Rick Stelmaszek’s coaching impact on Twins led to spot in team’s Hall of Fame

Widely separate eras of the Twins baseball operation met in announcements made this past week. On Monday, we learned the minor league staff assignments for 2024, and on Friday, Rick Stelmaszek became the first coach to be selected as a member of the Twins Hall of Fame.

I’ve come to look forward to the annual announcement on staffing — imagining there’s a person tucked away in a small office at the Fort Myers, Fla. headquarters with the full-time job of simply coming up with the titles for this endless wave of player developers that the New Twins deem to be required.

That’s one laugh, and you could get another imagining how Stelmaszek might have responded if told one of his young players would be missing “Camp Stelly” in Fort Myers on this morning because he had a meeting with the team biochemist.

The four minor league teams that play full seasons — St. Paul (AAA), Wichita (AA), Cedar Rapids (High-A) and Fort Myers (Low-A) — basically have a manager, five coaches, three trainers and strength people, a clubhouse manager and two technology experts.

Roughly 50 developers for four teams.

As for the lower levels, mostly the teenage prospects gathered in Fort Meyers for the “Florida Complex League,” or for the Dominican Summer League and academy, we’re talking dozens in the developmental area.

Which is quite a contrast to when Tom Kelly, Rick Stelmaszek and Jim Shellenback were on the field with 50 or 60 hopefuls in the Florida Instructional League starting in 1979, when Stelmaszek joined the organization.

“Kelly, Stelly and Shelly … that was the trio,” Kathie Stelmaszek said Friday, “Richard came home for a few days after the season and then headed to Florida.”

Stelmaszek became a coach with the Twins in 1981 and Kelly in 1982, yet they still were working the instructional league in the fall of ’82. Kirby Puckett was there after batting .382 in the rookie league in Elizabethton, Tenn.

“We had all kinds of players, two groups, and we’d play one group one day, then the other,” Kelly said. “One morning, Stelly sees the guys we have on the bus and says, ‘Don’t you want to play that Puckett fella more often?’”

Kelly laughed over the phone Friday and said: “I said, ‘Yeah, Stelly, I’d like to play him more often, but we got all these guys … and they want ‘em all to play.’ ”

Puckett and Stelmaszek were both from Chicago, although Kirby from the Robert Taylor Homes projects and Stelmaszek in the South Side’s 10th Ward, which wasn’t exactly a bastion of integration.

Kathie, Stelly’s wife, recalled meeting the Twins for a series in Milwaukee, followed by a day off, and then Kirby hitched a ride with them back to Chicago.

“They talked all the way, and then we dropped Kirby off at home,” Kathie said. “Those two were buddies from the start.”

So much so, who was it that Puckett called to before he went to the plate against Atlanta’s Charlie Leibrandt in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series? In that moment before Puck broke a 3-3 tie in the bottom of the 11th?

His Chicago pal, of course.

“I was down there in our bullpen and Puck is screaming at me, ‘Stelly, Stelly, this game is over!’” Stelmaszek would recall. “‘It’s over, Stelly!’”

It was. And … we’ll see you tomorrow night.

Stelly was Kelly’s bullpen coach and right-hand man for 15 seasons and two World Series titles. He made out the spring training schedule and, when a bus left for an exhibition, the other players stayed behind for the “Camp Stelly” workouts.

He coached 11 seasons for Ron Gardenhire, with five division titles. The Twins shook up the coaching staff in 2012, after two bad seasons in Target Field, and Stelly settled full-time back in the tight-knit south Chicago neighborhood near Indiana, where the steel mills — U.S., Wisconsin and Republic — have been torn down or now stand as a relic.

Kathie Markusic met “Richard” in grade school, they lived a block apart, and they started dating when Stelly became a ballplayer, including 60 games as a third-string catcher in the big leagues over three seasons.

She taught first-graders (and still substitutes) and Stelly worked some “crazy shifts, 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.” at a steel mill with his union card in the offseason in those early years.

The pancreatic cancer took him in November 2017 at 69, when granddaughter Aliza was 4, and Kathie can get emotional when talking about what a granddad Stelly already was, and would’ve been.

“I received a call from Rod Carew, Dave St. Peter and Dustin Morse before Christmas, telling me it would be announced in January that Stelly was going in the Twins Hall of Fame,” Kathie said.

“He would’ve been so proud … with my faith, I believe he knows it, that Richard knows he’s going to be there with Kirby, Tom Kelly and the rest of his friends.”