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

  Heading into the postseason Lemke decided that he had no reason to worry. “We had other superstars, so right away that took a lot of pressure off me,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I would, in turn, look out at the pitcher say, ‘The pressure’s on you. We all know who the big bats are. You have to get me out.’”

  In the middle innings of Game Three it appeared that the Braves could ride starting pitcher Steve Avery to their first World Series victory. After the fielding mishap in the first inning, which resulted in the Twins’ first run, Avery cruised into the seventh inning with a 4–1 lead. That’s when Kirby Puckett, who had struggled to this point, drove the second pitch he saw well out to left field. The blow was only a solo shot and the Braves retained a two-run lead, but the Twins’ bats were on the verge of waking up.

  An inning later, after Twins pinch-hitter Brian Harper reached on an error by Terry Pendleton, Atlanta manager Bobby Cox decided to go to his bullpen. Managers point out that they make so many choices in any game that it can be easy to second-guess. Although Cox could have kept Avery in the game—he had set down fifteen in a row at one point—the left-hander did seem to be tiring. Into the game came right-hander Alejandro Peña, who had come over from the New York Mets during the regular season and recorded three saves in the NLCS against Pittsburgh. A hard-throwing right-hander, Peña worked the count to 1–1 on another Twins pinch-hitter, Chili Davis.

  But as they say, baseball is a game of adjustments, ones often made on the fly. When Davis found he couldn’t get around on Peña’s fastball over the inside half of the plate, he opted to hit the next one he saw the other way. “Right after that he threw me a fastball up and away, and I fouled it straight back,” Davis recalled years later. “That’s when I said to myself, ‘Man, if you throw that one more time, I ain’t missing it.’ Then he threw it again. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Davis got his arms extended and was able to drive the ball out the opposite way to left field, tying the game at 4–4. “That stadium in Atlanta was a great place to hit in,” Davis said. “If I’d played in that ballpark instead of Candlestick Park, I might have four hundred or more home runs today.”

  As Terry Pendleton watched Davis’s home run sail into the seats, he couldn’t believe how the tables had been turned once again in the Series. “Just when you feel like it’s under control, they come back and tie the ballgame,” he recalled. “It’s not a good feeling. But that’s what that series soon became all about. You never felt easy with where you stood, even when you had the lead.”

  After this new swing in momentum, Peña was fortunate to hold Minnesota to just two runs scored in the inning. The Braves’ reliever gave up singles to Chuck Knoblauch and Kent Hrbek, and the Twins appeared poised to take the lead and seize control of the series. At this point Peña bore down, going with hard stuff to strike out Puckett and Shane Mack. The contest was now tied at 4–4.

  After the Braves went down in order in the bottom of the frame, both teams put men in scoring position in the ninth inning, but neither squad could score. With that, Game Three headed into extra innings in search of a hero, and an unlikely one would soon emerge.

  More baseball in Atlanta meant that the chant of the Tomahawk Chop became ever-present, loud, and obnoxious, the new soundtrack of this Fall Classic and soon to be on the greatest hits playlist for postseason action. Legend has it that Deion Sanders brought the cheer to Georgia after the chop became a hit at Florida State in the eighties. Sanders was a two-time All-American cornerback for coach Bobby Bowden at FSU, whose nickname is the Seminoles. To properly perform the cheer one needs to swing an arm, hinging at the elbow, in rhythm with the OHHH, a-ooooo cadence of those around you. Go ahead—it’s easy to follow along.

  Once The Chop took hold in Atlanta, many fans really got into the swing of things, so to speak, by wielding Styrofoam tomahawks back and forth in time with the chant. Such accessories were found at the souvenir stands inside the Atlanta stadium. No matter that the Tomahawk Chop and the war chant had no basis in Native American history or in the South itself, The Chop was here to stay.

  In fact, the cheering and chanting soon became so controversial that protests greeted fans outside of both stadiums during the Series. “We want Ted Turner to meet with us and put a stop to this stupid, ignorant, racist behavior,” Clyde Bellecourt, founder and chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), told the (Baltimore) Sun. “Why don’t they just call them the Atlanta Bishops? They don’t issue crucifixes when people come in the gate. They don’t wave crucifixes when someone hits a homer. Why don’t they call them the Klansmen, so they all wear sheets? How would the American people feel about that? During the seventh-inning stretch, they could hang Jews and blacks.”

