Review of "The Pride of Minnesota"

Admittedly, I am a sucker for any book on the Minnesota Twins.  When advance copies of this book became available, I immediately snapped it up and it was just as good as I had hoped.  Here is my review of "The Pride of Minnesota." 

Title/Author:

“The Pride of Minnesota: The Twins in the Turbulent 1960’s” by Thom Henninger

Tags:

Baseball, professional, history, Twins

Publish date:

May 1, 2021

Length:

344 pages

Rating:

4 ½ of 5 stars (very good)

Review:

During most of the decade of the 1960’s, the Minnesota Twins were one of the better teams in the American League.  They won the pennant in 1965 and while they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in an epic seven game World Series.  Much success was predicted for the team, but they did not win another pennant in a five year stretch in which they not only won many games but built a loyal following in the Twin Cities.  This excellent book by Thom Henninger covers that six year stretch in which the team won that 1965 pennant, the first two American League West Division titles, and fell just short of winning one of the most epic pennant races in baseball history.

If there was a characteristic of the book in which it might fall short of a reader’s expectation, it is because the bulk of the book starts with the 1965 season.  The Twins actually started to be noted as a good team in 1962 when they finished second to the Yankees in the American League. This started a gradual rise for the Twins and a gradual decline for the Yankees.  The attention was now on players like Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat and Jim “Mudcat” Grant instead of the aging New York start.  Henninger writes in excellent detail about not only the games and progress of the Twins’ march to the pennant in 1965, he provides the reader with excellent stories about many of the players as well as the action on the field.  This detail goes down to the last pitch of game 7 in the World Series when Bob Allison struck out against Sandy Koufax ending the Twins’ championship dreams.

Henninger continues with this style of writing that will take the reader inside the team during the 1967 pennant chase in which the Twins were one of four teams that took the race down to the final weekend.  The Twins just needed to win one game of the final two against the Boston Red Sox.  While describing both wins by the Red Sox, the writing is good enough to bring pain back to Twins fans who might not want to remember that fateful weekend at Fenway Park.  This style of writing continues into the 1969 and 1970 seasons when the Twins won the first two American League West Division titles and also tells the stories of new players who were important to the Twins success such as Rod Carew, Bert Blyleven and Jim Perry. 

Like many other baseball books about a particular year or time frame, there are passages on the pop culture, social issues and politics of the time.  What makes this book a little different in this aspect is that instead of just concentrating on the national events of the time, there are references to these events in Minnesota and the Twin Cities.  For example, there is a good deal of material on the musical British Invasion of 1964 and 1965 and the arrival of the Beatles.  But instead of just concentrating on their success nationally, Henninger writes about the one time the Beatles played in Minnesota at Metropolitan Stadium in 1965 when the Twins were on a road trip.  One of the best pictures in the picture section is here when George Harrison is featured donning a Twins cap. 

Other events covered in the book with a Minnesota theme were the floods and tornadoes in the 1965, the destruction of many businesses along Plymouth Avenue in north Minneapolis when other cities were experiencing riots in 1967 and the rash of bomb threats nationwide in 1970, which included a bomb threat called into Metropolitan Stadium during a Red Sox-Twins game.  Giving these parts of the book a local flavor was an excellent touch that readers from Minnesota will enjoy.

This is a book that any Twins fan or baseball fan from the Upper Midwest will want to add to their collection.  Full of both cultural references and excellent baseball from that era, it is a fine recollection of when the Minnesota Twins were one of the better teams in the American League.

I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Format Read:

E-book (Kindle)                                                                                                                              

Buying Links:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496225603/

https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Minnesota-Twins-Turbulent-1960s-ebook/dp/B08MQ43K4P/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr