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

  Davis smiled and said, “It was the best phone call I’ve ever made.”

  In becoming the first team to win three games on the road in a league championship series, the Twins had plenty of heroes to go around, many of whom MacPhail had brought aboard. Besides Pagliarulo and Davis, there were pitchers Kevin Tapani, David West, and Rick Aguilera. Those young arms had come to the Twin Cities in a controversial trade with the New York Mets when MacPhail sent staff ace Frank Viola packing. Tapani, West, and Aguilera had pitched in the deciding game against Toronto.

  “I said it last year when it wasn’t a popular thing to say, but I’ll say it again: everybody got what they thought they were going to get in that trade,” MacPhail said. “The Mets got a twenty-game winner. They were a big market team—they could afford him. We needed numbers. We needed a little bit of relief from payroll. We got the young pitchers we thought we were getting, and they got the big-stud left-hander that they thought they were getting.”

  ———

  In the bottom of the sixth inning of World Series Game One, the Twins’ Kent Hrbek lofted a high foul ball down the left-field line. Braves third baseman Terry Pendleton drifted over toward the temporary box seats where the game’s VIPs were often seated, but he couldn’t snag it. Instead the ball came straight down, striking Anne Vincent, the commissioner’s daughter, on the back of the head. She would be taken to the Metrodome’s first-aid room, but she refused treatment. Sporting a good-sized lump, she soon returned to her seat.

  “She was more embarrassed than anything,” said Fay Vincent, her father and baseball’s commissioner.

  Anne Vincent was still rubbing the back of her head when Hrbek laced a 3–1 offering from Braves reliever Jim Clancy into the upper deck in right field. The solo shot gave the Twins a four-run lead. After going only 3-for-21 (.143) in the ALCS against Toronto, Hrbek already had a double and home run in the 1991 World Series.

  A local hero in the Twin Cities, he grew up near the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington and in 1982 was the runner-up to Cal Ripken for American League Rookie of the Year. A big guy, outspoken and even goofy, Hrbek was a favorite with fans and media alike. ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian once called Hrbek “the most human baseball player ever.”

  “The only person who tells me what to do now is my wife,” Hrbek once said. “TK [manager Tom Kelly] can’t tell me to bunt. The coaches can’t tell me what to do. The only person I take orders from is my wife. She told me to cut the lawn today. So I cut the lawn.”

  If Herbie was smiling and circling the bases, then life was good in Twins Land. But one wouldn’t know it from by looking at Kelly. The Twins’ manager either had a scowl or thin smile as he watched the Series begin to unfold. Sure, he slapped hands with Hrbek, even stealing another glance down to the commissioner’s box to see how Anne Vincent was doing. But Kelly was already scheming how best to shut down the Braves over the next three innings, the quickest way to securing nine outs and the victory of this World Series game.

  In 1991 Tom Kelly and Andy MacPhail may have been the oddest couple in baseball. MacPhail’s father, Lee, once presided as president of the American League, and his grandfather, Larry, was general manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees. In comparison, Kelly came from the other side of the tracks. The oldest son of a minor-league pitcher, Kelly was born in Graceville, Minnesota, and this gave him as much claim to being a local hero as Hrbek. In reality Kelly spent much of his childhood in New Jersey, where his father pursued semi-pro baseball.

  “We’d always wondered what Tom would be doing if he wasn’t in baseball,” his younger brother, Joe, once said. “Thankfully, none of us ever had to find out.”

  “If I wasn’t managing baseball, what would I be doing?” Tom Kelly answered. “Probably be [working] on a farm.”

  Undoubtedly on a farm with race horses. Until a few months before the 1991 World Series began he and his brother had owned several harness horses and ran them at Freehold, the Yonkers and the Meadowlands raceways. “We were small-time,” Joe Kelly said. “It was a hobby for us. We sure didn’t get rich from it.”

  Together the brothers mucked stalls and walked their horses over a few winters. “It gave me an understanding of horses,” Kelly later told the New York Times, “and I think you can often understand people when you understand horses. I learned patience. I learned that you can’t be too hard on horses. I learned the saying in racing: ‘If you send out a good horse, you’ll get a good horse back. Send out a lame horse, and you’ll get a lame horse back.’