  The protests, which many consider the first united opposition to Indian sports nicknames, certainly put Jane Fonda in an uncomfortable position. The onetime activist sat alongside Turner, her husband, cheering for the Braves, despite that she had been arrested as part of an AIM protest in Seattle in 1970. When asked how he felt when he saw Fonda doing The Chop, Bellecourt replied, “I feel betrayed.”

  The chanting became louder as the Braves put two men on with two out in the bottom of the tenth, only to see pinch-hitter Jeff Blauser line out to Chuck Knoblauch at second. As the innings went by, Twins manager Tom Kelly kept a parade of pinch-hitters going up to the plate. Disgruntled about the lack of a designated hitter in the National League ballparks, Kelly was still determined to deploy his deep bench and keep his pitchers from being a laughingstock with a bat in hand. Here in Game Three, Kelly used his pinch-hitters in the following order: Gene Larkin (sixth inning), Brian Harper (eighth), Chili Davis (eighth), Mike Pagliarulo (ninth), Randy Bush (ninth), Paul Sorrento (tenth), Al Newman (eleventh), and Rick Aguilera (twelfth). Yes, that last guy is a pitcher.

  Near the end of the regular season Kelly ordered his pitchers to take batting practice under the watchful eye of hitting coach Terry Crowley. Aguilera, who had come over from an occasional at-bat in the National League, remembered the sessions becoming pretty competitive, reminding him of times with the Mets when Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, and even Sid Fernandez swung away for team bragging rights. For his part, Kelly wasn’t nearly as impressed with most of the Twins’ pitchers when they had a bat in hand. “We got through [Game Three] with only one pitcher getting embarrassed,” Kelly said.

  That was starter Scott Erickson, who struck out on three pitches in the third inning.

  “We saved everybody else from that, and I felt good about that,” the Twins’ manager added. “I didn’t want my pitchers to go up there and have to hit. It was a joke. [They] had no chance.”

  With so much mixing and matching, Kelly used a record eight pinch-hitters and a record number of twenty-three players in the ballgame. The only guys who didn’t see action in Game Three for the Twins were pitchers Kevin Tapani and Jack Morris, who was scheduled to pitch the next evening.

  Aguilera was warming up to pitch the bottom of the twelfth when the bullpen phone rang, asking whether he wanted to swing the bat too. Aguilera said sure, and moments later he ran down to the Twins’ dugout to put on a helmet and try to find a bat. “I grabbed the lightest bat that I could find,” he said. “To this day I don’t recall whose bat it was.”

  As the top of the twelfth inning unfolded the Twins had another major opportunity to go up three games to zip in the best-of-seven series. With one out, Gladden singled to right, and Knoblauch reached on an error by Braves second baseman Mark Lemke. Kent Hrbek, who was being constantly jeered by the Atlanta fans for his tussle with Ron Gant in Game Two, struck out in short order. When the Braves intentionally walked Kirby Puckett, that left the bases loaded with two out and the pitcher’s spot coming up. Kelly figured his closer, Aguilera, could do a better job at the plate than Mark Guthrie, who had never swung a bat in a big-league game to this point in his career. Even though Aguilera had last batted in 1989, he did have a .203 career average, with three home runs and eleven RB
Is, and he was originally signed as a shortstop. As a result, the Twins’ closer became the first pitcher to pinch-hit in a World Series game since 1965, when the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale faced the Twins’ Jim Kaat. In addition, Aguilera was the first pitcher to pinch-hit in the Fall Classic since the advent of the designated hitter in 1973.

  As Aguilera stepped into the batters’ box—Aguilera and Greg Olson had once been in the Mets’ organization together—he jokingly asked catcher Olson what Braves reliever Jim Clancy was going to throw him. Olson replied that they planned to come right at him, and, indeed, Clancy’s first pitch was a hard slider.

