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

  ———

  When the dust settled in Game Five, the Braves had trounced the Twins, 14–5. Right fielder David Justice finished with five runs batted in, with Mark Lemke right behind him with three RBIs on a pair of triples. With his home run in the seventh inning, outfielder Lonnie Smith became only the fifth player and the first from the National League to drive one out of the park in three consecutive games. He joined Lou Gehrig, who did it in 1928; Johnny Mize (1953); Hank Bauer (1958); and Reggie Jackson (1977). Yes, all the others were members of the New York Yankees when they accomplished the feat.

  Atlanta’s fourteen runs stood as the most in a World Series game since the Yankees scored sixteen runs in Game Two of the 1960 World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Lemke’s two triples tied a World Series record last accomplished by the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis in 1963. More puzzling was that Lemke had continued the grand tradition of second basemen—yes, second basemen—stepping up big in postseason play.

  Usually second base is home to one of the smaller guys on the team, somebody who doesn’t exhibit the best of arms. That’s not to denigrate second basemen, but take a look at any team, even one on the sandlot: the best arms are in center field, right field, third base, and short. Big guys who can hit but don’t have much range are often put at first base. Second sackers? They’re usually the last ones chosen when picking up teams, and perhaps that’s why Atlanta fans embraced this little guy named Lemke.

  “My two favorites on that team were Mark Lemke and Ron Gant,” recalled Larry Taylor, a former major general in the Marines who attended the games in Atlanta. “Lemke because I’ve always been partial to smallish second basemen, the position that usually attracts the guys with the least natural baseball talent. Smallish and not much natural baseball talent, that pretty much describes me.”

  For some reason in the postseason, though, second basemen often step up. Back in 1953 the Yankees’ Billy Martin had twelve hits in the World Series. Seven years later Pittsburgh second baseman Bill Mazeroski homered off Ralph Terry in the ninth inning of Game Seven to give the Pirates a 10–9 victory and the title over New York. In 1961 another Yankee second baseman, Bobby Richardson, collected nine hits in five games as New York downed Cincinnati.

  The Amazin’ New York Mets in 1969 wouldn’t have upset the Baltimore Orioles without Al Weiss hitting .454 in the series and delivering a key home run. Then there was Brian Doyle, another Yankee, who hit .438 in the 1978 World Series. A fill-in for the injured Willie Randolph, Doyle helped New York defeat Los Angeles. “If it happened for a few games during the season, they would just say you were lucky,” Doyle said. “But everything is so magnified in the World Series that they start comparing you with Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio.”

  The coronation was underway for Lemke, and if the Braves could close things out in Minneapolis, he had the inside track to be the series MVP. Heading into Game Six back in Minneapolis, he stood one triple away from tying Tommy Leach’s World Series record for four, which was set in 1903. “There’s a phenomenon at second base,” Commissioner Fay Vincent said. “The World Series is the coming out of second basemen.”

  Justice’s five RBIs marked only the fifteenth time anybody hit that many in the history of World Series. The last guy to do it was the Twins’ Dan Gladden in 1987.

  Justice admitted to feeling pressure to come through in the clutch. “From the team standpoint this has been a lot of fun,” he said. “But from a personal standpoint it has been something else. I feel like I’ve got a thousand knife marks in my back.”

  Ron Gant added, “Everybody expects you to do well. But what happens is then you try to do too much and try to play over your head. What you need to do is learn how to relax. You just have to try to do the best you can, and you will be better off.”

  After the game Atlanta fans lingered in the stands, some still doing the Tomahawk Chop. The mind-numbing chant could be heard well below the stands, echoing through the corridors outside the team clubhouses.

  “It’s all about home-field advantage,” said Atlanta pitcher John Smoltz. “The Twins play inside a place they call the Thunderdome. And now we have this cheering to remind us that we’re home, in front of our crowd.”

  That the Braves had anything to call their own, even if it was just a rousing cheer, after so many years in the baseball wilderness was something to behold—perhaps even indicative of the season at hand. In the two decades leading up to the 1991 Series the Braves had only five winning seasons. Now, after sweeping the Twins at home, the Braves stood one victory from a championship many thought was downright impossible when this season began.

  “I remember that the Braves were in third place at the All-Star break, only one game under .500 and nine and a half games out of first at the time,” said Terry Sloope, a longtime member of Atlanta’s Magnolia Chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. “For the Braves that was great. I remember thinking the Braves were actually playing decent ball that year, were actually competitive. Over the previous seven years or so they had been just horrible. A third-place finish somewhere near the .500 mark would have been just fine for most fans.”

