Get Yer (1969 Twins) Programs!!
My LCS has seen several waves of great vintage coming in lately, and I've possibly overdone it on cards from 1955-1973 lately. Which isn't really such a bad thing, but it's going to take several posts to just highlight my favorite of the new arrivals. So I'm just going to start with this awesome acquisition, a 1969 Minnesota Twins Program and Scorecard!
This was sitting on the counter by the team sorted star cards, and in decent looking condition for the price. Kind of cool that the cover is promoting the 100th Anniversary of Professional Baseball, as this season is the 150th Anniversary. Even though it's not perfect, I want to read it!
Still a good value considering the major stain covering up a good quarter of the back cover. Ruining a classic Hamm's Beer advertisement in the process. I haven't seen a whole lot of Twins publications from the 1960's floating around these days.
Other than a few ill-conceived seasons of airing Twins games on a Pohlad owned FM radio station, the Twins have been on WCCO since 1961. Nice ad for their 1969 coverage.
Nearly every signature is a perfectly legible take on traditional cursive writing. This page wouldn't make any sense in a program for today's game. Nearly every player's signature is now an illegible scribble. Without the context of a picture or a printed name by it, a collage of player signatures now would just be a mess.
I've worked in printing for close to 20 years now. Granted, my only working experience comes on the digital side. I need Photoshop and InDesign in order to do my job. In 1969, all of this had to be done with film. Other than the covers, the entire program is 2 color printed, with Pantone Red and Pantone Blue used on all inner pages. Which just so happens to be the Twins colors! When I took my first printing job in 2000, I worked in the digital side of pre-press. Back then, they still had a film department that handled the traditional method of getting ink on paper.
Overpriced Art College taught some of the basics of this process, so I knew how camera art was shot, negatives stripped onto signatures, then transferred to plate and press. My then job had me working graveyard shift alongside an ever-shrinking film stripping department. I'd talk to them at night, and understood what they were doing. Getting an understanding of how it translated to the far more efficient digital method, that I knew how to do. Technology was picking off the dinosaurs, and I empathized with them on their way out...
I looked at this page, and it brought to mind the process it would have taken in 1969, just to paste-up and strip this simple art. At least it only 2 color, so registration is not a huge concern...
The next page had an advertisement for Metro Metals, starring Bob Allison. Underneath that is the Twins 1969 season schedule. Now you can plan your visits to Metropolitan Stadium to see your favorite opponent! I've got my eye on that late season series vs the Seattle Pilots!
And who's not in the mood for Shakey's Pizza? Maybe without the French's Mustard, but heavy on the Rinky Ting Piano and Banjo PLEASE!!!
Apparently fixing the upside down Duff's ad wasn't in the Twins publications budget. I knew Calvin Griffith was a notorious cheap skate, but this is pretty bad. Hope Duff's got a full refund at least...
The list of team scouts is a nice add. As is the brief summary of their minor league system. I didn't know the Twins AAA ballclub was in Denver in 1969. Or maybe I did know and just forgot... Cool either way!
Does this page have a rare third color? Nope, just what you get when you combine Pantone Red and Pantone Blue, you get Pantone Purple! (Not really...) With the detail in the lamppost still visible, the pressmen did a good job of registering this page on press. Which is important, because you also have another Twins Twinkler to worry about. Not to mention a sack of Nut Goodies, Solid Falvor Hits and the worst slogan I've ever seen associated with pro sports...
I was wondering if the Twins were going to let the opponents hit. Or if they had to forage for sticks down by the river before each game...
After that mind numbing revelation, I've going to submit to the Minnesota Twins peer pressure and enjoy the flavor hit of a Winston. Great idea Twins!
After officially buying and saving each of the Twins yearbooks since I began attending games in person. I've been unofficially collecting older Twins yearbooks and programs since September 2012, when an antique store find jumpstarted that collection. I was on vacation in Minnesota. One of those mornings, I spent several hours wandering around Anoka with a friend of mine, taking pictures of buildings and other points of interest.
Including the former First National Bank of Anoka. Most recently known as yet another branch of Wells Fargo. When my age was in single digits, I had my first "Junior Banker" savings account at this bank. My family did their banking here as well, so I remember waiting at this drive through many times. Back then, the exit faced the Rum River Lumber company. Which had it's yard across the street. Sometime in the last decade, all that lumber assembled itself into condominiums...
