Former Twins manager Tom Kelly: I ‘took the game of baseball very personal’

Twins will retire former manager Tom Kelly s number…and it ain’t for his slumberous announcing or his term as president of the Todd Walker Fan Club.

I think some of the younger players during the ‘90s I might have been a little rough on. I was only trying to find out who could play and who couldn’t play. It was nothing malicious.

A guy like Todd Walker, he was a terrific hitter. I mean, he could hit. He could really hit, especially with nobody on. You got some men on and he wasn’t as good, and those numbers will prove that. But he didn’t want to work on his fielding at all. It was like embarrassing for him to do that. We’d try to get him to go work, and he’d get mad. We were just trying to help him. Maybe I was a little rough on him because pitching and defense was our way. He was an excellent hitter. He almost won the batting title one year. He was hitting .330-something right until the last week or two. Then he fell apart. It got to be too much for him, but he really was a good hitter. You really enjoyed watching him hit.

Todd felt bad about practicing in front of other people. If the other team still was in the dugout at 3:30 p.m., he didn’t want to go out there while they could watch. When they were all gone, then he’d go out.

You know what bothered him a lot? (Boston Red Sox standout Nomar) Garciaparra because Garciaparra turned into the real deal and he was picked ahead of Garciaparra. (The Twins picked Walker eighth overall in the 1994 amateur draft; the Red Sox selected Garciaparra 12th overall that year.) He couldn’t handle that. He let those kind of things bother him. He was a good guy. He just didn’t want to practice on the things he needed to practice on.