1989 ALL-STAR GAME PREVIEW : RIDING HIGH : On His Way to the Top, Puckett Has Never Forgotten His Roots

People don’t leave the Robert Taylor Homes. They escape. Kirby Puckett never saw it that way. For some inside the concrete monuments to society’s failures, their eyes take them farther than their feet ever will. A hundred yards might as well be 100 miles, the miles a lifetime. There are those looking out but not leaving, living but not alive.

Kirby Puckett was never one of them. Across the Dan Ryan Expressway, a mile or so up 35th Street, stood Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox. From between the dark buildings where he spent hours, sometimes entire days playing four-man baseball, Kirby Puckett saw beyond the world he had been born into.

There were no barriers. He didn’t see the buildings as walls of a prison any more than he pictured his tiny frame a ball and chain. Whether it was the mindless innocence of youth or the relative luxury of two parents and eight brothers and sisters, Kirby Puckett has always been able to look ahead and see himself.

Tuesday evening in Anaheim Stadium, the Minnesota Twins center fielder will trot onto the field with the same bounce that carried him through Chicago’s outer limits.

“It never changes,” said Puckett, who will make his fourth All-Star game appearance, second as a starter. “To be on the team, especially one of the starters, says a lot. It’s special. I don’t think I’d ever say that I didn’t want to go.”

It’s a child’s dream being played out by an adult, and Puckett embodies both. He remembers the last big league pitch as freely as the last rubber ball he slammed through a third-floor window in the projects. Despite fame, fortune and the potential of more of each, Puckett seems genuinely unaffected.

A year ago, as Minnesota left its Orlando spring training site, Puckett took a poor young clubhouse assistant to the store. He bought him a 10-speed bike among other things, and tacked on a few extra dollars with a message.

In April, the same boy asked if he could go to Minnesota. In May, Puckett sent him a plane ticket, set him up with a place to stay and for a week watched over him.

“I remember where I came from,” Puckett said. “No doubt about it, it wasn’t easy. But I love kids. I don’t have any of my own but when I do, I’ll be a great dad.

“In spring training, Thomas was scared to ask me, so he had somebody else ask if I would send for him so he could see Minnesota. I don’t think he has a dad because he’s always talking about his mom, and I know he’s a poor kid. My wife (Tanya) and I took him to the store and got him some things he normally wouldn’t have.

“I wanted him to know that even though he’s from a poor background, he can be something, even if it’s not a baseball player. If you work hard, you can get anything you want. I always believed that.”

A $2 million man in 1989, Puckett hasn’t stopped working. He rarely misses early-afternoon hitting sessions despite the fact they are designed for those less talented. Although he has batted .330 or better since early May, Puckett insists he’s struggling to find “a groove.”

“What gets me is his work ethic,” first baseman Gene Larkin said. “Puck’s hitting .340 (actually .336), and he’s out here taking batting practice almost every day. And there’s another thing: I’ll never figure out how he takes a high-inside fastball and hits it hard to right field. You can’t do that, but he does it all the time.”

At the same time, Puckett is no more impressed with a .500 week than he is upset or deflated by a slump. In early June, he went zero for 17 over five games without getting a ball out of the infield.

“You know me,” Puckett said at the time. “It comes and goes. No big deal. It’ll come back. Always does. I just wish it would get here soon.”

Puckett got eight hits in his next 12 at-bats.

“The easy answer is to say what impresses you most about Kirby is his consistency,” reliever Jeff Reardon said. “With me, it’s his confidence. Even when he gets a little down, it’s different than with other players. It’s sort of an attitude that says, ‘I’m having some trouble at the plate right now, but someone is going to pay.’

“When I was with Montreal, I used to think Tim Raines was the best player in baseball. That’s before I came over here and saw Puckett. He’s the best. I’m sure of it.”

He dutifully carries shopping bags of fan mail--”All from one day,” Twin Manager Tom Kelly says--to his locker.

“What are you going to do with that?” a teammate asks.

“Get after it,” Puckett says.

“Why bother?”

“Got to, man.”

“What impresses me is the way he gets into the camaraderie of the game,” Kelly said. “Kirby enjoys the atmosphere in the clubhouse--the cards, the silliness. He comes to the ballpark with a smile on his face and he takes that onto the field with him.

“There’s an aura--that’s a good word for me, aura--that surrounds him and tells you, ‘I’m really enjoying this.’ His teammates can see it. The fans can see it. It is a pleasure to watch him play.”