Wells Fargo closed this location in July 2011. The building had been prepped for demolition, and would be gone within a matter of weeks of these photos being taken. I hadn't even thought about this building in years, and lucked into being able to photograph it during it's final days as a complete structure.
But I'll get back to that abrupt side-story later. After we flip through a few more pages of the 1969 Twins Program and Scorecard.
I think Peter's logo is supposed to be the end of a stalk of wheat. But it looks more like a lit fuse. And I knew Heidelberg made printing presses, I didn't know they made wieners too... Wonder if that's a separate attachment for the presses? Folded signatures come out one side, while link sausages shoot out the back side. (That's dirty!) The cyan unit apparently makes bright blue bratwurst, that are served on the first and second deck of Metropolitan Stadium.
The list of hotels the Twins use in out of town cities is interesting. Especially the Cadillac hotel in Detroit. Knowing that building well from looking at urban explorer photos online of it abandoned and falling apart, back in the early 2000's. A once grand hotel was trashed quickly after closing in the late 1980's.
Uh... When the Twins travel to Oakland, Seattle, Boston or Chicago, do they have to sleep on the bus? Or on a friend's couch?
More nuts, Chinese food, some cows and a Twinkler of catcher George Mitterwald, coming off his 1968 rookie season.
But what's with the cows being used at the Met? What were they being used for? Did Griffith have cows grazing the fields instead of mowing them when the Twins were out of town. Not staying in hotels on some roadtrips.
The center four pages of the program are printed on a slightly different stock. This is the scorecard part of the Program. These would be printed in lower quantities closer to game day, then bound in with the existing pages of the previously printed programs. This would allow for custom current information to be printed. Such as rosters for the visiting team for that specific series.
Dear First Minneapolis Bank, (your logo looks very phallic), I'd really like to watch your 26 minute full color movie: "Baseball... Twins Style". So if you could lend that to me, that would be great!
And in case you forgot them, and are unable to sing along, the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner are provided as a service.
The breaking news in this issue of the program is all about the upcoming fan appreciation night, selected by Mr. Calvin Griffith himself! It will be this coming Friday, September 19, against the Seattle Pilots. I knew there was a reason I wanted to see the Twins play the Pilots!
The centerfold of the program (top half) was the visitors half of the scorecard. Revealing the opponents for this edition of the program to be the Oakland Athletics. A little research revealed that A's were at Metropolitan Stadium for a 2 game series, on Monday night, September 15 and Tuesday afternoon, September 16, 1969. Which makes sense, given the schilling of the upcoming Pilots games...
Catch Twins Baseball on WTCN channel 11! Knowing how scarce video and film of that era was, and with the practice of immediate erase and reuse after airing, I wonder if any footage from these shows exist today?
The Home half of the scorecard slipped during scanning, so I lost a part of the Hamm's Beer ad. I didn't feel like hooking everything back up just to rescan this page.
And your 1969 Twins television broadcast team for WTCN TV. Over 50 colorful games were being televised in 1969. Compared to just about all of them today. At least back then you didn't have to worry about Joe Buck suddenly showing up to be all Joe Buck on your TV...
Win Stephens of Win Stephens' Buicktown... There's a Minneapolis name I hadn't heard in decades... The Fair Oaks sounds like a nice hotel. Offering amenities that seem like standard no-brainers now, but likely less common in 1969. It was probably really expensive too... Like about $10 to stay there I bet!
I've spent a lot of time reading the pitching rosters. I'm guessing these include the expanded rosters of September call-ups. How else would you explain the Seattle Pilots employing nearly 30% more pitchers than any other American League team? And over on the right, you'll see the pitching roster of their fellow 1969 Expansion team, the Montreal Expos!
On our way back to my friend's car, he saw Kyle's Kollectibles advertising sports memorabilia for sale. Worth a look?
The Sports Memorabilia was pushed to the back of the store, behind the antiques. But Kyle had some very interesting stuff in his cases. Some older baseball cards, plus some odds and endsy Minnesota related pieces of varying quality. A lot of things I hadn't seen very often in my years of collecting, if ever at all...
