BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : Puckett at the Crossroads: Be a Twin or Leave to Win

It is almost as if Kirby Puckett has been a stranger in his own clubhouse this season.

Kent Hrbek retired. Shane Mack went to Japan. Gary Gaetti and Greg Gagne are playing for the Kansas City Royals. Pitchers Kevin Tapani and Mark Guthrie are with the Dodgers, Scott Erickson with the Baltimore Orioles and Rick Aguilera with the Boston Red Sox.

At one point in the Minnesota Twins’ long summer, Puckett shaved his head to symbolize the friends he has lost, the hopes that were shorn in economic decisions by an organization that had proved anything is possible in a small market.

The spirited nucleus of a team that won the World Series in 1987 and 1991 is long gone. Now Puckett is a member of the team with the worst record in baseball. He is surrounded by 13 rookies, the Twins having used a total of 16 this year. At 34, he has to think about his future.

Should he stay or go? His five-year, $30-million contract has an escape clause that would allow him to leave at the end of this season, but he watched the free-agent market virtually dissolve in the aftermath of the players’ strike and knows no one will pay him the $13 million for 1996 and ’97 that the Twins are committed to if he stays.

“I’m not thinking about it right now,” Puckett said in Anaheim on Friday night. “I’m leaving it open. I just want to finish strong and take it from there. If I decide to go, it will be to a team I can help and a team with a chance to win. I know I’ll have to take a pay cut, but being the highest-paid player has never been my goal.

“If it was, I could have gone to Boston before I signed this contract for $6 million or $7 million more. I just want to win. The one thing people will always be able to say about Kirby Puckett is that every time he went on the field he was trying to win.”

Can the Twins turn it around fast enough to satisfy that winning desire? Puckett said he had no answer for that.

“There’s a lot of potential and talent here, a nice foundation,” he said. “We need two or three more veteran players, particularly a pitcher to help lead the kids.

“Even though we have the worst record, it’s been fun watching at times. Chuck Knoblach is having a career year and has developed into one of the best players in baseball. There’s a lot of promise on the pitching staff. The kids are hungry. That keeps everyone motivated.”

Tom Kelly, the respected manager, said Puckett knows how pleasurable it is to win, but “I think we all want that. Unfortunately, you just have to accept the fact that the business of the game dictates how it works now. Business has become the dominant factor. The coming and going of players has become more commonplace. Fifteen years ago, it was uncommon for a player to leave. Now, it’s common for large numbers of players to leave. Teams lose identity. Everything revolves around the economics.”

Puckett said he understands what the bottom line is, but he was still saddened and disappointed to see so many friends and key players leave. He said this has been the toughest of his 11 major league seasons, but he didn’t blame that on what has happened with the team.

“I’ve always been a slow starter, but this year was the worst,” he said. “I ran out of time, what with the strike and short spring. I’ve really had to dig and work to get where I am.”

Puckett was hitting a lifetime low .244 at the end of May. He began the weekend series against the Angels having hit .346 since to raise his average to .319. He has 22 home runs and 88 runs batted in. The slow start, he said, has convinced him that he has reached a point where he needs to do more work in the off-season.

“I’ve always let the 600 or 700 at-bats that I get during spring training and the season carry me,” he said. “I’m going to do it differently this winter. I’m not going to go crazy, but I’m going to try to hit a couple times a week, at least. We have a lot of young guys and I have to stay ahead of them.”

Finding a place to hit in the winter is not always easy in the snow of Minnesota, but that’s been his home since he joined the Twins, and the suspicion is that he doesn’t really want to leave, that he likes what he sees of the young pitching staff, likes the respect and latitude he is given in the clubhouse and is concerned about a market that dried up even more when the Orioles, one of the few teams with the resources to meet his potential contract demands, traded for Bobby Bonilla.

“I’ve been with the one team all this time,” Puckett said. “I’ve been through all of the ups and downs, and I still have two world championship rings. Dave Winfield had to play 20 years to get one. Ernie Banks never got one. I’m fortunate in a lot of ways.

“Every year you see guys leaving and that hurts, but baseball is such a small part of life. I thank God for 11 years in the big leagues, for letting me play to the best of my ability. We’ll see what happens, but the game doesn’t owe me anything.”

STREAKING

Every manager wants his players to want to play every day, but how many managers want to have the lineup taken out of their hands by a playing streak of such duration that it becomes the player’s option as to when he sits? Not many, you can bet on it. Phil Regan, the Baltimore Orioles’ rookie manager who is signed through 1996--but might be gone after ‘95--stirred a streak-week hubbub when he said that Cal Ripken Jr., once he had the consecutive-games record, might benefit from a day off. Regan quickly backtracked, saying the decision was Ripken’s. “What I meant is that when he gets to be 38 or 39 [Ripken is 35], he might benefit by taking an occasional day, as guys like Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker have,” Regan said.

