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

  Besides the high-decibel noise, the stadium’s off-white, daze inducing roof also drove the ballplayers to distraction. As ESPN’s Jim Caple once wrote, the space-age lid was “so thin that you can tell when the sun goes behind a cloud during a day game. You can also hear the rain pelting on the roof during a thunderstorm.”

  Sounds kind of poetic, almost tranquil, doesn’t it? But good luck getting a bead on a ball hit in the air in the old Metrodome, especially with the stands filled and everyone yelling their heads off. “Everybody that plays here has a problem with the roof,” said Chuck Knoblauch, who lost track of a fly ball in the American League Championship Series despite having a season’s experience in the place. “Line drives seem to get lost in the lights. Even a simple pop-up gets lost for a split second.”

  Catcher Brian Harper added, “In outdoor ballparks you can take your eye off the ball and then pick it up again when you’re an outfielder or base runner. You cannot do that in the Metrodome because the ball and roof are so close to being the same color. We knew that on the Twins. We knew that you never took your eye off the ball.”

  Never take your eye off the ball. To their regret, the Braves would be reminded of this adage throughout the series, once at the most inopportune time.

  In Game Two of the 1991 series where the game took place did make headlines again. After the Braves went down in order in the top of the first inning, Twins leadoff hitter Dan Gladden lofted Tom Glavine’s first pitch to short right field. Mark Lemke, who had taken Jeff Treadway’s spot at second base, ran out headlong in pursuit.

  “Lemke has much better range,” Atlanta manager Bobby Cox told the media when explaining the lineup switch.

  Between the roar of the crowd and the tint of the roof, however, Lemke looked like a man chasing his hat in the wind. At the same time Lemke was running out, Braves right fielder David Justice was running in, ready to position himself to make a play on the ball. The two of them bumped together, and the ball fell to the artificial turf, putting Gladden on second base.

  A bit rattled, Glavine walked Knoblauch, and the Twins were in business. Not even Kirby Puckett hitting into a double play could stem the tide as Chili Davis followed by homering to left-center field. The blow staked Minnesota to a 2–0 lead, and the home run was the first World Series hit of Davis’s career.

  The Twins’ slugger initially thought he had hit a Glavine fastball. But later, after studying the replay, he decided it must have been a changeup. “Sometimes a guy guesses right, you know?” Davis said.

  A switch-hitter, Davis was in his eleventh big-league season in 1991 and had come to Minnesota after breaking in with the San Francisco Giants and then spending three seasons with the California Angels. Bothered by a lower-back strain, he was held to 113 games in 1990, hitting only twelve home runs. After the Angels let him go in free agency, the Twins became his only real suitor. Through it all general manager Andy MacPhail believed Davis would be a good fit in the Minnesota order. A switch-hitter, David could balance the Minnesota lineup, helping to protect Kent Hrbek against right-handed pitching.

  Such negotiations underscored the growing divide between the richer and poorer teams in baseball, even back in 1991. The top team payrolls that season belonged to the Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and, ironically, the Oakland Athletics. They were all at $33 million, give or take a few million. The Twins’ payroll stood at more than $22 million, roughly the middle of the pack financially. As a result, MacPhail couldn’t bid that high for such top free agents as Terry Pendleton, Rob Deer, or Darryl Strawberry, especially after signing Steve Bedrosian, Carl Willis, and Jack Morris to bolster the pitching staff.

  Healthy for the 1991 season, Davis led the team in home runs (twenty-nine) and runs batted in (ninety-three). He insisted that he wasn’t on a mission or trying to prove anybody wrong after most teams ignored him during free agency. Still, Davis told his agent, Tom Reich, that “they’ll be sorry that they let me get away. I’m not hurt. I’m not lazy. I’m not stupid.”

  Kelly agreed that Davis’s arrival initially took pressure off Hrbek and Puckett. Then, as he continued his comeback season, Davis’s performance forced everyone to eventually step up their game too. “They didn’t want to be embarrassed by the new guy,” Kelly told the (St. Paul) Star-Tribune. “He helped everybody.”