Underneath some piled up stuff in the corner, was what looked like a pair of stadium seats, sitting mounted to a free standing stand. The conflicting tones of blue looked awfully familiar...
I turned to my friend and asked, could we fit these in his car? He looked at the base and height, as Kyle (I think it was Kyle) moved the stuff sitting on top of them, so we could get a closer look. My friend replied that he thought they'd fit. If not, we could return with my dad's truck and get them.
A couple of years earlier, I found a pair of seats taken from Denver's old Mile High Stadium, on sale for $300. I turned them down despite debating long and hard over it. I've always wanted a pair of stadium seats in my collection, but that wasn't the right situation. Plus while Mile high Stadium was cool, I had no attachment to it. Now Metropolitan Stadium seats on the other hand, for $100 less?
Who knows... In September 1969, there could have been butts in those very seats that were reading this very program that I'm writing about today. Now they've been reunited! Kinda...
And I bet they were Super Valu fans as well! With some more Twinkering and the revelation that Minneapolis is more fun downtown. Brought to you by hotels. So you don't actually have to live there to have fun, and you can leave when you're done.
More cigarettes! I remember (not) selling BelAir smokes at 99 Spillihp. We had some in the rack for a while. No one ever bought them, and eventually we returned them to the vender for credit. We sold a bunch of Kool's, and an occasional Viceroy. Never saw any Raleigh brand though.
Below the Twinkering of Rod Carew, are a couple of prints of Hall of Fame plaques. A random assortment of baseball legends were scattered throughout the Program. These two (Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) make sense. But not having the plaque of Walter Johnson in the program did not make sense. Not only is Johnson still the winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball history, most of those wins came while pitching for the Washington Senators. Who the Twins were prior to 1961...
Underneath the ad for Charlie's Cafe Exceptionale, is a fascinating look at how the Twins distributed tickets in 1969.
Just go to your bank and ask for Twins tickets. Someone there will help! Same with charter busses... Just call one up, and they'll get the tickets and bring you to the game. Is this really how Major League Baseball operated in 1969? If you want to buy tickets, just ask someone and they'll do it for you? No wonder attendance at the Met was poor for so many years. Not enough people knew the right people...
I think it's funny the Twins Program went with the far lesser known Harmon Killebrew nickname of "Harm" when "Killer" was much more accepted. Also strange that such a mild-mannered superstar would have such violent aliases...
Apparently in 1969, you could both bring a bucket of chicken into the stadium to eat, then order more while at Met Stadium to pick up on the way home... Wonder how many people did that? There's Joe DiMaggio's and Ted Williams's Hall of Fame plaques, in a Pantone Blue Monotone. And look at all the different types of cigars that are available at Met Stadium concession stands! For your smoking pleasure!
I was hoping for more images of the stadium itself in this program, but they numbered few. At least this happy wiener vendor, posing in front of the Met's scoreboard is a great shot. When Target Field opened, they made a big deal about how they would sell Schweigert hot dogs, because that was tradition from Met Stadium. (The HHH Metrodome sold Hormel hot dogs, which were far superior. Though none could hold a candle to the Hebrew National hot dogs sold at Coors Field in Denver...)
Back in 2010, I wrote a lengthy story about Metropolitan Stadium for Wasted Quarter. That was In honor of attending my first game at Target Field. So I wanted to write a story about the Twins first stadium. I spent an unrealistic amount of time researching old photographs of the park, and reading anything I could find online about it.
Finding OldMetStadium.com (a tribute site ran by Lowell (Rick) Prescott), led me to a series of photographs provided by Robin Hanson. Robin submitted 32 high quality prints of an abandoned and falling apart Met Stadium, taken in 1983. Two years after the stadium closed, and two years before it would finally be demolished. So that Mall of America abomination could be built in it's place. The 32 pictures taken from various angles of the deteriorating ballpark are haunting and amazing. Someday I may have to write about them, just so I can show off how incredible they are.
This is my favorite picture ever of Metropolitan Stadium. The field overgrown, large pieces of metal have fallen from the upper deck to the seats below. Windows are all smashed out of the press boxes. The third base temporary bleachers removed to just support poles... Sad and amazing.
I didn't realize these brands of cigarettes were made by Lorillard. And I like the idea of an angry manager running on the field to smoke with the umpire.
