More parallels with the 1987 Twins

A few weeks ago I milked a Monday print column out of the notion that there are parallels between this year's Twins team and the World Series champs of 30 years ago.

As the survivors of the 1987 Twins were feted at Target Field last weekend I thought of a few more pitching parallels. Realizing that we can take this comparison too far:

Adalberto Mejia is this year's Les Straker, only left-handed. Rookie who emerged as the team's third-best starter, not enough innings to qualify for the ERA title (Straker threw 154 in '87, Mejia is one out shy of 75 innings right now). Straker posted an ERA+ of 104 in '87; Mejia's is currently 109.

Kyle Gibson equates to Mike Smithson. Tall right-hander who relies on a sinking fastball. Gibson led the 2015 Twins, who were in the playoff chase until the final weekend, in innings pitched, and Smithson threw more than 250 innings for the 1984 Twins, who were in the playoff chase until the final weekend. Smithson opened the '87 season as the third starter but was in and out of the rotation; the same has been true of Gibson this year.

Bartolo Colon is ... well, there are actually two realistic possibilities. Joe Niekro was, in 1987, a 42-year-old one-pitch pitcher in his 21st year in the majors; the Twins, his seventh club, acquired him in June. Niekro won 221 games in his career, five of them for Minnesota (four in '87, one in '1988). Colon is a 44-year-old one-pitch guy on his 10th club in 20 years and is credited with 235 wins.

The other possible comp is Steve Carlton, more for his status as a legend. Carlton was in 1987 already a 300-game winner. Like Niekro, he was 42; the Twins were his sixth team. Like Colon, he arrived in Minnesota in July. He didn't pitch a lot.

Carlton was a no-doubter Hall of Famer; Niekro, despite a distinguished career, never had a shot at the Hall. Colon is somewhere in the middle, and Niekro is the better 1987 comp if Colon remains in the rotation for the rest of the year, or even through August.

Al Michaels' Metrodome paranoia

It's always good to have a reason to run a photo of the
1987 Twins celebrating.

Al Michaels was at the Metrodome for all four World Series games in 1987; he was doing the play by play for ABC, the network telecasting the games in that bygone era.

He believes the Twins pumped in artificial crowd noise.

I was at those games too, as a paying customer. I'm quite certain the noise was genuine.

Now, I've been at a couple of Vikings games -- I go about once every 12 years or so just to remind myself how horrid NFL games are to attend -- at which I was certain the crowd noise was fake. Why? Because there was a certain level of sound and then an instantaneous burst of noise, with no buildup -- and because when I looked around my section, there was almost nobody yelling.

That was emphatically not the case in the 1987 Series. When I looked around while in full-throated roar, everybody else was doing the same thing. There were a lot of hoarse Series attendees exiting the Dome after those games.

And the Twins made it easy for us to yell and keep on yelling. In several of the big innings there were strings of first-pitch hits. The crowd gets excited about a hit, and the next guy immediately smacks a line drive, and things just keep escalating.

Look, I'm under no illusions about the 1987 Twins. They weren't the best team in baseball that year. Over the course of the full season, St. Louis was better, and Detroit was better, and Toronto was better, and several other teams were better. But the Twins got into the tournament and were the team that won eight games, so they are the champs.

I understand the impulse to suspect gamesmanship for a weaker team winning the title, whether it's the air-intake vents blowing in the opposite direction or recorded crowd noise. There's an easier, less conspiratorial reason: It's baseball. The weaker team can win a short series. That doesn't require skulduggery. And I don't believe the 1987 Twins used any.

Weakest Series winners

Kansas City won 89 regular season games, seventh most in the majors. San Francisco won 88, tying with Oakland for eighth. Neither won its division title. But one of them will win the World Series.

Which prompted me to wonder: What was the weakest World Series champ?

I'll base this on the teams relative to their time. I am quite certain that baseball today is played at a higher level than in the past. It's certainly played differently.

And this list will be heavy with relatively recent teams. It has to be, because for generations, the World Series always pitted the teams with the best records in their respective leagues. That hasn't been guaranteed since 1968, and as the playoff entrants have inflated, the chances of a team with a lesser record winning has increased.

So I start with the 1959 Los Angeles Dodgers, who somehow won the National League pennant with 88 wins, a total they reached only because they had to win a best-of-three series with the Milwaukee Braves after they finished the 154-game schedule of the time with 86 wins apiece, an absurdly low total for a pennant winner. The Dodgers were probably only the third best squad in the league, but they prevailed.

It's an odd team, with three 30-something holdovers from the great Boys of Summer team in the lineup and a few pieces of the almost-as-good 1960s teams, It was a bit late for the Brooklyn holdovers and a bit early for the next generation,

(I am fascinated by their shortstop situation. Don Zimmer is listed as the regular; he hit .165. Maury Wills got almost as much playing time; he had an OPB of .298 and a SLG of .298, which is a tough trick to pull. Three years later, Wills would win the MVP award, but you sure couldn't see that coming in his rookie year.)

Next up, a team close to my heart: the 1987 Minnesota Twins, winners of 85 regular season games and outscored for the season. Four American League teams had better records than the Twins, but they were all in the other division.

They are quickly followed by the 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 94 games although it's hard to see how. Orel Hershiser was great, Kirk Gibson won the MVP, and Tim Leary and Tim Belcher gave them two more sub-3.00 ERAs in the rotation. There's not much else there. But they beat a 100-win Mets team in the playoffs and a 104-win Oakland team in the Series.

Once we get into the wild card era, the chances for mediocre records to win it all multiply. The 2000 Yankees only won 87 regular season games, but I'm inclined to cut them some slack because 2000 is the Yankes' third straight World Series win.

The 2006 St. Louis Cardinals won just 83 regular season games, which is hard to figure. They'd won 100 the year before, 105 the year before that. Winning in '06 is something of a make-up for not winning the previous years with better teams. Still, 83 wins is the all-time low for a World Series winner, and I sure hope we never have a champ with less.

I'm never going to be all that impressed by the credentials of any wild card team, even though we've seen a number of them win (the Marlins in '97 and '03, the Red Sox on '04, Cardinals in '11). We'll have another one soon. But I don't think either is as unlikely a champion as the four teams linked to above.

My choice as the weakest Series champ? I'll take the 1987 Twins, and say it's better to be the weakest  team to win the World Series than the strongest team that didn't.

Ron Gardenhire in younger days

Ran across this YouTube video from a Twins 1987 spring training game.

Besides being amused by how much Gardy's body has changed over the years, I'm posting it because the clip also features Harmon Killebrew, who was one of the broadcasters for the team in '87. It is my recollection that Herb Carneal was strictly radio, Killebrew strictly TV, and John Gordon and John Rooney (the other voice on this clip) switched back and forth. Rooney left the Twins broadcasts for the White Sox after the season; he was one-and-done in Minnesota.

Rooney and Killer spent the at-bat discussing, vaguely, the issue of who the Twins would keep as a utility infielder. It was a three-way battle, with holdover Ron Washington versus imports Gardenhire and Al Newman. Newman won the job; Washington wound up with the Orioles; Gardenhire spent the entire 1987 season in Portland with the Twins Triple-A club and never played in the majors again.

Today. of course, Newman's out of the game and Washington and Gardenhire are prominent managers.