In this local baseball season of sour prospects and high-stakes indifference, there is no one in the Minnesota Twins organization with more to prove than manager Tom Kelly. Since the club's 1987-1991 heyday as the model of small-market ingenuity and accomplishment (it's easy to forget that, besides the two championships, as recently as 10 years ago Minnesota held the major-league single-season attendance record), the Twins have been in a complete organizational free fall. During that time, Kirby Puckett and Kelly have been virtually the only people associated with the team whose reputations have survived the beating the franchise has taken everywhere from the playing field to the court of public opinion. It's strange to hear a manager whose ballclub has produced the worst record in major-league baseball over the past five seasons still routinely referred to by his local proponents as one of the best managers in the game, and even stranger still to find such a manager not only relatively unscathed by the complete public-relations wipeout surrounding his team, but emerging despite it all as perhaps the most powerful man in... More >>>