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

  Early signs of trouble came in the midnineties when Wohlers began to have difficulty throwing to first base on routine fielding plays. Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone feared that such wildness would carry over to Wohlers’s deliveries to the plate, and sure enough that was the case. Wohlers began to walk more batters, and his pitches sometimes sailed past the catcher to the screen. Ironically, Wohlers’s wild streak affected only his fastball. His other pitches, the slider and split-finger fastball, remained accurate enough, especially for somebody coming out of the bullpen. Hitters, however, soon realized that the hard-throwing right-hander couldn’t throw his best pitch, the fastball, for a strike, and they began to wait on the slower stuff.

  After saving ninety-seven games in three seasons Wohlers was sent down to the minors in 1998, and his career never really recovered. When asked what went wrong, Wohlers replied, “I wish I knew.”

  Nolan Ryan, who suffered through epic bouts of wildness early in his career, believed that the real measure of a pitcher couldn’t be found in wins and losses or earned run average or any other statistic, for that matter. Instead, the pitcher nicknamed “The Express” said it came down to “Can you deliver the pitch you need to throw, with little margin for error, in the place you need to put it with the whole world watching you? That’s the mark of a quality pitcher.”

  In 1991 Ryan rose to the top level of the game one last time. On May 1 of this memorable season Rickey Henderson made history in the afternoon by breaking Lou Brock’s all-time steals record of 938. The whole event was staged to the hilt with Henderson holding the record-setting base aloft to show the crowd at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and proclaiming himself now the greatest of all time.

  That evening we were closing on the next week’s issue of Baseball Weekly when the buzz spread that Nolan Ryan had a no-hitter going in Arlington, Texas, against the Toronto Blue Jays. Despite the approaching deadline, we began to redo pages, demoting Henderson’s accomplishment, which had been expected for some time, and giving more space to Ryan, if the no-no happened. There was a connection between the two superstars, as Henderson had been Ryan’s five thousandth career strikeout victim and one of the final outs in Ryan’s previous no-hitter.

  “If he ain’t struck you out,” Henderson said years later, “you ain’t nobody.”

  Reports from Texas said people continued to file into Arlington Stadium as Ryan mowed down the Blue Jays in order on his way to sixteen strikeouts in the game. Once more things had fallen into order for the laconic right-hander, he was able to place his epic fastball precisely where he wanted.

  Ryan secured his record seventh no-hitter when he struck out Roberto Alomar to end the game. Coincidentally, Alomar’s father, Sandy, had been the second baseman behind Ryan in his first two no-hitters with California in 1973.

  “Normally you say that luck is involved in pitching a no-hitter,” former manager Bill Rigney said of Ryan. “But there’s no luck involved with him anymore.”

  “No contest, it’s Ryan,” Frank Robinson told the New York Times when asked what was the bigger baseball story on this historic Wednesday in May. “The thing that I admire most is that he’s a complete pitcher, 150 percent better than he was at any other time in his career. Hitters go up there, now, with hardly a chance.”

  The ability to throw a ball, one going nearly a hundred miles per hour, for a strike can elude the best of them. Yet as Ryan’s evening in 1991 demonstrated, the baseball gods aren’t necessarily fickle and cruel all the time. Occasionally they can be open to epiphanies and sometimes revelation. Almost three decades before Ryan’s final no-hitter, in a spring training game in Orlando, the Dodgers took the field with Sandy Koufax on the mound. Until this point in his career Koufax had been a disappointment. Everyone knew the promising left-hander could throw hard, but he didn’t throw many strikes or quality pitches for outs. Until this point in his career he was 36–40 in six seasons at the major-league level.

  Before the game began, Koufax told Norm Sherry, who was catching for the Dodgers that day, that he wanted to work on his breaking stuff. After walking the first two batters, Koufax decided to rear back and fire only fastballs, throwing them as hard as he could. Soon enough the bases were loaded with nobody out.

