Twins Flashback Friday: August 10, 1994 (Kent Hrbek's Final Big-League Game)
Join Brandon as he takes a walk down Minnesota Twins memory lane
One of my favorite offseason activities is tracking down old Twins games and different sorts of things to check out while passing the time between seasons.
Every week — or as often as I remember — we’ll post a “Twins Flashback Friday” where we’ll close out every week with a fun bit of Twins nostalgia that I find during the rest of the workweek.
This week, we found the final game of the 1994 season — and sadly, hometown boy Kent Hrbek’s MLB career.
Also, if you aren’t subscribed to Classic Twins on YouTube — which is where many of these flashbacks are found — do yourself a huge favor and run over there right now.
To say the 1994 season ended under cloudy circumstances is to say Kirby Puckett played a reasonably strong role in the Twins winning the 1991 World Series. This game was played just 30-ish hours before the MLB strike was initiated. The most recent meetings between the players and the owners had just recently concluded, with Donald Fehr walking out of the three-hour meeting earlier in the day stating it was a “complete waste of time.”
How prescient that wound up being, as despite the tempered optimism of Dick Bremer and Tommy John during this game, MLB canceled the rest of the season, the 1994 postseason and the start of the 1995 regular season after a hilariously misguided attempt with replacement players (great story here on that from Mike DiGiovanna in the Los Angeles Times.
As a result, nearly 13 years to the day the Bloomington native debuted in the major leagues (Aug. 24, 1981 at Yankee Stadium), Hrbek’s career came to an inauspicious end.
Let’s talk to it:
The pitching matchup: Jim Deshaies vs. Chris Nabholz
The broadcasters: Dick Bremer and Tommy John
Starting Lineups:
The location: H.H.H. Metrodome
The date: Aug. 10, 1994
The records (entering play): Red Sox (54-60) at Twins (52-60)
Click here for the Baseball Reference box score.
Curiosities:
The first inning took nearly 40 minutes as both starters struggled with scattershot command. The Twins wound up scoring a run before their first hit, giving the box score an unusual 1-0-0 look.
The lack of command from the two starters prompts John to tell a story about a prospect with the last name “Gassick” (not sure on spelling and couldn’t track down the name) who also had iffy command. The funny part of that story was that John said Sid Hartman, of all people, had the young pitcher go down to Florida to meet with him to try salvage his command, and as a result, his career. It apparently didn’t take.
Deshaies throws 33 pitches in the first inning, with the final being an absolute laser beam off the bat of Wes Chamberlain. Shane Mack tracks it down just in front of the 408 sign in center, but a few more feet would have made it the game’s first grand slam (more on that later).
Deshaies was closing out a truly brutal season, as he finished with a 7.39 ERA and 30 home runs allowed in 130.1 innings. The last pitcher to throw at least 130 innings with an ERA above 7.00 is Scott Elarton in 2001 (132.2 IP, 7.06 ERA). Just five pitchers total did it in the 1990s: Deshaies, Jason Bere (1995), Mike Moore (1995), Jim Abbott (1996) and Jeff Fassero (1999).
Hrbek unsurprisingly got a standing ovation in each of his plate appearances over the course of the night.
Hrbek and the rest of the Twins donned high socks — which in my opinion is a terrific look.
Behind the plate in his usual perch sat legendary PA announcer Bob Casey. He was well known for being ensconced behind home plate in a little tunnel, his NOOOOO SMOKING declaration before games and the iconic way he announced names like Kirby Puckett and Chuck Knoblauch.
The Twins featured a “Dawson shift” in which the Twins snuck Knoblauch closer to the bag at second. That’s right, the Twins were shifting even back in 1994 — some 20 seasons before the rules were adapted to make it much more difficult.
John Gordon makes an appearance in the TV booth in the bottom of the first inning — addressing Dick and Tommy as Richard and Thomas — and gives a progress update after undergoing back surgery just recently. He returns to the booth in 1995 and ends up serving the role as the team’s radio voice through the 2011 season before Cory Provus took over the role.
Dave Winfield’s Twins career also ends with a whimper, as he’s removed during a first-inning plate appearance after grimacing with pain following a pair of swings. Jeff Reboulet enters the game with a full count, strikes out but reaches when the ball kicks past Rich Rowland to the screen. For a brief second, Dick and Tommy joke about Pat Mahomes Sr. entering the game for Winfield, as he has his batting gloves on and keeps looking down the dugout. Winfield had gone on the injured list a month earlier with a jammed wrist, and while this injury appears similar, later on in the telecast it was revealed to be Winfield’s side bothering him.
