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 players listed below had just one hit while wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform. Most had more than one big league hit in their big league careers but for our purposes we are just looking for those players that had just one hit while wearing Minnesota Twins colors.
As you might suspect, since this list covers players that played for the Minnesota Twins from 1961 (when pitchers still batted) through 2019 the list has a lot of pitchers on it. The right-hand column on the list shows you the positions played by that player.
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.
September 3 was a busy day for big league debuts in a Minnesota Twins uniform.
Sep 3, 2014; Twins relief pitcher A.J. Achter (58) delivers a pitch in the ninth inning against the Chicago White Sox at Target Field. The Twins won 11-4. Mandatory Credit: Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports
A.J. Achter (P) – September 3, 2014 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 46th round of the 2010 MLB June Amateur Draft. Closed out a Twins 11-4 win over the White Sox at Target Field with a perfect 9th inning on 10 pitches.
Matt Fox (P) – September 3, 2010 – Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 1st round (35th pick) of the 2004 amateur draft. Fox debuted at Target Field in a start against the Texas Rangers going 5.2 innings (90 pitches) and allowing 2 runs on 4 hits and a walk but got a ND for his efforts. It was his one and only game for the Twins and one of only 4 big league games he would appear in.
In their final July game the Twins were helpless against Lee Stange, a former Twins pitcher and current Red Sox starter. Stange had a perfect game going until Harmon Killebrew singled with two out in the seventh inning at Fenway Park. The Twins final two hits took place in the ninth but Stange retired Tony Oliva and Killebrew on fly balls and he and the Red Sox closed out the 4-0 win. The Boston crew had only 4 hits themselves but three of them including a 3 run home run belonged to Carl Yastrzemski and Stange had the other Boston hit. Even though the Sox lost the five game series three games to two they held on to second place just 2 games out of the lead.
With 2/3 of the 1967 season in their rear-view mirror the Twins find themselves with a 53-47 record, good enough for fourth place tie and 5 games behind the league leading White Sox. With 17 wins and 13 losses in July the Twins scored 122 runs and held the opposition to just 94 runs.
The rest of the stories that I have done on the 1967 AL pennant race can be found here.
Between June 1 and June 15 the Twins fired (Sam Mele) and hired a manager (Cal Ermer) and went 10-6 playing all but one of the games at the friendly confines of Met Stadium. The team managed to pick-up 2.5 games in the standings but they still find themselves trailing the Chicago White Sox by four games.
June 13 wasn’t a great day in spite of the fact that the Twins scored in double-figures for the third day in a row and found themselves on the losing end of a 15-10 game. The Twins and Dean Chance were up 5-1 going into the sixth inning against the Detroit Tigers at the Met when the “S%#@” hit the fan, Chance gave up four singles and walked two before skipper Cal Ermer had seen enough and brought in reliever Jim Ollom who promptly gave up a single and a walk and he too found himself headed for the shower as Mudcat Grant came in to stop the bleeding. Three singles later Grant was gone and Jim Roland took the mound and promptly threw a wild pitch to allow another run, a passed ball followed which led to a sac fly, another Twins error kept the nightmare inning alive before Roland finally got the third out of the inning. When the smoke cleared the Tigers had put a 10 spot on the Twins and led the game 11 to 5. That would be 10 runs on 8 singles, three walks, two Twins errors, a wild pitch and a passed ball and a partridge in a pear tree. OMG! What we had here was the first time in Twins history that an opponent had scored 10 or more runs against the Twins in a single inning. The Twins bounced back with 5 runs of their own in the bottom of the inning to make it an 11-10 game but the Tigers scored 3 in the seventh and another in the eighth inning and the final score was 15-10 for the Tigers.
Here a couple of clippings out of the June 14, 1967 Minneapolis Tribune Sports section describing the action.
The June 10, 1967 Sporting News has a nice piece about Rod Carew and his base running problems and this time pitching coach Early Wynn puts Dave Boswell through his “wringer” method of fixing a pitchers problems.
Between May 16 and June 1 the Twins went 10-7 playing all but three games on the road in Chicago, California, Kansas City, New York and Boston. During that same time period Twins starter Dean Chance was on a roll, he beat the White Sox with a complete game 1-0 shutout, beat the Angels 7-2 with another complete game, lost to the White Sox 7-2, beat the Kansas City A’s 4-3 with 7 plus innings, and shut out the Red Sox 4-0 with another complete game effort bringing his record to 9-2.
On May 21 the Twins putting a good whipping on the California Angels by beating them 12-3 at Anaheim Stadium. Cesar Tovar was the hitting star when he became the first Twins player to ever get four XBH in a game when he went four for six with two doubles and two home runs.
The Twins had three home games in the midst of 14 road games against the league leading Chicago White Sox and Sam Mele‘s boys lost two of three to the Pale Hose. When June 1 rolled around the Twins found themselves just one game under .500 at 21-22 and 5 1/2 games behind league leading Chicago who was just percentage points ahead of Detroit.
The Minnesota Twins were unable to defend their 1965 championship season and finished 1966 with a 89-73 record in second place behind the World Champion Baltimore Orioles. The team was out to make amends in 1967 and get back to the World Series.
Tinker Field
In late March of 1967 the Minnesota Twins like every other team in the ten team American League was getting ready to wind down spring training at Tinker Field in Orlando, Florida and prepare for the long season ahead. The soon to be 1967 Minnesota Twins were a veteran team but they had high hopes for rookies like pitcher Jim Ollom, first baseman Rich Reese, third baseman Ron Clark and a 21 year-old Panamanian second baseman by the name of Rod Carew who spent 1966 in the class A Carolina League playing for the Wilson Tobs where he hit .292 with one home run and committed 21 errors.
Today you can read what Twins beat writer Max Nichols wrote about the Twins in the March 25, 1967 issue of the Sporting News which was the weekly baseball bible back in the days before the internet.
