I knew I wanted to cover baseball when I was a high school sophomore, so I had plenty of time to plan. I had two years' newspaper experience -- about 9 months on the night city desk and 15 on the sports desk -- before I graduated from college, so I knew something about the biz and had some bargaining power out of college, and I had a few clips. Once I got the beats I wanted I just dug in my spurs.

One revelation in general came when I was 22 and covering the Vikings. Looking around and seeing I was younger than everyone else in the press box, I had a good glimpse into my future and decided that when I was 40 I wouldn't be a broken down human covering sports. The hours stink and the pay is tough on mortgage payments. It's a job that can take its toll.

I don't recall anything surprising about covering the Twins, except at the time anyone with credentials could get a free drink and meal in the Twins' room, where Calvin Griffith and the Robertsons hung out before the game. MLB gradually eliminated that free Jim Beam policy, but at the '87 Series the Cardinals were still providing free Busch products. It was so damned cold there, though, you had to be a serious about your beer to want one.

If by "fundamentals" we are talking base running and fielding:

The Twins’ defense was not markedly improved in ’65 based on my research, but many errors were meaningless and the pitching was better. That pitching was often able to overcome the times when the defense gave teams four outs an inning, and because the team was running the bases better it could also offset some of those errors.

Kaat suffered the most. He gave up more than 120 runs, but only about 80 were earned. That’s a lot of needless pitching from the stretch.

If people gave Martin credit after the fact it was because he deserve the credit. Martin decided to make Versalles a project before the fact. He had been Zoilo’s doubleplay partner and he knew the guy. Martin deserves all the credit for the Versalles success.

On the subject of Martin, John Turturro has got Martin nailed in the “Bronx is Burning” series on ESPN. If Turturro never met Martin, and he probably didn’t that’s a helluva remarkable performance.

Carew was indeed a moody gent. He lockered next to Oliva, who would sometimes spruce up Rod’s poor p.r. habits by stepping in with a quote and a smile. Tony’s a Class A human being, and Rodney is a much changed man since his early Twins' days. He admits he was short with people at times.

I kept a stack of tear sheets that is only two inches high from all those years as a news hack, but a column about his departure is in the stack. My take on it was it was great to watch the guy play and good luck to him in California.

Those Angel fans saw the least of him. Twins’ fans saw the best of him. Carew didn’t have many full dance cards during his Angel days. He missed a lot of time, often when a really good lefty was pitching.

I see that Will kind already answered that question by saying that Calvin took care of his guys and kept them on the payroll.

It sounds to me – and I’m sure members of the board are thinking the same -- like this whole wife thing is something you’re making up as you go along.

Or more simply put, was the 1965 team the greatest Twins team ever? Souhan wrote recently that "[p]erhaps never before have the Twins possessed so much frontline talent." I would have to think that the 1965 had more "frontline" talent with Killer, Oliva, Allison, Kaat, and Grant. Throw in an MVP season from the shortstop and that has to be the best team ever... of course, they had injuries to some of that talent, Killer most notably, but in the end this had to be the best team in franchise history both from a frontline talent standpoint and from the standpoint of depth.

My vote is the ’65 team would whip the ’87 Twinks. That ’91 team was a good club.

In a broad context, though, the ’65 and ’87 teams struck uranium for fans, give or take an atomic number or two.
Those two teams are similar from a fan standpoint.

In ’65, the state finally had a big-league ballclub, but it didn’t have a championship team, and being fans have brief honeymoons with sports franchises it can be said that by ’65 people were getting ornery. Midwesterners wanted a winner, but ’64 had been such a dismal season people had begun to pray that someone would invent ESPN so they could watch Australian Rules Football.

Of course, in ’87, Minnesota was just a vast collection of recent losers – from Walter Mondale to the Vikings and their Super Bowl failures. Then they won the gonfalon, according to my Sports Writing Synonym for Winning phrase book.

So in a sense the ’65 and ’87 teams had a rags-to-riches impact on the people in Minnesota and the surrounding states.
What’s funny about that ’87 won-lost record is Whitey Herzog and the Cardinal fans – and others -- bitched about the Twins’ win total, and then last year the Cards win the Series with fewer regular season wins than the ’87 Twins. In fact, the Cards didn’t win a single game all season last year. You can look it up.

As for losing to the Dodgers, I don’t think it diminishes the ’65 Twins, it just doesn’t make for a “The Natural” ending, if we’re talking the movie, not literature.

I've always wondered this as well, particularly in light of the treatment Cuddyer got and how he responded when they finally quit jerking him around.