Although I'm calling bullshit on this Did You Know? article. While I don't feel like looking up the exact wording of whatever the rule change that was in 1969 exactly says, I feel the writer isn't interpreting the rule correctly. He states that a pitcher would qualify for a save weather leading 1-0 or 20-0. I do not recall any situation where anything larger than a 4 run lead qualifying as a save. After all, 4 is the number of runs that can be scored at at one time. And preventing that from happening, would mean you saved the game. The rule has never awarded a save for just being there... I found a bit of amusement the writer chose to use the term "liberalized" several times in explaining the rule change. incorrectly. Reminds me of the propaganda bastardizing the word liberal, incorrectly, in today's media...
Ordering one of everything on the menu, including five cigars, a steak sammich AND a pack of smokes, comes to a grand total of $8.45. What would that buy at Target Field today? A basic Schweigert hot dog. And maybe some warm water from the drinking fountain. But at least that hot dog would be Schweigert, because of Metropolitan Stadium!
As alluded to earlier, in addition to the Met seats, Kyle's Kollectibles sold me a decent run of old Twins yearbooks. For $5-$8 a piece, I purchased copies from 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980. With Rod Carew featured prominently, at least during the years he was still with the team. I was kind of disappointed with the six of them. They are all cool pieces of Twins history, but they were all very bland. Showing little character beyond the absolute minimum that could be expected of them.
Kyle's Kollectibles also sold me this sweet AWA former World Champions flyer, autographed by Maurice "Mad Dog" Vachon!
One of the last pages in the 1969 Program featured a map for arriving at Metropolitan Stadium and parking once there. Sad that today the Met is long gone, and that damn shopping mall is there now. I think the stadium and parking lots in this diagram deserve a closer look...
The diagram of Met Stadium is really not accurate. The dark blue shading does match the permanent grandstands, but the shape is way wrong, no left field double decker bleachers... Just a really poor effort Twins... Not even knowing what their own stadium looks like. No wonder they wanted a dome...
And if you were naming sections of the parking lot after rival American League teams, why give yourselves the smallest parking lot? And why is the Cleveland Indians lot for busses and taxi's only? The Athletics moved to Oakland two years ago! Update either the city, or change Athletics to Royals! And why are you snubbing the Seattle Pilots? Aren't you appreciating around them in four days?
I remember going to baseball card shows at the Thunderbird Motel, back in the 1990's. The motel was closed and then demolished in 2016. Expansion of that damn Mall of America, scalped the Thunderbird.
The 1969 Minnesota Twins Program & Scorecard closes out with a Spring team photo, inside the back cover. I would have expected the team photo to be taken inside the Met, but this is from Tinker Field in Orlando, Florida. Which was a nice surprise.
And that pretty much does it for the program. Was very happy to find it, and is a nice addition to my Twins collection. The small peek at the game in 1969 was eye opening. From just the perspective of advertising alone. It was all local businesses vs nationally known brands. Tobacco was also a major player on many pages, far more than alcohol.
Now that I've seen this one, I want to go back even further into team publications. I think I need something from the 1961 season. Just to see how the Twins saw themselves during their first season.
This was sitting on the counter by the team sorted star cards, and in decent looking condition for the price. Kind of cool that the cover is promoting the 100th Anniversary of Professional Baseball, as this season is the 150th Anniversary. Even though it's not perfect, I want to read it!
Still a good value considering the major stain covering up a good quarter of the back cover. Ruining a classic Hamm's Beer advertisement in the process. I haven't seen a whole lot of Twins publications from the 1960's floating around these days.
Other than a few ill-conceived seasons of airing Twins games on a Pohlad owned FM radio station, the Twins have been on WCCO since 1961. Nice ad for their 1969 coverage.
I found this next page particularly fascinating.
Nearly every signature is a perfectly legible take on traditional cursive writing. This page wouldn't make any sense in a program for today's game. Nearly every player's signature is now an illegible scribble. Without the context of a picture or a printed name by it, a collage of player signatures now would just be a mess.
