Reusse: No matter what, big league baseball is still in Minnesota

April 21, 1961, a Friday afternoon. The Twins were playing their first-ever game in Minnesota, against the expansion Washington Senators, the team that had replaced our club in the nation’s capital.

I was there with my father, Richard, a baseball man to his soul, so much so that among the players he recruited to play for the Fulda Giants in the summer of 1950 was Al Worthington, a pitcher for the University of Alabama.

“Big Al” or “Red,” whichever nickname you prefer, was the ace stopper for the Twins in the 1960s, including the 1965 American League champions. He is the oldest-living Twin at age 96, and not in fine enough health to join the small group of ’65 Twins who will be honored for a 60th anniversary with a brief ceremony on Saturday night at Target Field.

We lost that first home game to the expansion Senators, 5-3, a minor disappointment compared to the full picture — that being, we were in the big leagues.

Pardon me, but I’ve been around too long to join the current outrage. And when it comes to the Twins, that length of time is forever.

I was around when owner Calvin Griffith made Billy Martin one-and-done as manager in 1969, even after the hard-drinking little man had led the Twins to the first-ever American League West title. Back then, Twins fans were required to write letters to the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers, and other outlets, to express their vows to never attend another Twins game in protest of Billy’s firing.

Those vows requiring a stamp arrived by the thousands.

Which meant that he missed the ownership change to Carl Pohlad in 1984, and those two miraculous World Series triumphs in 1987 and 1991 with the managerial maestro, J. Thomas Kelly. And the rural fellow still protesting Billy probably didn’t bother to express his disdain over Smilin’ Carl’s involvement in the contraction scam that MLB was running in 2001.

One day, at an owners meeting in Arizona, after I had written some vile comments about MLB, the commissioner — Bud Selig, one of my all-time favorite baseball characters — called me into a conference room. And then he circled around with this small cigar and basically described contraction for what it was:

A strategy to get a better stadium situation for Carl in Minnesota.

It took another five years for approval of a new ballpark to make it through the state Legislature and Carl died in 2009, a year before Target Field opened.

The first decade of this century, 2001-2010, produced some terrific regular season baseball — and the next 15 have not been all you would hope as a team follower.

In these modern times for communication, there is no need for the current complainants to write a letter and attach a stamp. They can go to Twitter, or another outlet, and profanely bad-mouth the Pohlads when making their threats to never attend another Twins game with this ownership.

There is a huge difference between the Billy-ball threats of decades ago. Those were lovers of the Grand Old Game writing their letters. And even the contraction venom being expressed at the start of this century was based on a market where the Twins still were second in importance, behind the mighty NFL.

Now, we have the frightening sight of 18,000 people turning out for soccer games, to watch and to sing. And they are doing so out of preference, not to drink and perhaps to find temporary romance, as was the case with the youth that descended on the Met Stadium parking lot before (and during) Kicks games in the 1970s.

Yes, I’ve taken my fair number of shots at the Pohlads, with Carl being the lone two-time winner of the Turkey of the Year honor, and his grandson Joe having taken the honors in 2024 — but I don’t see these as baseball fanatics aiming obscene remarks at the Pohlad family name after Wednesday’s announcement they were not selling after all.

These were Twitter warriors, attempting to sound bold with their vile remarks.

I was a bit stunned by the trade deadline purge, but what was broken up was a team going nowhere. We can still admire Byron Buxton’s ability to play most of the time in 2025 in a fashion never anticipated to be seen again, and to wonder if, come 2026, Luke Keaschall and rookie Walker Jenkins have us dreaming of the return of Kirby and Herbie.