by Tim Wendel
Stew Thornley grew up in Minneapolis, becoming a noted baseball historian and the Twins’ official scorer. For him, Puckett and Mickey Mantle, another larger-than-life baseball star, share so many similarities, good and bad.
“Mantle was my hero growing up,” Thornley said, “just like Puckett was the hero for so many in this part of the country years later. I think that sometimes it’s as much the fault of the fans as it is the players when it comes to these things. We want to believe so much. That’s what we fell into with [Mark] McGwire and [Sammy] Sosa, before the revelations about steroids came out.
“Both Puckett and Mantle were far from perfect, as we found out. And sometimes the fans have difficulty accepting such transgressions, especially by their heroes.”
Thornley assembled a thorough, often-moving biography about Puckett for the Society for American Baseball Research. Near the end he wrote, “Learning the truth wasn’t easy for many, particularly those in Minnesota, and some had trouble reconciling the Puckett they had chosen to envision and the real Puckett—a human being with many virtuous qualities as well as some flaws.”
Thornley acknowledged those words were as much about his boyhood hero as the star he later covered. “I was thinking of Mantle,” he said. “How torn I was after reading Ball Four and hearing the other stories that showed that he was just another gifted athlete trying to be a man while playing a boy’s game.”
After the 1991 World Series Puckett would have other memorable times at the plate, leading the American League in hits in 1992 and in RBIs in 1994. But he would never again play in the postseason, and his career would end with the 1995 season. On September 28 Puckett was trying to drive in Chuck Knoblauch for his hundredth RBI of that season when a pitch from Cleveland right-hander Dennis Martinez sailed inside. It caught Puckett square in the face, breaking his jaw. This time his teammates ran from the dugout to find him lying in a pool of blood. “I still can’t believe how much he was bleeding,” Knoblauch said.
The next spring Puckett returned to action, and a week before Opening Day he batted against the Atlanta Braves once again, this time in Grapefruit League action. It would be Puckett’s last appearance as a player. The next morning he awoke with blurred vision. A black dot had appeared in his right eye, and the diagnosis was a central retina vein occlusion in that eye and glaucoma in both eyes. Despite three surgeries his vision didn’t return to the point at which he could hit big-league pitching anymore. As a result, Puckett’s career was over at the age of thirty-six.
On July 12, 1996, he made the announcement at the Metrodome that he was leaving baseball. “I never took the game for granted,” he said, a bandage over his eye. “I loved it and treated it with respect, but my life isn’t over. The world hasn’t come to an end.”
Puckett told his teammates that he loved them and would miss them. He added that he didn’t plan to put on a baseball uniform again.
“Considering what’s happened in the last few years, with the labor problems and everything else, the game can hardly afford to lose a player of Kirby’s ability and personality,” Twins manager Tom Kelly told the Los Angeles Times. “We saw how much he’ll be missed this year when we’d go into Boston or Baltimore or New York, and fans would have banners for him or would chant, ‘We want Kirby.’”
Scott Leius’s time with the Twins had ended the year before Puckett’s abrupt retirement. Now playing for Cleveland, he attended the sullen gathering as the Indians were the visiting team in Minneapolis that day. “It was a tough day,” he said. “But being there I realized how lucky I was. I played for three teams at the big-league level [the Twins, Indians, and Royals]. But there was something about that Minnesota team. Hrbek, TK, Kirby—I’d run through a wall for those guys.”
———
Some of the most famous home runs ever hit didn’t sound exactly right. They didn’t quite have that dry snap of a branch out in the woods as they left the bat. Mark McGwire’s sixty-second, which broke Roger Maris’s mark for the most homers in a season, came with a violent crack, leaving those in attendance wondering at first whether it had enough height to carry over the outfield fence. The same with Joe Carter’s World Series–winning home run in 1993. He didn’t start jumping for joy until the ball cleared the left-field fence.
If a hitter isn’t careful, he can fall in love with the sound of a well-hit ball. His mind can play tricks on him and make it sound better than it perhaps is. That drives veteran ballplayers crazy when they watch the superstars of today standing there, admiring a ball that doesn’t quite go out of the ballpark. For the sweet sound can be as illusory as any mirage in a desert.
When Puckett homered in Game Six he wasn’t sure he had really connected.
“The good ones you know right away,” he said years later. “But that one in the World Series wasn’t really a good one. We just happened to have close to sixty thousand people in the place, and when you get that many people in there it gets hot, and the ball tends to carry.”
Perhaps it had some help too. For years opposing teams grumbled about how the Twins’ long flies often carried to the seats whereas theirs died on the warning track. The Metrodome was air conditioned, and in 2003 Dick Ericson, the stadium’s longtime superintendent, confirmed that blowers behind home plate were sometimes turned on high when the Twins were at bat and throttled back when the opposing team stepped up. “It’s your home-field advantage,” Ericson told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Every stadium has one.”
