Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend by Thom Henninger

Reviewed by: Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend by Thom Henninger Frank G. Houdek Thom Henninger. Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 268 pp. Reis-sued in paperback, 2019. $19.95. Even knowledgeable baseball fans know, at best, three things about Tony Oliva, the Minnesota Twins star of the 1960s and ’70s who played his last game in 1976. First, he played like a future Hall of Famer at the beginning of his career, winning the American League’s batting championship (the first rookie to do so in the Modern Era). He then won the Rookie of the Year award in 1964, and earned All-Star selections and MVP votes (finishing twice as runner-up) in each of the eight seasons from 1964 to 1971. Then, in 1971, a devastating knee injury robbed him of his running ability and defensive skills, dimming the brilliance of his play and shortening his career. Finally, while teammates Harmon Killebrew and Rod Carew are members of Baseball’s Hall of Fame, Oliva is not, never receiving more than 47 percent of the writers’ votes in his [End Page 238] years of eligibility (though he fell one vote short of election by the Golden Era Committee in 2014). In Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend, Thom Henninger, associate editor of Baseball Digest, goes beyond these basic facts to explain why, more than forty years after he played his last game, Oliva “remains beloved by Twins fans” who, well aware of his feats on the field, “are equally taken by the warmth and magnetic personality of the man they will always know as Tony O” (247–48). Yes, Henninger devotes much attention to Oliva’s baseball exploits, particularly those eight spectacular years when he won three batting titles; led all major leaguers in doubles; ranked third in total bases, fourth in batting average, and tenth in slugging average; and became a Gold Glove-winning outfielder. But as interested as he is in Oliva the player, he is more enamored with Oliva the man. He wants readers to appreciate that, cut off from his family in Cuba by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which occurred just days after Oliva’s arrival in the United States on April 9, 1961, the twenty-two-year-old with no English “was able to overcome his sense of isolation and excel between the white lines,” but “[h]is ability to compartmentalize his alienation . . . did not dull its long-term effects.” In fact, in what might be termed Henninger’s thesis, he writes that Oliva’s “early years in the United States shaped the man he is today. Immediate family is paramount, and he is equally committed to his siblings and their families in Cuba” (213). For this reader, the most compelling parts of this well-written, well-researched book are those which explore these less well-known aspects of the Oliva story. At first glance, Tony Oliva is a standard athletic biography, with 15 chapters proceeding chronologically through the life and career of its subject. Henninger begins by sketching life for Oliva and his nine siblings in the Cuban province of Piñar del Río, which “revolved around the farm, . . . a baseball field [built by his father], and a river. . . .” (1). He describes how Oliva learned baseball, first by playing with his brothers on the family diamond, then with the village team at the age of fifteen, and finally graduating to winter league ball with professionals at nineteen. The next chapter explores the dilemma faced by Oliva and other Cuban ballplayers in the US who, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, had to choose between continuing to pursue their careers but being cut off from their homeland or returning to the island and forgoing any chance of playing professional baseball. In documenting the challenges that Oliva faced in moving through the Twins organization to reach the majors in this and the next chapter, Henninger leaves the path of the usual biography and moves toward more of a character study. He intersperses tales of on-the-field...

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