Harvey at Bat

The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was only two years old in 1984, the year Minnesota almost lost professional baseball.

One could hardly blame Twins majority owner, Calvin Griffith, for being willing to sell to Florida investors who wanted to move the Twins to Tampa. Griffith had been in baseball all his life and loved owning the team, which he had inherited from his father. But diamonds aren’t forever, and as the last owner of a major league franchise whose income was derived solely from baseball, he was in a near-constant financial bind—unable to pay the salaries of any team of pennant contenders, and without pennant contenders, unable to draw fans.

Griffith had an escape clause in his 30-year Metrodome lease that allowed him to move the franchise if attendance did not reach 4.2 million cumulatively in a three-year period. After averaging just 900,000 fans a year in 1982 and 1983, attendance would have to reach 2.4 million in 1984 to tie the team to Minnesota.

It was a nearly impossible number to reach: A major league attendance record of 2.8 million, set in Cleveland in 1948, stood until 1982, when the L.A. Dodgers broke it at 3.6 million. After H. Gabriel Murphy sold his minority share of the Twins to the Floridians, Griffith said his stake was for sale for $50 million. It looked like the Floridians would be eager buyers.

And then Harvey Mackay went to work. Mackay, who would later become a celebrated author and speaker—an excerpt from his seventh book is in this issue—was well-connected in the business community and a well-known supporter of professional and University of Minnesota sports. As he reported in his first book, Swim with the Sharks, he started his campaign to keep the Twins in Minnesota by calling Bill Veeck, former owner of the Chicago White Sox.

Veeck was perhaps baseball’s best promoter. Although he is best known for having sent a midget to bat—Eddie Gaedel walked on four pitches that failed to penetrate his one-and-a-half-inch strike zone—Veeck also inaugurated such promotional staples as bat night, fan appreciation night, and putting players’ names on uniforms. He had held a 20-year grudge against Griffith for failing to support his bid for an American League expansion franchise in Washington, D.C., after the Washington Senators moved to become the Minnesota Twins.