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

  “I always was encouraged to read more growing up,” Kelly said, “but I spent more time in the pool hall and playing ball. I used to sit on the buses when we would travel as minor leaguers. There’d be guys reading. And there’d be guys doing some crossword puzzle. There’d be guys shooting the bull. And there was a card game. Well, I was in the card game. I wish I did more reading.”

  After Seattle ownership didn’t land another right-handed bat, Lefebvre’s Mariners couldn’t keep pace with the Twins in the American League West in 1991. Although the Mariners improved in each of Lefebvre’s three seasons at the helm, setting new attendance records, they didn’t come close to winning the division. Even with an 83–79 record, the franchise’s first winning season ever, Lefebvre was fired.

  “I came to Seattle with a mission to make the M’s a winner and build fan support,” he said in a statement. “I feel that we’ve accomplished these goals.”

  It wasn’t good enough. Not with the way things were changing in 1991.

  ———

  With runners at first and third, with one out, the Twins brought in right-hander Steve Bedrosian, who, in 1987, had won the National League Cy Young Award with Philadelphia. Stepping in against him was journeyman Jerry Willard, who was more expendable than Mark Lemke within the Atlanta system. The catcher had spent ten years in the minors and been demoted to the Braves’ Triple-A team in Richmond three times in this season alone. Now, with everything on the line and Lemke standing at third base as the potential winning run, the guy coming to the plate had collected only fourteen at-bats for Atlanta this season.

  “I’d been with several clubs, and it just seemed for a long period of time like I never got a break from 1987 until now,” Willard later explained. “I never got a chance to either be an everyday catcher, a backup catcher or something.”

  After falling behind 1–2 in the count, Willard lofted a high fly ball to right field, and the game appeared to be over, to be remembered as a gritty comeback victory by Atlanta against the Twins’ bullpen.

  As Lemke tagged up at third base, Minnesota outfielder Shane Mack retreated three steps. He squared nicely up on the ball and had it in his possession only for an instant before making a great throw through to home.

  To everyone’s amazement the ball and base runner seemed to be converging at the plate at nearly the same time. Lemke decided he wouldn’t follow Lonnie Smith’s example and try to mow Brian Harper over. Frankly, he wasn’t big enough for that kind of play and he knew it.

  Instead, Lemke dodged to the outside, away from the Twins’ catcher. In a much closer play than many expected, when Willard first hit the ball, Harper caught Mack’s throw and edged across the plate, trying to tag Lemke out. The pair definitely made contact, with Harper doing everything he could to cut Lemke off.

  In a bang-bang play, home plate umpire Terry Tata ruled that Harper didn’t touch Lemke with the glove or ball. Instead, the only contact occurred when Harper’s elbow brushed against Lemke.

  “He’s out,” Jack Buck told his television audience, “safe, safe, safe.”

  It didn’t matter that Harper ended the close play sprawled out, holding his glove up high, showing the umpire that he still had the ball. The call was safe, and the hometown crowd roared the Braves’ 3–2 victory.

  Lemke remembered that when he “looked for Mack, somebody was blocking my view. When I finally got a glimpse of him, he already had the ball. I knew it was going to be close, and the only chance I had was to go around [Harper].

  “We made contact, but he hit me with his arm. I knew there was no way I could knock him over. I knew it would take a perfect throw to get me.”

  Jogging up the first-base line, Willard realized how close he came to not being a World Series hero after all. “When I hit it I thought it was deep enough,” he said, “but then I looked back at Lemke, and it looked like he got a bad jump. I couldn’t see the play at the plate, but I saw the umpire give the safe sign, and I just said to myself, ‘Thank God.’”

  Upon Tata’s safe call, Harper jumped in the air and threw his mitt to the ground in disgust. Later, in the Twins’ clubhouse, he was more subdued and said if the replays indicated that Tata’s call was correct, then “it was a helluva call.”

  Yet Harper maintained he had gotten such calls in the past. “I made contact and hung on to the ball,” he said. “Often that’s enough.”

