In a 32-13 exhibition loss to the New York Giants the other day, the Chicago Bears, favored to repeat as NFC North champions, didn’t play a single starter. The same was expected for the Bears’ game against the Indianapolis Colts on Saturday night. Reason: Prevent injuries.
To the dismay of some fans, limiting starters’ play in preseason games has become general practice in the NFL.
That’s not the case with the Vikings.
“I can only tell you we had a great crowd (66,636 sellout) in our stadium (25-19 victory over Seattle last Sunday),” Vikings president Mark Wilf said.
The Vikings drew 66,698 for their 20-9 victory over Arizona on Saturday despite missing several starters.
“Our fans are phenomenal, and I know our coach (and staff) wants balance, they want to take care of our players, but also want to get them ready for the season,” Wilf said.
“I can’t speak for what other teams do and how their fan bases react to it, but I can tell you we have a great fan base, and they came out.”
This is the 15th year that Zygi Wilf and brother Mark have owned the Vikings.
“It’s been a quick time, passed really fast, but it’s been an exciting time for myself, my family, getting to know the fans, getting to know the team,” Zygi said last week. “It’s been a great experience, and I’ve loved every bit of it — except for the losses.”
Zygi Wilf has been passionate about winning a Super Bowl and the accompanying Lombardi Trophy.
“Put it this way, in our business you need a lot of patience,” he said. “To build a stadium, you need a lot of patience. I guess to get the Lombardi will be some more patience.”
How close does Wilf, 69, feel his team is to winning a Super Bowl.
“I think we’re close — we’ve been close for the last several years,” he said. “For the last four years, we’ve had the best record in the NFC. But close is not being there. We’re going to try to be there every single year, and being a world class organization, having the right coaches and having the right people in the organization, the right players, we’ll be knocking on the door all the time, and we’ll be a voice to be reckoned with.”
The Vikings have been in Minnesota since 1961. The team has played in four Super Bowls, but without a victory.
Above all, Wilf, who owns a home in the Twin Cities, said he wants a Super Bowl championship for Vikings fans.
“It’s more for all the fans,” he said. “I’ve been here for 15 years, and all the fans have been here for a lot longer. That would be a great thing for Minnesota, because everyone in Minnesota is a Vikings fan. I know how important that would be for them. That’s the pleasure I would have, and I can’t really wait for that to happen.”
The Wilfs have invested some $200 million in the Vikings Lakes project in Eagan and have partnered in construction of a 14-story Omni hotel on site. In total, they have invested nearly $1 billion in Twin Cities real estate.
“We’re real estate developers,” Zygi said.
Can he afford all that?
“I hope so,” he said.
The Vikings announced their move of headquarters from Eden Prairie to Eagan two years ago. Zygi Wilf said he has been happy in Eagan.
“Very much so — I think it’s a great community, great county, great location,” he said. “As a real estate developer, that’s very important.
“It’s close to the airport, close to both St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Mall of America, and yet when you’re out here, you feel like you’re in the woods. You don’t have to go far to be at a lake. We have several lakes on the premises. This is going to be a destination area for everyone in the Twin Cities area to come and enjoy.”
Wilf said he has no plans for the Vikings’ former Winter Park site, now a soccer facility.
“We’re busy right now building in downtown Minneapolis on Park Avenue and Washington and plan on building several hundred million dollars worth of apartments right across the street (from the Eagan facility),” he said.
“That’s our business — we like doing that. We like to invest in the Twin Cities. It’s something that from Day One was important to us. It wasn’t just the stadium that we invested money in — we’ve invested twice the amount in the surrounding areas in the Twin Cities. I think the investments have turned out pretty good for everybody.”
The last non-player employee from owner Calvin Griffith’s Washington Senators’ move to Minnesota for the 1961 season died last week. Gil Lansdale, who began work with the Senators in 1951 and retired from the Twins in 1986 after a career in novelties, sales and marketing, was 93.
