51% of your games at third base. The most obvious name that you would think of that belongs on this list is Harmon Killebrew but he does not qualify because he played 1,939 games in a Minnesota Twins uniform but only 517 of them were at third base. My silly rule but it is what it is. My biggest surprise looking at the list is to see Eric Soderholm so high on the list.
I went out to the CenturyLink Sports Complex on Friday to see who was out there before the pitchers and catchers report early next week. I got there about 8:45 am and there wasn’t a player in site and the fields were all empty, as a matter of fact I was the only fan out there for about 15 or 20 minutes. About 9AM or so the players started drifting out to the field with the big grassy knoll, I would guess there were about 25 or so and they did some stretching and running before moving on. Fans started arriving about 9:30 or so.
It was fairly quiet at the complex, pretty much what I expected at this time of the year. I was hoping to see Miguel Sano but I didn’t spot him at all. I took a few pictures that are posted under “2018 Spring Training” on the right-hand side of the page. It is hard for me anyway, to identify the players, particularly the minor leaguers’ without names on their uniforms.
I see that the Twins missed out on Yu Darvish when he agreed to a deal to become a Chicago Cub. I know that the Twins are in desperate need of starters but I am happy they didn’t spend $126 million on Darvish over the next 5 years, there are other and I think better options out there that will be a better fit. I applaud the Twins decision not to give in to a player and give him an opt-out in his contract. An opt-out is a one-way benefit for the player and is a dumb idea for baseball teams and those that fall for that agent trick deserve what they get.
Baseball is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see the pitchers and catchers in action next week.