  Across the visiting clubhouse Twins leader Kirby Puckett added, “I thought he was out. In a collision like that, where two players make contact, you’re out most of the time. It was just like Smith’s play. I’ve been called out on plays like that, right here in the big leagues.”

  Meanwhile, Jack Morris grumbled about Kelly lifting him for a pinch-hitter after six innings. “TK screwed up by taking me out,” he later told Sports Illustrated. “We would have won it.”

  With the Series now tied at two games apiece, with another contest remaining in Atlanta, everybody was feeling the pressure.

  ———

  Game Five

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1991

  AT ATLANTA-FULTON COUNTY STADIUM

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  When Chili Davis came to the Minnesota Twins he was told to put away his glove. His days of patrolling the outfield, which he had done with some flair earlier in his career with the San Francisco Giants, once leading the National League in assists, were now behind him. At thirty-one, Davis didn’t run like he used do, and the switch-hitter was assigned to be the team’s designated hitter for the season, playing 150 games at DH and making only two appearances in the field.

  Back on September 29, the same day after the New York Mets fired manager Bud Harrelson, the eighth manager to be canned so far that year, the Twins found out they had clinched the American League West title while heading to the airport in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Hours earlier Minnesota had lost 2–1 to Toronto, the team they would soon defeat in the league championship series. When they received word that Seattle had downed second-place Chicago, the Twins were officially division champs and the first team in major-league history to go from last place to first place. The team buses pulled over on the Queen Elizabeth Way between Toronto and the Hamilton airport, and the players briefly congratulated each other. The next day, as the team finished its road trip in Chicago, Davis told manager Tom Kelly that he was open to playing some outfield in preparation of the team advancing to the World Series.

  “I knew the National League parks from my days with the Giants,” Davis recalled. “I told him, ‘We’ve got a week now with nothing on the line, let me play the outfield, get some games at that position again.’ I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘Nah, we don’t need you. You’re our DH, and that’s it.’”

  A few weeks later, as the World Series began, Kelly was asked whether he was tempted to put Davis in the field, with the designated hitter unavailable for the games in Atlanta. “I wouldn’t do that in a tie or close game,” he replied, “because of the defensive liability.”

  Yet after the second consecutive close loss for the Twins in Atlanta, Kelly decided to roll the dice. Davis remembered that he and Kirby Puckett were walking out of the visitors’ clubhouse after the 3–2 defeat in Game Four when Kelly shouted out, “Get your rest.”

  Davis turned and asked, “You’re talking to Puck, right?”

  Kelly shook his head. “No, you, number forty-four,” he told Davis, “because you’re in there tomorrow. You’re starting in right field.”

  In that off-hand way, it became official: Davis would replace Shane Mack in the Twins’ lineup and defensive alignment.

  Before Game Five got underway Davis tried to make light of the situation, saying he was back in the field because Kelly “got sick and tired of seeing me on the bench.”

  When asked about his troublesome back Davis replied, “You don’t know this, but three years ago I had surgery to remove my whole back. And now there’s nothing left.”

  Decades later, though, Davis admitted he di
dn’t get much sleep the night before Game Five. “This guy—I told him to work me into outfield at the end of the regular season,” he said of Kelly. “And now he’s going to stick me out there in friggin’ Game Five of the World Series. Until that point in that season about the only time I’d touched the outfield was during BP, shagging flies.”

  Game Five’s starters, Kevin Tapani for the Twins and Tom Glavine for the Braves, were sharp early, and the contest remained scoreless into the bottom of the fourth inning. That’s when Tapani fell behind Ron Gant, who laced a 2–0 fastball into left field for a single. David Justice followed by poking a Tapani fastball the opposite way, where it hit off the top of the fence and bounced into the seats for a home run. After Sid Bream walked and Greg Olson singled, Mark Lemke continued to be the man of the hour, lofting a fly ball deep to right field, out in Davis’s direction.

  As they like to say, the ball will find you in this game, often when you don’t want to see it come calling. At first Davis appeared to be in a good position to make a rather difficult catch. But then Lemke’s blast continued to carry, sailing closer to the fence. When Davis tried to chase down the ball, he never really caught up to it. As he neared the wall the ball glanced off his glove and dropped to the ground. Bream and Olson easily scored, and Lemke ended up on third base.