  Of course, Atlanta manager Bobby Cox believed his ballclub could reach higher, could be the first ballclub to go from last place to the world title in a single season. The Braves had fired him after the 1981 season only to put him back at the helm in Atlanta nine years later. He had returned in large part because he saw the potential in this organization. Still, if anybody understood how baseball could break a guy’s heart, it was Cox.

  Born in Tulsa, he grew up in Fresno County, California, and signed with Los Angeles for $40,000 after attending Reedley Junior College. He spent five years in the Dodgers’ minor league system before eventually going to the Braves in their first year in Atlanta. Cox never made that big-league team as a player, but he did catch on with the New York Yankees in 1968 and was named to the Topps’ Rookie All-Star Team. A year later he lost his job in New York to Bobby Murcer and, as a result, soon turned to managing.

  In 1971 he guided the Yankees’ farm team in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and had a winning record in each of his six years in the minors. He became Billy Martin’s first-base coach in 1977 in New York as the Yankees won the World Series. That’s when Atlanta hired him to assist with such promising young players as Bob Horner and Dale Murphy. Cox led the Braves to their first winning season in six years in 1980. But that didn’t keep owner Ted Turner from firing him the next season.

  Cox returned to the American League, taking over as manager for another young team on the rise, the Toronto Blue Jays. Cox nearly led them to the World Series in 1985, as the Blue Jays lost in seven games to the Kansas City Royals for the American League pennant. That fall Turner lured Cox back to Atlanta, this time as the Braves’ new general manager. Throughout baseball the Braves were considered to have plenty of young stars—on the major-league roster and especially down on the farm—so when manager Russ Nixon failed to get results, Cox stepped in as manager in 1990. John Schuerholz was named as the new GM, and the two became one of the most successful duos in baseball history.

  “It wasn’t only the Xs and Os and knowing all the strategy with Bobby,” remembered pitcher Mark Grant. “Somehow he stayed a humble human being through it all. I can guarantee you the day he stands at the podium in Cooperstown, one of the first things out of his mouth will be something like, ‘One of the reasons I was here was that I had such great talent.’ He’s not afraid to recognize that. He’s so humble. He was a guy who got along with everybody, but he didn’t play favorites.”

  Terry Pendleton said he loved playing for Cox because the manager “had the patience of grandma out there. The rest of us could be in a mean, crazy panic and Bobby would be saying, “No, no, we’re good. Things are going to be just fine. You wait and see.’

  “When a player is struggling, he knew that Bobby would stick with him, and sooner or later the player would break out of it. Often Bobby had a better idea of how good his
players could be then they did. Also, some guys want to manage before the first pitch is ever thrown. Bobby would let the guys play and manage when he had to manage. He never got ahead of the game and what needed to be done at the time.”

  As a baseball lifer, Cox knew that warm and fuzzy stories didn’t carry the day as much as some people wanted to believe. Baseball was like everything else now—it was “What have you done for me lately?” And how long a manager stayed in his job had little to do with how loud folks cheered on a particular evening in October. During his two decades already in baseball Cox had seen it all and could detail the broken hearts and find the dead bodies as well as anyone. Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair at Fenway Park during the 1975 World Series, for example, was replayed over and over again on the TV this time of year. But the Red Sox had lost to the Cincinnati Reds in seven games in that Fall Classic, and their manager, Darrell Johnson, was soon sent packing. Few remembered that, but Bobby Cox did. A decade later Boston again had the championship within its grasp after winning the first two games over the New York Mets and later holding a three-to-two games lead. They had to win, right? But they didn’t, did they?

  After Game Five Cox tried to tell those around him that the St. Louis Cardinals had once held a one-game lead heading back to the Twin Cities against the Twins. Those 1987 Cardinals were then the best team in baseball, in his opinion, with a quality pitching staff and superb team defense. Another veteran manager, Whitey Herzog, led them. Yet in the din of the Metrodome the Cardinals came unhinged and lost the remaining two games and the World Series.

  As Cox briefly surveyed his victorious clubhouse, he knew that the same thing could happen to his ballclub. When the media began with questions about being on the brink, being only one win away from baseball’s promised land, Cox refused to play along.

  “There’s no place like it,” Cox said of the Metrodome as the Tomahawk Chop continued several levels above him. “There really isn’t. Our job is to focus on the next game up there. That’s all there is for us.”

  ———

  “We play this game every day.”

  That’s a bromide often bandied about in baseball. I’m told Earl Weaver and Sparky Anderson said it, often to new reporters on the beat who were too excited, too intense for a sport that delivers a box of score results almost daily for half of the year.

  San Francisco Giants Roger Craig gave me the following piece of advice my first year covering baseball in the Bay Area, back when I tried to interview half the team in a single afternoon at Candlestick Park for a sidebar that eventually ran in the back of the sports section: “Son, we play this game every day.”

