Who was Kirby Puckett?
It's hard to imagine a more simple question requiring a more complicated answer.
Kirby was born 65 years ago Friday to Bill and Catherine Puckett. During his career, his birthdate was erroneously reported as March 14, 1961. He was the ninth of nine children in the Puckett family, who resided at the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on the south side of Chicago that Kirby called "The Place Where Hope Dies."
The last remaining building was demolished in 2007, one year after Kirby passed away. Articles often refer to it as just across the freeway from Comiskey Park, but it looks as though they were separated east/west by the freeway, but north/south by about two miles.
And maybe there's some symbolism there. Big-league dreams were so close, yet so far away.
Puckett was a mama's boy who kept his nose clean as a kid, and made his way from the projects to a job working at the Ford Motor plant in Chicago to Bradley University, where he played under legendary coach Dewey Kalmer.
Puckett's one season at Bradley was terrific; he slashed .378/.464/.660 in 156 at-bats with eight home runs, 21 stolen bases and more walks (25) than strikeouts (22). He never again did that at any level of baseball in his life.
But it was one-and-done at Bradley, but not for reasons one might expect. The elder Puckett passed away, and Kirby — ever influenced by the closeness to his mother — returned back closer to home to Triton College in River Grove.
Details from Triton can be sparse, but the NJCAA official record book says Puckett was an NJCAA All-American in 1982, and Baseball America says he hit .472 with 16 home runs and 78 RBIs (and 42 stolen bases) while being named the NJCAA Player of the Year.
The Twins sent just one scout to watch Puckett — the late great Jim Rantz, a Twins Hall of Famer who was instrumental in the team's farm system development for many years. Even that was an exercise in serendipity, as he was there to watch his son play for another team in the Central Illinois Collegiate League — a wood-bat league for college players — during the MLB strike in 1981.
This was between his year at Bradley and his year at Triton, and the Twins, namely Rantz, saw enough to select him third overall in the (now defunct) January phase of the draft. That draft was last held in 1986.
The Twins offered him $6,000 to sign, but he rejected their overtures and went to Triton. This was in the draft-and-follow days, so the Twins retained his rights as he went on to his incredible season with the Trojans.
The Twins circled back with a much healthier offer of $20,000, and Kirby signed on the dotted line. "Thank God we the rights to him," Rantz later noted, as Puckett was no longer a needle in a haystack but a player firmly on the radar.
The Twins sent Kirby to rookie ball in Elizabethton in 1982 for the rest of the year, and he slashed an obscene .382/.438/.491 in 65 games, though to be fair, he was markedly older than the average age of the league.
Mind you, everyone thought he was 21 at the time.
He moved up to a more age-appropriate level with Visalia (A-ball) of the California League in 1983, and held his own with an .808 OPS and 48 stolen bases.
Puckett was 21 games into his Triple-A season when he was summoned by manager Cal Ermer to tell him he was headed to the big leagues, three time zones away in Anaheim with a spot in center field awaiting him. Darrell Brown wasn't the answer out there, and hometown outfielder Jim Eisenreich was fighting a personal battle with Tourette's Syndrome, which cost him all of the 1985-86 seasons.
For Puckett, the rest was pretty much history. He didn't play that first day in Anaheim because of some travel mishaps, but he picked up four hits the next day and it was off to the races. Perhaps literally, as he stole 14 bases that season and 21 more the next while only hitting four home runs (all in 1985).
Puckett found the magical power stroke he became known for in 1986 — largely attributed to Tony Oliva's tutelage — and hit 31 home runs. From that point on, he hit at least 12 home runs in every season except 1989, when he won the batting title by hitting .339.
Also keep in mind that 20 home runs was kind of a big deal back then. So while 207 career home runs might not seem like much, a 19-homer average over 162 games — especially when he hit just four over his first two seasons — is stil pretty impressive. Omit those first two seasons, and the average jumps to 22 per 162 games.
The rest was history. Puckett made the All-Star team every season from 1986 on, a total of 10 trips. He won six Gold Gloves, six Silver Sluggers, and finished in the top 10 of AL MVP voting seven times.
