Hall of Fame Outfielder Kirby Puckett Dies at 45

Photos
Kirby Puckett Remembered
Kirby Puckett died Monday, March 6, a day after the Hall of Fame outfielder had a stroke at his Arizona home. He was 45. Puckett carried the Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and 1991.

Kirby Puckett, the Hall of Fame outfielder who rose from a Chicago housing project to win almost all the honors, accolades and rewards professional baseball could bestow, died yesterday in a Phoenix hospital after a stroke. He was 45.

During 12 seasons in the American League, Mr. Puckett, whose stocky, 5-foot-8-inch frame seemed to radiate power, amassed a career batting average of .318 with the Minnesota Twins and helped lead the team to two world championships.

Beyond his prowess as a fearsome right-handed hitter with 207 career home runs and 1,085 runs batted in, Mr. Puckett was adroit afield, winning the Gold Glove award for defensive play six times.

Moreover, he was known for projecting a cheerful good nature and infectious enthusiasm for the game that made him one of the most popular figures on the playing field, in the clubhouse and among baseball fans of the upper Midwest during a career that began in 1984 and continued through the end of the 1995 season.

The retinal damage that impaired his sight in one eye and forced him into premature retirement was regarded as a blow to the sport and mourned by fans throughout the nation. In 2001, he was named to the Hall of Fame, taking his place alongside the other great stars of baseball.

His image, however, was later tarnished. His marriage broke up amid allegations of infidelity and abuse. In 2002, a woman who said she had an 18-year affair with him obtained a court order in Minneapolis forbidding him to have contact with her.

An allegation that he groped a woman in a Minnesota restaurant resulted in a trial in 2003. Mr. Puckett denied the charges, and a jury acquitted him.

These matters tested the loyalties of a vast army of fans, many of whom were taken by the accounts of his rise from the humblest of beginnings to the ranks of athletic royalty.

He was born in Chicago, the youngest in a family of nine children, and raised in the Robert Taylor Homes, a gritty and notorious housing project on the city's South Side. Too short for basketball, he was kept from football by his mother.

That left baseball, and according to an account in the Chicago Tribune, he taught himself to bat by thrashing with a stick at a wadded-up sphere of discarded aluminum foil.

After high school, he entered Bradley University, left and enrolled at another Illinois school, Triton College.

Selected by the Twins in the first round of the 1982 amateur draft, he made his major league debut May 8, 1984, and amassed 165 base hits in 128 games, finishing with an average only four points below .300, the gold standard for batters.