Kirby Puckett, who patrolled center field and played his entire 12-year career for the Minnesota Twins, would have been 54 this month. His birthday was March 14.
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| Photo by Rolf Boone |
That’s probably why the Baseball Writers Association of America wasted no time in voting Puckett into the Hall of Fame during his first year of eligibility in 2001. Puckett won 82 percent of the vote that year and suddenly found himself in Cooperstown.
He finished with a career batting average of .318 and more than 2,300 hits. In 1988, Puckett absolutely mashed, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 runs batted in. He also had 234 hits, including 42 doubles.
That’s hitting, people.
Puckett was certainly well on his way to 3,000 hits before pitcher Dennis Martinez hit him in the face with a fastball on Sept. 28, 1995.
That’s doubly painful because Sept. 28 is my birthday. His career effectively ended that day.
Puckett would go on to play in spring training games the following season, but he also developed vision problems in one eye and eventually was diagnosed with glaucoma. Surgeries couldn’t correct the problem, so Puckett retired from the game at 36 with career earnings of $43.2 million.
I am a longtime Twins fan who has never set foot in Minnesota.
In fact, I became a Twins fan on a bet, a friend in the 7th grade daring me to pick any team in the old American League West and make them my favorite. He boasted that his California Angels would win a World Series before any team I picked, so I went ahead and chose the Twins, knowing nothing about the team. I soon learned they lost more than 100 games in 1982.
It would be years before I reconnected with that old friend, but by then I had long won the bet. Not only did the Twins win a World Series, they won two before the Angels would win their first in 2002.
Meanwhile, I remained a loyal Twins fan. I looked up the team’s box score every morning in the paper and my father took me to see them play whenever they made their West Coast swing through Seattle to play the lowly Mariners. Except, of course, they could never beat the M’s on the road.
Portland, Ore., my hometown, also was home to the Portland Beavers, for years the AAA affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies and Twins during the 1980s.
The Twins would play exhibition games against the Beavers in Civic Stadium and I’ll never forget watching Puckett play center field. In one game, the Beavers tried to challenge the Twins by scoring runners from second and third on a sharp hit to Puckett.
But he would have none of it, rifling a throw to home plate so fast — and in the process demonstrating the huge difference between a major league arm and a minor league arm — that he sent both runners scurrying back to their bases.