THE WORLD SERIES : CALVIN’S TEAM : Griffith Built Nucleus Before Selling Twins Three Years Ago

The players taped his picture to the walls of the clubhouse latrine. Bumper stickers appeared that read: “Trade Calvin.” Calvin Griffith laughed in recollection.

“They wanted to run me out of town,” the man known as the last dinosaur said in his Metrodome office Thursday.

They wanted to run him out of town because he seemed to run so many others out during his penurious ownership of the Minnesota Twins.

Rod Carew, Lyman Bostock, Dan Ford, Butch Wynegar, Bill Campbell and Larry Hisle were among the players who were traded or left as free agents because of their escalating salaries.

Now, though he sold the Twins three years ago, Griffith receives a different reaction in malls and markets.

He is stopped and congratulated on the success of the Twins, who as American League champions meet the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series starting Saturday. Does Griffith share in the exultation? Does he feel that in part, at least, the team is still his?

“Yes,” he said, “I’m very much excited because I have the feeling that I put the nucleus there.

“It’s very satisfying when people stop me on the street and say, ‘This is your team, Calvin.’ You have to feel good about that, and I do. I feel good about the team because I brought many of these players to the major leagues.”

Of the 24 players on Minnesota’s postseason roster, Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Frank Viola, Tim Laudner, Steve Lombardozzi, Gene Larkin, Randy Bush and Mark Davidson were all at some level of the Minnesota system before Griffith sold the club to Minnesota banker Carl Pohlad in September 1984.

In addition, Greg Gagne, Roy Smalley, Bert Blyleven, Tom Brunansky and Les Straker were acquired via trade or free agency while Griffith still operated the team.

Would Griffith have been able to satisfy the contract demands of Brunansky, Hrbek and Blyleven, as Pohlad has? General Manager Andy MacPhail, hired by Pohlad, cited the realities of Griffith’s financial situation and said he doubted it. Said Hrbek: “Now we have an owner who will spend a buck or two. Carl Pohlad is not a loser.”

Pohlad protects his privacy as if it is a bank vault. He paid $35 million for the Twins, $24 million of which were shared by Griffith and his sister, Thelma.

“I’m not throwing it around,” said Griffith, who never did.

The Twins now rank 16th among the 26 teams with a 1986 average salary of $364,708. In 1982, when Gaetti and Hrbek played their first full seasons, the Twins were last with an average salary of $67,300. The industry average was $242,000. The ’82 Twins had 15 rookies on the roster at one point and went 60- 102. Griffith believes it was the genesis for the current success, saying “we always believed in young players.”

He believed in meeting the budget. It wasn’t easy.

“I always said that if I had to borrow money to stay in business, that would be the day I’d get out,” he said. “It never got to that point, but I could see the handwriting. We always paid our bills, but there were lots of times that I’d come in on the 15th of the month and wonder how we’d make our payroll.”

Baseball was it for Calvin Griffith. His life, his sustenance. There was no corporate foundation, no bankroll from industry or real estate.

Long before the Washington Senators became the Minnesota Twins in the 1961 season, he was the bat boy for the 1924 and ’25 teams that won consecutive pennants. He was the traveling secretary and batting practice pitcher for the 1933 pennant-winning Senators. Clark Griffith, his uncle and guardian, owned the team then and willed it to Calvin and Thelma in 1955.

Griffith reflected Thursday and said that if he hadn’t had a contract with a beer sponsor in Washington--”contracts were honored then”--that he might have been in Los Angeles long before Walter O’Malley, that he was “snooping around out there” in the early ‘50s.

The Twin Cities, he estimated, kept the Griffiths in baseball “20 years longer than we otherwise would have been,” meaning if they had attempted to stay in Washington. There was one last pennant in 1965, two division titles and many years when his front office staff consisted primarily of son Clark, now a local attorney, nephew Bruce Haynes, and brothers Billy and Jimmy Robertson.

“When it’s family,” he said, “they’re willing to do two or three chores and work all hours.

“Now they have to punch a clock here. I’ve never seen as much help as they’ve got here now. It’s like the government. They get in each other’s way. You’ve got secretaries sitting at their desks reading books. And I’ve never seen so many computers. Pretty soon the damn managers will be using them.”

None of Griffith’s kin remain on the Twins’ staff. Griffith is allowed a Metrodome office, where he answers mail and makes phone calls, as a provision of the sale to Pohlad.

At 75, separated from his wife, who resides in their estate on Lake Minnetonka, Griffith lives in an Edina townhouse. He is something of a lonely figure now, a curiosity piece, part of the Metrodome tour. He accompanied the Twins to Detroit for the playoffs but only as a late addition, a bribe from the club, some say, to bow out of plans to write a postseason column for the St. Paul paper. He was asked if he is made to feel a part of the organization?

“No, not exactly,” he said. “If I was part of it, they’d come in and ask me some questions, take advantage of my knowledge and experience. Andy MacPhail comes in once in a while, but he has his mind made up already.”

Andy MacPhail is 34 and baseball’s youngest general manager. He is the son of Lee MacPhail, former American League president, and the grandson of Larry MacPhail, former general manager and owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees.

Griffith said that MacPhail is bright, level-headed and on his way to becoming a top executive. He called MacPhail’s acquisition of relief pitcher Jeff Reardon the “salvation” of this year’s team.

Once that was Griffith’s domain. He obviously misses the action. Is he bitter over his non-role with the Twins?

“I’m happy and healthy,” he said. “I have this little office and a box for my mail. I’m entitled to eat lunch and dinner here when the club is home. I went to every game here this year and I’ll be going with the team to St. Louis (World Series trips were a provision of the sale). I eat regularly. I have no worries. I’m enjoying life?”

No regrets then over the sale?

“None,” he said. “Money was getting scarcer. It was only a matter of time before we had real problems. I’d been brought up in baseball, fought the wars in Washington and knew it was the right thing to do.”

Griffith seems to have been right in another way, too. Common sense? Collusion? By any name it’s restraint, which Griffith advocated all along.

“I saved $6 million when Larry Hisle signed with Milwaukee,” he said of the former Twin who went to the Brewers as a free agent. “He played one year there, got hurt and couldn’t play again. What guarantee does a player give the club that he’ll be able to perform up to standards? How many pennants have Gene Autry and George Steinbrenner won? I’ve had six or seven owners tell me that they wished they had done it the way I did. I don’t know how many times I told them that you can’t keep payin’, payin’ and payin’ when you’re not takin’ it in.

“Collusion? Hell. The owners are too smart to get into any collusion and risk being penalized. How can an arbitrator tell you how to spend your money? We should have listened to Bob Short and Charlie Finley when they tried to tell us that we shouldn’t get involved with arbitration. “

We? He still uses that pronoun in reference to the Twins as well. He predicts they will win the Series because of superior defense and power.

And he will stay to the final out, having run for the subway, he said, and missed Cookie Lavagetto’s pinch double off Bill Bevens in the fourth game of the 1947 World Series and Bobby Thomson’s historic home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 playoffs.

He doesn’t want to miss this. He helped create it. That’s the new bottom line that people here seem to be taking into account.