He also was a key cog in two World Series winners, and the author of many signature moments in his career. It wasn't just the postseason, either.
Puckett also had a legendary Saturday-Sunday at County Stadium in Milwaukee in late 1987, going 10-for-11 with six extra-base hits (four homers, two doubles). For some context, that's a slash line of .909/.909/2.182, or a 3.091 OPS.
After the thrilling World Series win in 1991, the Twins and Puckett had a solid encore in 1992. Puckett had a 7.1-win season via bWAR, and the team won 90 games to finish second in the AL West.
Unfortunately, this was during the dominant run by the Oakland A's, who won 96 games that season. Had the six-division format existed, the Twins would have made the playoffs. Alas, that was still two years away.
The rest of Puckett's career featured him playing on also-ran Twins teams, though the 1996 team was built with a vision of offense. The Twins added Paul Molitor and Dave Hollins to an offense expected to be centered around Puckett and Chuck Knoblauch, who hit an incredible .341/.448/.517 that season. Scott Stahoviak and Rich Becker showed promise as youngsters, Matt Lawton made his way into 79 games and the team also had returning AL Rookie of the Year Marty Cordova in left.
It wasn't a team that was built to contend, but there was a vision. Unfortunately, that vision did not include Puckett, and it was due to his, well, vision.
Puckett's career ended in a pool of blood in late September 1995. The Twins were playing out the string against Cleveland when an errant Dennis Martinez pitch caught Kirby near the left eye, ultimately breaking his jaw.
Puckett healed up and was hitting like gangbusters next spring when he woke up with blurry vision in his right eye — not on the side Martinez hit him.
It was diagnosed as glaucoma, and countless doctor visits and operations ensued, but ultimately nothing could be done to restore his vision.
Kirby hung them up for good on July 12, and he was named executive vice president after that.
From the public eye, Puckett's life continued in that role without much fanfare or hubbub through his Hall of Fame election in 2001.
However...things changed not long afterward. Maybe changed isn't the right word.
There were two Kirby Pucketts.
One was championed by the late, great Jim Caple in this ESPN feature from his Hall of Fame induction in 2001.
The other was demonized by a piece a year-and-a-half later, also at ESPN, by George Dohrmann which detailed in extensive depth the malfeasances Puckett committed during, and especially after his career.
By all indications, everything Caple wrote was true before that warm summer day in Cooperstown in 2001.
Unfortunately, there's ample reason to believe the Dohrmann piece as well.
The article details in depth — seriously, it's a worthwhile read no matter your Puckett persuasion — his reported issues inside, and outside, his family.
There were instances of Puckett having extramarital affairs. Surely this wasn't that shocking from a professional athlete, especially one during an era where camera phones and social media did not exist.
But those seem more problematic in further light shone by Tonya Puckett's allegations of domestic violence, including physical and verbal assault which led to Kirby threatening to kill her on multiple occasions.
Outside of the home, Puckett's mistress said the former ballplayer has started to "become full of himself and very abusive." He'd open up his car door and urinate in plain view of others in crowded places.
The issues culminated when he allegedly pulled a woman into a bathroom at Redstone American Grill in Eden Prairie in Sept. 2002. While he was found not guilty on all accounts, the damage was done.
And maybe this was sort of like the Martinez fastball to Puckett's head. It wasn't the direct cause of the end, but it was the last thing we got to see before it.
The Twins quietly dissolved their association with Puckett, and he retreated to Scottsdale, where he was living with his fiancé when he suffered a stroke on March 5, 2006, and died a day later after being removed from life support — eight days shy of his 46th birthday and 22 days before the 10th anniversary of Puckett waking up with blurred vision.
Puckett men didn't live to old age, Kirby always said. He didn't expect to live long, so he planned to truly live.
This story isn't to relitigate Puckett's life and times off and on the field. He's gone, and has been for nearly 20 years. There's no reason to do it, and no healing of any kind comes from doing so.
But it does stand as a cautionary tale that we don't really know the people we watch on TV some 100-plus times over the spring, summer and, in this case especially, fall.
It's impossible to remember Kirby Puckett one way without thinking about the other.
And maybe that's just how it has to be.