I moved to Minnesota in October 1986, when the Twins had just ended a season full of promise. I was aware of this even though I hadn’t been a baseball fan for years, because I had just started watching the game again while I was still living in Austin; one of my roommates (on whom I had a sort-of crush, and on whom my cat Tim had a major crush) would watch Rangers games on nights when he was home, and Tim would follow him into the bedroom where the TV was, and I would eventually follow Tim and get drawn into the game as well as the company. It was a good time to move to Mpls. as a reborn baseball fan: the following year, the Twins overcame their mediocre road record to clinch the division, and then the pennant (in an exciting series with the tough-as-nails old guys from Detroit that we interrupted work to watch), and finally the World Series. I was a Twins fan, and a Minnesotan, for both of the team’s Series victories, and the 1991 Series was an amazing one from a baseball perspective…but from a great-story perspective, the ’87 Series was even better. And though Kirby wasn’t my favorite Twin (that would be Kent Hrbek, who always took the game just seriously enough, never too seriously, and played with the same sense of joy that a little kid does), he was clearly the hero nonetheless, and the most reliable player on the team for years, and I loved him just like everyone else in Minnesota did. It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to experience that ’87 Series as a fan, and Kirby was the symbol of everything that was great about it. Even people who had never paid attention to sports before got caught up in it.

I loved his public persona, too. For a year or so, I did a radio show on the cable radio station (remember cable radio? No? That’s okay, neither does anyone else) in Mpls.’s Warehouse District with one of my co-workers, and we used to have lunch afterwards at the Loon Cafe, a favorite hangout of Kirby’s. We’d see him there more often than not, and though I never had the nerve (or the desire, really; I’m big on leaving celebrities alone) to approach him, lots of others did, and he was always gracious and accommodating and easygoing. The staff loved him too. He still lived in the city at that point (though not for long; he moved to the ‘burbs shortly thereafter), and there was even talk of him running for mayor, though nothing ever came of it and who knows if it was ever even a real possibility. But just the idea of it fit in with Kirby’s overall image: he was salt of the earth, a true class act. It was impossible not to love him. It still is, really.

All of which, of course, made it harder to accept the awful stories that came out after he was forced to stop playing baseball. Not just the sexual assault charges, of which he was acquitted, but the horrifying, and apparently accurate, accounts published in Sports Illustrated of his physical and sexual violence and abusiveness. For the longest time, I just refused to accept those stories, and when it finally became impossible to ignore them, I simply stopped thinking about the subject at all; my mind would sort of close up when Kirby’s name was mentioned. We don’t get to have many heroes in sports anymore, and seeing one who had so thoroughly seemed to be the genuine article was crushing.

So maybe now I should feel worse than I do about allowing myself to have rose-colored memories of Kirby. But he’s gone, and it feels like a little bit of my own history is gone with him, and I will mourn him in spite of everything. It’s not quite the same as “trust the art, not the artist,” because whereas it’s possible to divorce an artist’s abhorrent personal traits from the work they produced, with Kirby, part of what made him a great baseball player was the stuff beyond the stats: the enthusiasm that he brought to every game, his graciousness off the field (with fans and other players, at least), the way he mentored younger players, his fidelity to the Twins when he could have commanded more money elsewhere, the way he served as a spokesman and a role model for so long. All of those things gave extra impact to his brilliance at the plate and in the field. (There was no sight on earth quite like seeing that short-legged, pot-bellied little guy leap halfway to the sky to make a catch at the centerfield wall.) And if beneath all of that was a man of much poorer character, then the public character becomes tainted, inevitably. But then again, I didn’t experience Kirby the person; like thousands and thousands of other Minnesota fans, I experienced Kirby the Hall of Fame-bound baseball player. And that’s who I’m mourning tonight, with all my heart. So rest in peace, Kirby, and thanks.