Greatest Twins Teams of All Time: 1969

Overview
Let’s get this out of the way now. There’s one man synonymous with this season: a certain Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., commonly known as “Billy.” Martin first earned his bread as the feisty second baseman on the Mickey Mantle Yankees of the 1950s. He didn’t hit particularly well, but his spark plug nature and wild card tendencies fed into a knack for World Series victories; Billy claimed five rings as a player. He was loud, chaotic, and—if such a thing exists in sports—Billy was simply a winner. His future managerial career resulted in a .553 winning percentage—a number made even more impressive considering the teams he took over typically stunk the prior season. 

In 1969, though, Martin was a new skipper looking to turn around the Twins following a rare forgettable season. 

Cal Ermer proved a feckless replacement for Sam Mele, the man who helmed the team during their glorious run in 1965. The squad still claimed classic talents like Harmon Killebrew and Jim Kaat, along with new stars like Rod Carew and Dean Chance, who both joined the team for the 1967 campaign, in addition to their usual deep cast of complimentary pieces and excellent bullpen options. For one reason or another, they never gelled. Owner Calvin Griffith sensed his dynamite group of athletes couldn’t wait around to figure something out under Ermer. His solution? The former 3rd base coach and one-time manager of the Denver Bears.

Lineup
Baserunning was one of the core tenets of Billy Martin’s strategy. He pounded aggression into his players, emphasizing stolen bases and special attention to taking the extra base whenever possible. Even Harmon Killebrew shed his adherence to stagnation to swipe eight bags, five more than his next-highest season. By season’s end, only the Seattle Pilots, Kansas City Royals, and New York Yankees stole more bases.

Perhaps the flashiest steals came from Rod Carew, who stole home on seven separate occasions in 1969. Thom Henninger, in The Pride of Minnesota: The Twins in the Turbulent 1960s, writes that, in the spring, Martin "taught [Carew] to time a pitcher's delivery and start for home from a walking lead when he knew he could make it safely."* The resulting threat netted a handful of free runs and uneasy deliveries from pitchers privy to Carew's desire for theft. 

No one in the AL scored more runs than the Twins. Killebrew had his best season by OPS+, slashing .276/.427/.584 while leading the league in homers (49), RBIs (140), and walks (145). He took home the AL MVP award over a pair of Orioles thumpers, Boog Powell and Frank Robinson. Carew clocked the first of many (many, many, many) .300 seasons, hitting .332 as Minnesota’s top-of-the-order assassin. Tony Oliva—brilliant as always—led the league in hits and doubles. Yet there was one more major offensive contributor outside of the trio of future Hll-of-Famers: 27-year-old Rich Reese. The Ohioan had technically been around since 1964, but he barely registered as a name to know until 1967. Following a pair of decent seasons, Reese crushed in 1969, hitting .322 with a .513 slugging percent; he hit so well that Killebrew moved to 3rd base to accommodate the newfound force. 

With shortstop the year prior as the kind of unanswerable question teams loathe to endure, Minnesota made a move for veteran Leo Cárdenas, hoping that his tranquil glove could soothe the previous positional shortcomings. The fit was perfect. Cárdenas enjoyed one of his best seasons at the plate, slashing .280/.353/.388 over 160 games while playing his typical, sanguine defense.

The addition also allowed super-utility man César Tovar to forget ever needing to play shortstop, freeing him up to focus most of his play at second base or in center field. A passing glance could render Tovar an easily missed background extra in Minnesota's packed lineup, but Martin saw Tovar as his "little leader," the kind of guy "who got everyone going" at the top of the lineup, and in the clubhouse, as the kind of energy jolt Martin was himself in his playing days.** 

Pitching
That the Twins pitched well in 1969 wasn’t a surprise; exactly who led them that year was. Dean Chance served as the assumed ace, but he battled arm issues, only tossing 88 ⅓ frames after totaling nearly 600 innings between 1967 and 1968; his career soon wound down, with his last major league pitch coming in 1971. Lefty Jim Merritt had been a reliable rotation staple, but he departed to Cincinnati in the trade that brought Cárdenas to Minnesota. Two men stepped up in their wake: Jim Perry and Dave Boswell.

