Duane Eugene Kuiper

Born in Racine on June 19, 1950, he was raised on the 100-acre Mount Pleasant farm Henry and Annette Kuiper bought in 1952 for $35,000, just east of Interstate 94 on Highway 20. Henry, an accomplished softball pitcher, threw tennis balls until the chores were done. Jerome I. Case High School played a fifteen-game baseball schedule. The Yankees drafted him out of that gym. He turned them down, then the Pilots, White Sox, Reds, and Red Sox through junior college and a Southern Illinois team that lost the 1971 College World Series final. Cleveland offered $8,000, half of New York's number. His father said take it, or word might get around that he did not want to play.

Twelve major-league seasons produced a .271 average and one home run in 3,379 at-bats: a Steve Stone slider on August 29, 1977, two rows into the right-field seats on Monday Night Baseball, beamed back to Racine. Teammates ran to the plate to meet him; his line was "Me and Sadaharu Oh." He hit two bases-loaded triples in one game at Yankee Stadium and caught two balls that helped Len Barker's 1981 perfect game. Gaylord Perry, going for twenty wins, told the kid on his first start that an error meant he would never play behind him again. Traded to the Giants for Ed Whitson, he later became Mike Krukow's broadcast partner in San Francisco.

The Mount Pleasant farm sold in 2018 for an Advocate Aurora hospital. Kuiper walked the ruins and said a warehouse would have been fine; a hospital made his dad feel great. Younger brother Glen broadcasts for the Athletics. Birth was in Racine; the raising, and the hometown story, is the dairy farm in Mount Pleasant.