Calvin Robertson Griffith (December 1, 1911 – October 20, 1999), born Calvin Griffith Robertson, was a Canadian-born American Major League Baseball team owner. As president, majority owner and de facto general manager of the Washington Senators/Minnesota Twins franchise of the American League from 1955 through 1984, he orchestrated the transfer of the Senators after 60 years in Washington, D.C., to Minneapolis–Saint Paul in the autumn of 1960 to create the Twins. He was famous for his devotion to the game and for his sayings. He was the last MLB owner who had no income apart from his franchise.
On June 19, 2020, the Minnesota Twins removed his statue from Target Field regarding what the Twins called "racist comments he made in Waseca in 1978", admitting a racial motivation to moving the Senators from Washington D.C.
Early life He was born in Montreal, Quebec, as Calvin Griffith Robertson, the son of James A. Robertson and the former Jane Barr Davies. His father was a native of the Shetland Islands who emigrated to Canada and became a minor league baseball player. Robertson had a tryout with the Montreal Royals of the high minors before his career washed out and he became a newspaper distributor. Troubled by alcoholism, he died in 1922, leaving a widow and seven young children in Montreal in dire circumstances. But a sister, Anne ("Addie") Robertson, had moved to the United States, where in 1900Grahek, Mike, Clark Griffith. SABR Biography Project she married Clark Griffith, a future Hall of Fame pitcher who became a manager (Chicago White Sox, New York Highlanders, Cincinnati Reds and Washington Senators) during the first two decades of the 20th century, and then president and chief stockholder of the Senators after 1920."Letters from Quebec Day Induction at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame," Seamheads.com
Clark and Addie Griffith had been concerned for some time about James' alcoholism. After he died, the childless Griffiths took Calvin and a sister, Thelma, into their Washington home in 1923, when Calvin was 11 years old. The two children both assumed the Griffith surname, even though they were never formally adopted. Their mother and siblings moved to nearby Takoma Park, Maryland.
Griffith was a batboy for the Senators, including during their 1924 World Series championship. During the 1925 World Series, United Press published short articles written by Griffith and the batboy for the opposing team, the Pittsburgh Pirates (who won the series).
Baseball club ownership and operations Washington (1955–1960)
The senior Griffith owned the Senators until his death at age 85 in October 1955; the team then passed into the hands of Calvin, 43, who had worked his way up through a variety of positions since the 1920s. After starting as a batboy, he attended Staunton Military Academy in Virginia and George Washington University in the U.S. capital. Then, he was a minor league player and manager (serving a brief stint under Joe Engel and the Chattanooga Lookouts at Engel Stadium) before he joined the Washington front office in 1941,Griffith, Calvin Robertson, interview by William Cooper. April 22, 1977, A. B. "Happy" Chandler: Desegregation of Major League Baseball Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. eventually becoming executive vice president. Calvin and his sister, now Thelma Griffith Haynes, each inherited half of their uncle's 52 percent stake in the Senators. For the next 29 years, Thelma voted her shares along with her brother's, giving Calvin effective control of the team.
Other Robertson children also assumed important positions with the Senators. Three of Calvin's brothers — Sherry, Jimmy and Billy Robertson — became team executives, as did Thelma's husband, former pitcher Joe Haynes. Meanwhile, brother-in-law Joe Cronin, a Hall of Fame shortstop married to sister Mildred Robertson, served as playing manager of the Senators and then the Boston Red Sox. Cronin eventually became general manager of the Red Sox and then president of the American League. Calvin's son Clark Griffith II and nephews Bruce Haynes and Tom Cronin held executive posts in the Twins' front office.
On the field: Sluggers and struggles Under Calvin's ownership, the left-field dimensions of cavernous Griffith Stadium were immediately shortened. Although the distance along the left-field foul line decreased by only to in , the left-center-field power alley was reduced to ; a -high inner fence made the new contour even friendlier to right-handed power hitters. The original dimensions were favored by the late Clark Griffith, who, as a former moundsman, built his successful early 20th-century teams on pitching, speed, gap-to-gap hitting, and defense. The pennant-contending 1945 Senators, who fell short of the AL championship by 1 games, hit only one home run—an inside-the-park blow by Joe Kuhel on September 7Box score: 1945-09-07, Retrosheet—in 2,601 home at bats all season.Home/road splits, 1945 Washington Senators, from Retrosheet The 1955 Senators hit 20 home runs at Griffith Stadium during their 77-game home schedule.Home/road splits, 1955 Washington Senators, from Retrosheet
The 1956 club, with the new dimensions in place, slugged 63 long balls at their home park, and Washington clubs of the late 1950s featured powerful right-handed hitters like Roy Sievers, Jim Lemon, Bob Allison and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew. Sievers () and Killebrew () established a new Senators' single-season home run record with 42 blasts to lead (or, in Killebrew's case, co-lead) the American League in that category.