I've worked in printing for close to 20 years now. Granted, my only working experience comes on the digital side. I need Photoshop and InDesign in order to do my job. In 1969, all of this had to be done with film. Other than the covers, the entire program is 2 color printed, with Pantone Red and Pantone Blue used on all inner pages. Which just so happens to be the Twins colors! When I took my first printing job in 2000, I worked in the digital side of pre-press. Back then, they still had a film department that handled the traditional method of getting ink on paper.
Overpriced Art College taught some of the basics of this process, so I knew how camera art was shot, negatives stripped onto signatures, then transferred to plate and press. My then job had me working graveyard shift alongside an ever-shrinking film stripping department. I'd talk to them at night, and understood what they were doing. Getting an understanding of how it translated to the far more efficient digital method, that I knew how to do. Technology was picking off the dinosaurs, and I empathized with them on their way out...
I looked at this page, and it brought to mind the process it would have taken in 1969, just to paste-up and strip this simple art. At least it only 2 color, so registration is not a huge concern...
The next page had an advertisement for Metro Metals, starring Bob Allison. Underneath that is the Twins 1969 season schedule. Now you can plan your visits to Metropolitan Stadium to see your favorite opponent! I've got my eye on that late season series vs the Seattle Pilots!
And who's not in the mood for Shakey's Pizza? Maybe without the French's Mustard, but heavy on the Rinky Ting Piano and Banjo PLEASE!!!
And naming your player write ups, "Twins Twinkler"? What does that even mean?
And Ching Johnson Builders? Really?
The list of team scouts is a nice add. As is the brief summary of their minor league system. I didn't know the Twins AAA ballclub was in Denver in 1969. Or maybe I did know and just forgot... Cool either way!
Does this page have a rare third color? Nope, just what you get when you combine Pantone Red and Pantone Blue, you get Pantone Purple! (Not really...) With the detail in the lamppost still visible, the pressmen did a good job of registering this page on press. Which is important, because you also have another Twins Twinkler to worry about. Not to mention a sack of Nut Goodies, Solid Falvor Hits and the worst slogan I've ever seen associated with pro sports...
Bats. Both teams use them...
Tremendous.
After that mind numbing revelation, I've going to submit to the Minnesota Twins peer pressure and enjoy the flavor hit of a Winston. Great idea Twins!
******
Including the former First National Bank of Anoka. Most recently known as yet another branch of Wells Fargo. When my age was in single digits, I had my first "Junior Banker" savings account at this bank. My family did their banking here as well, so I remember waiting at this drive through many times. Back then, the exit faced the Rum River Lumber company. Which had it's yard across the street. Sometime in the last decade, all that lumber assembled itself into condominiums...
Wells Fargo closed this location in July 2011. The building had been prepped for demolition, and would be gone within a matter of weeks of these photos being taken. I hadn't even thought about this building in years, and lucked into being able to photograph it during it's final days as a complete structure.
******
But I'll get back to that abrupt side-story later. After we flip through a few more pages of the 1969 Twins Program and Scorecard.
Minnesota Twins inspired smoke break over!
Hey kids! Go smoke!
Uh... When the Twins travel to Oakland, Seattle, Boston or Chicago, do they have to sleep on the bus? Or on a friend's couch?
I could go for a Crisscross Sundae right about now too...
But what's with the cows being used at the Met? What were they being used for? Did Griffith have cows grazing the fields instead of mowing them when the Twins were out of town. Not staying in hotels on some roadtrips.
The center four pages of the program are printed on a slightly different stock. This is the scorecard part of the Program. These would be printed in lower quantities closer to game day, then bound in with the existing pages of the previously printed programs. This would allow for custom current information to be printed. Such as rosters for the visiting team for that specific series.
Dear First Minneapolis Bank, (your logo looks very phallic), I'd really like to watch your 26 minute full color movie: "Baseball... Twins Style". So if you could lend that to me, that would be great!
And in case you forgot them, and are unable to sing along, the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner are provided as a service.
The breaking news in this issue of the program is all about the upcoming fan appreciation night, selected by Mr. Calvin Griffith himself! It will be this coming Friday, September 19, against the Seattle Pilots. I knew there was a reason I wanted to see the Twins play the Pilots!
The centerfold of the program (top half) was the visitors half of the scorecard. Revealing the opponents for this edition of the program to be the Oakland Athletics. A little research revealed that A's were at Metropolitan Stadium for a 2 game series, on Monday night, September 15 and Tuesday afternoon, September 16, 1969. Which makes sense, given the schilling of the upcoming Pilots games...
