Calvin Griffith

Calvin Robertson Griffith (December 1, 1911 – October 20, 1999), born Calvin Griffith Robertson, was a Canadian-born American Major League Baseball team owner. As president, majority owner and de facto general manager of the Washington Senators/Minnesota Twins franchise of the American League from 1955 through 1984, he orchestrated the transfer of the Senators after 60 years in Washington, D.C., to Minneapolis–Saint Paul in the autumn of 1960 to create the Twins. He was famous for his devotion to the game and for his sayings. He was the last MLB owner who had no income apart from his franchise.

On June 19, 2020, the Minnesota Twins removed his statue from Target Field regarding what the Twins called "racist comments he made in Waseca in 1978", admitting a racial motivation to moving the Senators from Washington D.C.

Early life

He was born in Montreal, Quebec, as Calvin Griffith Robertson, the son of James A. Robertson and the former Jane Barr Davies. His father was a native of the Shetland Islands who emigrated to Canada and became a minor league baseball player. Robertson had a tryout with the Montreal Royals of the high minors before his career washed out and he became a newspaper distributor. Troubled by alcoholism, he died in 1922, leaving a widow and seven young children in Montreal in dire circumstances. she married Clark Griffith, a future Hall of Fame pitcher who became a manager (Chicago White Sox, New York Highlanders, Cincinnati Reds and Washington Senators) during the first two decades of the 20th century, and then president and chief stockholder of the Senators after 1920.

Clark and Addie Griffith had been concerned for some time about James' alcoholism. After he died, the childless Griffiths took Calvin and a sister, Thelma, into their Washington home in 1923, when Calvin was 11 years old. The two children both assumed the Griffith surname, even though they were never formally adopted. During the 1925 World Series, United Press published short articles written by Griffith and the batboy for the opposing team, the Pittsburgh Pirates (who won the series).

Baseball club ownership and operations

Washington (1955–1960)

The senior Griffith owned the Senators until his death at age 85 in October 1955; the team then passed into the hands of Calvin, 43, who had worked his way up through a variety of positions since the 1920s. After starting as a batboy, he attended Staunton Military Academy in Virginia and George Washington University in the U.S. capital. Then, he was a minor league player and manager (serving a brief stint under Joe Engel and the Chattanooga Lookouts at Engel Stadium) before he joined the Washington front office in 1941, eventually becoming executive vice president. Calvin and his sister, now Thelma Griffith Haynes, each inherited half of their uncle's 52 percent stake in the Senators. For the next 29 years, Thelma voted her shares along with her brother's, giving Calvin effective control of the team.

Other Robertson children also assumed important positions with the Senators. Three of Calvin's brothers — Sherry, Jimmy and Billy Robertson — became team executives, as did Thelma's husband, former pitcher Joe Haynes. Meanwhile, brother-in-law Joe Cronin, a Hall of Fame shortstop married to sister Mildred Robertson, served as playing manager of the Senators and then the Boston Red Sox. Cronin eventually became general manager of the Red Sox and then president of the American League. Calvin's son Clark Griffith II and nephews Bruce Haynes and Tom Cronin held executive posts in the Twins' front office.

On the field: Sluggers and struggles

Under Calvin's ownership, the left-field dimensions of cavernous Griffith Stadium were immediately shortened. Although the distance along the left-field foul line decreased by only to in , the left-center-field power alley was reduced to ; a -high inner fence made the new contour even friendlier to right-handed power hitters. The original dimensions were favored by the late Clark Griffith, who, as a former moundsman, built his successful early 20th-century teams on pitching, speed, gap-to-gap hitting, and defense. The pennant-contending 1945 Senators, who fell short of the AL championship by 1<small></small> games, hit only one home run—an inside-the-park blow by Joe Kuhel on September 7—in 2,601 home at bats all season. The 1955 Senators hit 20 home runs at Griffith Stadium during their 77-game home schedule.

The 1956 club, with the new dimensions in place, slugged 63 long balls at their home park, and Washington clubs of the late 1950s featured powerful right-handed hitters like Roy Sievers, Jim Lemon, Bob Allison and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew. Sievers () and Killebrew () established a new Senators' single-season home run record with 42 blasts to lead (or, in Killebrew's case, co-lead) the American League in that category.

However, the Washington pitching staff bore the immediate brunt of the changes to the ballpark. The 1955 Senators posted a 4.62 staff earned run average—4.01 at Griffith Stadium. To Griffith's credit, however, his pitching staff (led by ace right-hander Camilo Pascual) began to post respectable earned run averages beginning in and by , the Senators' ERA was down to 3.77 (3.88 at Griffith Stadium).

Calvin Griffith also invested in Washington's traditionally weak farm system and scouting operations. In , The Sporting News' Official Baseball Guide showed only three full-time scouts on the Senators' org chart, although one of them was Joe Cambria, who established a pipeline of playing talent from Cuba to the franchise that endured until his death in 1962. The TSN Baseball Guide listed eight scouts on the Senators' staff. But by 1960, the team's last year in Washington, the same annual listed 23 full-time talent hunters working on the Senators' behalf. The changes to the farm system were less dramatic. Historically, Clark Griffith's farm system was concentrated on low-level minor league teams. For years, Double-A Chattanooga—on paper, two rungs below the majors—was Washington's top farm team. For a time, the Senators had only two other farm teams, Class A Charlotte and Class D (equivalent to a Rookie-level team in today's system) Orlando. Calvin added Triple-A affiliates, first in 1956 and then, for good, in 1960. Even then, the team usually fielded 6–8 affiliates throughout the 1950s, and the 1960 Senators actually sponsored one fewer team than the 1951 club.