My assessment based on research, stats and interviews is Killebrew was better defensively than any other option, so that’s part of the reason he was moved. Injuries played a role in some of the moves, the team’s personnel in others.

Then-Indians’ outfielder Leon Wagner made a comment that I use in the book about Killebrew’s fielding. He praised Killebrew.
Fans then, and SABRmatcians now, might view his fielding as poor, but ballplayers look at things differently.

He was thought of as a good fielder at first base and passable at third. He was known for a good infield arm and soft hands. As a left-fielder, he was more of a liability than either at first or third. He had leg hinges that creaked and a weak outfield arm.

Killebrew has said this movement might have affected his offense a little, but back then most guys just wanted to play somewhere. He plain said when we talked for the book that there were many times he played when he probably shouldn’t have, but he didn’t want to risk losing his job, hard as that might be for us to believe.

There's a piece on my Web site about him that first appeared in the renegade Twins' program Gameday sold outside the Dome.

The downer part of the story doesn't mean it's not a workable manuscript.

The '65 team's WS loss was one thing that made me balk briefly about writing my book: Do people want to read about a team that didn’t win?

But in my first four hours of research I uncovered a half-dozen stories I had never heard, but were interesting to me, and being the first rule of writing is to entertain yourself I proceeded. I also figured if this stuff interested me, it would interest enough other people to make it worth my time.

And after that early research a sense of urgency appeared in my garage, sat down behind my car and put a ‘tater in the tail pipe. Like that hasn’t happened to you.

I knew these sources were not getting any younger. Nor was I. Or Lindsey Lohan, for that matter. Two of my sources died during the research and writing, and Earl Battey and John Klippstein had died the year before. Jim Lemon died last year.

It gets a little tougher to mine for those nuggets of truth once the cast is gone and all that is left are newspaper accounts and legend. Sure, there is some film and video from that era, but sports writing isn’t about sports, it’s about people, and once there is no one left to tell the stories about Camilo Pascual stealing dinnerware you have lost a good deal of the sense for who these men were.

Bostock's life is certainly a good story, and his survivors including his mother could still be around.

CarterHayes, I disagree that Allison has been Earl Battey'd. As a lifelong Twins fan who wasn't even born until the 80's, Allison was always held in high regard in everything I ever heard or read.

If you neutralize his Twins stats (throwing out his first three seasons) to a 750 run environment, and in 10 seasons you get a .267 batting average, 225 homeruns, 701 RBI's, and 751 runs created. Compare that to Hrbek (who has the weakest case of the retired numbers) and you get .282, 297, 1112 and 1120. Pretty similar numbers spread over three extra seasons but without the 2 World Series titles and the hometown boy attachment. I don't want the Twins to become like the Yankees and have a ton of numbers retired - save it for the truly elite.

Allison and Killebrew were the Mantle and Mays of the franchise in the early '60s. Allison really didn't want to move here at all, he liked D.C. Killebrew was concerned about the Met and the cold weather, but Allison comes across as the most vocal about the move, based on my research.

It's important to remember that with no free agency back then the mainstays of a franchise only moved along if the team wanted it that way, so there is a nucleus of the '65 team that also played for years on either side of '65. Because Allison was part of that group, he's a fond memory for older Twins' fans.

Certainly, death is hard on a guy's image, and the fact Allison has missed about a decade of appearances causes him to fall from the limelight. However, the U of M has a Bob Allison Ataxia Research Center and the annual January Twin Cities BBWAA awards for the past two years have been held in conjunction with BAARC's big fund-raiser. There are a lot of kids who attend this with their parents, so the more alert ones become aware of the man and his unfortunate end.

Calvin always maintained Allison should be in the Hall of Fame. That's a stretch -- he had a relatively brief career -- and you can't retire every number. I don't think Bob Allison stories will disappear entirely any time soon, and you're right about his baserunning. No one wanted to get in the guy's way on the pivot at second.

Wow, someone's on a merry-go-round of years that is spinning faster than mine, yet he's unaware.

I've got that on videotape, which is the first hint as to how old it is. February 11, 1986, before the Twins won their first pennant.

No kidding.

All those who weren't alive then, raise your hands.

Letterman chose four celebrities, I believe, to do short films. Killebrew ended up getting bumped when the films ran long, so Dave turned a show into Harmon Killebrew Night. The film was just part of the night, in which LeRoy Neiman painted a mural and Charlie Pride, who could not get to New York because of a snowstorm, sang a song over the telephone.

Kaat and Allison were there, and 'brew really acquitted himself very well.