Minnesota Twins

The Minnesota Twins are a professional baseball team based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Twins are a member of the Central Division of Major League Baseball's American League. From 1982 to the present, the Twins have played in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. more...

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The "Twins" name originates from Minnesota's Twin Cities area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. They are sometimes called "the Twinkies" by fans and media (though not by the club), a two-syllable play on "Twins" inspired by the snack cake of the same name.

One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1901. Then the Washington Senators (not to be confused with the Washington Senators that were enfranchised in 1961 as a replacement and eventually became the Texas Rangers), the team moved to Minneapolis in 1961, then based in Metropolitan Stadium.

Team history

Washington Senators: 1901 to 1960

For a time, from 1911 to 1933, the Washington Senators were one of the more successful franchises in major-league baseball. The team's rosters included Hall of Famers Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin, Bucky Harris, Heinie Manush and one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Walter Johnson. But the Senators are remembered more for their many years of mediocrity and futility, including six last-place finishes in the 1940s and 1950s.

A losing start for a charter franchise

When the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, the new league placed a team in Washington, a city that had been abandoned by the National League a year earlier. The Washington club, like the old one, would be called the Senators.

The Senators began their history as a consistently losing team, at times so inept that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charley Dryden joked: "Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League." The 1904 Senators lost 113 games, and the next season the team’s owners, trying for a fresh start, changed the team’s name to the Nationals. But the Senators name remained widely used by fans and journalists, and the team later restored it as the official name.

The ‘Big Train’ arrives

Whatever the name, the club continued to lose, despite the addition in 1907 of a talented 19-year-old pitcher named Walter Johnson. Raised in rural Kansas, Johnson was a tall, lanky man with long arms who, using a leisurely windup and unusual sidearm delivery, threw the ball faster than anyone had ever seen. Johnson’s breakout year was 1910, when he struck out 313 batters, posted an earned-run average of 1.36 and won 25 games for a losing ball club. Over his 21-year Hall of Fame career, Johnson, called the “Big Train,” would win 417 games and strike out 3,509 batters, a major-league record that would stand for more than 50 years.

Read more at Wikipedia.org