Meet the new Kirby at Target Field

Most baseball fans have easy access to indoor restrooms. But for one Twins fan, his only option is outside, near the players' parking lot.

Kirby is not your normal Twins fan. Although most people identify the name Kirby with Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett, this Kirby is a 13-month-old black lab.

Kirby is one of a few bomb-sniffing dogs employed by the Twins for the first time.

"He's a half bomb dog, half fan dog," Kirby's handler, Mike Litman, said.

His puppy's most prominent job, besides cheering on the team, is to keep the stadium safe.

This is Kirby's first year as an explosives K-9. The shift for Litman and Kirby is five hours long: two hours before the game, and three hours during. The duo normally starts a search at the front gate and makes their rounds throughout the stadium.

In order to carry out this responsibility, Kirby endured tedious training, which included many repetitions of sniffing and rewarding.

"Training is about three months," Litman said, "and he is trained to find about 19,000 different explosives."

Explosives have six odors common to each family of bombs, so dogs are trained to find every kind. Kirby is a reward dog, so he gets to play with his toy "Wubba" if he finds something.

Kirby alerts by sitting by the suspicious area, which is called passive alert. Luckily, no explosives have been found at Target Field.

The players are the stars for most fans, but Litman feels he has one, too.

"He is a Twins star," Litman said.

Editor's note: Reporter Sammy Hurley was part of The Complete Package, a high school journalism workshop sponsored by the National Scholastic Press Association. Nineteen students — from the Twin Cities, Kansas, California, Arizona and Florida — participated in the workshop, and Star Tribune reporters and editors were involved in some of the coaching. The students were invited to report and write stories at Target Field on July 29, and this story on Kirby was selected to appear on startribune.com. You can read all of the NSPA students' stories at nspa16.snodemo.com.