  “I was playing him shallow, but that Lemke was hitting everything in sight,” Davis remembered. “I had to go back after the ball. It hit the glove, and I almost caught it against the wall, only to see it pop out. Some people dogged me after that, saying any good outfielder would have made that play. But it was a tough play.”

  The official scorers agreed and awarded Lemke a triple. That said, Davis would soon face his share of criticism. “Thankfully, Johnny Bench came to my defense,” Davis said, “reminding everybody that I’d once played center field at Candlestick Park. Bench told anybody who would listen that I was a good outfielder. I just hadn’t been out there the whole season.”

  After Davis’s adventure in right field, Tapani battled to finish the inning and left, trailing the game, 4–0. The Twins’ starter didn’t return for the bottom of the fifth inning.

  “I had my chance to make a great play,” Davis said. “I just didn’t come through.”

  ———

  In 1991 what was going on away from the field sometimes superseded the action between the lines. Teams scrambled to fill out their rosters in large part because few ballplayers remained with a franchise for the entirety of their careers. In the growing era of free agency big money usually trumped any sense of team or civic loyalty, especially when even rookies were afforded high-powered counsel. In this new era Scott Boras soon became the most powerful sports agent in baseball and one of the most powerful individuals in sports. From 1983 to 1991 twenty-five of his clients were chosen in the first round of baseball’s amateur draft, with most going in the top ten for soaring contracts and signing bonuses.

  The son of a dairy farmer, Boras grew up in Elk Grove, California, just south of the state capital of Sacramento. From a young age he excelled at playing baseball and attended the University of the Pacific on a baseball scholarship, going on to play four seasons in the minor leagues. When bad knees ended his playing career Boras returned to school, first earning a degree in pharmacy and then a law degree back at Pacific. His first clients in baseball were Mike Fischlin, a former high school teammate who played infield for the Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros, as well as relief pitcher Bill Caudill, whom Boras met during his years in the minors.

  From the start Boras proved to be adept at leveraging the marketplace, and he soon became a major headache for team owners. Big contracts and landmark deals were his signatures, in large part because Boras remembered when scouts had low-balled him when he was a minor-league player. The team representatives, whether they were a scout, a general manager, or even the owner, were never to be fully trusted, Boras told his clients. A ballplayer only had several key times in his entire career when he could compete on close to equal footing with management at the bargaining table—hence, the talk of leverage and waiting for the right moment to really strike a deal. Boras wasn’t reluctant to tell a high school player to go to college if that meant possibly a larger payday—in essence more leverage down the road.

  In the seasons leading up to the 1991 season Boras put together a series of deals that turned heads within the game. He negotiated a $1.5 million contract for his old friend Caudill that made the pitcher the second-highest paid reliever in the game at that time. In 1988 he represented a pair of young-gun pitchers (Andy Benes and the Braves’ Steve Avery). They were among the top in the amateur draft, and Benes signed for a record $235,000 bonus. A year later Boras got a landmark $350,000 deal for pitcher Ben McDonald with the Baltimore Orioles, and in 1990 he scored a stunning $1.2 million package for Todd Van Poppel, another top-prospect pitcher, with the Oakland Athletics. With the high-powered agent calling the shots, Van Poppel received that kind of money, even though he was taken thirteen players after Atlanta made shortstop Larry “Chipper” Jones the top selection in 1990.

  Some teams tried to avoid players Boras represented. They disliked spending so much and having their negotiations often stretch past the eleventh hour. “Ask anyone in the business: It’s called The Boras Factor,” San Diego Padres general manager Joe McIlvaine told Baseball America. “Almost every Boras client underachieves in the major leagues, and that’s no accident. He takes the focus away from playing and puts it on the money.”

  Padres scouting director Randy Smith added that some ballclubs were ready to draw a line in the sand. “Boras changed the industry with the Van Poppel and McDonald deals,” he said in August 1991, “but the industry is ready to say enough is enough.”

