Story update: The answer appears to have been found thanks to a Blade reader, but we still suggest reading the initial piece of this mystery below first.

A few weeks ago, the Mud Hens posed on Twitter what seemed the softball of all softball questions.

What number did Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett wear during his time in Toledo?

The Hens are holding a Puckett bobblehead night June 8, and, as if to get a jump on promoting it, placed a four-ticket bounty on the correct answer.

“FANS: WE NEED YOUR HELP,” the tweet read.

Surely, they were humoring us. Puckett played for the Hens in 1984, not 1884. This was a piece of cake. Baseball preserves its history like the Vatican keeps its Secret Archives. Even if no one had an old photo or scorebook lying around, the answer would be just a click of the mouse away. (Did you know Ed “Mouse” Mierkowicz had two hits, two RBIs, and wore No. 2 for the pennant-winning 1945 Tigers?)

The Hens actually misplacing the number of their most famed alum since World War II would be like losing a haystack in a needle.

Or so we thought.

Turns out, this was no promotional stunt. When the bobblehead maker asked the Hens for Puckett’s number last month, yes, the team really needed the answer.

And, soon enough, so did many others.

What followed was the uniform mystery to end them all and a rabbit hole that — along with the size of the search party — grew by the day, ensnaring a network of amateur gumshoes, the team historian, a gutter-minded Wikipedia editor, a hapless newspaper columnist, and, rumor has it, archaeologists on loan from the hunt for Atlantis.

“It turned out to be a bit of a struggle,” official Hens historian John Husman said with a laugh.

The problem is the late Puckett passed through town like a meteor in the night in an era before the fevered rating of prospects was big business.

Before he became a 10-time all-star for the Minnesota Twins and a first-ballot entry into Cooperstown, Puckett was just another guy who broke camp with the 1984 Hens.

OK, that’s not entirely true. The 5-foot-8 house on wheels was more than that, drafted with third overall pick of the 1982 January draft by the Twins, the Hens’ then-lowly parent club.

But few in town gave Puckett or a Toledo team coming off a third straight losing season much thought. The 24-year-old center fielder played here 21 games, hitting .263 with a home run and five RBIs, then was on to the big time.

When he was called up to Minnesota along with Toledo teammate Mike Hart, The Blade ran only a photo of Hart with a story headlined: “Mud Hens Lose Outfield Pair.”

Most anticipated Puckett would be back in Toledo in a couple of weeks, including team radio voice Jim Weber. At the time of Puckett’s early-May summons, the Hens were in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, for a series against the Maine Guides, and Weber was the one who drove him to the airport. The prospect was to meet up with the Twins in California.

“He was nervous and a little bit scared,” Weber said, “intimidated he had just gotten to Triple-A and now all of the sudden they’re calling him up.

“He kept asking me all the way out to the airport, ‘Jeez, I wonder why they called me up?’ I told him, ‘Well, they called you up to play.’ Here I am trying to give him confidence. I say, ‘So what if you’re only there two weeks? Hey, it’s a good experience.’”

Weber laughs. The next night, Puckett made his debut against the Angels and had four hits.

“Yeah, two weeks all right. He never came back,” said Weber, the soundtrack of Toledo’s summer for 43 years and counting. “I was the last guy he ever saw in the minors.”

Puckett was gone, and, as the Hens discovered 34 years later, without a trace.

Staffers knew he wore No. 28 with the Class-A Visalia Oaks in the California League in 1983 and No. 34 with the Twins. But his digits in Toledo? Hmm.

All of the obvious places to look proved dead ends. The Internet betrayed not a crumb. Neither did the Blade’s archives. The paper ran daily box scores of Puckett’s games — including one of a home showdown against a 21-year-old Pawtucket fireballer named Roger Clemens (Puckett went 1 for 3) — but those did not include uniform numbers.

An old scorecard? That would have done the trick too. The issue was the bone-chilled spring crowds at Lucas County Stadium numbered a couple hundred souls — “at most,” Weber said — making an April, 1984, scorebook a treasure rarer than the lost Fabergé eggs. Not even former Hens official scorer Rick Youngs — now an expert Blade deskman — or Weber could promptly rummage one up.

Youngs guessed Puckett wore No. 24 or 28. Dave Hackenberg, our incomparable predecessor who covered that Hens team, hazarded it was 26 but deferred to Youngs.

In any case, the search continued, and with two promising leads.

Turns out, there is indeed a photo of Puckett in a Mud Hens jersey — an unpublished Blade shot of him, as the team’s 3-hole hitter, lined up third to the right of Toledo manager Cal Ermer during opening night introductions at the stadium in Maumee. 

A second picture promised to turn up in a set of ’84 Hens trading cards. The 24-player set from an old company called TCMA featured many recognizable names, including infielders Alvaro Espinoza and Steve Lombardozzi, the latter of whom had a game to match his name. (In the 1987 World Series, Lombardozzi became the player with the longest last name to belt a postseason homer, only to see the record broken by Doug Mientkiewicz, the new Hens manager.)

Here it was, honest-to-goodness evidence Puckett existed in Toledo beyond our imagination and ... one last reminder to keep dreaming. The photo, shot from the front, was absent the answer; the card collection absent a Puckett.

In the end, the search simply had our number, the Hen hunt turning into a goose chase. It was best left to the experts to take it home.

Husman did just that through an encyclopedically researched process of elimination.

He maintains the Hens’ all-time roster, and of the 32 players who passed through in 1984, he has numbers for 25 of them. One of the few numbers unaccounted for to begin the season was 28, the digits Puckett wore the year before and those inherited in Toledo by Jim Weaver. He was the outfielder called up from Double-A Orlando to replace Puckett.

“My conclusion,” Husman said after a search that exhausted some 50 man hours, “is that Kirby Puckett wore No. 28 as a Mud Hen.”

No doubt about it.

We think. Those four tickets the Hens offered up? They’re still on the table.

“We're going with No. 28,” said Emily Croll, the team’s manager of events and game day presentation. “But if someone can come forward with proof, even after the fact, we’ll [honor] it. Or maybe the seats will sit empty and the mystery continues.”

Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.

First Published January 18, 2018, 11:21 p.m.