Baseball: The Man Nobody Wanted

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The rightfielder of the Minnesota Twins is a hoax. He calls himself Tony, but his name is Pedro. He has claimed to be 27, but he is really 22. He swings a bat as though he were waving goodbye to his grandmother. And he is probably the only ballplayer in the major leagues who got turned down twice by the minors. But none of that is likely to keep Tony—or Pedro—Oliva from becoming Rookie of the Year and, just possibly, the only player in history to win the American League batting championship in his first big-league season.

The son of a back-country Cuban plantation worker, Oliva was barely 19 when the Twins' man in Havana spotted him in 1960 and offered him a minor-league tryout. He jumped at the chance. Trouble was, he needed a passport, and Cuba being Cuba, that involved all sorts of red tape. So Pedro simply borrowed his brother Tony's—and has been using his brother's name ever since.

Down to the Ds. The tryout was a washout. After three days, the Twins offered him—free—to the National League's Houston Colts. The Colts turned him down too. At that, Oliva went to visit a buddy who was playing for the Charlotte, N.C., Hornets—a Twins farm club. The Hornets didn't want him either. Out of charity, the general manager got Tony a berth on the Wytheville, Va., Twins, a Class D team in the Appalachian Rookie League. And all of a sudden Tony started hitting baseballs with his unconnected swing.

That first year at Wytheville, he clouted ten homers, drove in 81 runs, and hit .410 for the season—highest batting average in all of organized baseball. Tony had to learn how to field from the first grade up, but he batted .350 at Charlotte in 1962, .304 at Dallas-Fort Worth in 1963, .365 in the Puerto Rican League last winter, won a starting berth with the Twins this spring. In his first 100 trips to the plate, he collected 43 hits, and his average has not dropped below .380 since. Last week Oliva was leading the American League in batting (.389), runs (41), hits (77), doubles (12) and triples (5), and ranked sixth in home runs (with 11).

There is always a chance that opposing pitchers will find some way of getting Tony out. Nothing yet has worked —not even the ultimate weapon. Pitchers call it the "brushback"; batters call it a beanball. It is the highest compliment a pitcher can pay a hitter, and Oliva has been getting a lot of fan mail from the mound. He has eaten dirt at least a dozen times this spring. Things have reached such a stage, in fact, that Twins Manager Sam Mele has ordered retaliatory measures. "Anybody knocks Tony down, he gets knocked down himself," he tells Twins pitchers.

Out Like a Marble. "If nothing happens to upset that natural ability," says Mele, "Tony can be one of the game's great hitters." Only one bad thing seems remotely likely to happen to Oliva: choking on a chuckle. A gold tooth gleams in his constant smile, and his laugh explodes like a marble popping out of a bottle of ginger ale. Tony's English is still practically nonexistent, and he is just beginning to learn his teammates' names. "Big Powder," he calls fellow Cuban Vic Power.