Calvin Griffith

But a sister, Anne ("Addie") Robertson, had moved to the United States, where in 1900 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.

Clark and Addie Griffith had been concerned for some time about James' alcoholism.

Calvin Robertson Griffith (December 1, 1911 – October 20, 1999), born Calvin Griffith Robertson, was a Canadian-born American Major League Baseball team owner.

Troubled by alcoholism, he died in 1922, leaving a widow and seven young children in Montreal in dire circumstances.

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).

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, 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.

Under Calvin's ownership, the left-field dimensions of cavernous Griffith Stadium were immediately shortened.

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 7 —in 2,601 home at bats all season.

In 1946, 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 1951 TSN Baseball Guide listed eight scouts on the Senators' staff.

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.

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.

The 1955 Senators hit 20 home runs at Griffith Stadium during their 77-game home schedule.

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.

Although the distance along the left-field foul line decreased by only 14 ft to 388 ft in 1956, the left-center-field power alley was reduced to 360 ft; a 6 ft-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 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 (1957) and Killebrew (1959) 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.

To Griffith's credit, however, his pitching staff (led by ace right-hander Camilo Pascual) began to post respectable earned run averages beginning in 1958 and by 1960, the Senators' ERA was down to 3.77 (3.88 at Griffith Stadium).

Calvin Griffith also invested in Washington's traditionally weak farm system and scouting operations.

But by 1960, the team's last year in Washington, the same annual listed 23 full-time talent hunters working on the Senators' behalf.

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."

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.