And so much great retro Minneapolis related advertising!
Northwest Orient!
The active roster for the visiting Oakland Athletics.
The Home half of the scorecard slipped during scanning, so I lost a part of the Hamm's Beer ad. I didn't feel like hooking everything back up just to rescan this page.
And here's the Minnesota Twins active roster for that mid September 1969 series vs Oakland.
And your 1969 Twins television broadcast team for WTCN TV. Over 50 colorful games were being televised in 1969. Compared to just about all of them today. At least back then you didn't have to worry about Joe Buck suddenly showing up to be all Joe Buck on your TV...
Win Stephens of Win Stephens' Buicktown... There's a Minneapolis name I hadn't heard in decades... The Fair Oaks sounds like a nice hotel. Offering amenities that seem like standard no-brainers now, but likely less common in 1969. It was probably really expensive too... Like about $10 to stay there I bet!
I've spent a lot of time reading the pitching rosters. I'm guessing these include the expanded rosters of September call-ups. How else would you explain the Seattle Pilots employing nearly 30% more pitchers than any other American League team? And over on the right, you'll see the pitching roster of their fellow 1969 Expansion team, the Montreal Expos!
And that does it for the 4 page scorecard.
Let's go back to Anoka, Minnesota in September 2012...
******
The Sports Memorabilia was pushed to the back of the store, behind the antiques. But Kyle had some very interesting stuff in his cases. Some older baseball cards, plus some odds and endsy Minnesota related pieces of varying quality. A lot of things I hadn't seen very often in my years of collecting, if ever at all...
Underneath some piled up stuff in the corner, was what looked like a pair of stadium seats, sitting mounted to a free standing stand. The conflicting tones of blue looked awfully familiar...
"Those seats from Met Stadium?"
"Yup! Someone brought them in to see if we could sell them."
"How much?"
"$200."
I turned to my friend and asked, could we fit these in his car? He looked at the base and height, as Kyle (I think it was Kyle) moved the stuff sitting on top of them, so we could get a closer look. My friend replied that he thought they'd fit. If not, we could return with my dad's truck and get them.
"I'll take them."
Yeah... I'm not turning these down...
And the seats fit in his car with no problem!
Who knows... In September 1969, there could have been butts in those very seats that were reading this very program that I'm writing about today. Now they've been reunited! Kinda...
And I bet they were Super Valu fans as well! With some more Twinkering and the revelation that Minneapolis is more fun downtown. Brought to you by hotels. So you don't actually have to live there to have fun, and you can leave when you're done.
More cigarettes! I remember (not) selling BelAir smokes at 99 Spillihp. We had some in the rack for a while. No one ever bought them, and eventually we returned them to the vender for credit. We sold a bunch of Kool's, and an occasional Viceroy. Never saw any Raleigh brand though.
Below the Twinkering of Rod Carew, are a couple of prints of Hall of Fame plaques. A random assortment of baseball legends were scattered throughout the Program. These two (Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) make sense. But not having the plaque of Walter Johnson in the program did not make sense. Not only is Johnson still the winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball history, most of those wins came while pitching for the Washington Senators. Who the Twins were prior to 1961...
The Minnesota Twins 1969 Roster, brought to you by Shufeldt Cadillac.
Just go to your bank and ask for Twins tickets. Someone there will help! Same with charter busses... Just call one up, and they'll get the tickets and bring you to the game. Is this really how Major League Baseball operated in 1969? If you want to buy tickets, just ask someone and they'll do it for you? No wonder attendance at the Met was poor for so many years. Not enough people knew the right people...
Uh-oh... Employers Overload!
I think it's funny the Twins Program went with the far lesser known Harmon Killebrew nickname of "Harm" when "Killer" was much more accepted. Also strange that such a mild-mannered superstar would have such violent aliases...
Don't cook tonight call Chicken Delight! With a slogan like that, how can you fail?
Apparently in 1969, you could both bring a bucket of chicken into the stadium to eat, then order more while at Met Stadium to pick up on the way home... Wonder how many people did that? There's Joe DiMaggio's and Ted Williams's Hall of Fame plaques, in a Pantone Blue Monotone. And look at all the different types of cigars that are available at Met Stadium concession stands! For your smoking pleasure!