  But of what help would Davis be when the series shifted to Atlanta for Games Three, Four, and Five? The team’s designated hitter, Davis wouldn’t have a regular spot in the batting order and would probably be relegated to a pinch-hitting role. Hrbek and others feared that could severely slow the Twins’ attack. Through it all Davis tried to stay upbeat. “I think the guys won about 75 percent of the games I didn’t start,” he said.

  ———

  As long as there are umpires, there will be a degree of human error in the game. The national pastime, unlike the National Football League, wouldn’t fully embrace instant replay until the 2014 season. Well-trained human beings, not machines, are always considered the best option, but it can lead to intriguing twists and turns, even with the game’s top officials between the lines.

  Of course, baseball has had plenty of umpiring controversies over the years. For example, Jim Joyce’s blown call in 2010 cost the Tigers’ Armando Galarraga a perfect game. Yet when it comes to postseason miscues, Don Denkinger still tops the list. He became a household name to angry St. Louis fans after he called Jorge Orta safe at first base in the ninth inning of Game Six in the 1985 World Series. Replays showed that Orta was clearly out, and the Cardinals could have closed the game out and been crowned world champions.

  “A bad call—it’s synonymous with my name,” Denkinger told the Associated Press after Jim Joyce’s blown call with Galarraga. “Any time there’s a bad call they call me.”

  He also told ESPN, “Had I got that play right, or they had instant replay and got it corrected, they would remember the ’85 World Series, but they wouldn’t have remembered my name.”

  Six years later after the 1985 controversy, the Braves came into the World Series ready to take advantage on the basepaths. Several of the Twins’ pitchers had high leg kicks, which led to good jumps, and Twins catcher Brian Harper had an average arm at best. “My back and my arm were killing me by the end of that season,” Harper later admitted. “And they liked to run. It wasn’t the most comfortable of situations for me.”

  With two out in the top of the third inning and Lonnie Smith on first base, Gant slapped Kevin Tapani’s 1–1 fastball into left field. Dan Gladden’s throw to third base was off line, and the ball dribbled past the bag toward home plate. Tapani backed up the play, and once he saw Gant take a wide turn around first base, he fired the ball across the diamond to Hrbek.

  In the Twins’ dugout manager Tom Kelly wasn’t thrilled with Tapani’s decision. “I was angry because I don’t like seeing the ball thrown all over the field,” he later wrote. “If Tap makes a bad throw, we have a circus with people running all over the place. We try to stay away from circuses.”

  Yet what ensued proved to be much more than an errant throw and could have played in the main ring at Bozo’s Big Top. Gant beat Tapani’s throw and returned to first base safely, standing up. Hrbek slapped the tag on Gant anyway, and the two of them became entangled, looking like a pair of awkward dancers at the far edge of the dance floor. Together they stumbled into foul territory, with Hrbek still holding the glove with the ball on Gant’s leg. When Gant came off the bag, first baseman umpire Drew Coble called the Braves’ base runner out.

  The Atlanta dugout erupted in protest, with manager Bobby Cox running onto the field to join Gant and first-base coach Pat Corrales in confronting Coble.

  “I was clearly on the base,” Gant later said, pointing out that Hrbek was “double my size.”

  In the official tale of the tape Gant stood six-foot, 170 pounds, with Hrbek four inches taller and easily weighing more than 200 pounds.

  “The officiating has got to be better than that
,” Gant added. “If he hadn’t pulled me off, I would have stayed on the base.”

  Of course, Hrbek had a different interpretation of the pivotal play. “He came into the base and pushed into me. I kind of fell back and he fell over me with his foot coming off the base. If I had pushed him, I’d have pushed him back on the base.”

  The Twins’ first baseman added that he played the moment like “a charge” in basketball.

  Coble had umpired in the American League since 1979, and this was his first World Series appearance. His take on the play? “[Gant] lunged into the bag. His momentum was carrying toward the first-base dugout. When he did that, he began to switch feet. He tried to pick up one foot and bring the other down. . . . [In] my judgment, his momentum carried him over the top of Hrbek.”

  Ironically, Don Denkinger himself was on the field that night, umpiring down the right-field line. A bit of cruel irony that Braves third baseman Terry Pendleton, who was on the Cardinals in the 1985 World Series, couldn’t help but notice.