Said Texas Ranger Manager Johnny Oates, Regan’s predecessor with the Orioles: “In the last year or two, I always felt that if God wanted Cal to have a day off, He’d let it rain. Otherwise he was going to be in the lineup; it was out of my hands. Now the pressure’s on the manager. The streak isn’t an excuse any more.”

Of the streak, Seattle Mariner Manager Lou Piniella said Ripken’s record will never be broken . . . “unless agents substitute in games their players don’t play. . . . Now be sure you say that’s a joke, just a joke.”

Former Baltimore manager Earl Weaver said his 1982 decision to move Ripken from third base to shortstop “was no stroke of genius.” Weaver said it was based on memories of watching the tall Marty Marion play a graceful shortstop while growing up in St. Louis and knowing that Cal Jr., 14 when Weaver first noticed his demeanor and moves, had inherited the baseball instincts of his father, Cal Sr. “He was the guy I wanted out there handling cutoffs and relays in the late innings. He was the guy I wanted the ball hit to for the final out,” Weaver said.

TOUCHING BASES The Cincinnati Reds iced the National League Central title by winning 12 of 13 games from the Houston Astros, who paid a price for not signing Ron Gant before the Reds did when Gant was job hunting with his broken leg. Gant batted .419 with eight home runs and 18 RBIs in those 13 games and said of the Astros: “They looked at X-rays of my leg and determined they didn’t want me. I felt like I had something to prove to them. I turned it up a notch when we played them.”

The Chicago Cubs have stayed alive in the NL wild-card race despite a 24-31 record at Wrigley Field before the weekend. Center fielder Brian McRae, in his first season with the Cubs, dredged up an old theme to explain the home record. “There are too many day games,” he said. “Your body is always trying to catch up from night games on the road. It takes two or three days before you feel even close.”

It has been 41 years between titles for the Cleveland Indians, but when they do it, they do it the right way. The 1954 pennant winner set a league record with 111 victories. The ’95 division winner has a shot at 100 victories in a 144-game season and a winning percentage of .700, which would be the first in either league since . . . yes, the ’54 Indians.

Boston Red Sox Manager Kevin Kennedy is believed leaning toward starting Roger Clemens in Game 1 of the playoffs ahead of Tim Wakefield. Clemens is an intimidating force again, having struck out 56 batters and recorded a 2.06 ERA in his last 56 2/3 innings before the weekend. Said Clemens of the Ripken record: “It’s great that it happened and it’s something we can look back on and say it happened in our generation. We can congratulate him when we’re in Baltimore next week, and now we can pitch him inside again.”

Red Sox designated hitter Jose Canseco has resumed the dangerous practice of taking flyballs in the outfield, preparing for the World Series. He’s more worried about his elbow than his head because of surgery two years ago. “I know I can make the short throw and can throw accurately,” he said. “Stretching it out and making the long throw is unchartered water for me.”

Sparky Anderson continues to sound like a man who is not planning on managing the Detroit Tigers next year. Anderson, as he has since bolting the replacement spring, consistently refers to the organization as “they” instead of “we.” He did it again the other day, reflecting on Phil Nevin’s first few days with the club. “I think they finally got themselves a good young player,” he said. “The deal [with the Astros] was a steal since they got him for someone [Mike Henneman] who wasn’t going to be with them next year anyway.”

NAMES AND NUMBERS

--Pittsburgh Pirate coach Tommy Sandt’s son graduated from Northwestern, so Sandt had keen interest in the Wildcats’ stunning upset of Notre Dame last weekend.

“They’re really celebrating in Evanston,” Sandt said. “They’re reading two books instead of one.”

--It took him eight starts, but Dennis Martinez of the Cleveland Indians finally won his 10th decision Tuesday, becoming the only active pitcher to have won 10 or more games in each of the last nine years. Martinez is also the active leader with 229 victories.

--If Don Mattingly, a free agent at the end of the season, is in his final month with the New York Yankees, it is noteworthy that he has had 257 teammates in 12 years. Among them, Joel Sherman of the New York Post pointed out, have been seven players who won the rookie-of-the-year award and four who were Cy Young winners. He has played with three sets of pitching brothers--Joe and Phil Niekro, Melido and Pascual Perez and Al and Mark Leiter. He played with one Berra (Dale) and for another (Yogi). He also played with a Gags (Mike Gallego), a Pags (Mike Pagliarulo) and a Rags (Dave Righetti).