However, the Washington pitching staff bore the immediate brunt of the changes to the ballpark. The 1955 Senators posted a 4.62 staff earned run average—4.01 at Griffith Stadium. One year later, the staff ERA jumped to 5.33—with an abysmal 5.55 ERA at home.Home/road splits, 1956 Washington Senators, from Retrosheet To Griffith's credit, however, his pitching staff (led by ace right-hander Camilo Pascual) began to post respectable earned run averages beginning in and by , the Senators' ERA was down to 3.77 (3.88 at Griffith Stadium).Home/road splits, 1960 Washington Senators from Retrosheet
Calvin Griffith also invested in Washington's traditionally weak farm system and scouting operations. In , The Sporting News' Official Baseball Guide showed only three full-time scouts on the Senators' org chart, although one of them was Joe Cambria, who established a pipeline of playing talent from Cuba to the franchise that endured until his death in 1962. The TSN Baseball Guide listed eight scouts on the Senators' staff. But by 1960, the team's last year in Washington, the same annual listed 23 full-time talent hunters working on the Senators' behalf. The changes to the farm system were less dramatic. Historically, Clark Griffith's farm system was concentrated on low-level minor league teams. For most of Clark's tenure as owner, Double-A Chattanooga—on paper, two rungs below the majors—was Washington's top farm team, and the Senators' only other farm teams were Class A Charlotte and Class D (equivalent to a Rookie-level team in today's system) Orlando. Calvin added Triple-A affiliates, first in 1956 and then, for good, in 1960. Even then, the team usually fielded 6–8 affiliates throughout the 1950s, and the 1960 Senators actually sponsored one fewer team than the 1951 club.
Griffith also began to invest, cautiously, in bonus babies, with Killebrew a notable success. The proof of his endeavors was in the pudding: by 1960, his Senators featured home-grown players like Killebrew, Allison, Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Jim Kaat (elected to the Hall of Fame in 2021) and Zoilo Versalles. He also obtained young talent like Earl Battey, who was the team's starting catcher from 1960 to 1967, and power-hitting prospect Don Mincher, both acquired for Sievers in April 1960, and starting pitcher Jack Kralick, signed as a minor league free agent the previous season. The trio came to Washington from the White Sox.
Off the field: Relocation efforts But the results of Griffith's efforts were initially hard to detect. The 1956–59 Senators averaged 95 losses each season, with three last place finishes in a row (1957–59). Attendance hovered below 500,000 until 1959, when it improved to 615,000. The move of the St. Louis Browns to nearby Baltimore as the Orioles (a move Calvin had adamantly opposed) dampened the Senators' regional appeal, even though the Orioles of the 1950s were also mainstays in the American League's second division.
Even before his uncle's death, Calvin had doubts about whether the Senators could survive in Washington. Not only was Griffith Stadium the smallest stadium in the majors, but the surrounding neighborhood had already gone to seed. At the 1956 World Series, Griffith, not even a year into his tenure as the Senators' president and majority owner, began preliminary talks with Los Angeles city and county officials about a potential transfer to the West Coast. Brooklyn Dodgers' owner Walter O'Malley, learning of Griffith's interest and thwarted by New York City officials in his plans to replace his decaying ballpark, Ebbets Field, soon supplanted Griffith as Los Angeles' prime target. The Senators also attracted other suitors: The Washington Post reported in the autumn of 1956 that the club's board of directors had received (and rejected) feelers from San Francisco, Louisville — and Minneapolis.Steinberg, Dan (October 21, 2014), "Calvin Griffith Once Considered Moving the Senators to San Francisco." The Washington Post The Senators still owned their home ballpark, but Washington was considering building a new, publicly financed facility in a location Griffith disliked, saying it was too far from the team's traditional fan base in the District's northwest suburbs. Under the plan, Griffith's main tenants, the Washington Redskins of the National Football League, would abandon Griffith Stadium for the new District of Columbia Stadium (which they did upon its completion in the fall of 1961). While the new facility was intended for the Senators as well, Griffith and the District could not agree on rental terms.
By this time, it was an open secret that the Senators were a candidate for relocation. Like his uncle before him, Griffith had no income apart from the Senators. However, American League owners were reluctant to antagonize the United States Congress (and jeopardize baseball's exemption from antitrust laws) by moving the Senators out of town without a suitable succession plan. Indeed, Griffith himself publicly testified that he intended to keep the Senators in the capital as long as he could make ends meet.
Even then, however Griffith had begun to seriously discuss moving his club to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–Saint Paul in September 1959, but talks stalled. The area's hole card was Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, roughly halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. While it had opened in 1956 for the Triple-A Minneapolis Millers, its real purpose was to attract a major league team to the Twin Cities. It had been built to major league specifications, and could easily be doubled in size to 40,000 seats in order to accommodate a major league team. Griffith had initially been skeptical of moving the Senators there because of Minnesota's harsh winters, but was sold on the area when the Senators played an exhibition against the Philadelphia Phillies shortly after the 1958 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Years later, he offered another reason for moving to the state: "I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota, it was when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ball games, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. It’s unbelievable. We came here because you’ve got good, hard-working, white people here.”