  “So I like to rest my players as often as I can. You want to keep them healthy. And that’s why I try to use the entire roster of players. And attitude is important with horses and players. I like to rest a player on the up note. If he goes 0-for-four and I rest him, he’s bothered about his bad day. But if he goes two-for-three and I rest him, he’s a happier player.”

  Although there were lessons to be learned at the horse track, nothing overshadowed the ball diamond for Tom Kelly. He played in the minors for thirteen seasons, and in 1975 he reached the Twins for forty-nine games, where he batted .181 and hit his only major-league home run off the Tigers’ Vern Ruhle. In 1987, his first time managing in postseason play, Kelly was sometimes abrasive and ill at ease with the influx of media. But he huddled with media consultants before the 1991 postseason and then insisted he was actually enjoying his team’s return to the World Series.

  Certainly his players enjoyed playing for him. Hrbek told a story about when the Twins once trailed the Angels, 3–0.

  “You ain’t doing diddly, TK,” said Hrbek, who had been given the day off and wasn’t at his usual post in the field.

  “Think you can do better, Herbie?” Kelly replied.

  “Can’t do worse.”

  So Kelly sat alone at the end of the bench, and nobody did much of anything as the Twins rallied to tie the game.

  “That’s it, Skip,” Hrbek finally said. “I’m exhausted from thinking so much. You have it back.”

  The bench broke up as Kelly once again officially took the helm.

  ———

  Heading into the top of the eighth inning, Kelly and the Twins appeared to be in control. They held a 5–1 lead, with their best pitcher, Jack Morris, on the mound. Despite such success, Kelly debated with himself whether to lift his staff ace. The Twins’ bullpen was well rested after having five days off before the start of the World Series, and the Minnesota manager noticed that Morris didn’t exactly have his best stuff in Game One. The right-hander with the bushy mustache, which gave him the air of an ornery aging gunslinger, had gotten by more on grit and guile this evening. Still, he had thrown only eighty-nine pitches to this point, so Kelly decided to let him start the eighth inning against the top of the Atlanta order, his fourth time through the lineup.

  From the get-go, Kelly realized that leaving Morris in the game was a mistake, perhaps even a game-changer. He watched his starting pitcher walk Lonnie Smith and then Jeff Treadway to start the inning. That put two men on with none out, leaving the Twins’ bullpen in a bit of a bind. Kelly, like many managers, liked to give his relievers a clean slate when possible—nobody on base to start an inning. In his autobiography, Season of Dreams, Kelly said that his father, a minor-league pitcher, instilled another important lesson in him: “When you see the ball hit hard, it’s time to make a change. If you’ve seen some warning signs and you wait too long, then you’re not doing your job.”

  Although Morris hadn’t exactly shot up red flares of distress—he had sent down the Braves in order in the seventh—by this inning he was out of sorts, slipping several times in his delivery to the mound.

  “Jack was such a competitor that he rarely wanted to come out of games,” catcher Brian Harper said. “He was from the old school, where starting pitchers were determined to finish what they started. He was a throwback to guys like Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan. But he had also pitched a lot of innings that year and the seasons before. He was a wo
rkhorse, no doubt about it, but TK knew that sometimes those are the guys you have to really keep an eye on.”

  Later Morris said he had “just run out of gas” in Game One. So much so that when Kelly came out to the mound, Morris simply handed him the ball without any protest. Atlanta had two men on with the heart of their order—Terry Pendleton, David Justice, and Ron Gant—due up. The first Twins’ reliever would be left-hander Mark Guthrie to face the switch-hitting Pendleton.

  As things shifted in their favor, many in the Braves’ dugout began to manipulate their hats, going to their “rally caps.” This had become the team’s MO during the great run in the second half of the season, catching the Dodgers and then upsetting the Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League Championship Series. Although rally caps, an appeal to the baseball gods, seemingly have been around forever, they didn’t really take off at the big-league level until 1977 with the Texas Rangers. Those on the bench turned their ballcaps inside out or backward to inspire a rally, usually in the later innings. During the 1986 season the Boston Red Sox, Houston Astros, and New York Mets joined in, with the Mets continuing the practice all the way to a World Series title.