Between the sound of the bat and whatever he knew about the stadium’s internal workings, Puckett bolted out of the box in Game Six. “I was running hard because I thought it was going to hit the Plexiglas above the fence,” he said. “I was looking to get a double, or maybe it bounces off the glass and does something weird and I can get a triple. I don’t want an inside-the-parker. That’s too much work. But then it landed six or seven rows up, and that’s because there were so many people. They helped put it out.”
Any hitter will tell you that there’s a real Zen thing to hitting home runs. Try too hard and you’ll surely fail—pop one up to the outfield at best. But begin to relax, try to believe that it’s simply a science, and occasionally a lightning bolt shows itself in the heavens.
Puckett reached the majors as a leadoff hitter and was scared to death when Ray Miller, the Twins’ manager before Tom Kelly, began to bat him third in the Minnesota lineup. “I wasn’t a home run hitter,” Puckett said. “I told Ray that. I didn’t think I’d ever be a home run hitter. But he told me to relax and just hit the ball hard, and you know something? It was the strangest thing. The homers? They happened. They were there when I needed them.”
Our last conversation about the yin and yang of home runs took place in the autumn of 1998, almost seven years to the day after Puckett went deep against Atlanta, extending that epic World Series to a seventh and final game. We were in Puckett’s executive office with the Twins, overlooking downtown Minneapolis. On the wall hung framed newspaper front pages and colored drawings from the Twins’ glory days. We spoke excitedly about the 1998 recent season that saw McGwire and Sosa break Maris’s single-season home run record, how the whole shebang seemed almost too good to be true.
“I’m happy as an ex-player,” Puckett told me, “but mostly I was excited for everybody in the country who is a sports fan. My kids are taking about it. They’re eight and six, and before, they didn’t even watch baseball. But with this, they knew what was going on.
“Even Rip took a day off this season. He’s about the same age as I am, but he looks like he’s a hundred years old. I asked him this year, ‘Was it worth it?” And he said it was. But I said, ‘Look at you, man, you look terrible.’ For me, an off day was good. But Cal Ripken never saw it that way.
“It was all unbelievable. I know, after the strike in 1994 it was ugly at a lot of ballparks. If I didn’t sign autographs for everybody, somebody would yell, ‘Hey, Puckett, we pay your salary.’ But with this ’98 season, we’ve healed the past.
”
Puckett’s discourse was equal parts jazz riff and state-of-the-union speech, and in listening to the tape of our conversation years later I still want to believe so much about this sweet spot in time. I remember it being a sunny day in Minneapolis, with the wind gusting out of the west, off the prairie. Not cold enough yet that you couldn’t go down to the local sandlot and see whether you could get a game going. I almost mentioned that to Puckett. Hey, let’s get out of here and see if kids were playing somewhere in town. Because as he spoke about hitting that home run in Game Six and just dingers in general, the words just tumbled out of his mouth, rapid-fire style, punctuated with “man” this and “man” that. A barrage that once prompted Sparky Anderson to ask, “Do you ever shut up?”
But, of course, when Puckett got on a roll nobody wanted him to shut up. For we were witnessing one of baseball’s wonders: a guy who could play the game and loved to do so too.
If I had known what was on the horizon when it came to Puckett and the revelations of his private life, I would have begged him to come with me. Let’s drive around town and look for the game or go down to the field here at the Metrodome and perhaps run around those bases again. For Puckett had made good on his vow. Except for a day or two in spring training, he hadn’t put on the uniform to coach again. Instead, he went to work in an office and was a public relations emissary as a team executive vice president. If we had known what would soon unfold, I would have asked, and I like to believe that Puckett would have said, “Sure thing, man. Let’s go see if we can scare us up a game. There’s got to be someplace a guy can still swing a bat in this town.”
———
Some of Puckett’s teammates believe he didn’t coach because his weight embarrassed him. An issue when he was playing, his weight got him when he ballooned up in retirement and refused the team’s offers to be a regular hitting coach in Florida or when the ballclub returned north for another season. After retirement he spent a lot of time fishing, a pursuit he had fallen in love with during his decade-plus in the Twin Cities. Sometimes he went with ex-teammates, like Kent Hrbek, but usually he kept company with guys outside his old circle of baseball friends.
To the public, Puckett sported an All-American image and marriage. He and his wife, Tonya, had adopted two children, a son, Kirby Jr., and a daughter, Catherine. Yet the couple divorced in 2002, shortly after Puckett was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Tonya Puckett recounted what she said was a history of domestic violence, including a phone call in which the superstar threatened to kill her. “I feel Kirby went out and played ball and made a living,” she told local writer Bob Sansevere. “My job was raising my children and being a wife and doing everything to build him up in the community and make it happen.”
After that bombshell, Laura Nygren stepped forward. She claimed that she had been Puckett’s mistress for eighteen years. “Kirby is not the person everyone thinks he is,” Nygren told the (St. Paul) Pioneer Press.