Griffith also began to invest, cautiously, in bonus babies, with Killebrew a notable success. The proof of his endeavors was in the pudding: by 1960, his Senators featured home-grown players like Killebrew, Allison, Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Jim Kaat (elected to the Hall of Fame in 2021) and Zoilo Versalles. He also obtained young talent like Earl Battey, who was the team's starting catcher from 1960 to 1967, and power-hitting prospect Don Mincher, both acquired for Sievers in April 1960, and starting pitcher Jack Kralick, signed as a minor league free agent the previous season. The trio came to Washington from the White Sox.

Off the field: Relocation efforts

But the results of Griffith's efforts were initially hard to detect. The 1956–59 Senators averaged 95 losses each season, with three last place finishes in a row (1957–59). Attendance hovered below 500,000 until 1959, when it improved to 615,000. The move of the St. Louis Browns to nearby Baltimore as the Orioles (a move Calvin had adamantly opposed) dampened the Senators' regional appeal, even though the Orioles of the 1950s were also mainstays in the American League's second division.

Even before his uncle's death, Calvin had doubts about whether the Senators could survive in Washington. Not only was Griffith Stadium the smallest stadium in the majors, but the surrounding neighborhood had already gone to seed. The Senators also attracted other suitors: The Washington Post reported in the autumn of 1956 that the club's board of directors had received (and rejected) feelers from San Francisco, Louisville — and Minneapolis. The Senators still owned their home ballpark, but Washington was considering building a new, publicly financed facility in a location Griffith disliked, saying it was too far from the team's traditional fan base in the District's northwest suburbs.

At the same time, Twin Cities-based owners won a franchise in the new Continental League, which served in part to turn the spotlight on Griffith's financial struggles in Washington. However, when he sought permission to move there for the 1959 season, the other American League owners turned him down again. Carew downplayed the significance of Griffith's remarks in later years, stating that he "saw no signs racism whatsoever" when he played for the Twins under Griffith and that he and Griffith did in fact agree that he should play for a bigger market team which had enough money to pay him what he was worth. The transaction ended almost 65 years of Griffith family ownership. He stayed on for a time as chairman of the board.

Legacy

Quotable comments

Griffith became well known for his public statements. Wrote Sports Illustrated in 1983: "Griffith long ago established himself as one of sport's most accessible and quotable owners. Reporters could rap on his door, enter and fill their note pads with sentences so coarse in honesty and so magnificently mangled in syntax that some began to enjoy him. He was quoted last year as saying that rookie center fielder Jim Eisenreich was 'doomed to be an All-Star'."

"He'll either be the best manager in baseball—or the worst", he said when he gave a young Billy Martin his first manager job after the 1968 season. A year later, Griffith became the first owner to fire Martin, despite Martin's having led the Twins to 97 victories and the 1969 American League West Division title. The firing—which stemmed from Martin's well-publicized, alcohol-fueled assaults on 20-game-winning pitcher Dave Boswell and team executive Howard Fox—was highly unpopular with many Twins' fans. However, even before then, a number of Twins executives had received complaints about Martin's heavy drinking on road trips. When he was asked who would replace Martin as the Twins' 1970 manager, Griffith replied, "I guarantee you one thing. I won't do anything rational." Griffith began to make comments about specific players and about race in general. Coleman is quoted as saying, "I was wincing the whole time thinking, you don't want to say that." At that point, Griffith interrupted himself, lowered his voice and asked if there were any blacks around. After he looked around the room and assured himself that his audience was white, Griffith resumed his answer stating:

<blockquote>"I'll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don't go to ballgames, but they'll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it'll scare you to death. We came here because you've got good, hardworking white people here."</blockquote>

He went on to call Carew a "damn fool" for accepting a below-market $170,000 annual salary when he was actually worth "a lot more than that." Griffith denied charges of bigotry, Carew's anger seemed to lessen by 1991 when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and called Griffith to thank him for jump-starting his career. Carew claimed that Griffith was "the first person" he called after being inducted.

Death

Griffith died in Melbourne, Florida, on October 20, 1999, at the age of 87 from complications related to pneumonia, a kidney infection and a high fever. He was buried in Washington, D.C., a city he rarely visited after moving the Senators to Minnesota.

Griffith was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010.

References

External links

Minor league playing and managing record, from Baseball Reference
"The Last of the Pure Baseball Men," Atlantic Monthly profile by Michael Lenehan, 1981
BaseballLibrary – career highlights
Minnesota Public Radio - Calvin Griffith Dead at 87
Washington Post - Leaving for the Last Time
ESPN - Griffith dies after developing kidney infection
Interview with Jon Kerr, author of Calvin: Baseball's Last Dinosaur, interviewed by Stew Thornley, NORTHERN LIGHTS Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #176 (1991)