  “Believe it or not, I felt pretty comfortable in that at-bat,” Aguilera recalled. “I was seeing the ball.”

  Clancy’s first pitch, a slider in the dirt, was blocked nicely by Olson. The second offering was a fastball on the outside corner. Years later Aguilera wondered whether he should have swung at that one, perhaps flared it to right field. But the bat sat on his shoulder for that offering. Clancy’s third pitch was another fastball, moving over the inside part of the plate, and Aguilera went for it.

  “I got a decent swing on it, but I got jammed a little bit,” he said. “Not enough to get it in the gap. I knew that I made pretty good contact, so it was not going to bloop in over the shortstop’s head. It was hit better than that. But I also knew it probably wasn’t hit hard enough to get in the gap or get over Ron Gant’s head. So it was decent contact and put your head down and run to first base. [Clancy] just got a little bit inside on me.”

  In the end Aguilera gave a good account of himself, driving a ball fairly deep to center field, where Gant had to make a running catch. Still, it went down as nothing more than another out in the scorebook, and the Twins had left the bases loaded.

  “I surprised a few people,” Aguilera added. “I know Crowley was impressed. I didn’t embarrass myself, and I didn’t embarrass TK for putting me in there. In looking back on it I’m more disappointed about how I did on the mound in the next inning.”

  Kelly added, “We tried to win the game within a nine- or ten-inning structure, and we couldn’t get the job done. We had our chances. We had the hitters we wanted up in those situations, but they just couldn’t get the job done.”

  Chili Davis, one of the few pinch-hitters to deliver on this night, added, “We get those opportunities again, and I guarantee you we get some runs.”

  Aguilera’s well-hit out also got Mark Lemke off the hook. The Braves’ second baseman had stood with his head down, pawing the dirt with his feet after making the error on Knoblauch’s grounder that put the winning run in scoring position in the top of the twelfth. When Cox went to the mound to make a pitching change, Lemke tried to push the word “goat” out of his mind. Teammates told him not to worry about it—keep his head up. Still, Lemke knew he had put the Braves “in a real tough situation.”

  Now that the Braves had wriggled out of the jam, Lemke would soon have the chance to redeem himself and, possibly, end Game Three. During the regular season Lemke had batted just .234, with a pair of home runs and twenty-three RBIs. He remained a utility guy who struggled so much that he sought out the advice of Terry Pendleton, the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1991, who told Lemke to put the regular season behind. “When the playoffs start nobody cares what you did back then,” Pendleton said. “They only care about what you do in the playoffs and the World Series. That’s what people remember.”

  Lemke took the veteran’s advice so much to heart that he began using Pendleton’s bats when the third baseman wasn’t looking. “I guess you could say he had open range to them,” Pendleton said. “Mine was a bigger bat than the one he’d been using—thirty-six inch, thirty-two ounces. With my bat he started to do what he was capable of doing.”

  Lemke remembered that he “was getting out on too many balls tailing away. So Terry and I talked, and he suggested that I go with a bigger bat, so I tried his. It was about two inches longer and several ounces heavier than mine, and sure enough I was able to get good wood on those outside pitches. With that bat I began to flair them the opposite way, and with each hit that postseason my confidence really grew.”

  The twelfth inning soon became one curious situation heaped upon another for Aguilera. Not only had the Twins’ closer pinch-hit, almost giving the Twins the lead, but now he began the inning of a tie game—not with the lead, which closers usually prefer. Also, he was making his third appearance in a row, realizing that he would probably need to keep pitching until the game was decided. Aguilera knew that he was in it for the long haul, ready for “two, three, or more innings,” he said. “I knew I was the last guy.”

  Later Aguilera admittedly became too fine with his pitches.

  With one out in the bottom of the twelfth, David Justice singled and stole second after Brian Hunter popped out. The theft was the Braves’ first stolen base of the series, underscoring Nixon’s absence. Olsen drew a walk off Aguilera, and that brought Lemke up with two on, two out, and the hometown Chop crowd raising a real ruckus now.

