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The Franchise: Minnesota Twins
In The Minnesota Twins , take a more profound and unique journey into the history of an iconic team.
This thoughtful and engaging collection of essays captures the astute fans’ history of the franchise, going beyond well-worn narratives of yesteryear to uncover the less-discussed moments, decisions, people, and settings that fostered the Twins' one-of-a-kind identity.
Through wheeling and dealing, mythmaking and community building, explore where the organization has been, how it got to prominence in the modern major league landscape, and how it’ll continue to evolve and stay in contention for generations to come.
Twins fans in the know will enjoy this personal, local, in-depth look at baseball history.
This thoughtful and engaging collection of essays captures the astute fans’ history of the franchise, going beyond well-worn narratives of yesteryear to uncover the less-discussed moments, decisions, people, and settings that fostered the Twins' one-of-a-kind identity.
Through wheeling and dealing, mythmaking and community building, explore where the organization has been, how it got to prominence in the modern major league landscape, and how it’ll continue to evolve and stay in contention for generations to come.
Twins fans in the know will enjoy this personal, local, in-depth look at baseball history.
326 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 11, 2024
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1772 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 20, 2024
I hate to give this book a negative review because I enjoy listening to La Velle E. Neal III on the radio and on podcasts. He's an engaging speaker & storyteller who always has keen insights into the Minnesota Twins. Sadly, however, this tome is plagued by two pretty substantial issues that render it below-average.
First and foremost, roughly 80-90% of the material here is "generic Twins history". If you've read one other book about the history of the Twins you'll have heard almost all the tales here before. La Velle does include some original content/interviews--and I wish that was the whole book! Instead, this was made for the most generic audience possible and also suffers from the overlapping coverage downfall--where a chapter on Tom Kelly and chapters on 1987 & 1991 will cover the same material two or even three times.
Secondly, "The Franchise" contains more than its share of spelling/grammatical errors, typos, or downright misinformation in stats/facts. A couple of such blunders I can overlook--but not as many as are present here. Again, very sad considering Neal is so good in newsprint or over the airwaves.
Overall, though, I was disappointed in this Twins tome. Free of errors I could have given it a right-down-the-middle 3/5 star ranking, but as-is 2 stars is all I can muster.
First and foremost, roughly 80-90% of the material here is "generic Twins history". If you've read one other book about the history of the Twins you'll have heard almost all the tales here before. La Velle does include some original content/interviews--and I wish that was the whole book! Instead, this was made for the most generic audience possible and also suffers from the overlapping coverage downfall--where a chapter on Tom Kelly and chapters on 1987 & 1991 will cover the same material two or even three times.
Secondly, "The Franchise" contains more than its share of spelling/grammatical errors, typos, or downright misinformation in stats/facts. A couple of such blunders I can overlook--but not as many as are present here. Again, very sad considering Neal is so good in newsprint or over the airwaves.
Overall, though, I was disappointed in this Twins tome. Free of errors I could have given it a right-down-the-middle 3/5 star ranking, but as-is 2 stars is all I can muster.
July 13, 2024
Good history of the Twins but WAY too many typographical errors, dates wrong, etc.
June 16, 2024
You can also see this review, along with others I have written, at my new blog, Mr. Book's Book Reviews.
Mr. Book just finished The Franchise: Minnesota Twins, by La Velle E. Neal III.
This is the fifth book in The Franchise series that I have read in the last two years. I’ve found the series to be very good, with one exception. Mr. Book gave the Yankees’ version in C, followed by an A for the Red Sox version (despite his life-long love of the Yankees and lack thereof for the Red Sox), while the Cubs and Braves both got a B+.
The book contains 22 chapters, almost all of them about a specific player, manager, stadium or season.
The chapter on Bert Blyleven did an excellent job describing not just his pitching accomplishments, but the great character that he is. The chapters on the history of baseball in Minnesota from about the 1950s through the late 1970s, Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew were also excellent.
I have to give the author credit for not avoiding the dark side of Kirby Puckett. I also liked the fact that, even though the book was about the Twins, for chapters on players like Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, Jack Morris, the author also gave good coverage of the players’ entire career and didn’t just limit it to their time in Minnesota.
One of the great things about baseball and history books is all of the great tidbits that are found in them. A great example from this book is the story about the day Metropolitan Stadium had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat in 1970.
