Tim Teufel Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

Tim Teufel
This article was written by Rory Costello and is presented in part, courtesy of the Society for American Baseball Research

Tim Teufel, who played mostly at second base but filled in at all three other infield positions, had good line-drive power, with 86 home runs in the majors. After breaking in with the Minnesota Twins in September 1983, he went on to play ten full seasons. He spent a little over half that time with the New York Mets, platooning with Wally Backman on the 1986 world champions. Mets fans remember him as a mild-mannered member of that hard-partying crew. Yet Tim had a scrappy side too, as he showed when he got the better of hulking reliever Rob Dibble after the flamethrower drilled him with a pitch in 1989. The lasting visual image of Teufel as a player is the “Teufel Shuffle” hip movement as he settled into the batter’s box.

Timothy Shawn Teufel was born on July 7, 1958, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Fairfield County is known for affluence, but the Teufel family was working class. Tim’s father, William Teufel, Jr., was a carpenter. His mother, Marjorie McKenzie Teufel, had William and Catherine before Tim.[1]

In his youth Tim was a Yankees fan. He played Little League and then Babe Ruth ball, with the Knights of Columbus team in Greenwich. It helped that his father, who had played baseball in the Army, was a local youth coach. So was his uncle Robert, for whom a field in Greenwich is named.[2] Teufel attended the Catholic Middle School and St. Mary’s High School. At that time, he was a shortstop.[3] In 1990 his middle-school coach in baseball and basketball, Peter Borchetta, remembered the youngster as intelligent and hard-working: “He used to like to come to practice early and leave late and have me throw to him for hours on end. I always felt he had the potential because he had the stick-to-itiveness.”[4]



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