Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves Gave Us the Best World Series of All Time

by Tim Wendel

  Perhaps the telling moment that the worst-to-first underdogs could take the AL West came after the third victory. In the bowels of the Metrodome several of the A’s hurried from the visiting clubhouse, eager to avoid questions from the media. One of them appeared to be José Canseco, who was considered to be among the best players in the game at the time after hitting forty-two home runs and stealing forty bases in 1988. Of course, this was long before evidence of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs became so overwhelming.

  Canseco opened the clubhouse door and saw a half-dozen or so members of the press. Glaring at them, he swung the door shut, and the loud thud echoed down the hallway. With that, Canseco strode off. Yet after a few long strides he stopped and looked back with a thin smile. “Just kidding,” he said.

  The Twins weren’t kidding around in 1991 as they finished with ninety-five victories, one more than the Braves over in the National League, eight games ahead of the Chicago White Sox, and eleven games up on Canseco’s Athletics when the regular season ended.

  “I just never felt like we were a last-place team,” Brian Harper said when comparing the Twins’ 1990 and 1991 editions. “It was unbelievable how [in 1990] when we hit we didn’t pitch, and when we pitched well we didn’t hit. Last year was the weirdest year I’ve ever seen.”

  But it wouldn’t hold a candle to what was about to happen in the 1991 postseason.

  ———

  Round ball. Round bat.

  Ted Williams once said that having them greet each other so the impact is square and solid remains the most difficult feat to accomplish in sports, and any slugger who has come before or after him will echo those words.

  What do we make of those moments when ball and bat do meet just so? When the ball flies off the bat as though it had a mind of its own and for an instant the only role it knows in life is to soar over the outfield fence like a flock of geese heading for the horizon? What registers in the batter’s box? What does one remember?

  “It’s the feel,” said Frank Robinson, who hit 586 home runs during his career. “You don’t feel anything down the bat handle. I’m not trying to make a joke. That’s how it is.

  “When you’ve really hit the ball there are no vibrations. You could be swinging through air. That’s how perfect it is.”

  Besides the feel in the hands, there is the sweet smack to a well-hit ball. Robinson cautioned that each ballpark has different acoustics and dimensions, so the sound can sometimes fool you. But every slugger worth his salt knows the crisp reverberation that a home run ball often makes. At first Robinson described it as “a gun shot,” but then he searched for better words. A gun shot, in this day and age, seemed too callous for something so magical.

  Robinson and I once discussed such things during batting practice at a major-league game. As the home team continued to hit, Robinson paused, simply listening, waiting for that sound again. Even though the clamor built for another game, Robinson was able to tune such diversions out. When the next batter stepped into the cage the rhythmic rat-tat-tat of bat-hitting-ball began again. It could have been a carpenter driving nails or a woodsman splitting wood, except there was a particular fullness or certainty to this particular sound.

  “There it is,” Robinson said, and moments later a deep fly sailed past the outfield fence. “It’s like you’re out in the woods and you step on branch. A dry branch. It’s that snap that goes just so. But you have to be careful. The sound comes and goes depending upon the ballpark, the crowd that day. You can’t wait for the sound to tell you every time the ball is going out.”

  Together we turned back to the batting cage, and here it came again. For a brief second that sound, that snap of a ball well hit, broke through the mounting anticipation of another game, no matter how loud the commotion may have been. Another well-hit ball soared into the sky and landed in the stands beyond the fence.

  “Nothing else offers the kind of excitement that a home run does,” Robinson said. “Not even a perfect game. Because a home run is instant—it’s so surprising.”

  And so it was again, this time in Game One of the 1991 World Series. In the bottom of the fifth inning Kent Hrbek roped a 2–0 pitch from Charlie Leibrandt to right field for a stand-up double. Scott Leius followed with a soft single into left, with Hrbek holding at third base. Leibrandt may have trailed only 1–0 at this point, but he wasn’t fooling many of the Twins’ hitters.

