Kirby Puckett!

Okay, his birthday was actually yesterday, but I couldn't just let my all-time favorite player's 50th birthday pass by without comment.

From 1965 until 1986, Major League baseball held, in addition to the regular June draft, a smaller amateur draft in January for players graduating from high school or college in the winter. I haven't looked beyond the first round of most of those drafts (I did check each year's first round class), but it seems very likely that Kirby Puckett is the second-greatest player ever taken in any January draft. Carlton Fisk went 4th overall in 1967, and the drafts had a handful of other stars (Al Hrabosky, Ken Singleton, Ellis Burks, Moises Alou), but the overwhelming majority of January draftees either failed to make the majors or, if they were among the extremely lucky few, popped up for a cup of coffee. When Puckett was drafted third overall in 1982, only two of the other twenty-four players drafted in that round made the majors -- one for 8 games (and a 9.58 ERA) and one for 67 at-bats.

The point (aside from the fact that there was this whole thing called the January Draft that I knew almost nothing about before today) is that the Twins could not have expected a whole lot when they used their third overall pick in that draft to select a short, (then) skinny outfielder from an Illinois community college.

But they quickly discovered that they did, in fact, have something. Puckett hit .382 in 65 rookie league games in 1982, then hit .314 in a full season at single-A in 1983, sprinkling in a tiny bit of power (29 doubles, nine homers). He made the jump to triple-A in 1984 and was actually hitting just .263 and slugging just .325 through 80 at-bats, but the Twins called him up anyway. Puckett was the Twins' leadoff hitter in his first game, on May 8, 1984 (this was a young team whose only hitter with better than a .349 OBP, Kent Hrbek, was also one of only two hitters on the team with any power). Puckett grounded out to lead off the game, but then hit singles in four straight at-bats, just the fifth player to get four hits in his debut (still just one of eight, among whom only he and Willie McCovey really went on to have any success).  (click here to continue reading)

Puckett followed that up (after 1-for-5 and 1-for-4 games) with two straight three-hit games and then two straight two-hit games, and was hitting .485 after his first 34 trips to the plate, and it was pretty clear that he was up for good. He hit .296 in '84, but with no homers, just 12 doubles, and 16 walks, which makes for a pretty dismal rookie year, but nobody really noticed. He increased his power output significantly in '85, with four homers, 13 triples and 29 doubles, but was still a well below average hitter (he nonetheless got himself three points in the MVP voting). He then immediately became an entirely different player in 1986, hitting 31 home runs. After slugging .363 in 1984 and 1985, he slugged an even .500 from 1986 through 1995.

Everybody knows Puckett had a short career, but he was exceptionally durable. After his call-up in May of '84, he played 128 of the team's remaining 131 games, then averaged 156 games per season from 1985-1993. The last two years were shortened by the strike, but Puckett played 108 out of 113 and then 137 out of 144 team games. For his career, he was on the field for 97% of his team's games.

Until Puckett died in 2006, it was believed that he was born in 1961, and thus was 34 in his final season. Turns out, as was uncovered by the Minneapolis Star Tribune some time earlier but not publicized until his death, that he was actually born in 1960, so he had been 35 in his final season. That's pretty old for a center fielder -- and in fact Puckett wasn't a center fielder anymore, having spent 1994 and '95 almost exclusively in right. But his bat wasn't slowing down at all; his 130 OPS+ in 1994-95 was well over his career average. Had he stayed healthy, he could have expected to surpass 3000 hits sometime in 1999 or 2000 (around the same time Tony Gwynn did).

Puckett, because of my biases, is the one guy who tests my faith in the advanced metrics. Puckett has 45 career WAR, just 215th among position players. He's around or ahead of several Hall of Famers, but they're Hall of Famers like Ralph Kiner, Earl Averill and Nellie Fox. Career WAR penalizes short-career players, but Gene Tenace amassed 48.6 wins in eight full seasons and a bunch of partial ones, and Bobby Bonds managed 56.9 in what amounted to twelve and a half. Puckett doesn't do any better by Baseball Prospectus' WARP or career Win Shares. Part of the problem is his defense -- these systems (which aren't anything near as good as the ones we have available from 2002-present) all see him as at least a little below average in CF, though he won six Gold Gloves and was viewed by most observers at the time as the best defensive center fielder in the game for most of his career. Even if we say he's above average in the field, though, he ends up looking a lot like Kiki Cuyler (49.8 WAR). To start to see him as having comfortable Hall of Fame numbers, you'd have to take his glaucoma away and give him five more years or so at 2 WAR a year, plus the better D -- all just to get into Richie Ashburn territory.

I'm firmly convinced that Puckett is better than the advanced metrics suggest, but eventually you have to admit that, based on his career numbers, he just doesn't stack up. He's not only well short of Ashburn and Snider, he's well short of Kenny Lofton, Andruw Jones, Reggie Smith and Jimmy Wynn. But then you do have the fact that he led the Twins to their first two world championships, and in particular that 1991 postseason, in which he won the ALCS MVP and then single-handedly won Game 6 of the World Series. And you have six Gold Gloves and ten straight All-Star games. He was legitimately one of the greatest players of his (too brief) time, and was the most famous and beloved player of his franchise's history. That's enough for me. Would it be enough if it were any other player but Kirby, though? I think so, but I honestly can't be sure.

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