Jim, brother of Gaylord, worked as a swingman since joining the Twins in 1963, but he always found himself on the staff outskirts. He started as many as 25 games in two separate seasons, but it took Martin pushing the veteran into a full-time role for Perry to blossom. So he did, eschewing the assumed drop-off from the lowered mound to win 20 games with a 2.82 ERA over 261 ⅔ innings. He earned Minnesota’s first Cy Young award the following season. 

What fueled the sudden breakout for the 33-year-old? Martin believed aggression was the culprit; he would go to the mound and rile up his hurler, forcing him to challenge hitters instead of pitching around the corners.**

The next crucial figure was also a holdover from years past. Dave Boswell owned a terrific curveball and a mercurial spirit as volatile on the blisters that often plagued his right hand. He spent the first few seasons of his major league career as a swingman like Perry—although, starting in 1966, his swings favored the rotation. He dropped his ERA to 3.23 in 1969, won 20 games, gobbled a career-high 256 ⅓ innings, and infamously fought Billy Martin in a bar melee that left him with an inflamed eye. If you ask Billy, Boswell threw the first punch; if you ask Dave, Martin started the fight. In any case, Boswell left for two weeks, banished to his house as punishment. He actually pitched better following the incident, sporting a 2.79 ERA in 12 starts the rest of the way. Don’t look into what lesson this teaches. 

Outside of Perry and Boswell, Jim Kaat was his usual, reliable self, a young, thin lefty named Tom Hall expanded upon his impressive 1968 debut with an effective year, and Ron Perranoski put forth yet another tremendous season, leading the league with 31 saves; he finished 13th in the MVP vote. 

Postseason
1969 saw the debut of a new playoff round: the Championship Series. Teams no longer had to be the best in their league; they just had to be the best in their six-team division. Only the Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando A’s threatened Minnesota, but their 88 wins couldn’t touch Minnesota’s 97.

The 109-win Orioles were their reward.

Baltimore swept the Twins, just as they would do the next season, but the series was close, at least for a time. The Orioles took Game One in a 12-inning nerve-fest that ended when Minnesota spoiled a bases-loaded situation just to watch Paul Blair walk it off with a bunt single. Game Two was even closer: Boswell and Baltimore starter Dave McNally duked it out into the 11th before Perranoski entered to earn the final out of the frame, eventually surrendering his second game-winning hit of the series. Game Three slanted Minnesota’s way after a first-inning score, then turned into an 11-2 drumming, only notable for one crucial decision.

Instead of giving Kaat the nod—like fans and Calvin Griffith expected—Martin placed his faith in Bob Miller, who produced all season as a Swiss army knife capable of starting and relieving. Miller’s subsequent implosion, when combined with Martin’s cavalier attitude towards his superior, caused Griffith to can his manager after just one season. It would not be the last time Martin was fired from a managerial position. It wouldn’t even be close to the last. 

Concluding Thoughts
This was a genuinely fun and deep team. The lineup raked, and the pitching staff had plenty of juice even with essentially ⅓ of a season from Chance. They just ran into a buzzsaw. 1969 happened to be the first full year with Earl Weaver manning the helm in Baltimore—and their 109-win juggernaut was probably the best iteration of that team, even if they did fall to the Miracle Mets in the World Series. There’s an alternate future where Minnesota was a little luckier in games one and two, giving them a lead over the Orioles they probably would have kept. 

But they weren’t. That’s baseball.

Anyways, Billy Ball was a tremendous success. This team may be a little overrated, given that Bill Rigney's team in 1970 put forth essentially the same season (which may mean that that team was actually underrated; who's to say), but it's hard to argue against such an iconic and memorable squad. I think this is the perfect placement for this team—it’s exactly where I ranked them—and I’m glad to see our writers agreed. 

“Carew, Killebrew, and Oliva. Peak Rich Reese. Perry, Kaat, Boswell in the rotation.” -Hans Birkeland

“Harmon Killebrew had a career year and finally won MVP. Rod Carew won his first batting title. The Twins won 97 games this year, but were swept by Baltimore in the ALCS. Long before the Yankees, the Orioles were the postseason bully of the Twins.” -Tom Froemming

Previous Entries:
#10 - 2010
#9 - 2023
#8 - 2002
#7 - 1970
#6 - 2019
#5 - 2006
Honorable Mentions

Sources:

https://www.baseball-reference.com

Henninger, Thom, The Pride of Minnesota: the Twins in the Turbulent 1960s, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021.)

Martin, Peter and Golenbock, Peter, Number 1, (Dell Publishing Company, New York, 1980.)