Lyman Bostock blazed trail to Anaheim

Torii Hunter is not the first exceptional center fielder to leave the Twins to sign a free-agent contract with the American League team in Anaheim, Calif.

Lyman Bostock did the same on Nov. 21, 1977, signing a five-year contract for a total of $2.5 million with the California Angels. That was the first offseason when there was full-scale free agency in major league baseball.

Precisely 30 years later, on Nov. 21, 2007, the Los Angeles Angels signed Hunter to a five-year contract for a total of $90 million.

Bostock batted .336 with 14 home runs and 90 RBI for the Twins in 1977 and received $500,000 per year. Torii Hunter batted .287 with 28 home runs and 107 RBI for the Twins in 2007 and received $18 million per year.

For me, this makes it official: There has been significant inflation in major league salaries during the three decades since players union leader Marvin Miller won free agency for his dues-paying members.

Bostock was as affable a presence in the Twins clubhouse as was Hunter years later. Lyman was more high-strung and, yes, more talkative.

The contract was large enough by the standards of early free agency that Bostock felt a need to get off to a fast start. Instead, he wound himself so tight he created an early-season slump.

He started the year 2-for-39 and announced that he wanted to give back his paychecks to the Angels -- give them personally to owner Gene Autry -- until he started to produce.

Autry refused, so Bostock gave his first two checks to charity. This covered the month of April, when he batted .147.

Bostock started to hit, of course, and was able to laugh about his early struggle when the Angels made their last visit of 1978 to Met Stadium on Sept. 18-19.

Bostock was in the visitors clubhouse at the start of the series, pantomiming his early slump for a Twin Cities sportswriter.

"I was the original April fool," Lyman said. "I watched some videotape of myself. I was pumping my leg, lunging forward, almost falling down. Man, did I look funny. I looked like Sadaharu Oh."

Teammate Don Baylor said: "You didn't look that good."

Bostock had his average in the high .290s. The Angels closed the series with a 4-1 victory behind Nolan Ryan. Bostock went 2-for-4 and drove in a run.

He saw the sportswriter on the way out of the ballpark, shouted, "Take it easy on my boys, Poison" -- meaning, Willie Norwood and Hosken Powell, two outfielders who had been forced into the Twins' lineup that season after the free-agent losses of Bostock and Larry Hisle.

The Angels were leaving for Chicago, then would return to California to close the season. That was where Bostock was raised, and now where he was playing.

California was this world's taste of heaven, the way Lyman saw it.

"He liked Minnesota, but according to Lyman, no place could touch California," Hisle said in 1988. "It had the best baseball, the best football, the best basketball, the best beaches, the best sun, the most attractive people. California was it."

Bostock never made it back home after he left Minnesota on that September afternoon. He was visiting relatives in Gary, Ind., on Saturday night, as he always did when his team was playing the White Sox in Chicago.

He was blasted with a shotgun and was pronounced dead the next morning -- 1:20 a.m. on Sept. 24, 1978. The man who fired the shotgun, Leonard Smith, was acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity.

Thirty years later, that still can cause Lyman's admirers to spit in anger.

Hunter has been back this week to open the season with the Angels against the Twins. He was 0-for-8 entering Wednesday's third game of the series.

He's a bit calmer about these things than was Bostock. It's unlikely that batting .147 in April would cause Torii to try give his paychecks back to management.

And if he did, his accountants would have apoplexy, since it would be 36 times more costly than it was for Lyman Bostock to surrender a couple of checks from the Angels.

Patrick Reusse can be heard weekdays on AM-1500 KSTP at 6:45 and 7:45 a.m. and 4:40 p.m. preusse@startribune.com