  Then came that sound again. Despite the crowd of more than fifty-five thousand at the Metrodome, pretty much all of them now on their feet, cheering and waving those infernal white Homer Hankies, that sound of a dry branch breaking in the woods, an echo of every long fly that’s ever happened in this game, was about to occur again.

  Gagne, the number-nine hitter in the Minnesota hitter, came to the plate. If anything, the Twins’ shortstop wanted to do better this time around, his second appearance in the World Series. Back in 1987, when the Twins defeated the Cardinals, the last time the Metrodome was really transformed into the “Thunderdome” for an extended period, Gagne had hit a paltry .200.

  Now, four years later, Leibrandt got him to swing wildly at an off-speed offering in the dirt. But when the second pitch sailed toward the inside half of the plate, Gagne was ready. With an almost effortless swing, he caught it square and solid, and the ball began to soar toward the left-field fence, landing eight rows or so into the bleachers. With that, Minnesota took a 4–0 lead.

  Decades later, watching footage of the game, you can still hear that sound Robinson talked about. For an instant it was there again. The surprise. The snap. The siren call that Robinson and almost any other slugger who has ever picked up a bat through the years knows by heart. For this is what any slugger dreams about, what they worry won’t ever return when they’re buried in a slump.

  “I told myself to be ready for the fastball,” Gagne said. “Actually, I was looking to go the other way. I wanted to hit the ball in the hole [between the first and second basemen], but I got a hold of it, and out it went.”

  Twins manager Tom Kelly and others on the Minnesota bench were stunned that Leibrandt threw Gagne a low fastball on the inner half of the plate. “That’s what Gags can hit out of the park, and somehow that’s what he got,” Kelly said.

  Years later, in describing this particular home run, Gagne still sounded surprised with himself and what had actually transpired. “It reminds me how unpredictable baseball will always be,” he said. “In my previous at-bat, Leibrandt had made me look foolish. He struck me out, and every pitch had been a changeup. I wasn’t close to any of them.

  “Back in the dugout I talked with Kelly, and he told me to just sit on the change. Just be ready for that one pitch. I’ll be honest with you—that made me kind of uncomfortable. Everybody has a different approach at the plate, and somebody like Dan Gladden, well, he could go up there looking off-speed and be confident that he could also get around on the hard stuff. I wasn’t so sure of myself. . . . But my last at-bat had been so lousy, I decided to try it Danny’s way.

  “So I’m up there now, looking for Leibrandt’s changeup, and he had a good one too. I just wanted to drive it the other way. Then he threw me a fastball, and it caught too much of the inner half of the plate.”

  When Gagne saw the fastball from Leibrandt, he simply reacted to it. “If I’d thought at all about it, I would have missed it. It would have been by me,” he said. “I saw fastball and just swung, and as soon as I hit it I knew it was gone.”

  The homer was Gagne’s fourth in postseason play and the first ever given up in the playoffs by Leibrandt, who was soon lifted from the game and replaced by reliever Jim Clancy.

  The Twins squandered a chance to break the game wide open later in the same inning when Gladden was thrown out at the plate. With one out and Gladden on third base, Brian Harper hit a liner down the left-field line. Believing it would drop for a hit, Gladden first broke for the plate and then had to scramble back to the bag when Braves outfielder Brian Hunter caught it.
He compounded his mistake by then trying to tag up and score, coming in with spikes somewhat high on Atlanta catcher Greg Olson. Even though the ball arrived well ahead of Gladden, the resulting collision sent Olson flying backward, rocking him on to his head and flipping him completely over. It became the cover shot on Sports Illustrated. “I never saw Danny do that before,” Kelly later told team announcer Ted Robinson. “You learn from day one that if the ball goes in the air to the outfield, you go back to the base.”

  It wouldn’t be the last bang-bang play with major contact at the plate in this Series. Despite the hard slide, Olson refused to criticize Gladden afterward. Instead, the catcher stuck up for Leibrandt, insisting that outside of the mistake to Gagne, Atlanta’s starting pitcher had done a good job. “He’s got the best changeup on the team,” Olson said. “He struck out Kirby Puckett twice, and anytime you can do that you’ve got to be doing something right.”