  Certainly no ballclub ever had as many rally formations for their team lids than the 1991 Braves. There was the “Bonnet,” where the back of the cap was tucked in and the bill pointing upward, and the “Spout,” in which cap wasn’t turned completely inside out and the bill of the cap stuck out like a spout of a watering can or jug.

  “We didn’t invent the rally caps, but we sure had a lot of fun with them,” said Mark Grant, who traveled with the team and was in uniform on the Braves’ bench despite missing the season with a torn labrum in his pitching shoulder. “We started to develop different types of rally caps for different times of the game. Pretty much everybody got into it because not only was it fun, but the rally caps thing seemed to be working for us.”

  Atlanta’s favorite saw the bill turned sidewise, sitting atop the head like a dorsal fin on a large fish. This rendition, credited to pitcher Steve Avery, was simply called the “Shark” and was deployed “when we’ve got a rally in progress and we want to go for the kill,” the left-hander explained. Now, in Game One, many players on the Atlanta bench, urged on by Grant and Avery, turned their cap around in this fashion, a smile creeping across their faces. They had rallied many times in the late innings this season, so why not do it again? This time in the belly of the beast—the feared Metrodome.

  Only a few days ago the Braves had shut out the favored Pirates in back-to-back games behind young pitchers Avery and John Smoltz to reach the Fall Classic. “I was doing deep-breathing exercises,” Braves general manager John Schuerholz remembered. “I was trying prayerful concentration, anything I thought could work.”

  Against Pittsburgh, Braves pitchers had stopped Barry Bonds, one of the game’s best hitters. “We noticed that Barry had a tendency to swing for the fences once the playoffs rolled around,” explained Atlanta pitching coach Leo Mazzone. “He was such a great hitter during the regular season, but we felt the bigger the game, the more he tried to pull the ball and jack it out of the park. We felt we could get him out down and away, that we could pitch him so that he could do everything but pull it.”

  Bonds hit only .148 in the 1991 NLCS versus Atlanta and didn’t drive in a run.

  Behind Avery, the Braves won Game Six of the NLCS, 1–0, and a night later they took Game Seven, 4–0, with Smoltz in command. As Mazzone pointed out decades later, “[We] had a twenty-one-year-old, a twenty-three-year-old, and a twenty-five-year-old, Steve Avery, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine, plus Pete Smith and Charlie Leibrandt, a guy a lot of people thought was washed up. They got us to the seventh game of the World Series.”

  Avery pitched a playoff record sixteen and a third scoreless innings in the NLCS, prompting Pirates outfielder Andy Van Slyke to say, “If he’s going to keep pitching like that, I’m going to come up with a disease every time we see him. It’s going to be some kind of stomach disorder, Avery-itis. No, make that Poison Avery.”

  Certainly some kind of malady hit hard in the Steel City after the 1991 NCLS. Thanks to the game’s economics, the escalating gap between the rich and poor teams, the small-market Pirates weren’t able to hang on to their stars for much longer. Bonds would sign with the San Francisco Giants after the 1992 season, while Bobby Bonilla would soon join the New York Mets and Van Slyke would finish his career in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

  “Back in ’91 we knew we were right up against the team with the best pitching in baseball,” Van Slyke said. “In looking back on it I think if [the Braves] had gone on that winning streak of theirs earlier in the season, it could have been a different story for us in the NLCS. The reason I say that is they were just on such a great winning streak, we just knew it was going to be tough for us.

  “It’s like when you’re on a run and you get into your third or fourth mile, the endorphins are released in your body and you feel like you could go for another ten miles after that. You could see that those Braves were on an endorphin run when we faced them in the postseason. The way they won—how they won—set them up for the postseason.

  “I think it’s similar to how you see teams that get the wild card these days coming down the stretch. They’re still on this great run, and they aren’t feeling any pressure. They think that they can’t lose. And when you think you can’t lose, you often end up being a better player than you probably are.”

