On June 19, 2020, the Minnesota Twins removed his statue from Target Field regarding what the Twins called "racist comments he made in Waseca in 1978", admitting a racial motivation to moving the Senators from Washington D.C.[1][2] He was born in Montreal, Quebec, as Calvin Griffith Robertson, the son of James A. Robertson and the former Jane Barr Davies.

[8] The senior Griffith owned the Senators until his death at age 85 in October 1955; the team then passed into the hands of Calvin, 43, who had worked his way up through a variety of positions since the 1920s.

Three of Calvin's brothers — Sherry, Jimmy and Billy Robertson — became team executives, as did Thelma's husband, former pitcher Joe Haynes.

Meanwhile, brother-in-law Joe Cronin, a Hall of Fame shortstop married to sister Mildred Robertson, served as playing manager of the Senators and then the Boston Red Sox.

Calvin's son Clark Griffith II and nephews Bruce Haynes and Tom Cronin held executive posts in the Twins' front office.

The original dimensions were favored by the late Clark Griffith, who, as a former moundsman, built his successful early 20th-century teams on pitching, speed, gap-to-gap hitting, and defense.

In 1946, The Sporting News' Official Baseball Guide showed only three full-time scouts on the Senators' org chart, although one of them was Joe Cambria, who established a pipeline of playing talent from Cuba to the franchise that endured until his death in 1962.

The proof of his endeavors was in the pudding: by 1960, his Senators featured home-grown players like Killebrew, Allison, Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Jim Kaat (elected to the Hall of Fame in 2021) and Zoilo Versalles.

[6] At the 1956 World Series, Griffith, not even a year into his tenure as the Senators' president and majority owner, began preliminary talks with Los Angeles city and county officials about a potential transfer to the West Coast.

[15] The Senators also attracted other suitors: The Washington Post reported in the autumn of 1956 that the club's board of directors had received (and rejected) feelers from San Francisco, Louisville — and Minneapolis.

[16] The Senators still owned their home ballpark, but Washington was considering building a new, publicly financed facility in a location Griffith disliked, saying it was too far from the team's traditional fan base in the District's northwest suburbs.

However, American League owners were reluctant to antagonize the United States Congress (and jeopardize baseball's exemption from antitrust laws) by moving the Senators out of town without a suitable succession plan.

While it had opened in 1956 for the Triple-A Minneapolis Millers, its real purpose was to attract a major league team to the Twin Cities.

We came here because you’ve got good, hard-working, white people here.”[17] At the same time, Twin Cities-based owners won a franchise in the new Continental League, which served in part to turn the spotlight on Griffith's financial struggles in Washington.

The new Senators started at square one with players discarded from the eight original AL teams; the club lost 100 games in 1961, and had only one winning season (in 1969).

Well aware of the bitter century-long rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Griffith was determined not to offend fans on either side of the Mississippi River.

(Meanwhile, the Twins' second-largest shareholder, Washington businessman H. Gabriel Murphy, filed suit in federal court seeking to block the franchise shift; his legal battle with Griffith lasted for eight years.)

In 1962 rookie infielders Rich Rollins and Bernie Allen joined the maturing core of the team as the Twins vaulted into second place with 91 wins, only five games behind the New York Yankees.

Griffith also shrewdly acquired two starting pitchers, Jim Perry and Mudcat Grant, in separate transactions with the Cleveland Indians.

In 1967, sparked by Griffith's off-season trade for 20-game-winner Dean Chance, 1965 acquisition César Tovar, and another brilliant rookie, Rod Carew, who became the team's starting second baseman at Griffith's insistence, the Twins narrowly missed the pennant by dropping the season's final two games to the eventual league champion Red Sox.

With the exception of future Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven, who debuted as a teenager in 1970, the team's supply of elite minor league talent began to ebb during the 1970s.

[15] Some of the club's best young players, such as relief pitcher Bill Campbell and outfielder Lyman Bostock, departed as free agents.

[15] The last five full seasons of Griffith's ownership (1979–83) witnessed only two .500 or better teams, and attendance fell below one million fans at both Metropolitan Stadium and the Metrodome.

In 1973, as one of the Junior Circuit's longest-serving owners, Griffith was elected vice president of the American League, a post once held by his late uncle Clark; he served in the position into the 1980s.

Reporters could rap on his door, enter and fill their note pads with sentences so coarse in honesty and so magnificently mangled in syntax that some began to enjoy him.

The firing—which stemmed from Martin's well-publicized, alcohol-fueled assaults on 20-game-winning pitcher Dave Boswell and team executive Howard Fox—was highly unpopular with many Twins' fans.

Speaking at a Lions Club dinner in Waseca, Minnesota, Griffith was unaware that Minneapolis Tribune staff writer Nick Coleman was attending the gathering.

"[27] Griffith denied charges of bigotry,[27] but his Waseca remarks allegedly spurred Carew's trade before the 1979 season and "haunted Calvin for the rest of his life.

"[28] Carew's anger seemed to lessen by 1991 when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and called Griffith to thank him for jump-starting his career.

[19] Griffith died in Melbourne, Florida, on October 20, 1999, at the age of 87 from complications related to pneumonia, a kidney infection and a high fever.