In fact, there’s quite a bit of speculation about if this is the final game for a lot of good players on each side. Future Hall of Famer Andre Dawson is one of those players, with Bremer even going so far as to say it was likely his final season. Dawson wound up playing two years for the Marlins, totaling 121 games in a bit of a revival (93 OPS+) after a tough final year in Boston (83).
For some added context, here are podcast episodes we recorded on “That 90s Baseball Pod” about how the strike came to be, and one we did with Reboulet.
Knoblauch gets picked off in the first inning, but ends up stealing two bases to cap a season with 45 doubles and 35 steals. The last MLB player to reach these marks was Jose Altuve in 2014, and Knoblauch to this day remains the only Twin to ever do it.
Knoblauch takes third on a grounder to third, deftly moving up when Greg Litton throws over to Mo Vaughn at first base. John says that manager Eddie Stanky with the White Sox in 1966 used to have a deal where he’d buy players alligator-skin shoes for taking that base.
Vaughn was wearing No. 35 on his hat, which was a nod to his friend and former Boston Celtics player Reggie Lewis, who had died a little over a year earlier.
We get a look at an #OldFriend in clean-shaven Tom Brunansky, who is back for his second tour of duty with the Red Sox after the Brewers saw fit to barely play him, then dump him in a trade for Dave Valle earlier in the season.
Another #OldFriend mentioned but who did not see action was Frank Viola. Viola picked just six games with the Red Sox in 1994 with a 4.65 ERA, and struck out just nine batters in 31 innings (with 17 walks). He wound up needing Tommy John surgery. Viola was clearly at the end of his rope, as he played just two more seasons with just nine more appearances with the Reds in 1995 and Blue Jays in 1996 (7.25 ERA over 44.2 IP).
In Otis Nixon’s second plate appearance of the evening, he hits a foul ball that looks to be a one-in-a-million as it sneaks through the hole above the Dairy Queen sign behind home plate, splitting the uprights between Casey and MSC staffer Dan Dettman. Dettman, a mainstay at Target Field during my days covering the team, tragically passed away in 2020 due to a tree-cutting accident at his home. I’ll always remember he and his fellow colleagues playing cribbage to pass the time in the press box dining room before home games.
On a lighter note, a few minutes later an MSC camera person holds up a sign saying “Will Work For Food” — no doubt a not-so-subtle nod that they were about to be out of work with the imminent work stoppage.
Puckett hits a grand slam in the second inning off Scott Bankhead, who entered after Nabholz departed with a hamstring issue. The top of the first ended with Chamberlain’s long drive to Mack. The bottom of the first ended with future Twin Nixon skying above the 408 sign in center to steal a grand slam from Pedro Munoz. A combined 24 runs were scored in this one, but it could have easily pushed 30 if the air conditioners had been set properly.
The third inning features an oldie but a goodie — the Snapper Mow-’em-Down inning. If the Twins pitcher set down the opponent in order, a lucky fan won a Snapper walk-behind mower. Sadly, this was not the case on this evening.
The broadcasters both mention if the season were to resume, getting the World Series in would provide some curious dilemmas. The Mariners weren’t playing in the Kingdome due to four ceiling tiles falling into the stands behind home plate in July, and were forced into a 22-game road trip to end the season. Matters became even more complicated when two workers were killed nearly a month later in a crane accident. Meanwhile, the Expos — the prohibitive favorite in the NL — were playing in an Olympic Stadium that was unable to close per John. The main reason this was a subject of discussion was the potential of pushing the World Series back in order to play a full 162 after the season was suspended, which would mean playing into potentially November in possible cold-weather cities like Seattle and Montreal. Much ado about nothing.
Bremer tells a story about getting a Harmon Killebrew commemorative mug for when he hit his 500th home run. However, Killebrew needed 16 games to go from 499 to 500 — and as a result, Bremer said the mugs were handed out before Harmon hit his 500th.
Puckett homers later in the game off lefty reliever Tony Fossas for a multi-homer game. He finished his career with 13 such games — now tied for sixth in Twins history with Gary Gaetti behind Killebrew (35), Justin Morneau (20), Tony Oliva (18), the man of the hour himself, Hrbek with 16 and Bob Allison with 15.
That seventh inning in which Puckett homers features the Twins scoring eight runs off Todd Frowirth and Fossas. Five straight Twins reach base to start the inning, and 10 in total reach base in the inning as the games goes from a 9-7 nailbiter to a 17-7 laugher (which was also the final score).
Just six batters stuck out all night in 93 plate appearances combined.
So sit back and enjoy Kent Hrbek’s final big-league game: