Former Twins 1B Kent Hrbeck (above, right) is making an appearance at this weekend’s Rock N Jock Expo in New Hope, MN, and while City Pages’ Danny Sigelman takes care to note they’ll be showing the Grant Hart documentary, “Every, Everything”, his music Q’s for Hrbeck are a little more general in nature :
Music plays a big part in baseball games, at least for the fans. Is there some music from when you were on the field you really remember as part of the game?
Everytime I hear “If I had the Time of my Life” from Dirty Dancing, they played that song in the video of the World Series. Whenever I hear that song, I start crying. I have a soft spot in my heart for that song. You can play it any place and I always get sentimental over it. I guess when they hear it most people think about Dirty Dancing, but I think of baseball.
Right on, Did you have a song for your walk-up music back then?
We didn’t have walk up music then. It wasn’t a thing. I’ll tell you, Harmon Killibrew is rolling over in his grave if these guys have to have walk-up music. He’d say, “You have to hit the ball no matter where you are. If you have to have your song to get fired up to hit, then how you going to hit the ball when we go on the road and you don’t have that song?”
You must have had some feelings about them tearing the Metrodome down?
I had tears watching them blow the thing up. That was a special place in my life. It’s where I spent my summer for 14 years. I played in the very first game there ever and saw the last Vikings game they played at the Dome. I know it was horrible to watch baseball there. But all my memories are in there. I really want to get a couple seats if I can.