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Old 12-30-2019, 06:53 PM   #1
bpbrooksy
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Location: Minneapolis/Chicago
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We're Gonna Win, Twins: A Minnesotan Dynasty (1961-)

Prologue

It's a wonderful year to be a Minnesotan.

(Well, they all are. Having spent the majority of my life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, I can attest to the unrivaled spirit of the state, whose marriage of the picturesque natural world with a vibrant metropolitan center defies anyone to deem it "flyover" territory.)

But 1961 is special. Despite recently losing their basketball team to California, the people of Minnesota were repaid in kind with two professional sports franchises in the same year: the expansion Minnesota Vikings, and the subject of this report, a scrappy little relocated team from the nation's capital.

First, a little history.


Since 1901, the Washington Senators had been one of the founding members of the American League. Defined by lifelong ace pitcher Walter "The Big Train" Johnson and manager-cum-owner Clark Griffith, the largely-mediocre ballclub won the 1924 World Series and strung together a few decades of otherwise unremarkable baseball. Griffith, elected to the Hall of Fame nine years before his death, passed away in 1955 and left the team to his nephew (and adopted son) Calvin Griffith.

With Major League Baseball continuing that proto-American ideal of westwardly manifesting destiny, the younger Griffith sold the Senators' stadium back to the city and began eyeing potential relocation destinations for a team in need of a kick in the pants. San Francisco was an early candidate, but the New York Giants got there first. Eventually, Calvin Griffith set his sights on the Twin Cities.

It took some convincing; the American League, understandably so, was initially hesitant to remove the national pastime from the national capital -- especially with a pending expansion, the first since the league's inception. A solution was eventually brokered -- with the league already planning to expand into Minneapolis, the ol' switcheroo was pulled: an expansion team would take over in Washington, and the existing Senators would be the ones to move into Minnesota instead.

The team would ultimately play their games in suburban Bloomington (in an outdoor facility shared with the expansion Vikings), but the christening of the team inspired some immediate statewide unity. Not wanting to isolate the fans from the opposite side of the Mississippi River (a factor that played into the departure of the Minneapolis Lakers), Griffith opted to name the team the Minnesota Twins.

It's a distinction reflected in the team's first logo: a player decked out in Minneapolis Millers gear shakes the hand of a man from the St. Paul Saints.


The rest, more or less, is history. But it's an interesting history, which begins at a fascinating time in the baseball mythos.

In this historical reimagining, it'll be my job to steer this team to more than the two championships that the real-life Twins have come away with since their inaugural season. It's my goal to pen a dynasty that can pair breezy, cleanly-formatted, enjoyable reading with an in-depth look at real artifacts of the time.

And, of course, to have a heck of a lot of fun. After all, as legendary Twins manager Tom Kelly said one fateful October evening in 1991, "Oh, hell. It's only a game."

Game on.
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