When Kirby Puckett made the Baseball Hall of Fame a few years ago, one couldn't help but wonder whether his public relations mojo impacted the voting. He had solid but not spectacular numbers, had a couple of big playoff games (incl. a game-winning homer in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series), and was a perennial All-Star, but the same could be said of many other players who are not in the Hall of Fame. We (the fans) were told about the "intangibles" he brought to the game, and off-field "contributions" to the community. He even won a Roberto Clemente Award one year, given to the baseball player who best exemplifies the Pirate great's service to the public, as well as being enshrined in something called the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

Well, as it turns out, he was an even bigger fraud than Joe DiMaggio; a violent misanthropic abuser who couldn't have been more different than his image. According to Sports Illustrated,

Puckett’s ex-wife, Tonya, divorced him in December, barely a year after she told police that he threatened to kill her during a telephone conversation. Over the years, she told SI, Puckett had also tried to strangle her with an electrical cord, locked her in the basement and used a power saw to cut through a door after she had locked herself in a room. Once, she said, he even put a cocked gun to her head while she was holding their young daughter.

His abuse of his family was matched by the contempt he showed for others. According to one of his mistresses,

they were together when Puckett said he had to leave to visit a sick child who was waiting to meet him.
“That’s great, you get to make that kid’s day,” (she) told him. “That must make you feel good.” But she said Puckett just snapped back at her.
“I don’t give a s---,” he said. “It’s just another kid who’s sick.”

Puckett, who declined to be interviewed for the article, currently faces charges that he assaulted a woman in the men's room of a restaurant last year.

The case of Kirby Puckett is as a clear a case as any of the perils of judging people by how they come across in public, rather than their objective accomplishments. When Puckett was elected to Cooperstown, there was much discussion about how his numbers were inferior to those of Albert Belle, who was on the verge of shutting it down, yet no one conceived that a "bad guy" like "Joey" could make the Hall: too abrasive, too vulgar, too mean. Puckett, on the other hand, was practically viewed as a saint, both on and off the field. Ironically, Belle turned out to be less of a lowlife than the man who made the Hall.