Twins sale: Letting go, moving on

Kirby Puckett's famous Seat 27 won't be available. Neither will the infamous "baggie" that hung in right field, nor the two World Series trophies the Minnesota Twins won in 1987 and 1991.

But when the Twins hold the mother of all moving sales Saturday at the Metrodome, there will be 20,000 programs from Kirby Puckett memorial night in 2006, a couple of signed Nick Punto jerseys and a bunch of bobbleheads.

"There will be literally tens of thousands of items," Patrick Klinger, the Twins' vice president for marketing, said Thursday. "After 28 years of playing baseball in the Metrodome, we've accumulated a vast array of items."

The team played its last game at the Dome on Oct. 11 and almost immediately began planning and packing for its move to Target Field in downtown Minneapolis.

"We cleaned out the closets and took a look at everything we had in every nook and cranny," said Kevin Smith, the Twins director of communications.

Among the items found in storage were the thousands of programs for the memorial to Puckett, one of the most popular players in team history, who died of a stroke in 2006. The team expected a full house for the memorial, but a March snowstorm kept attendance down, Klinger said.

Others items in the sale include bobbleheads, Twins publications, media guides artwork, Dome signage (including championship banners that hung outside the dome), jerseys, signed bats and balls, Homer Hankies, posters, cups and mugs, videos, backpacks, pennants and even TVs.

"If we have it, it goes," Smith said. "There's no room to take this old stuff."

Some items will be getting moved. Such as Seat 27 from Row 5 of Section 101, the spot in the left field bleachers where Puckett's home run landed in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.

Other items are still being dealt with, such as the large sheet of plastic bearing the Twins' logo that the team draped across bad seats in right field during the baseball season.

Used to disguise the fact that the Metrodome was not a true baseball stadium, it came to be known locally and nationally as the "baggie" for its resemblance to a plastic garbage bag.

Twins officials are trying to figure out what to do with it; it won't be for sale on Saturday.

Klinger said there might already be a deal in place.

"I'm speaking a little bit out of school here," Klinger said, "but my understanding is that we're doing a deal with a company that has some use for it and that it will be cut up."

Heron Marquez Estrada • 612-673-4280