The baseball world lost one of Minnesota’s own this week when Jerry Koosman died on October 31. The Appleton, Minn., native and 1969 World Series winner is remembered by plenty of fans as the other name on Nolan Ryan’s 1968 Topps rookie card, but for Minnesotans who watched him closely, he was far more than a footnote.
Jimmy Lonetti, who owns D&J Glove Repair in Minneapolis, was one of those fans. Koosman’s 19-year career had already made an impression on him by the time he was collecting cards, and the left-hander’s Minnesota roots only made that connection stronger.
Lonetti first noticed Koosman on his 1971 Topps card, and what stuck with him wasn’t just the two All-Star nods or the 1969 Miracle Mets. It was the fact that Koosman came from Morris, Minn.
Lonetti said that made Koosman feel even more remarkable.
“As I reached high school age, my baseball card collecting had ended and playing baseball and closely following the Twins had been replaced by soccer (the Kicks!), girls and parties,” Lonetti recalled.
“My high school friends and I still had a tradition, though, to skip school on the day of the Twins home opener to go to the game at the old Met. For the 1979 home opener, we did get to see Jerry as the starting pitcher for the Twins.
The game was against the Angels, and Rod Carew returned to the Met in front of over 37,000 fans. Koosman was outpitched by Frank Tanana, and the Twins lost 8-1.”
That 1979 opener came after the Twins landed Koosman in a December 1978 trade with the New York Mets, two months before the club dealt Carew to the California Angels. On paper, Koosman looked like a major addition. In the moment, though, not every Twins fan saw it that way.
“At that point for many Twins fans, even before the Carew trade, dissatisfaction with Calvin Griffith had already been pretty well established,” Lonetti said, “and truthfully any player moves he made were looked through the lens of him probably just trying to save money (whether true in the Koosman case or not).”
That skepticism fit the mood around the franchise at the time. Griffith had a reputation for being tight with money, and the Koosman deal arrived only three months after his infamous meeting with the Waseca, Minn., Lions Club, where he made racist comments about why he moved the Twins to Minnesota in the first place. Those remarks helped sour the relationship with Carew, especially after Griffith called him a ‘damn fool’ for not taking a below-market salary.
Koosman’s arrival, then, came during one of the lowest points of the Griffith era. But once the season got rolling, he gave the Twins something they badly needed.
His rough Opening Day outing turned out to be just a blip. He settled in, and in 1979 he became one of the team’s two bright spots along with Roy Smalley.
Koosman won 20 games that season, the 10th time in Twins history a pitcher reached that mark. It was the best year of his Minnesota run, as he posted a 3.38 ERA, 130 ERA+, 1.33 WHIP and 157 strikeouts in 263 ⅔ innings.
The rest of his time with the Twins was less memorable. He finished with an ERA above four in both 1980 and 1981, and on August 31, 1981, Griffith traded him to the Chicago White Sox.
Minnesota got three minor leaguers back, and only one of them, Randy Johnson, would make a brief appearance in the majors. No, not that one.
Lonetti remembered Koosman as a steady veteran on a pitching staff that needed one.
“Along with Dave Goltz, I viewed Jerry Koosman as a dependable veteran presence on a Twins pitching staff made up of young, unproven arms and older retreads,” said Lonetti. “I always think of him fondly as a ‘Minnesota kid done good.’ Kind of like other Minnesotan-born Twins pitchers like Charlie Walters and Dick Stigman.”
Koosman’s death leaves a real void, but his place in the game - and in Minnesota baseball memory - is secure. He was a small-town kid who became one of the best left-handed starters from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s, and for fans from Morris and beyond, that legacy won’t fade.
In 2026, 16 Minnesota-born players were in the majors, but only Caleb Thielbar and Brandon Williamson came from small towns, Randolph and Fairmount. Plenty more are still working their way through the minors, hoping to build the kind of hometown legacy Koosman left behind.
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