Kirby Without Tears

Great hitters see things the rest of us can’t. Such as the rotation of a baseball thrown at ninety-five miles per hour from sixty feet, six inches away. Such as the split second when that ball collides with the swung bat, is crushed out of round, then rockets toward the empty stretch of AstroTurf between the futilely sprinting right fielder and the foul line or, better yet, toward some guy frantically putting on his kid’s glove in the cheap seats left of the 408 marker in center. Kirby Puckett, the greatest all-around hitter Minnesotans have ever had the pleasure to watch on an everyday basis, has something else, and that something enables him to laugh out loud at the picture of himself as a two-eyed All-Star turned one-eyed buccaneer.

“Kirby has the gift of perspective,” says his agent and one of his closest friends, Ron Shapiro. Perspective, in this case, is not to be confused with point of view or perception, about which Puckett himself will speak, in more depth, in a moment. The perspective Shapiro is talking about is Puckett’s unshakable ability to see the relative importance of the various pieces of his life and determine that, all things considered, his life is very good indeed.

It’s difficult to believe that four years have passed since the spring of 1996. The Twins had acquired the great Paul Molitor and still had the very good Chuck Knoblauch, and Puckett, at thirty-six, was having the kind of Grapefruit League that prefigured a huge regular season. Hopes for a rejuvenated organization, for a reprise of the unlikely World Series years of ’87 and ’91, rode the spring breezes. Then just like that—for Puckett and thus for the franchise—those hopes vanished. On Wednesday, March 27, Puckett blistered the ball off Atlanta’s Greg Maddux, baseball’s best pitcher at the time. The following morning people were holding their hands up in front of Puckett’s face, asking how many fingers. The “volleyball” that he said a pitched baseball looked like when he was on one of his signature streaks had, literally overnight, become a “black dot” that signaled the end of his career.

The ironies, like so many of Puckett’s 2,304 career hits, came in bunches. He had never been on the disabled list. He was showing no negative effects of the shattered jaw from the errant fastball that prematurely (by three games) ended his ’95 season. His eyesight had been so good he hadn’t bothered to have his eyes routinely examined. He’d been seeing the ball so well during that training camp, in fact, he was batting a red-hot .344, with a couple of home runs and a team-leading fourteen runs batted in.

But Puckett, a congenitally positive and life-affirming fellow, had never had much time for irony. Less even for despair. Not that there weren’t dark days during that late spring and early summer when the news about his eye was bad, then uncertain, then hopeful, then bad again, then catastrophic. “He’d be down a little bit and there’d be a little frustration,” recalls Shapiro, whose home was Puckett’s refuge during his treatment with Baltimore retinal specialist Bert Glaser. “But I never sensed anger, and nothing resembling self-pity.” Shapiro’s associate, Michael Maas, says he invited a few of his pals over to his house to play cards with Puckett during that difficult period. Maas says he could sense Puckett’s preoccupation that evening, that he was “not the same old Kirby.” Maas’s friends, however, were charmed out of their socks by the ebullient ballplayer—utterly convinced, Maas says, that they had never enjoyed the company of a more upbeat and positive person.