  ———

  Legend has it that the Curley brothers, Tom and John, were pretty bummed when they heard that the Sporting News was dropping baseball box scores. The bad news came in late 1990, and we were years away from such results being computerized and available 24/7 on the Internet.

  So when the Curley brothers heard about the “Bible of Baseball” dropping full boxes, their first reaction was, how were they going to keep their fantasy league going? But the baseball-loving brothers held a far different station in life from most seamheads. As top executives for the Gannett Corporation, they soon realized that if the Sporting News wasn’t going to publish baseball box scores anymore, they very well could.

  In short order they told Paul White, then baseball editor for USA Today, to pull together a prototype of what a baseball-only, tabloid-style publication could look like, with a week’s worth of box scores filling up the back end. The frenzied process continued into the new year, and soon several of the top advertisers in the United States—Budweiser, General Motors and Miller—showed major interest. A staff of twenty was proposed, and after some dickering, eighteen of us came on board, the new tenants on the twenty-first floor of the second of the company’s skyscrapers along the Potomac River.

  Start-ups invariably mean long hours and making up things on the fly. Still, I love them, and I’ve been a part of several during my journalism career (Sports Bulletin, Sports Inc., and The National). Most start-ups fail, and perhaps that’s why I’ll always have a soft spot for Baseball Weekly. It still exists in kind of an altered state out there in the marketplace.

  ———

  What made the “Worst to First” World Series so unlikely, so improbable, was that the Twins and Braves arguably defeated better ballclubs on paper—the Toronto Blue Jays and the Pittsburgh Pirates—in the league championship series. The Blue Jays and Pirates were considered to be among the best teams in baseball, with their rosters studded with such stars as Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Bobby Bonilla, and Barry Bonds. Both teams would lose in gut-wrenching fashion in this year’s postseason. Only one team, the Blue Jays, would soon rebound from such heartbreak.

  In 1991 Toronto’s chances took a major hit in Game Three when Joe Carter, their all-star right fielder, crashed into the outfield wall and injured his ankle. Until this point Toronto seemed to have things well in hand. But with Carter hobbled, coupled with curious decisions by Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston, the Twins soon won out and advanced to the World Series.

  The League Championship Series began in 1969 as a five-game series and expanded to a seven-game format in 1985. Back in 1991 that seemed to favor the Blue Jays, who had a deeper pitching staff than Minnesota did. Yet Gaston chose knuckleballer Tom Candiotti to pitch the first game in Minneapolis over young fireballer Juan Guzmán and consistent left-hander Jimmy Key. The Twins scored two runs in the first and second innings off Candiotti and held on for a 5–4 victory.

  In Game Two of the ALCS the Blue Jays did what other teams could only dream of: they defeated the Twins in the Metrodome. With Guzmán in command, Toronto stopped Minnesota from winning its eighth consecutive game at home, which would have tied a postseason record.

  After gaining a split on the road, Toronto returned home and once again appeared to have the pitching advantage. Twins right-hander Scott Erickson may have gone 20–8 during the regular season and been nicknamed “The Prince of Darkness” for using a black glove and wearing dark socks on the days he pitched, but due to a sore elbow, his aura of invincibility had been broken weeks ago. In Game Three Erickson’s scowl was still there, yet his pitches lacked velocity. Twins manager Tom Kelly later admitted that he had been worried when Erickson threw thirty-one pitches in the first inning as the Blue Jays took a 2–0 lead. “Damn right I was worried,” he said. “[You’re] trying to get through a best-of-seven series with just three starters like we are, then you’d be worried too.”

  As Erickson labored, Toronto starter Jimmy Key tied an American League postseason record by retiring the first eleven batters he faced. In the top of the fifth, though, Carter climbed the fence in right, trying to corral Shane Mack’s hard liner. In doing so, Carter strained ligaments in his right ankle, and Mack’s drive went for a triple. He would later score on Kent Hrbek’s groundout.