  Sherry came to the mound and told the stubborn left-hander, “Sandy, we’ve only got nine or so guys here to play this game. If you keep this up, you’re going to be here a long time. Why don’t you take something off the ball? Lay it in there. Let them hit it. We’ll catch the ball, get some outs, and maybe we’ll get out of here at a decent hour. Nobody is going to swing the way you’re going now.”

  Koufax followed Sherry’s advice and promptly struck out the side.

  A few days later, back at the Dodgers’ spring complex in Vero Beach, the buzz was that the fireballer had somehow turned the corner—gone from wild prospect to a pitcher with real control. In “the string area,” a series of practice mounds with strike zones of various heights, Koufax pitched with command to Sherry. As the Dodgers’ brass looked on, Sherry covered the plate with dirt. Then the catcher drew a line at the outside of the plate, with another for the inside part. With that Sherry moved his mitt from one corner of the plate to the other, and Koufax had no trouble hitting the target. “It was unbelievable how much he changed,” Sherry remembered decades later. “The previous years he couldn’t have come close to that. Heck, the previous week he couldn’t have done it.”

  That season Koufax broke through for good, going 18–13 and leading the National League with 269 strikeouts. He pitched the first of his four no-hitters the next season and led the league in victories and strikeouts in 1963, 1965, and 1966.

  Jeff Torborg, who caught Koufax’s perfect game in September 1965, agreed with Ryan’s assessment of quality pitching. Sooner or later the key becomes “Can they harness their stuff?” he said. “That’s not an easy thing to do. Sometimes it can take years. Just ask Nolan or Sandy.”

  ———

  By the time Steve Bedrosian replaced David West in the bottom of the seventh inning, Game Five had turned into a laugher for the hometown team. The Braves put up six runs in the frame and then tacked on three more in the bottom of the eighth inning.

  The Twins’ offense was still swinging for the fences as Minnesota scored five runs over the last four innings. But with the bullpen unraveling fast, the Twins simply couldn’t keep up on the scoreboard. West gave up four earned runs without recording an out. Bedrosian lasted an inning and allowed two more earned runs, and Carl Willis finished off the evening with three earned runs of his own in one inning of work.

  “Some nights you just have to forget about it,” Willis said, “and try to turn the page.”

  ———

  “[Build it to be] compatible with the warehouse and Baltimore’s civic buildings in terms of scale, configuration, and color. . . . [Build it] so the fans can see the city.

  “Reduce the height of the second deck. Reduce the height of the third deck. . . . Trees, plants, and other greenery are critical to designing this facility as a ballpark, not a stadium.”

  Even today, after so many copycat ballparks have arisen, the words still jump off the page. The memo written by Baltimore Orioles vice president Janet Marie Smith to HOK Sport ranks among the most important documents ever penned regarding stadium design in this country.

  In the fall of 1991 the Orioles raced to finish their new jewel of a ballpark in time for Opening Day the following season, and they had to be a little like the Beatles before the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Others may have forgotten about what they were up to, but everybody in the band knew they were about to shock the world. Even today, when it comes to baseball stadiums in this country, one can separate the eras into Before Camden Yards and After Camden Yards.

  Before the Baltimore ballpark, which did open to acclaim in 1992, most stadiums were multipurpose facilities. They were not only home to baseball games but also football, rock shows, monster truck shows, an
d on and on. The emphasis was on a quick turnaround, maximizing the calendar to fill as many dates as possible. Where the Braves and the Twins called home in 1991 fell into that category. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was as cavernous and as soulless as Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, or Riverfront in Cincinnati. The Metrodome in Minneapolis may have been domed, putting it at first glance into the same company as the Astrodome in Houston or SkyDome in Toronto, yet when it came to sightlines and general ambience, the Metrodome had more in common really with the cookie-cutter, multipurpose stadiums. For here was a domain in which a Hefty garbage bag, stretched taut and true, stood in for the outfield wall in right field, and the fence in dead center was sported by a stretch of Plexiglas straight out of a local hockey rink, and it was all topped off by that Teflon roof.