Twins East: Blake Parker, the ex-Twins reliever with the take-forever setup, has landed with the Philadelphia Phillies, and in 9 2/3 innings has struck out 14 with a 3.72 earned-run average.
Another Phillies pitcher who was with the Twins this season, Mike Morin from Andover, Minn., has stuck out nine in 14 innings with a 3.21 ERA.
Former Twins executives Andy MacPhail and Terry Ryan are with the Phillies.
Pat Neshek, the ex-Twins reliever from Park Center, is on the Phillies’ 60-day injured list with a strained hamstring.
First baseman Logan Morrison, a bust with the Twins last season, is trying to make a comeback with the Phillies. In 11 at-bats, he has two singles and a double and is hitting .273. The Phillies are competing with the New York Mets for third place in the National League East.
That was ex-Twin Cole De Vries, 34, pitching seven scoreless innings for the Minneapolis Cobras to advance to the Class A state amateur championship round last week.
Only four of 52 near-court premium season-ticket seats, at a cost of $2,500 apiece, remain for the No. 3 ranked Gophers volleyball team that opens at North Carolina on Friday.
Happy birthday: Hall of Fame ex-Twins manager Paul Molitor turned 63 last week.
The Twins have used 29 different pitchers this season.
The Twins’ Triple-A Rochester club has had a franchise record 70 different players appear in a game this season.
In his Triple-A debut for Rochester last week, top pitching prospect Brusdar Graterol struck out three in two innings, allowing just a single.
St. Paul’s Town and Country Club plans a renovation on its third green, constructing a surrounding horseshoe bunker.
Ex-Twin Brian Dozier, who has hit 19 homers for the Washington Nationals this season, came off the team’s paternity list last week.
The first football game at Henry Sibley’s new $5 million Warrior Field will be Sept. 6 against St. Thomas Academy. The multi-purpose stadium, financed through a bond referendum nearly 18 months ago, will seat 1,500 on the home side, 500 on the visitors side.
Meanwhile, St. Thomas Academy has resurfaced its football field and track.
The St. Paul Saints on Sunday will honor Lexington Park, their home from 1897 to 1956, by giving commemorative pennants to the first 1,500 ticket buyers for the game against the Chicago Dogs.
Former St. John’s wideout Blake Elliott is on the College Football Hall of Fame ballot for a seventh straight year. Legendary late Johnnies coach John Gagliardi, asked how he was able to recruit Elliott to St. John’s, said, “we had to go all the way to Melrose for him.” Melrose is an 18-minute drive to the St. John’s campus.
Newly elected to the Mahtomedi High School Hall of Fame for induction at halftime of the game against Park on Thursday: Mike Dolezal, Bridget Conroy Johnson, John Strenger, Jenna Hemenway Veenis and Lindsey Weier.
Newly elected St. Thomas Academy Athletic Hall of Fame: Greg Vannelli, Jim Bard, Peter Assad, Jim Boland and Mikael Dahlstrom for induction Sept. 27.
Four-time cancer survivor Casey O’Brien will be keynote speaker at the 123rd Cretin Alumni banquet on Sept. 19 at the Joe Mauer Field House.
DON’T PRINT THAT
The first person Wild owner Craig Leipold interviewed for the general manager job that went to Bill Guerin last week was former Edmonton Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli.
It looks like ex-Gopher rebounding star Jordan Murphy will end up with the Timberwolves’ G League team in Des Moines, Iowa.
The Vikings will win their division with an 11-5 record, defeating the Green Bay Packers (10-6) in the first round of the playoffs, then lose to the New Orleans Saints, who will then defeat the Los Angeles Rams and lose to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIV, Sports Illustrated predicts in its latest issue.
White Bear Lake contractor James Miller, 63, who was recently assaulted by U.S. 1980 Olympic hockey player Mark Pavelich near Lutsen, Minn., was readmitted to a local hospital last week for a ruptured spleen.
Ex-Twins infielder Eduardo Escobar, 30, now has 28 home runs and 100 runs batted in for the Arizona Diamondbacks and leads the league in triples (10).
