The extent to which the Minnesota Twins are "cursed" is up for debate. Last season the club snapped a disastrous postseason losing streak, though the success quickly proved unsustainable. The 2024 campaign began in historically abysmal fashion, heated up in a major way throughout the summer, and now the Twins find themselves limping toward a wild-card playoff berth.
Could the hard-luck franchise's fortunes change with the elimination of a typo spree located outside of Target Field? With pedantry on full blast, let's dive into a potential micro-curse that might've just been lifted.
Gate 34, the main entrance that brings fans into Target Field, is named after the jersey number of Kirby Puckett, the Baseball Hall of Famer, star of the Twins’ only two championship teams, and the most important player in franchise history.
On the wall, next to that gate and near the giant glove sculpture, is a graphic listing the team’s historic winners of the Rawlings Gold Glove, the annual award Major League Baseball presents to the best defense player in each position. And on a recent visit to Target Field, we noticed something very wrong in that display: Kirby Puckett’s name is spelled incorrectly, as “Kirby Pucket,” minus the second T. Not once, but four times, for Puckett’s Gold Gloves in 1988, 1989, 1991, and 1992.
This sign is, mind you, steps away from the statue of Kirby Puckett, right outside the gate named to honor Kirby Puckett, and even includes a giant picture of Kirby Puckett. It’s all outside a stadium decorated with numerous pieces of Kirby memorabilia and his retired number 34.
Yet it’s spelled ‘Pucket.’ I mean, they even spelled “Mientkiewicz” right! Torii Hunter received the correct two-"I" treatment!
I’m a lifelong Twins fan who lives out of town, and I only get to a Twins game about once a year. And as someone who was on hand both for the Game 6 home run at the Metrodome in 1991 and Kirby’s Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown in 2001, I ended up almost as upset at the misspelling as I was at that game’s result, a 15-0 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays. (However, I will say the Twins’ game-day experience and presentation was first-rate, as always.)
I posted the picture on social media and received some entertaining responses. One wag joked that the Pohlads were too cheap to spring for the second “T.” One Philadelphia fan thought maybe the shortened name was an homage to “Curby Bucket,” a municipal recycling mascot introduced in Philly in the 1990s, even though Kirby Puckett—aside from a free agent visit in 1992—had no ties whatsoever to Philadelphia.
I also discovered that I appeared to be the first person to notice this. No one has posted about it in any online forum that I’m aware of. I put the question to some writers covering the team, but none had heard of it before either.
It was all a big mystery: When did this sign go up? How could such a mistake be made, and why didn’t anyone catch it? Did it summon a curse that could tank the squad's ambitions in 2024 and beyond? Or, more likely, are the Twins staffed by people too young to remember Kirby Puckett’s career, much less the spelling of his name? Joe Pohlad, the family scion who took over as executive chair two offseasons ago, is in his early 40s, indicating that he was at least cognizant of the championship teams. Let us (and Tom Kelly) be forever thankful his grandfather didn’t pull a Little Big League and put him in charge when he was 12.
From old pictures, we can tell that there used to be a smaller sign under the giant glove listing the historic Gold Glove winners, with “Puckett” spelled correctly. A “Target Field for Newbies” video posted by KARE 11’s YouTube just before the start of the 2023 season showed the sign, and it looked much the same as it does now, although we couldn’t zoom in to see whether the misspelling was there at the time.
However, there is a subtle difference: The word “winners” extends further to the right, over the column that says “Players.”
We reached out to the Twins and were told by Dustin Morse, the team's senior VP of communications, that the sign was changed to its current form prior to the current season.
“I do know this was flagged a few weeks ago and is in the process of being replaced/corrected,” Morse says. He added that the team often replaces graphics because they fade over time.
And thankfully, the Twins informed us Wednesday that the sign has been corrected following all that social media hubbub. Apparently the plaque had been correct for 14 years, eventually suffered from sun damage, and was swapped out for the typo-laden replacement earlier this year; the good-natured crew responsible for ballpark signage tells us they're "genuinely embarrassed." Here's proof that Kirby Puckett’s name has been restored to its proper, two-T spelling on the Gold Glove display, courtesy of that very crew:
Whether the banged-up Twins, currently clinging to the last playoff position in the American League, can fix up their on-field woes is another question entirely. Here's hoping the Baseball Gods are also sticklers for spelling.