  At one point, after Game Two, Denkinger took it upon himself to answer questions from the pool reporter directed at Coble. “There is a judgment call by this umpire,” Denkinger declared. “There is no appeal to the plate umpire in this case.”

  The explanations, on the field and after the game, didn’t sit very well with the Braves and certainly not their manager. “You don’t like to cry about umpire’s call,” Bobby Cox said. “[But] you can’t move a guy off an occupied base. I don’t care if it’s just a little nudge. You can’t do it. I don’t think [Coble] meant to call the play wrong, but in our minds it was wrong. It was as simple as that.”

  The Twins’ Dan Gladden disagreed: “The only thing controversial about that play,” he said years later, “was that Ron Gant forgot to slide.”

  Watching from the Minnesota dugout, catcher Brian Harper also noted who the men in blue were this evening. He had been on the 1985 Cardinals along with Pendleton. Until Denkinger’s blown call, Harper was in line to be the hero, as his pinch-hit single had driven in the go-ahead run for St. Louis. In fact, Harper was rehearsing his answers for the press with teammate Andy Van Slyke, another member of that Cardinals team, when Denkinger called Orta safe.

  “Andy was asking me the usual questions,” Harper said. “How does it feel to win the World Series? That kind of stuff until Orta was ruled safe. Then it all went out the window. I was soon forgotten when it came to being the World Series hero.”

  In this World Series game things settled down without anybody being ejected. That had been Cox’s main goal when he left the dugout—to make sure Gant didn’t get tossed. Although the Braves’ manager would be ejected a record 158 times during his twenty-nine-year major league career, he was downright civil this time. “Umpires don’t like to be embarrassed,” Cox later explained. “[Coble] probably thought he made the right call.”

  The play wasn’t soon forgotten, though, not in the days or even years to come. Two decades later the Twins offered a Hrbek/Gant bobblehead of the play to the first ten thousand fans through the turnstiles. Even so the Atlanta ballclub remained a bit touchy about what had happened. “[We] begrudgingly gave our approval because although it wasn’t a great moment in Braves history, it was for the Twins,” a Braves’ spokesperson told the (St. Paul) Star Tribune.

  Twenty-two years later, when the Twins visited Atlanta for interleague play, Gladden brought along his Hrbek jersey and the two-headed bobblehead for announcing the game on Twins radio. After the Braves swept that two-game series he decided the whole incident “was still cursed, at least from my point of view. Winning in Atlanta, at least for teams from Minnesota, rarely seems to work out.”

  ———

  Seeing a chance to tie the game go by the boards would annoy many starting pitchers. Yet Braves starter Tom Glavine was unlike most pitchers. Almost from the time he made the big-league team for good in 1988 Glavine reminded pitching coach Leo Mazzone of Whitey Ford, the staff ace of the New York Yankees dynasty teams in the 1950s and 1960s. Both were left-handed control specialists, used to changing speeds and hitting spots, who kept their composure when the game was on the line. “Tommy is a stoic figure on the mound, like Whitey,” Mazzone said. “And Tommy represents our Braves pitchers the same way Whitey represented those great Yankees teams.”

  In the bottom of the second inning, with the Metrodome faithful cheering for an early knockout, Glavine walked Ken Hrbek but then got Scott Leius to ground into a double play. In the bottom of the third he retired the Twins in order, striking out Dan Gladden and Kirby Puckett.

  Earlier in his career Glavine would show all of his pitches—fastball, curveball, slider, and changeup. But after going 10–12 in 1990 the left-hander had decided to throw his two-seam circle changeup more. In doing so, he reached the twenty-victory plateau for the first time in this season—an amazing turn of events for a pitch he literally picked up one day.

  The story goes that Glavine came to his signature pitch during spring training of 1989. With a fastball that would never be compared with Nolan Ryan’s heater, Glavine knew he needed another offering to keep hitters off balance. Scouts often talk about range when it comes to pitching—that’s why they will settle like crows behind home plate at games, monitoring every pitch with their own individual radar guns. What they often track is the difference in speed between a fastball and whatever kind of breaking ball the pitcher is throwing. A range of only a few miles per hour between different pitches won’t get the job done. Batters will soon adjust and start hitting rockets to the far corners of the ballpark.