  Of course, the Pirates returned to the playoffs in 1992, only to lose another Game Seven to Atlanta again, as Sid Bream this time rumbled around third base for the winning run. After that, a curse seemed to settle upon western Pennsylvania. Despite management’s best intentions and the construction of a beautiful downtown ballpark, the ballclub wouldn’t finish above .500 for more than two decades and wouldn’t return to postseason play until 2013. Yet such angst and agony was well down the road on this night, the first game of the 1991 World Series. There were most pressing decisions at hand.

  When Jack Morris had been on the mound for Minnesota, the Braves’ Pendleton batted from the left side, going 0-for-3. Despite such success, Tom Kelly liked to turn switch hitters around late in a game, make them hit from the other side. The Twins’ manager felt it played with the batters’ mind. In addition, Pendleton had hit only four of his career-high twenty-two home runs during the regular season from the right side. All in all Kelly liked his odds with a left-hander, even a journeyman like Mark Guthrie, on the mound.

  For a moment it appeared such mind games wouldn’t add up to much, as Pendleton smoked Guthrie’s second pitch to the right-field side of second base. Yet somehow Chuck Knoblauch backhanded the ball on one hop and then threw to Gagne to start a double play. Time and again in the Series the Twins’ middle infielders looked like they had been together for years rather than being thrown together for this season. They could turn a double play with the best of them and, by the end of this Series, would turn a DP for the ages, a pantomime of style and grace, done entirely without a ball.

  Tonight it was good enough for a crucial, real-life twin killing. With first base now open, Guthrie pitched carefully to David Justice, eventually walking him, the third free pass of the inning. That put runners on first and third with two out. Twins closer Rick Aguilera was brought in to face Gant, who singled to bring home Smith. It was Gant’s third hit in the game. Once again the Braves were threatening, with the tying run now coming to the plate. But Aguilera made sure there would be no late-inning heroics from Sid Bream on this evening, as he induced the Braves’ first baseman to fly out to Puckett in center field on his first pitch.

  From there Aguilera would set down the Braves in order in the ninth, and Minnesota took the opening game of the 1991 World Series, 5–2.

  Afterward Kelly walked to the commissioner’s box and gave the lineup card to umpire Steve Palermo. Partially paralyzed in a shooting incident, Palermo had gone to the mound on crutches and thrown out the first pitch. Kelly had seen
Palermo in the Twins’ dugout before the game but wasn’t sure what to say, so he decided to give him the lineup card instead. To Kelly, that seemed more appropriate than any attempt at chit-chat. After all, things were about to get serious in a hurry.

  ———

  Game Two

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1991

  AT HUBERT H. HUMPHREY METRODOME

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  The Metrodome opened for business in April 1982, becoming the third domed facility in baseball, after the Astrodome in Houston and Seattle’s Kingdome. Over the years it would host the World Series, NCAA’s Final Four, the Super Bowl, and such rock headliners as Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. In essence the Metrodome, which was eventually rechristened Mall of America Field, stood as the multipurpose venue that cities were once so eager to embrace. But when you talk to the ballplayers about the Teflon-topped, multipurpose stadium that was slated to be replaced after the 2013 football season, what they remember is the earsplitting noise and that infernal, mesmerizing roof.

  Sellout crowds jammed the Dome in the autumn of 1991, with the off-white lid holding all the commotion inside, making it as loud as a jet plane taking off. One of the loudest noise levels ever recorded at a sports stadium occurred here during the 1987 World Series. St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Joe Magrane wore earplugs, and infielders for both teams had to use hand signals to communicate with each other, with bullpen coaches putting a foot atop the phone receiver. Often it was too loud inside the Metrodome to hear the next call for a reliever, so coaches learned to go with the vibration instead.

  “They ought to nuke this place,” St. Louis manager Whitey Herzog said after his ballclub lost four in a row there in the postseason.

  Opposing pitcher Dan Quisenberry echoed this theme of annihilation, adding, “I don’t think there are any good uses for nuclear weapons, but then, this may be one.”