Then, in October 2002, Puckett was charged with false imprisonment, criminal sexual misconduct, and assault after an incident at a restaurant in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. A woman accused him of pulling her into the men’s room and groping her. The case went to trial, and although Puckett was found not guilty, his reputation would be forever tarnished. Sports Illustrated soon ran a story with the headline, “The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett.”
THE HUBERT H. HUMPHREY METRODOME
The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome hosted the Super Bowl and the NCAA Men’s Final Four, as well as the World Series. It was often loud and noted for its “Hefty bag” in right field and the Teflon-coated roof.
(NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NY)
Nicknamed “The Launching Pad,” this was where the Braves’ Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record in 1974. After opening in 1965, Atlanta Stadium soon became home to the first major-league team in the Deep South. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)
ATLANTA-FULTON COUNTY STADIUM
Few had more fun playing the game than Rickey Henderson. Many considered him to be the top leadoff hitter of all time. When he retired, he was baseball’s career leader in stolen bases.
(JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
For a guy who didn’t want to be a reliever, Dennis Eckersley made the most of opportunity, finishing with 390 career saves. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
Tony La Russa won World Series titles with Oakland in 1989 and St. Louis in 2006 and 2011. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
In Oakland, pitching coach Dave Duncan, left, helped La Russa put together one of the top staffs in the game. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
The Hall of Fame’s board of directors voted unanimously in 1991 to bar ineligible individuals. That included Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hit king. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)
Jim Lefebvre, center, made the Seattle Mariners into a winner, but it wasn’t enough to save his job as a record number of managers were fired in 1991. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
Oakland’s Jose Canseco tied with Cecil Fielder for home-run honors in 1991 as each hit 44. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
Candice Wiggins with her siblings and father, Alan Wiggins. (THE WIGGINS FAMILY)
Alan Wiggins struggled to find a home in Baltimore after leaving San Diego.
(NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NY)
In September 1991, baseball’s Statistical Accuracy Committee officially put Roger Maris’s sixty-one home-run season ahead of Babe Ruth’s sixty.
(NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, COOPERSTOWN, NY)
Born in Minneapolis, first baseman Kent Hrbek became a local hero to Twins fans. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
An aggressive hitter, Dan Gladden would score the winning run in the 1991 World Series. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
A key offseason addition, Chili Davis settled in as Minnesota’s designated hitter. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
After being with five teams, Brian Harper arrived in Minnesota looking for a job. He ended up becoming the full-time catcher. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
Closer Rick Aguilera solidified the Twins’ bullpen and ranked among the best relievers of his era. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
With Gary Gaetti gone to the California Angels, Scott Leius helped fill the void for Minnesota at third base.
(MINNESOTA TWINS)
Kirby Puckett surprised himself by being able to hit for power after reaching the major leagues. He had friends seemingly everywhere he went.
(JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
With one swing of the bat, Puckett joined the ranks of those who have homered with everything on the line in the World Series.
(MINNESOTA TWINS)
Puckett’s career ended prematurely after the 1995 season due to irreversible retina damage in his right eye. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
Rookie Chuck Knoblauch took over for the Twins at second base in 1991.
(MINNESOTA TWINS)
The addition of Scott Erickson rounded out the Twins’ starting rotation in 1991. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
Veteran Greg Gagne would join with Knoblauch to turn a fake DP for the ages in the 1991 World Series. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
Tom Glavine reached the twenty-victory plateau for the first time in 1991 and was named the National League’s Cy young winner. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NY)
Terry Pendleton, the National League’s MVP in 1991, still contends that the Braves were the best team in baseball in 1991. (JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
David Justice supplied power for the Atlanta Braves’ attack, helping lead the ballclub to the first of fourteen consecutive visits to the postseason.
(JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
The Braves’ Mark Lemke saved his best at-bats for postseason play. He remains a favorite in Atlanta.
(JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
Pitcher John Smoltz turned to mind visualization to right his career, and in doing so he assured that Atlanta would have arguably the best rotation in baseball
.
(JOSE LUIS VILLEGAS)
In building his media empire, Ted Turner transformed the Braves into “America’s team.”
(NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NY)
Dan Gladden’s hard slide upended Braves catcher Greg Olson and set the tone for a no-holds-barred World Series.
(MINNESOTA TWINS)
When Twins first baseman Hrbek became entangled with the Braves’ Ron Gant, the umpires found themselves back in the postseason spotlight.
(MINNESOTA TWINS)
No lead was safe in the 1991 World Series, which saw four walk-off endings and three games go to extra innings. (MINNESOTA TWINS)
Atlanta’s baseball nickname, the Braves, brought out demonstrators at both World Series venues. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Some protesters put together this banner in a response to the Braves’ nickname.
(MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
The controversy about the Braves’ nickname only made many in Atlanta cheer louder as this was the season when the Tomahawk Chop took hold. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Mark Lemke was safe at the plate in Game Four, which knotted the World Series at two games apiece. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The Braves prided themselves on their rally caps, which they felt had helped them turn the tide throughout this season. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)