It was announced Thursday that Tom Kelly will have his No. 10 retired by the Twins – a deserving honor, without a doubt, for the man who was in charge for the only World Series titles the Twins have won (and the only titles among the Vikings, Wild, North Stars and Timberwolves, we might also add). With a different man in charge, who knows how 1987 and 1991 would have turned out – and who knows if this market would have tasted a championship among the aforementioned teams?

The distinction gives us a chance to look back on a noteworthy – though somewhat odd – managerial career. It also brought to mind questions that have no perfect answers. First off: Kelly's career was odd in several ways. He took over the Twins toward the end of 1986, right around the time he turned 36. By age 37, he had led the squad to its first World Series. By 41, the Twins had captured a second World Title under TK. That's phenomenal stuff – the kind of start to a career that might have put Kelly on the path toward the Hall of Fame someday. But then, of course, the Twins went into a tailspin that we like to call "the mid-to-late-1990s." From 1993-2000, the Twins did not have a single season above .500. In fact, only five of TK's 15 full seasons (which does count the strike-shortened years) featured Twins teams above that modest break-even mark. And then, just as the team started to show promise again – starting off hot in 2001 with a young squad and finishing with 85 victories – Kelly hung it up at the age of 51. He stayed around the game and in the organization, but he was done with the big-league managerial thing at a relatively young age. There are tons of local scribes who knew TK and wrote about him often and well. We do not fit into that category. We met him in 1997 – smack dab in the middle of all the losing, and six years after his Twins knocked off our then-beloved Braves in the 1991 World Series -- while we were working at the U of M's Minnesota Daily. Terrified, we lurked near him during batting practice for several minutes before Kelly – perhaps either sensing our unease or wanting the creeper behind him to be done with it – motioned us over. That might have been the only time a source initiated an interview. But we were grateful. The resulting column (on a PDF, scroll down) was not a masterpiece. And it certainly gives us no license to wonder more deeply about why or how he walked away. In a 2007 Jim Souhan column, Kelly offered this: "It was the right time to go. Gardy [Ron Gardenhire] was ready to manage. It was ... well, I'll spit this out. Not many people know this. It's not a big thing. One time, it was somewhere in the middle of that last [2001] season, I missed something. I missed something. I don't exactly remember what it was, but it happened." It's somewhat cryptic, but it speaks to Kelly holding himself to a higher standard than most of us might hold ourselves. In more quantifiable terms, we have numbers. And those numbers say this: He started young, ended young, had losing teams in two-thirds of his seasons and won two World Series championships. Just an odd set of facts. Second, however, we do have to wonder: How would the 2000s have played out differently for the Twins with TK at the helm? This is not a knock on Ron Gardenhire; six AL Central titles in 10 years should not be taken for granted or diminished. Rather, it's a simple curiosity. TK certainly had a definite style of play and preference for what he liked in a player. Would he have coaxed a different kind of chemistry – and playoff success – out of a few of those Twins teams? Would he have pushed the wrong buttons, upsetting the balance achieved by Gardenhire and negating the team's progress? Or would it have played out much the same? We don't know the answer, but we sure think giving TK the chance to play with Johan Santana, Justin Morneau, Joe Mauer and co. would have been interesting. Your thoughts, please, in the comments.