  In the decade leading up to the 1991 World Series many in the game realized that oval concrete bowls, which could host so many events, didn’t truly serve the national pastime. The search began for something more memorable and appropriate to showcase the game. With construction costs escalating, cities and sports franchises only had to look north to Canada for a pair of vivid demonstrations about what was now at stake.

  In Montreal Olympic Stadium had replaced Parc Jarry, where the Expos played from 1969 to 1976. Located in north Montreal, Jarry was hardly an ideal place for the first major-league baseball franchise outside of the United States. Less than thirty-thousand fans could cram into the place, and initially the makeshift ballpark was supposed to be the ballclub’s home for only a season or so. Thanks to political haggling, however, construction of a new stadium was delayed for years. Despite the minor-league-like digs, outfielder Rusty Staub, nicknamed “Le Grand Orange” for his reddish hair, helped the new team draw a following.

  After suffering through eight seasons at Jarry, the Expos and their fans went upscale in 1977 when they moved into Stade Olympique, which had been the main venue for the 1976 Summer Olympics. On paper the new facility was stunning, with a retractable roof that was supposed to rise up like a giant handkerchief in good weather. Unfortunately, the apparatus rarely worked, and the roof soon began to leak. Eventually, the ballclub replaced the roof with a permanent lid.

  Built in a hurry for the 1976 Games, the new ballpark soon began to fall apart. During the 1991 season a fifty-five-ton piece of concrete fell onto an exterior walkway. Although nobody was injured, the Expos were forced to play their final thirteen home games on the road. In the ensuing years part of the roof collapsed in a snowstorm, and as recently as 2012 another concrete slab fell in the facility’s underground parking garage. Called “The Big O” when it opened for the Olympics, the stadium soon became known as “The Big Owe.”

  As Gary Gillette and Eric Enders wrote in their classic book Big League Ballparks, “By the time the stadium was finally fully paid off in 2006, the Olympics were gone, the Expos no longer existed, and interest and repairs had driven the stunning final price tag to an estimated $1.61 billion.”

  In the world of ballpark design Olympic Stadium became a real cautionary tale. So when Toronto followed them to the drafting board a few years later, also with a retractable dome in mind, the first goal was not to duplicate Montreal’s folly. The improbable design team of Roderick Robbie and Michael Allen won the contract for Toronto’s new stadium along the Lake Ontario waterfront. Though neither one of them had ever attended a baseball game in their lives, they certainly did their homework, even talking with the team’s beat reporters about what they liked in particular stadiums around the league. But it was left to Allen to eventually solve the riddle of how to move the roof back and forth economically and efficiently.

  As Allen remembered it, he was on a flight to Ottawa, sitting in the front row, when it was time for a beverage and snack. (Yes, this was back in the day when domestic carriers still served complimentary meals.) With no tray table to pull down from the back of the seat in front of him, Allen was instructed to snag the table out of his armrest. As he did so, Allen realized here lay the answer—how to solve the riddle of the great dome roof. As the flight attendant waited, he repeatedly folded the table in and out of the armrest in amazement by what he saw. “That was it,” Allen recalled. “The answer to how we could put it all together.”

  When completed, the SkyDome roof towered thirty-one stories into the sky, more than twice the height of Houston’s Astrodome. The roof was divided into four sections, and to open to the heavens the larger ones moved back along tracks, with the remaining smaller section swinging in underneath, mirroring that airline tray on the flight to Ottawa. In the early days the roof’s opening and closing sometimes drew more applause than the teams on the field. Pretty much everyone was impressed, and some were left to wonder what could have been. “It’s great,” pitcher Mike Flanagan told Sports Illustrated, “but I was kind of hoping they’d have retractable fences.”

  With its plethora of restaurants, wide concourse, and a hotel with rooms overlooking the field, the Toronto stadium came with a slew of modern-day bells and whistles. And unlike Montreal, its retractable roof actually worked—opening or closing in about a half-hour. Although truly functional, some still didn’t care for the overall ambience. Michael Janofsky of the New York Times compared SkyDome to “an airplane hangar or merchandise mart or a place in which Crazy Eddie might hold a giant warehouse sale.”

