Gardy’s a mean man for sacrificing old Horse Snort.

Alas, as a Twin Nathan has never worked more than 73 games, and 78 is his career high. At age 27, Bill Campbell pitched in 78 games for the Twins and was a sacrifice bunt from throwing 168 innings. Nathan has thrown about one-quarter as many innings this season.

Number of starters on the Twins’ staff with 168 innings this season: Zero.

Not only did Campbell not succumb, he went on to pitch until he was 38, finished his career tossing more than twice as many innings as Nathan now has in his entire career (Campbell started a third as many games as Nathan has, so it’s not as if Campbell piled up the innings as a starter when he was younger), and at age 37 Campbell threw more innings than Nathan has this season.

Wow. A closer might have to get 5 outs.

In one five-day span in ‘76, Campbell threw 13 1/3 innings of relief. Two of those times he went 5. He went 6 once that season, at least 5 innings five other times that season, at least 4 three other times, and at least 3 on 14 occasions.

And Campbell wasn’t even Mike Marshall.

Time for “baseball people” to get over the love affair for a one-inning, wuss job like “closer.”

Bill Campbell was a little before my time (the end of his career in 87 was about the time I was aware of a game called ‘baseball’)

I suppose that means you missed the other planet blowing up and being transported here on the space ark. Unless your parents told you about it.

Campbell’s season was brought to you by Twins’ broadcaster Bert Blyleven, who wasn’t a broadcaster at the time and, at 26 – Scott Baker’s age – refused to sign a contract and was traded to Texas two months into the season, leaving the Twins to ride on the backs of starters such as Minnesota native Dave Goltz and Jim Hughes. You remember Jim.

The Twins even recalled 1973 phenom Eddie Bane from the minors to give up an earned run more often than every other inning that season.

Campbell, who had started seven times the year before under manager Frank Quilici – who said when he was fired after the season that a manager was only as good as his bullpen – was moved permanently to the bullpen by new manager Gene Mauch. A wise decision in that Campbell was better suited for the role and had come off a winter in Venezuela where he pitched something like 7,000 scoreless innings of relief. Mauch leaned on “Soup” often because he could find the mound and some of the other fellers could not.

Soup signed a big free agent contract with Boston for $750 – although a dollar was worth a lot more back then and gas was cheap because cars ran on meringue – after the season and was never heard from again in these parts.

This was also a year in which the Twins sometimes drew 21,000 fans to a game and owner Calvin Griffith threatened to move the team and a stadium bill failed. So in that regard it could have been a lot of seasons.