Ken Landreaux played for the Twins in 1979 and 1980, and holds the franchise record with a 31-game hitting streak in 1980. I covered the Twins extensively in those seasons. I liked him as a character, but I didn't see him as the brightest bulb in the clubhouse.
There was one early morning – 3:30 is early, right – in New York when I was returning to the team hotel after visiting several saloons. As I approached the revolving door, a cab pulled up and Kenny was the lone passenger.
Once he made his exit from the cab … well, put it this way, I did the assisting for Kenny to get into the hotel, on an occasion when I could barely assist myself to perform that feat.
One quirk I noticed with Kenny during those years was that he used "K.T. Landreaux'' as his autograph. His middle name was Francis, so I asked where the "T'' came from, and as I recall, Kenny said it was because he preferred to pronounce his first name "Ken-tuth.''
As I said, Kenny was a character, and now all these years later, I owe him an apology for questioning his ability for book learnin'.
Kenneth Francis Landreaux is now something I'm not: a college graduate.
To fulfill a promise to his mother, Kenny recently went back to Arizona State to complete a degree and, last week, at age 60, he was in the December graduating class.
An ASU degree is nothing to sneeze at. Ask Chad Hartman, a local radio host and an ASU graduate. He proudly refers to his alma mater as "the Harvard of the West.''
Landreaux was the top young player obtained from California in the Rod Carew trade on Feb. 3, 1979. He was the Twins' center fielder for two seasons.
Howard Fox was the traveling secretary, a vice president and had owner Calvin Griffith's ear on matters of player deportment. Landreaux wasn't a favorite of Howard's, and on March 31, 1981, right before the season started, the Twins made the puzzling decision to trade Landreaux to the Dodgers for Mickey Hatcher.
The deal left the Twins without a big-league center fielder – much as they don't have one of those (with Danny Santana playing shortstop) at the moment for 2015.
The Twins used Hatcher in center for most of the strike-shortened 1981 season, even though he was iffy to play left field without injuring himself.
Hatcher was popular with Twins' fans in the early years – mostly, I say, because he tossed so many baseballs to the kids hanging out in the Metrodome's left field stands during batting practice.
If Calvin had known how many baseballs Hatcher was going to cost him, he never would have made the Landreaux trade. But he did, and it remains a trade that belongs in the pantheon of bad ideas by the Twins.
As it turned out, Landreaux won a World Series with the 1981 Dodgers, and Hatcher would win one as an extra player for the 1988 Dodgers.
And now Kenny has a college diploma. I don't know about Mickey.
It has become a trend at colleges around the country, to make completing a degree more accessible for long-ago athletes. The University of Minnesota has been at the forefront of this, and the greatest football Gopher of my lifetime – Bobby Lee Bell of Shelby, N.C. – graduated this month at age 74.