  Batting left-handed against Aguilera, Lemke worked the count to 1–1. Aguilera threw him a pitch on the outer half of the plate, and Lemke stroked it the opposite way. As the crowd roared, the ball dropped in front of Twins left fielder Dan Gladden, who came up throwing. Charging around third base, Justice cut to the inside and slid in just ahead of Harper, who was trying to apply the tag.

  Safe at the plate, Justice had won the game for the Braves, and Lemke’s hit had given the hometown team its first World Series victory ever in the South.

  “We’ve been on such a roller coaster ride,” Olson said afterward. “We really felt if we could win this game, we could win the Series. But if we lost, who knows what would happen.”

  “The weirdest thing in this game is that Clancy gets the win for getting out a pitcher,” said Kevin Tapani, one of the few Twins who didn’t play in Game Three.

  The Twins’ Randy Bush added, “It could have been a storybook ending for Aggie. But nobody here is down. If anything, you can’t wait to play again after a game like that.”

  That said, the Twins knew they had missed a golden opportunity to go up three games to none in the Series. In battling back to win in extra innings, the Braves had guaranteed that a more boisterous crowd of Tomahawk Choppers would be back tomorrow night.

  ———

  Game Four

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1991

  AT ATLANTA-FULTON COUNTY STADIUM

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  Less than twenty-four hours after the Braves’ extra-inning victory the two teams were ready to go back at it, with a pitching matchup between youth and experience. Atlanta’s John Smoltz was eager to take on his boyhood idol, Jack Morris. Interested parties, though, couldn’t quite leave last night’s game in the rearview mirror. Twins manager Tom Kelly said that if Game Three had gone on much longer, he would have had outfielder Dan Gladden pitch and shifted reliever Rick Aguilera to the outfield.

  “If I’d gone to the mound,” Gladden said, “I would have been the most underpaid pitcher out there.”

  Commissioner Fay Vincent declared that Game Three had been one of the best ever played in postseason history, comparing it with Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Series, the 1986 National League Championship Series between the New York Mets and Houston Astros, and Kirk Gibson’s dramatic homer off Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series.

  Vincent added that the World Series coming to Atlanta and the South for the first time gave this series “a freshness. The tomahawking, the chanting makes it special.”

  Undoubtedly, the Twins disagreed.

  In Game Four Minnesota again took the early lead as Mike Pagliarulo singled in Harper, who had doubled to lead off the top of the second inning.

  In the bottom of the third inning Morris was sailing along, striking out Smoltz and Lonnie Smith. He seemed to be in control until Terry Pendleton smacked a 3–1 fastball, driving it out for a home run to right-center field
. The game was tied at 1–1 and promised to be another tense one.

  “That’s the way almost every game of that Series was,” Scott Leius remembered. “Soon you just kind of fell into it, just going from pitch to pitch, inning to inning, knowing you’d come out the other end—someday, somehow.”

  By the bottom of the fifth Morris was falling behind too many Atlanta batters. Smith led off the inning with a single to left field. In the stands Jane Fonda sat alongside Braves owner Ted Turner, both of them wearing Atlanta ballcaps, and to Turner’s left was former president Jimmy Carter. They cheered as Smith stole second base, moving into scoring position for Pendleton, who had homered two innings earlier. The National League MVP smoked a line drive to center field, which sailed over Kirby Puckett’s head. In a base-running blunder and a harbinger of what was to come, Smith mistakenly tagged up. As a result, he was at least a step late rounding third base as Braves third-base coach Jimy Williams waved him toward home.

  Chuck Knoblauch took the relay throw from Puckett and briefly appeared surprised that Smith was even trying to score on the play. Knoblauch collected himself and threw accurately to Harper at home plate. The ball arrived on a difficult in-between hop the instant before Smith ran headlong into Harper, who was on his knees. The force of the collision knocked Harper onto his back, with Smith flying over the top of him.

  “I thought Kirby [Puckett] was going to catch it, so I got a few steps down the line,” Smith recalled. “When I saw it drop in I knew I had to kick in the speed. I came around third, and I saw Brian catch the ball. I couldn’t go around him and I couldn’t go under him because he was down.”