Molitor May Take Final Swings Batting Standout Considers Retirement After 20 Seasons

Linda and Blaire Molitor had been pestering him for weeks.

Should they make the season-ending trip to Cleveland with the Minnesota Twins this weekend? Will that be the place Paul Molitor’s wonderful career finally ends?

Molitor wasn’t dodging his wife and daughter, he just didn’t have a definitive answer. He still doesn’t, but Linda and Blaire will be at Jacobs Field.

Just in case.

“They’re coming, but they’re not sure why,” Molitor said. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”

The reason is simple. Even though, at 41, he still is among the most dangerous hitters in the majors, Molitor hasn’t decided whether to retire after his 20th season.

He still is tremendously productive, still using that distinctive swing - hands frozen, body poised until the last possible instant - to lash hits to every point of a ballpark. But Jimmy Carter was president when Molitor was a rookie, after all, and the Twins are on their way to a team-record fifth straight losing season.

Maybe it’s just time to try something else. Or maybe not.

“I never played with the aspirations of being one of those guys who was able to compete into their early 40s,” he said. “It’s just something that not too many players even talk about setting out to do. It just kind of happens.”

In Molitor’s case, it happened in style.

Although he lost 576 games - the equivalent of 3-1/2 seasons - to injuries or strikes in the prime of his career, Molitor last season became the 21st player to reach 3,000 hits. The milestone hit, a triple off Kansas City’s Jose Rosado (he is the only person to triple for his 3,000th hit) came Sept. 16, 25 days after his 40th birthday and near the end of a remarkable season.

A St. Paul native, Molitor returned home to hit .341 in 1996, setting career highs with 225 hits, 113 RBIs and 161 games. The only game he missed was the day after his 3,000th hit.

“As long as he stayed healthy, that’s all we were hoping for,” general manager Terry Ryan said. “If he stayed healthy, we knew he could lead us.”

Molitor slipped a little this year, partly due to a painful abdominal strain that put him on the disabled list for two weeks in April and still bothers him.

He still climbed to 12th on the hit list and entered the final five games hitting .304, the highest average among players on the Twins roster for the whole season.

What has been most remarkable about Molitor this season is that he has been so productive on a team that stumbled in April and never recovered. It has been clear for months that the Twins were playing for nothing, yet Molitor continued to push himself even though he is surrounded by mostly marginal players.

“It’s said that you can enjoy the competition even if you don’t have a chance to win as long as you feel like you are contributing and teaching and learning, competing,” he said. “I’ve tried to make the most of all those situations.”

Although he is just six years younger than his manager, Tom Kelly, and two years younger than Ryan, Molitor probably will remain productive if he decides to come back to the Twins in 1998.

But he has left that question unanswered, and he has left an entire state and the game waiting.

Molitor says he was encouraged when owner Carl Pohlad said Ryan would return next year, and when Kelly said he planned to be back, too. He wants to know what the Twins plan to do to improve during the off-season, a factor he says will figure heavily in his future plans.

He plans to stay in baseball, either on the field or in the front office, after he quits playing. He said deciding where his 12-year-old daughter will attend high school also is a consideration.

For now, all Molitor knows is that Linda and Blaire will be in Cleveland to watch his last game of 1997. Maybe it will be just another game.

Or maybe not.