  When Larry Lucchino, then the Orioles’ president, first saw Toronto’s SkyDome, he said, “They built the eighth wonder of the world. We’re just building a nice little ballpark.”

  Baseball had yet to see the best in ballpark design, so the door remained ajar for the Baltimore Orioles to turn back the clock and throw in a few novelties at the same time.

  Guidelines and standards—baseball has plenty of both. So much so that the line between such designations can become blurred at times. The pitcher’s mound lies sixty feet, six inches from home plate. That’s a rule, of course, as is the ninety feet between the bases. “The ball field itself is a mystic creation, the Stonehenge of America,” Roger Kahn once wrote.

  As the Orioles began work on their new ballpark, though, they realized that perhaps too much was set in stone when it came to ballpark dimensions. Major League Baseball’s guidelines called for 330 feet down either line, a symmetrical outfield of equal proportions. Certainly that made it easier for baseball and football to share the same venue. Such formulas remained perfect for multipurpose facilities. Yet in Baltimore the Colts had already fled to Indianapolis in the middle of the night in 1984, leaving the Orioles as the only professional team in town at the time. That meant “the stars were aligned” to try something new and distinct, remembered Janet Marie Smith, the team’s vice president for planning and development.

  At the time recent industry standards for baseball stadiums were Kansas City’s Royals Stadium and Chicago’s new Comiskey Park. The former was located off a freeway, a fair distance from downtown, and Comiskey had a steep upper deck that many fans found challenging and, god forbid if you suffered from vertigo. Baltimore’s new ballpark would be downtown and baseball only. As a result, the Orioles decided to embrace the game’s past and emulate such old-style structures as Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Fenway Park in Boston’s Back Bay, and Wrigley Field in northern Chicago. What did these places have in common? An asymmetrical outfield, seating low and close, and light towers instead of banks of lights ringing the stadium’s upper lip. “We wanted our ballpark to be old-shoe comfortable,” Smith said, “even if it was brand new.”

  This nod to the past extended to the small touches at Camden Yards. The flags above the right-field wall flew in descending order of the team standings and are changed each game day to reflect the current rankings. A small silhouette of Wee Willie Keeler can be seen in the chairs. The bullpen areas remain visible so most fans can view who is warming up. Seven-foot walls, instead of the eight-foot ones MLB guidelines called for, line the outfield, which makes it easier for leaping catches that take away would-be home runs. After
much debate and local opposition, the famed B&O warehouse, which stands fifty feet wide and a thousand feet long, became part of the overall design. Amazing to think that it was slated to be demolished in the original plans.

  “It was fitting that the new age of the retro-park was celebrated in Baltimore, a provincial, blue-collar, crabcakes-and-beer town with thick roots and a thicker accent,” wrote Tim Kurkjian of ESPN The Magazine. “It is a neighborhood town, a brick town, which is why the ballpark was built of brick and steel, not of concrete like the flying saucers that landed in too many major league cities.”

  Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in April 1992, with the hometown team edging the Cleveland Indians, 2–0.

  “I made sure I took in the whole experience on my way to the ballpark that day,” recalled Charles Nagy, the Indians’ starting pitcher that day, “and when I got to the park hours before the game, I went on the field to soak it all in.

  “It was very exciting. When Jacobs Field [in Cleveland] was built, I saw a lot of Camden Yards. It was special to be a part of the opening of a great new ballpark. I just wish we’d won.”

  The new ballpark in Baltimore would usher in a new era in stadium design and change industry standards forever. “If you look at three-quarters of the ballparks built since Camden Yards, they have been built in a downtown setting,” Smith said. “It’s been part of an urban renaissance, which is nice because there are not a lot of things that bring people into a downtown today.

  “We don’t have any need for a central banking center or central anything really anymore. But we’re still social animals, and it’s good to have cities alive. Sports has found a way to help this process with its newer ballparks.”