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The long and short of it Puckett, Winfield took different paths to Cooperstown
Kirby Puckett was one of those players that you just ... knew. From the beginning. He was a good guy. A hard worker. He was someone who earned everything he ever got through the sweat of his brow and the will in his heart. Dave Winfield was the other one. He was the tall guy. The smooth one. He was the one with more talent in his lanky frame than two or three All-Stars put together. When Winfield crushed a line drive with that savagely cutting swing of his and started off on his lightning-like bolt around the bases, it was pure athletic ability on parade. In his 12 years in the major leagues -- every last one of them with the Minnesota Twins -- Puckett drove to the park in an old pickup truck and, for the longest time, had an old Hack Wilson card stuck in his locker. Wilson, like Puckett, was a small guy who did not much look like an athlete. But ol' Hack drove in 191 runs in 1930, a mark that stands firm 71 years later. Winfield loped around the big-league landscape for 22 years, playing for six different teams from San Diego to Toronto, putting in nine high-profile years with the New York Yankees, getting traded twice, switching teams through free agency a few times, piling up the numbers in what everyone assumed would be a Hall of Fame career. The two men, Puckett and Winfield, played together, too, when Winfield returned to his home state and joined the Twins for the 1993 and '94 seasons. In fact, when Winfield smacked his 3,000th major-league hit in 1993, Puckett scored. Sunday, the two men will be together again on the dais in Cooperstown, N.Y., as the newest inductees into baseball's Hall of Fame. "It will be," Puckett said last January when he learned he'd made the Hall, "very, very special going in with him." Said Winfield: "The best thing I can say about [Puckett] -- and I played with a lot of guys -- was that he's the most positive person I played with on a daily basis." One of the best things about the game of baseball -- and, for that matter, the Hall of Fame itself -- is that it is big enough for two stars as seemingly different as Puckett and Winfield. One was a 5-foot-8 plug of pure energy, a teammate who cajoled and rallied and amazed, a man whose career was cut tragically short but who never accepted an ounce of sympathy for it. The other was 6-foot-6, one of the most talented all-around athletes of his generation, a man who had a long, successful career but never generated the kind of adoration that Puckett did. Winfield is the only athlete to be drafted by a pro football team, a pro basketball team and a pro baseball team. And he was drafted by two pro basketball teams. But he chose baseball -- he never spent a day in the minors -- and barreled through losing and winning and small towns and big ones for long enough that we probably took for granted just how well he played the game. When he was in New York, he drove in at least 100 runs in five straight seasons (1982 to '86), the first Yankee to do that since Joe DiMaggio . Only four other players have had both more hits and more homers than Winfield (3,110 hits and 465 homers): Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Eddie Murray and Stan Musial. He was a seven-time Gold Glover and played in 12 All-Star Games. Winfield's trademark was a whacking right-handed swing and an almost non-stop aggressiveness on the basepaths. "Going from first to third, scoring from first on a double," Winfield said, "for a big guy, those are things I really enjoyed." Puckett was discovered playing in a recreational league after banging around in jobs on the assembly line at a Ford plant and as a census taker. Once he hit the big leagues, though, he was there to stay. He had four hits in his first game and hit .296 in his rookie season. In September of 1995, a Dennis Martinez fastball crushed into his face, ending his season. Puckett came back the next year, played well in spring training but woke up one morning before the season unable to see out of his eye. Glaucoma had rid him of his sight in that eye and in July of that year, he retired after only 12 seasons. Because of that, Puckett's career numbers are not what many consider Hall of Fame caliber. Still, he averaged 192 hits a year and hit .318 lifetime. In his first 10 years, Puckett had more hits (2,040) than anyone ever had. He played on two World Series winners with the Twins. He also won six Gold Gloves and played in 10 All-Star Games. Puckett's trademark was, and is, his size. For years before he cracked into the pros, scouts would say he was too small and too heavy to be effective on the major-league level. That criticism spurred him throughout his career. "I'd lie in bed and wish I was 6-6 and 260,"Puckett said, "and I'd wake up 5-8 and 260." That was plenty, though. There will be stories told this weekend about Puckett and Winfield, stories that sometimes come too easily. To say that Puckett was simply an overachiever with marginal talent is slighting him, as much as it would be to say that Winfield accomplished what he did on talent alone. Puckett had an abundance of natural talent. And Winfield worked hard at becoming an All-Star hitter and fielder. Still, it's a wonderful game that allows a wound-up plug of a man like Puckett and a multi-gifted athlete like Winfield to excel, each in his own way. Despite their differences in size and talents and demeanor and longevity, Puckett and Winfield, in the end, are not so different after all. In the end, they are both Hall of Famers. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
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