Look into Puckett’s Metrodome locker and Willie Mays looks back. Three color photos, 8 by 11, side-by-side, paper the back of an upper shelf. On the right side is a signed picture from teammate Al Newman, to Al’s right a black-and-white reprint of Hack Wilson.

That each of the three men have similar dimensions is no coincidence. Puckett always wanted to be Willie Mays. His body has always looked like Hack Wilson’s and Newman is sometimes asked to sign Puckett’s name.

“Willie Mays, as a kid, was my idol,” Puckett said, sitting in the Twins’ dugout dressed and holding a bat almost five hours before game time. “As far as Hack goes, one day at the park they were giving out books to us kids and I read about him.

“In ’84 I saw a picture of him and it said he was 5-6, 190 pounds. It looked like he was built just like me. I looked up his numbers and read all about him. People told me he was a star. I read up on his and he was a bad alcoholic, but on the field he came to play.

“You can’t take that away from him. One-hundred and ninety ribbies. I don’t think anybody will ever break that record.”

On a wall in Puckett’s basement hangs a painting, Puckett on one side, Hack Wilson on the other. He’s still never met Willie Mays.

“I just want to meet him, shake his hand,” said Puckett. ‘I haven’t yet, but I will some day. I know other people have probably told him I want to meet him.”

In between the buildings of the Robert Taylor Homes, Puckett became Willie Mays. Day after day, he would gather three friends and play baseball for hours in the summer sun.

Construction crews often left chalk around work sites in the area, which became handy for fashioning strike zones. A square would be drawn on the side of one building and the games would begin. Hit the ball past two outfielders and it’s a single. Two bounces off the next building was a double, one bounce a triple and a fly ball off the bricks was a home run.

Even then, with his cube-like body still taking shape, Puckett was the only one strong enough to reach the other building. So when the rubber ball sailed through a third-floor window one afternoon and all four players scattered, everyone knew which apartment to call.

The Puckett family moved out of the projects when Kirby was 12. His father worked for the post office and had another job on the side, and although they scraped, when it came time for a new ball, glove or bat, they found the money. “When you’re the baby of 9 all you have to do is ask,” said Puckett. “We weren’t on welfare or anything. If you looked around the neighborhood, we were in about the top five in terms of money.”

Puckett didn’t play organized baseball until high school, which to some extent might explain his hitting style.

“I’m a hacker,” he said.

And so he is. The only player that comes close to Puckett’s hit total since 1984 is Boston’s Wade Boggs. They couldn’t be more different. Boggs hits left-handed and watches every pitch with the eye of a surgeon. Puckett is the most prolific right-handed hitter, in terms of average, since Joe DiMaggio. And he’s never see a pitch he didn’t like.

“Granted, Boggs and (Don) Mattingly are great ballplayers,” pitcher Frank Viola said. “But this guy does things I’ve never seen anybody else do. Just how he gets his hits off some of the pitchers he faces. Being able to hit a line drive on a pitch up over his eyes. Amazing.”

Puckett’s walks have dropped each of the last four seasons from 41 in 1985 to 23 in 1988. At the same time, his batting average has climbed from .288 to .356. Since 1986, Puckett leads the majors in total bases (1,206) and runs produced (632). But what defines Puckett and sets him apart from the others is his durability and availability.

Coming into 1989, Puckett had missed 11 games in his first four full major league seasons. He didn’t miss his first game in 1989 until June 5.

George Brophy, now a Houston scout, headed the Minnesota farm system when Puckett signed in 1982. While the debate over the game’s best player is an ongoing one, Brophy thinks it ends with Puckett.

“We were impressed with Kirby’s mental approach from the first day in rookie league camp,” Brophy said. “I don’t think anything upsets him when it comes to baseball.

“If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would’ve said Mattingly was the best in the game. Now, he’s had some back problems and Kirby has put some distance between himself and the rest of the players in this game, including Mattingly.”

Opposite the black and white photo of Wilson, the left side of Puckett’s locker is covered with more pictures and baseball cards. There are two of Hack Wilson and to the left of those is a page torn from a book. Above the long paragraph and to the right of another Wilson photo are the words: “Inducted in 1979.”

“You know what registers with me a couple times a game when I’m playing right field?” Randy Bush said. “I’ll look over and say, ‘I’m playing next to a Hall of Famer.’ How about that? There’s a bona fide Hall of Famer standing next to me in center field.”

There may be no escaping that.