  “Sure, you wonder what could have been,” Carter said years later. “You wish you could always play at your best, be healthy. Unfortunately that’s not the nature of the game. It’s something you file away and look to have go your way the next time you find yourself in that position.”

  Meanwhile Kelly successfully deployed his bullpen, setting down several Toronto threats. The game went into extra innings, and this would soon be a trend for this postseason, when the Twins caught lightning in a bottle. Mike Pagliarulo homered off rookie reliever Mike Timlin, and then Rick Aguilera pitched a scoreless inning to cement the Minnesota victory.

  Kelly said Pagliarulo’s home run “surprised everyone in the stadium, including me.”

  After hitting just .254 for San Diego, Pagliarulo signed with the Twins before the 1991 season. “I wasn’t begging for a job,” he later insisted. “There were a couple of teams still interested. But I needed to find a situation that was right for me. That’s why I signed with the Twins.”

  In doing so, he got together with Twins hitting coach Terry Crowley, who tweaked Pagliarulo’s swing, searching for more power. “A lot of people thought he was washed up,” Kirby Puckett said. “But we knew he could play.”

  The next two games would be in Toronto, and Puckett cautioned that his Twins “weren’t exactly in the driver’s seat.” Still, the Blue Jays were heading for the ditch thanks to the extra-inning loss and Carter’s injury. The Toronto slugger stayed in the lineup as the designated hitter and tried to stay active by playing ping-pong in the Blue Jays’ clubhouse. But it was no good. With Toronto already holding a 1–0 lead, Carter struck out with two men on in the third inning.

  The Twins took Game Four, 9–3, and then clinched the AL pennant by scoring six runs in the last four innings to win 8–5 the following evening.

  As Gladden drifted back to catch a fly ball on the warning track for the final out, CBS Sports’ Dick Stockton told viewers, “And the Minnesota Twins have gone from the cellar to the penthouse in the American League.”

  Once again the Blue Jays had come close to reaching the World Series, only to fade in the ALCS. Three times (1985, 1989, and now 1991) in the previous six years Toronto had been one step away from reaching its first World Series and fell agonizingly short.

  Despite such disappointment, Blue Jays general manager Pat Gillick decided to retain Gaston as his manager. “We had a very patient ownership group in Toronto, which allowed us to build that team the way it should be,” Gillick explained decades later. “It was like we were climbing a mountain. We went through a lot of trials and tribulations. We made the playoffs in ninety-one, and we didn’t get there. All those bumps along the road just make you appreciate when you do win a World Series.”

  Thanks in large part to Gillick’s patience, the Blue Jays fin
ally did reach baseball’s summit the season after losing to the Twins. It began a run for the Blue Jays that would see them win two consecutive World Series titles, the first team to do so since the New York Yankees in 1977 and 1978.

  Gillick was once asked what makes a general manager successful. “Respect,” he replied. “Not respect for myself but respect for the employees who are in those positions. Many times we hire people to do jobs, and we don’t let them do their jobs.”

  To be an effective leader Gillick believed that “you have to be a good listener. And you can’t be a good listener when you’re talking.”

  Gillick maintained that his employees “knew that I listened to them. They went back and said, ‘I made a contribution. He listened to me. He took in what I had to say. He may not have done exactly what I told him to do, but I know he listened to me.’”

  Gillick would eventually be selected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, a member of the class of 2011, along with former Twins pitcher Bert Blyleven and former Blue Jay Roberto Alomar.

  Back in 1991, though, Gillick seemed a long way away from the victory champagne. This time around it was Andy MacPhail’s eyes that were smarting, his hair matted down from a dousing of the bubbly after the Twins took the American League pennant. In the victorious Twins’ clubhouse, he was the general manager explaining how he had rebuilt his ballclub into a pennant winner when a massive right hand broke through the throng surrounding him.

  “Thanks for that phone call,” said Twins designated hitter Chili Davis, who signed with Minnesota during the previous offseason. Davis, like Mike Pagliarulo, had proven to be a key addition for Minnesota.

  “Thanks for coming here,” replied MacPhail. “Thanks for leaving home.”