  That proved to be easier said than done, as most ballclubs found that sooner or later they had to deal with Boras because he represented many of the top prospects. That became only more apparent in 1991 as four of the top eight selections, including pitcher Brien Taylor, were Boras clients. A six-foot-three left-hander with a fastball clocked in the midnineties, Taylor was just the kind of arm big-league scouts fall in love with. Ironically, the Taylor family decided to go with Boras as its representative only after a phone call from an anonymous baseball executive told them to steer clear of the high-powered agent. “Right then, I knew he was the man for us,” said Bettie Taylor, Brien’s mother.

  Boras told the Taylor family that the marketplace had been set by the $1.2 million deal he had completed the year before for Van Poppel. The Taylors agreed and told the Yankees that they wouldn’t settle for a penny less. The negotiations soon became a high-stakes game of chicken. At the time Commissioner Fay Vincent had banned New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner from day-to-day involvement in his team’s operations for paying a gambler named Howie Spira to dig up “dirt” on Dave Winfield. But that didn’t stop the “Boss” from weighing in from the sidelines. With Boras telling the Yankees that Taylor would enroll in college, put off turning pro, if he didn’t get the right deal, Steinbrenner went public with his frustration. Days before the deadline for Taylor to sign or go to college, Steinbrenner said that if the Yankees let the pitcher slip through their fingers, those responsible “should be shot.”

  Boras couldn’t have planned it any better. The Yankees soon caved, giving Taylor a record $1.55 million signing bonus. The deal rippled throughout the amateur draft, with number-two choice Mike Kelly, an outfielder, receiving $575,000 from Atlanta. Meanwhile, the asking price for the remaining Boras clients skyrocketed. Pitcher Kenny Henderson wanted $1 million and eventually enrolled at the University of Miami when Milwaukee offered only $500,000. Pitcher John Burke did likewise after refusing $360,000 to sign with Houston.

  As always with Boras, the negotiations were all about leverage. “The truth is this is not a risk,” he said of the Taylor deal specifically and his philosophy overall. “If the player has a level of certainty, then pay for it.”

  ——�
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  In the bottom of the fifth inning of Game Five the Braves tacked on another run against Twins’ reliever Terry Leach, a journeyman reliever who had seen his salary rise from $190,000 to $500,000 in recent seasons. In comparison, Atlanta starter Tom Glavine was destined to soon become the highest-paid player on the Braves and would see his salary triple from $775,000 to $2.9 million by the start of the next season.

  In any event Glavine was staked to a 5–0 lead in Game Five and appeared ready to bring it home when he suddenly couldn’t throw a strike to save his life.

  With one out, the Braves’ left-hander walked Chuck Knoblauch. After Puckett singled to right, Glavine walked Chili Davis and then Brian Harper. With one run already across, Glavine walked Scott Leius, and Minnesota was back in it, and the Atlanta ace was out of the ballgame.

  In the sixth inning Glavine faced six batters, walking four of them. Although Kent Mercker did a quality job in relief, the Twins had cut the lead to 5–3 by the time the dust settled. “Tommy threw the ball great,” Atlanta manager Bobby Cox said. “But he got the five runs and forgot to pitch.”

  Thankfully for the Braves, Twins pitching soon followed suit. David West, who had thrown well in the American League Championship Series, came into the game in the seventh and proceeded to one-up Glavine. He allowed two hits and a pair of walks without getting anyone out. From there the game dissolved into a laugher, the only lopsided game of this epic series, as the Braves scored six runs in the inning, taking an 11–3 lead.

  Such meltdowns on the mound can be more frequent than many would think. Over the years the list of prominent pitchers who overnight couldn’t throw a strike no matter how hard they tried includes Steve Blass, Pat Jordan, and Steve Dalkowski. A future victim of such ineptitude was in the Braves’ bullpen during the 1991 series. Mark Wohlers’s fastball may have been clocked at 103 miles per hour, making him a valuable closer on the Braves’ future championship team in 1995, but too soon he would forget how to throw a strike too.