Tom Nieto Remembered By His Former Rochester Red Wing Players

The Minnesota Twins lost another member of their franchise family just a couple of weeks ago. Former catcher and minor league manager, Tom Nieto, died on March 27 of a heart attack at 65 years old, a day after Opening Day.

Older fans remember him as part of the 1987 Twins as the backup catcher to Tim Laudner. Younger fans may have gotten one of his baseball cards from junk card sets of that era. But for two coaches currently in the Twins system, Toby Gardenhire, the Twins Field Coordinator, and Saints manager Brian Dinkelman, he was their manager.

Nicknamed Chief, Nieto began his coaching career in the New York Yankees system and served as Willie Randolph’s bench coach with the New York Mets from 2004 to 2008. Following his and Randolph’s firing on June 17, 2008, Tom Nieto began his own managerial career in the Twins farm system in 2009.

He was assigned to manage Double-A New Britain, where he found Gardenhire and Dinkelman still climbing the minor-league ladder.

“He was great,” Gardenhire said. “I was with Tom for three years, I think it was, and we had a lot of fun. He was tough, he paid attention to detail, and he was a very, very smart man.”

“He was good to have in the clubhouse, he was fun to be around, kept it loose in there,” said Dinkelman. “I had him in New Britain and Rochester for a couple years. To hear that news was tough to hear because he was a great baseball guy.”

The 2009 Rock Cats had plenty of familiar Twins players of that era, from Danny Valencia to Cole De Vries, Rene Tosoni, and Anthony Slama, to name a few. Mark Grudzielanek was the only MLB veteran on that club at the time. He spent 15 years in the majors as a second baseman and was eying a comeback after going unsigned in the 2008-09 off-season.

Minor league managers have a wide variety of personalities to deal with, from hot young prospects to veterans like Grudzielanek aiming for a comeback, to rehabbing major leaguers who are just in town for a weekend stint. There was more of that in Triple-A Rochester, with Jacque Jones making his last hurrah in pro baseball, Trevor Plouffe inching his way to the majors, and Glen Perkins recreating himself from a starter to a reliever.

Once the trio of Dinkelman, Gardenhire, and Nieto reached Triple-A together in 2010, the future managers of the St. Paul Saints learned firsthand what their future jobs would be like.

“It’s a long baseball season, and there’s going to be days that are good and days that are not good,” Dinkelman said. “He seemed to come to the ballpark every day as the same guy, no matter whether it was good or bad. I know we had some tough stretches in Rochester, the first couple of years I was up there. But he came to the park every day prepared and ready to work and just tried to make us better ball players,”

“It’s a different level when you’re up there, when you have a bunch of veteran guys, and it’s not like managing a bunch of kids,” said Gardenhire. “You have professionals, and learning how to handle those guys, I learned a lot from Chief, watching how he did it, how he dealt with some of the big league guys that came down, and some of the guys who just came up. He was always really good to me.”

Tom Nieto would even let his players, who would become future managers, occasionally try their hand at coaching. Gardenhire had the opportunity to send signs from the bench to former Twins catcher Jose Morales in a game, and he learned the hard way why it’s important to study up on them as often as he could.

“I remember a game, we were playing in Scranton, and he let me do the touches to the catcher, the throw over signs, and I accidentally put the pitch-out on twice in one inning,” said Gardenhire. “It was like touches after the nose, and I didn’t mean to do it, but I put them on twice, and he was like, ‘All right. You’re done.’”

Part of what helped Nieto’s cool and calm demeanor come across to his players was that he was an avid reader. Former catchers often become managers in the game. However, a studious individual like Nieto and his reading habits also helped inspire his players' knowledge outside the game.

“He came to the park every day prepared and ready to work and just tried to make us better ball players,” Dinkelman recalled. “We’d always catch him a couple of times in the manager’s office. He was always reading something and joking around with us, so it was tough to hear that news, but I will always enjoy the time I got to spend with him.”

“He’d be at the ballpark, and I’d walk back there, and he’d be reading a book, and we’d be talking about books and stuff like that,” said Gardenhire. “He was just a really good man. A lot of times when you’re at Triple-A, and you’re scuffling when you’re trying to make it to the big leagues, that’s what you need. You need a baseball guy who has been there and done it, and seen it, that you can kind of just bounce things off of, and that was Chief. He was awesome.”

While Nieto’s death leaves a hole in Gardenhire, Dinkelman, and many of his former players’ lives, his impact on their growth into ballplayers and eventually managers is something they’ll never forget and will always appreciate how he lived up to being the Chief in their baseball lives.