Escobar was traded last season for pitcher Jhoan Duran and outfielders Gabriel Maciel and Ernie De La Trinidad.
Duran, 21, has 119 strikeouts in 102 innings between Pensacola and Fort Myers. Maciel, 20, is hitting .289 with three homers and 33 RBIs between Class A Fort Myers and Cedar Rapids. Trinidad, 23, is hitting .232 with five homers and 30 RBIs between Fort Myers and Pensacola.
It’s hard to remember when the Vikings played a noon start Saturday exhibition game in Minneapolis as they just did against the Arizona Cardinals.
QB Josh McCown, 40, lured out of broadcasting by the Philadelphia Eagles for $2 million last week, is the guy who in 2003 stunned the Vikings with a last-play pass to the Cardinals’ Nate Poole, bitterly ending Minnesota’s playoff plans.
Closer Craig Kimbrel, 31, in whom the Twins had interest until the Chicago Cubs offered three years and $43 million, is 0-2 with a 5.28 earned-run average and 11 saves after 17 games.
Twins closer Taylor Rodgers, 28, who is pitching for $1.53 million and eligible for arbitration this winter, is 2-3 with a 2.59 ERA and 19 saves after 47 games.
With five weeks remaining in the regular season, Max Kepler has become the Twins’ most valuable player.
The Gophers last week, for one day only, offered what they billed as a State Fair Special: $10 tickets for the football opener on Thursday against South Dakota State, and sold more than 7,000 during the 24-hour period.
The University of St. Thomas pays WCCO-AM to broadcast its football games.
The Division III No. 3 ranked St. John’s football team has 192 players on its roster. St. Thomas, ranked No. 7 nationally, has 132 rostered players.
Former Gophers football coach Glen Mason and ex-Ohio State linebacker James Laurinaitis from Wayzata return to the Big Ten Network.
Onlookers from Minnesota in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at a recent game between the Twins’ Class A Kernels and the Miami Marlins’ Clinton Lumberkings were impressed by the work of home plate umpire Emma Charlesworth-Seiler, the Hopkins High School-Hamline University grad who is the first woman to umpire in the Midwest League.
Charlesworth-Seiler, 24, has advanced in each of her three seasons of professional umpiring. She is the seventh woman to umpire an organized baseball game.
The Midwest League uses two umpires per game and provides a rental car for travel throughout the league, which has teams in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana.
Coincidentally, the game Charlesworth-Seiler umpired featured Kai-Wei Teng, who pitched seven scoreless innings for Cedar Rapids, then was traded by the Twins to the San Francisco Giants for reliever Sam Dyson.
Tony Oliva, 81, will learn in December whether he finally has been elected to baseball’s hall of fame 2020 class in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Twins starter Michael Pineda uses a tobacco plug, but not when he pitches.
“Would make me dizzy,” he said, shaking his head.
Scott Sandelin, who has coached Minnesota Duluth to two straight NCAA men’s hockey championships, turned down an offer to coach the Anaheim Ducks’ San Diego Gulls AHL team.
This is the 10th anniversary of the Gophers TCF Bank Stadium.
Outfielder Jaylin Davis, 25, traded to the Giants in the Sam Dyson Twins deal, was named International League player of the month for July, when he hit .368 with 11 home runs, eight doubles and 27 RBIs in 28 games for Triple-A Rochester.
Twins TV analyst Jim Kaat will call the Class AAA baseball championship game on Sept. 17 for Fox Sports.
The Gophers baseball program is planning a Sept. 27-28 alumni baseball game at Siebert Field.
Director of Golf at the Liberty National course in the New York area, where Patrick Reed won the recent Northern Trust FedEx Cup playoff, is 1999 Roseville graduate Dan Schliegert.
Ticket sales are approaching 32,000 for Saturday’s North Dakota State-Butler football game at Target Field.
OVERHEARD
Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, asked if there’s anything on the field he wants to see from his team: “Win the close ones.”