It was very difficult to find a chapter that wasn’t very good in this book.
One does not have to be a Twins fan to enjoy this one. It so enjoyable that I give this an A+, which means it is inducted into the Hall of Fame. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 16, 2024.
Mr. Book just finished The Franchise: Minnesota Twins, by La Velle E. Neal III.
This is the fifth book in The Franchise series that I have read in the last two years. I’ve found the series to be very good, with one exception. Mr. Book gave the Yankees’ version in C, followed by an A for the Red Sox version (despite his life-long love of the Yankees and lack thereof for the Red Sox), while the Cubs and Braves both got a B+.
The book contains 22 chapters, almost all of them about a specific player, manager, stadium or season.
The chapter on Bert Blyleven did an excellent job describing not just his pitching accomplishments, but the great character that he is. The chapters on the history of baseball in Minnesota from about the 1950s through the late 1970s, Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew were also excellent.
I have to give the author credit for not avoiding the dark side of Kirby Puckett. I also liked the fact that, even though the book was about the Twins, for chapters on players like Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, Jack Morris, the author also gave good coverage of the players’ entire career and didn’t just limit it to their time in Minnesota.
One of the great things about baseball and history books is all of the great tidbits that are found in them. A great example from this book is the story about the day Metropolitan Stadium had to be evacuated due to a bomb threat in 1970.
It was very difficult to find a chapter that wasn’t very good in this book.
One does not have to be a Twins fan to enjoy this one. It so enjoyable that I give this an A+, which means it is inducted into the Hall of Fame. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.
Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 16, 2024.
April 19, 2025
A must read for all Minnesota Twins baseball fans. The book looks at how major league baseball ended up in Minnesota by 1961 and the people behind the effort. Then it examines various heroes and hall of famers in individual chapters. Then looks at some of the influential managers (Billy Martin, Tom Kelly, and Ron Gardenhire. It delves into the ownership Calvin Griffith and Carl Pohlad and the Pohlad family who have been the only owners of this 60 plus year franchise. What made this interesting to me was the various tidbits that I didn't know, especially that Donald Trump made an offer to Griffith in the early 80s to buy the Twins and that Carl Pohlad was willing to have the MLB contract the team in the early 2000s and accept a cash payout, and only a Minnesota judge kept the team from leaving town. The book ends with the highlights of their two World Championship seasons of 1987 and 1991.
August 23, 2024
3.5
I feel I learned a lot about the Twins organization. The way the book was split up into sections seemed a little disjointed and unorganized. I liked some sections more than others (The Icons and the Stadiums) and was surprised I even found the financials of what the club was worth over the years interesting. Even though you would be reminded in a new section about something that was already presented in another section I found I didn’t hate that because it would help me retain the info better. Overall I felt reading this was time well spent.
I feel I learned a lot about the Twins organization. The way the book was split up into sections seemed a little disjointed and unorganized. I liked some sections more than others (The Icons and the Stadiums) and was surprised I even found the financials of what the club was worth over the years interesting. Even though you would be reminded in a new section about something that was already presented in another section I found I didn’t hate that because it would help me retain the info better. Overall I felt reading this was time well spent.
July 27, 2024
The content is good and it's a fun read, but the typos are just egregious. Far too many which are far too obvious and I hope they're fixed if this gets another printing.
April 5, 2025
As a long-time Twins fan, this well-written book brought back a lot of good memories. It also gave me one more reason to detest the Pohlads.
September 10, 2024
Just finished this book. It’s a pretty good deep dive into the history of the franchise from the time they moved to Minnesota to now. The only complaints I have about the book is there were some factual errors, typos the editor didn’t catch and information that was repeated that feel may have been to make the book longer than it needed to be. If you’re interested, you can purchase the book here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0D21W...
October 2, 2024
In this book, Neal offers insight into the impactful people and settings that make up Twins history, and their impact in the culture of baseball in Minnesota and the Twin Cities. He does so in an engaging and enjoyable way, however this book suffers from a distracting ammount of issues that should have been resolved in the editing process, such as misspellings, gramatical errors, incorrect dates, and redundancies across chapters. I'd love to see these issues resolved in a later edition, but for now I would still recommend this book to fellow Twins fans and baseball enthusiasts!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews