A Lingering Vestige Of Yesterday

Calvin Griffith gets up from his desk with a groan and stretches black rubber half-boots over his shoes. He limps out of his office into the darkness, moving carefully across the parking-lot ice to the royal-blue Bonneville with the miniature baseball glove dangling from the rearview mirror.

Sometimes on the way home he stops at a grocery store. "I like that because you run into people who talk to you," he says. He drives to his suburban Minneapolis apartment and there mixes himself two vodka and tonics. "I try to keep it to two." He gets out the cocktail rye bread, toasts it and spreads it with cheese and maybe a little taco sauce. He turns on the TV. "Dynasty, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Magnum, P.I., Dance Fever. I love to see those nimble bodies move."

When the TV show is happy, something Griffith doesn't understand happens to him. "If I see people making up or getting back together with each other. I cry," he says. "But if anything gets sad, I turn it off."

When the rye and cheese are gone, he takes a steak or an Italian dinner from the freezer and cooks it. After dinner, it's time for the 10 o'clock news. Then it's time for bed.

"You're right," says Griffith, the 71-year-old owner of the Minnesota Twins. "It's no fun for me, alone in that damn apartment."

Griffith's life is no lonelier than those of many people his age in America. It's the way he combats his loneliness that marks him.

CAMPBELL'S MINIMUM TOO HIGH FOR CALVIN
TWINS TRADE BLYLEVEN, THOMPSON
BRAUN: TRADE ME SOON AS POSSIBLE

Seventy-two baseballs are displayed in Griffith's office. There are three Calvin Griffith nameplates on his desk, and a fourth of sorts scrawled on tape across a pitcher of coffee. There's an American flag planted to the left of the desk and behind that is a statue of Babe Ruth. There are nine pictures of Griffith, including Richard Nixon with Calvin and Dwight Eisenhower with Calvin. Nowhere there family with Calvin.

"Richard Nixon," says Griffith, "he was good. A real good baseball fan. Go look at that baseball over there. It was signed by FIE-del Castro. I got some over there signed by movie stars, too...uh, Gary Grant and the other actor, Charles Heston, and...oh, who else? Ali, Ali...I don't know how to pronounce his last name. He's the fighter. Ali Muhammad, that's it."

He has shaken hands sitting down, saying he is too old to get up, and now he's already telling a stranger about the small cyst he will have removed from his wrist the next day. He peers at it with the same disdain The Babe would have given a bruise from a fastball, and then he gives it the same cure. He spits on it.