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On May sixteenth, nineteen eighty four, Harvey McKay walks up to the Minnesota
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Twins box office and pays over two hundred thousand dollars for forty four thousand tickets
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on Family Day so he can keep the Twins in Minnesota. Here's the craziness
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that goes behind the story today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports
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History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports
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history every day now. The history of the Twins goes back way back to
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Washington, DC in nineteen oh one as one of the original eight teams of
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the American League, and their name was the Washington Senators, and in nineteen
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oh five they changed their name to the Washington Nationals, and that lasted again
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until nineteen fifty five, when they changed it back to the Senators until nineteen
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sixty. In nineteen twenty four, they won their very first American LEGE pennant
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and their first and only World Series, with legendary pitcher Walter Johnson leading the
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way. But after that they struggled for the next twenty five years, having
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only moderate success, and the owner, Calvin Griffin, was ready to move
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on as in nineteen fifty five, he took over the team and actually sold
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the Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington, who least dipped back to them,
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which at the time was a common move in what the Boston Braves,
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Saint Louis Brown's, and Philadelphia Athletics had all done before so they could move
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to other cities. And in nineteen fifty five he started flirting with different options,
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even possibly going all the way to San Francisco, but he settled on
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Minneapolis, and his reasoning is actually kind of sad. Here's a quote from
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Calvin Griffith on his reasoning for moving to Minnesota in his own words, I'll
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tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was that I found out you
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only had fifteen thousand blacks here. Black people don't go to ballgames, but
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they fill up a rattling ring and put such a chant it'll scare you to
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death. It's unbelievable. We came here because you are good, hardworking white
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people. All I can say is, Wow, that is terrible, and
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I think it's great what the city did later to kind of push him out,
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because the team actually started out pretty good with their time with the Twins
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as Hall of Famer Rock Crew was coming into his own and they wanted the
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American League pennant in nineteen sixty five, just four years after being in Minnesota,
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and how they got the team name was interesting. They want to be
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called the Twin Cities to bring Minneapolis and Saint Paul together, as previously the
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NBA had the Minneapolis Lakers, who moved to Los Angeles due to poor attendance,
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and they thought maybe it's because Saint Paul didn't want to support a team
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called Minneapolis, so they didn't want to have that issue, so they wanted
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to the Twin City Twins. Major League Baseball rejected that and they'd later changed
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it to the Minnesota Twins so they could include both the cities even though they
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played in Minneapolis. But by the nineteen eighties, the Metropolitan Stadium started to
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become in disrepair and the Metropolitan Stadium, which the Twins shared with the Vikings,
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was becoming too small for football as the AFL and NFL merger included a
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rule that the stadiums had to have capacity over fifty thousand, and the Metropolitan
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Stadium could hold was forty nine thousand, so they needed a new stadium,
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and this was an outdoor stadium, and they thought that both the Vikings and
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the Twins could benefit by having an indoor arena, which they had seen successful
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previously at the Astrodome and was becoming more and more popular, and so they
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put together plans to fund the Metrodome, which would be a ten year effort
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to support the team. And the leader and the chairman of the Metrodome committee
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was Harvey McKay, a prominent businessman in Minnesota, and the project to build
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the Metrodome would cost sixty eight million dollars and over one hundred and twenty four
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million dollars in infrastructure costs. It was a huge undertaking, but they knew
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they could make it back by keeping their teams. But unfortunately, the Twins
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included a clause in their lease that if they did not average over two million
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in attendance over a three year period, then the owner could break the lease
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and move the team. So, after two years of a slumping team,
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the attendance had fell under a million per year, so they were coming up
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on a third year in nineteen eighty four. That year, nineteen eighty four,
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they needed to sell two point four million tickets in order to keep the
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team in Minnesota. So mckayka with local business people in the area and convinced
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them to donate, and they donated over six million dollars to help them buy
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tickets whether people attended the game or not, and had all started on May
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sixteenth, nineteen eighty four, when he bought over two thousand tickets, and
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he would do this for every game, buying multiple tickets as much as he
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could, spidding that six million dollars so they could keep the team in Minnesota
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because by this time, Calvin Griffith, the owner of the Twins, was
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trying to move to a warmer location and it didn't matter as the team had
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been struggling for multiple years. Although their farm system had some great talent behind
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it, the team itself on the field nineteen eighty four was not good and
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had not been good for years and seeing the riding on the wall, and
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Calvin Griffith finally sold to Carl Pollard, who purchased ninety seven point five percent
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of the Twins from Calvin. Now there was another offer from Donald Trump,
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and Calvin said he took Carl Pollard OFLFER as he wanted to keep the team
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in Minnesota, but the issue was more that the PA could not be broken
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due to the tickets that were being sold to the group by Harvey McKay and
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Donald wanted the team to be near New York, so the team was sold
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and got away from the racist owner they had, and despite the actual attendance
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being well under a million, they had sold over two point five million tickets
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that year and were able to keep the team in Minnesota. And it's a
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good thing they did because they had an upstart team led by Kirby Puckett leading
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the way, changing the team's fortune, and in three short years, the
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nineteen eighty seven team won the World Series, beating the Saint Louis Cardinals,
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and the following year, in nineteen eighty eight, the Twins were the first
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team in American League history to draw over three million fans in a season,
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and these were actual fans, not just people buying tickets to keep the team.
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The Twins have been a staple in Minnesota ever since, winning another World
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Series in nineteen ninety one and consistently having great teams throughout the years, and
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hopefully we'll stay that way for years. And I think we can all take
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away from this story hearing just how great it is that fans decided whether the
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team could move or not, not these owners that have millions of dollars already.
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I understand the reason of moving can be very lucrative and good for the
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league sometimes, but small market teams in the Midwest have ravid fan bases and
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if you allow that to grow, it will be there for years and years.
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And the Twins were allowed to grow their fan base, and to hear
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the Twins moving now would just feel wrong. So being a fan doesn't mean
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you can't do anything support your team. You keep your team where it is
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now. I want to keep you where you are as one of our fans,
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So follow or subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss any episode,
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because we'll be back tomorrow for more daily sports history.