I was hoping for more images of the stadium itself in this program, but they numbered few. At least this happy wiener vendor, posing in front of the Met's scoreboard is a great shot. When Target Field opened, they made a big deal about how they would sell Schweigert hot dogs, because that was tradition from Met Stadium. (The HHH Metrodome sold Hormel hot dogs, which were far superior. Though none could hold a candle to the Hebrew National hot dogs sold at Coors Field in Denver...)
Back in 2010, I wrote a lengthy story about Metropolitan Stadium for Wasted Quarter. That was In honor of attending my first game at Target Field. So I wanted to write a story about the Twins first stadium. I spent an unrealistic amount of time researching old photographs of the park, and reading anything I could find online about it.
Finding OldMetStadium.com (a tribute site ran by Lowell (Rick) Prescott), led me to a series of photographs provided by Robin Hanson. Robin submitted 32 high quality prints of an abandoned and falling apart Met Stadium, taken in 1983. Two years after the stadium closed, and two years before it would finally be demolished. So that Mall of America abomination could be built in it's place. The 32 pictures taken from various angles of the deteriorating ballpark are haunting and amazing. Someday I may have to write about them, just so I can show off how incredible they are.
This is my favorite picture ever of Metropolitan Stadium. The field overgrown, large pieces of metal have fallen from the upper deck to the seats below. Windows are all smashed out of the press boxes. The third base temporary bleachers removed to just support poles... Sad and amazing.
I wonder if my seats are somewhere in this picture?
Although I'm calling bullshit on this Did You Know? article. While I don't feel like looking up the exact wording of whatever the rule change that was in 1969 exactly says, I feel the writer isn't interpreting the rule correctly. He states that a pitcher would qualify for a save weather leading 1-0 or 20-0. I do not recall any situation where anything larger than a 4 run lead qualifying as a save. After all, 4 is the number of runs that can be scored at at one time. And preventing that from happening, would mean you saved the game. The rule has never awarded a save for just being there... I found a bit of amusement the writer chose to use the term "liberalized" several times in explaining the rule change. incorrectly. Reminds me of the propaganda bastardizing the word liberal, incorrectly, in today's media...
Enough about that... GO SMOKE!!!
How to keep score... Useful information to pair with the scorecard centerfold.
Big ad for the Hopkins House, a Twinkering on Tony Oliva, more cigarettes (Heheheheheh... Tareyton 100's...) and Concession Stand prices! Cool!
I gotta take a close look at those prices!
Gross, tasteless Schweigert...
The 1969 Program, however, far exceeded the low bar set by the late 1970's yearbooks...
Verne Gagne sure loved to make himself champ a lot...
The diagram of Met Stadium is really not accurate. The dark blue shading does match the permanent grandstands, but the shape is way wrong, no left field double decker bleachers... Just a really poor effort Twins... Not even knowing what their own stadium looks like. No wonder they wanted a dome...
And if you were naming sections of the parking lot after rival American League teams, why give yourselves the smallest parking lot? And why is the Cleveland Indians lot for busses and taxi's only? The Athletics moved to Oakland two years ago! Update either the city, or change Athletics to Royals! And why are you snubbing the Seattle Pilots? Aren't you appreciating around them in four days?
So much wrongness here...
The 1969 Minnesota Twins Program & Scorecard closes out with a Spring team photo, inside the back cover. I would have expected the team photo to be taken inside the Met, but this is from Tinker Field in Orlando, Florida. Which was a nice surprise.
And that pretty much does it for the program. Was very happy to find it, and is a nice addition to my Twins collection. The small peek at the game in 1969 was eye opening. From just the perspective of advertising alone. It was all local businesses vs nationally known brands. Tobacco was also a major player on many pages, far more than alcohol.
Now that I've seen this one, I want to go back even further into team publications. I think I need something from the 1961 season. Just to see how the Twins saw themselves during their first season.
******
On Thursday April 18, 2019, Four Baggers and Foreclosures received it's 50,000th hit.
While not a huge number, it's more than I'd expected to do when i started doing this in July 2017.
I'd like to thank everyone who has read my stories.
I've got a whole lot more to write about here!
Comments
Post a Comment