  “They can dial up on that heater,” Billy Ripken said. “But Ryan had that nasty hook to go along with the fastball. Randy Johnson had that nasty slider.”

  Glavine experimented with a split-fingered fastball and other breaking pitches, but he couldn’t get any of them to work for him on a consistent basis. One day, in 1989, he was shagging balls during BP when he picked one up and adjusted his grip. His middle and ring fingers extended along the ball’s seams, and he placed the tip of his index finger on top of the thumbnail. It was a more exaggerated grip than the four-seam changeup, and as Glavine threw it back into the infield, he realized he was on to something. The grip wasn’t much different from other breaking pitches, “but it made all the difference to me,” he said.

  So much so that Glavine soon threw his changeup as much as forty times in a game and was never reluctant to deliver it on pivotal counts—3-and-2 or 3-and-1. That’s how much he believed in what he had found. As Braves general manager John Schuerholz later pointed out, Glavine put together an impressive career “with his style of changeup after changeup after changeup. Come and hit this pitch if you think you can. If you do, I’ll make it even more difficult for you to hit it the next time. As a painter of corners, he was an absolute Michelangelo.”

  In Game Two Glavine soon made believers out of the Twins, retiring fifteen batters in a row at one point. With him in control, Atlanta battled back to tie the game at 2–2 in the fifth inning.

  Glavine, like many great athletes of yesteryear, learned early on to do what works and not to think too much about the where and why. When he was growing up every sport still had a season, giving players valuable time to reflect when that equipment from the last season was stowed away in the closet. Glavine’s father, Fred, remembered when a scout wanted to see his son pitch again after Tom had appeared in a late-summer tryout camp before his senior year. The young pitcher told the scout he would have to wait until spring rolled around. Hockey season was on the horizon, and Glavine was so adept at his second sport that he would be offered a scholarship to play hockey at the University of Lowell and later be drafted in the fourth round by the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League.

  For Glavine there were few if any similarities between baseball and hockey. Still, he played them both through high school, believing that the routine gave him time to heal and stay mentally fresh. Of course, today’s youth sports stars rarely are allowed such op
portunities. Once a kid begins to excel at a particular sport, coaches and parents urge him to specialize—play his supposed sport year-round. But in doing so, so much can be lost.

  Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, for example, pitched no-hitters in Little League and excelled so much at high school basketball that he was offered a college basketball scholarship.

  Mark McGwire quit baseball temporarily during his sophomore year in high school to play golf. If he hadn’t been caught up in the steroids controversy, he would be playing in more pro-ams and may have caught on with the senior PGA Tour. He was almost as good with a golf club in his hands as he was with a baseball bat. The Braves’ Deion Sanders was such a well-rounded athlete as a kid that he became the first athlete to play in both a World Series and a Super Bowl. “Parents need to make the major decisions that affect their kids’ lives,” Sanders said. “But when it comes to play, they shouldn’t discourage a broad approach. When a child wants to color, do you tell him to use just one black crayon?”

  Due to the huge influence of travel teams and the tantalizing hope of a college sports scholarship, the days when kids marked the seasons by a particular sport—football in fall, basketball and hockey in winter, and track, lacrosse, and baseball in spring—are just about gone forever. One wonders what would have happened to Glavine, Montana, or Sanders if they were young sports stars in this day and age.

  Summer hockey, fall baseball, indoor winter soccer, elite year-round teams that travel far from their neighborhoods—these are all part of a new kid-centric culture in which specialization supposedly breeds success. But does it?

  Sports psychologist Rick Wolff, author of Coaching Kids for Dummies, cautioned that “excelling in sports has become as much a part of the American dream for parents as getting their kids into the best school and living in the best neighborhoods.”

  Sanders added that parents “are using their kids as a lottery ticket. Before all this money came along, moms and dads didn’t go crazy at games. They didn’t curse their kids and get on them to play better. It was just fun. Now, there’s a Yellow Brick Road, and parents think it’s their ticket.”