All-Star baseball player Kirby Puckett (1960–2006), born in Chicago, Illinois, near baseball's Comiskey Park, played his entire 12-year baseball career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins. During those 12 years, he was named to 10 consecutive All-Star teams and was named MVP of the game in 1991. He won the Gold Glove Award six times, won two World Series with the Twins (1987, 1991), was named the Twins MVP five times, and, at the time of his early retirement in 1995 due to retinal damage in his right eye, he had obtained the highest career batting average (.318) for a right-handed batter since Joe Dimaggio. During his career, he wrote two books: I Love This Game! My Life and Baseball (1993) and Be the Best You Can Be (with Tim Houle). He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001 and died from a stroke in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2006.