  In essence, like any piece of advice, it remains equal parts wisdom and warning. A reminder that baseball will never be like football, where a week of mind-numbing practices culminates in a game seemingly always bigger than the one the week before, and to win or lose it means the world. No, a baseball team can look downright terrible one night and terrific the next; it’s which identity that eventually emerges over the course of another long season that eventually decides things. Ballclubs rarely reveal themselves in grandiose star turns; instead, it’s the little moments, what happens every day that defines everything by the end of the season.

  One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about baseball is how methodical it can be. How such due diligence can add up over time.

  In those early years at Baseball Weekly I didn’t have much time for other things I dreamed about doing. Besides doing my part to get a new publication off the ground I also had two young kids at home. Decades later it’s strange to look back on those days, with both of my children now in their twenties and moved out of the house, and remember how little free time there once was to even think about and ponder other projects.

  That’s how I came to write on my commute to work on the Washington, DC, subway. It wasn’t much time, only twenty-five minutes from the parking garage where I left my car to the long escalator ride back above ground at the Rosslyn station and face to face with the USA Today skyscraper headquarters for another day. Yet I began to write in a spiral notebook that I brought along—a page at best in an unruly scrawl, and that was enough for now. Soon it was either time to go to work or, on the evening commute back home, time to do my best to be a family man with all that it entails. Back in the day there were major responsibilities at either end of that subway line.

  The summer after starting at Baseball Weekly I made my first trip to Cuba, and the level of play there stunned me. The starting infield for their national team back in the early 1990s, Orestes Kindelan, Antonio Pacheco, German Mesa, and the great Omar Linares, ranks as one of the best I’ve ever seen.

  Even in such an exotic, star-crossed place the game could still be the same. Before one contest several of us were speaking with Linares, hinting to him how much more money he could make in the major leagues, what a star he could be in America. But the third baseman, who could field like Brooks Robinson and hit like Mike Schmidt, only smiled and said, “But there’s another game here to play tomorrow.”

  In his own way Linares was staying as true to things as Roger Craig or Earl Weaver or any other wise baseball man. He was reminding us that one always had to be mindful, that it was necessary to stay in the moment. To be successful you had to remember, “We play this game every day.”

  ———

  After Game Five, with Atlanta now holding the upper hand, the buzz among both teams was remarkably similar. Everyone was reminding everyone else that this Series was far from over, that it would ultimately go to the team that stayed focused on the next game and didn’t allow its attention to waver.

  Down the corridor from the Braves’ clubhouse, past the swells hanging around owner Ted Turner and his wife, Jane Fonda, was the visitors’ clubhouse. Inside Twins skipper Tom Kelly appeared to be as relaxed as Cox was wound tight. Kelly talked about the state of his team as though he were viewing a wreck on the highway from a good distance away. Perhaps that was the correct approach to take, seeing as his ballclub had lost by nine runs on this night in Atlanta.

  Kelly, like any good manager, focused on what could turn things around for his team. As he reminded everyone, the remaining games of the 1991 season, whether it was one contest or two, would be back in Minneapolis, an American League venue. Prior to 2003 home-field advantage alternated between the American League and National League. So, like in 1987, the Twins could enjoy the last two games at home. After 2002 the home-field advantage went to the winner of the All-Star Game, a change made by Commissioner Bud Selig in the wake of the Midsummer Classic ending in a 7–7 tie when both teams ran out of pitchers. Even under Selig’s new guidelines, the Twins would have been going home with a chance to turn the tables as the American League won the 1991 All-Star Game, 4–2, at Toronto’s new SkyDome, with Cal Ripken the game’s MVP.

  Returning to an American League city meant that the designated hitter was back in play. Shane Mack, even with seven strikeouts so far in the Series, would be in the outfield. Kelly said he was confident that Mack could turn it around. “We’ve hidden all the razor blades,” the manager said. With Mack back in right field, Chili Davis would again be the designated hitter.

  “There are just some things Chili just can’t do,” Kelly told the press.

  “Like what?” he was asked.

  “Catch the ball,” Kelly tersely replied.

  As Kelly saw it, the Twins’ hitting attack had been shut down for long stretches during the first five games of the series. How much this had to do with lack of a DH in Atlanta or the impressive trio of Braves starting pitchers—Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery—was left to hang in the air.

  “And we’ve been in this situation before,” the manager said, again alluding to 1987. “The way it works out, we got to play three games here but have a chance to play four at the American League park. It looks like we’re going to need all four to get the job done. Hopefully, it works our way.”

  Twins closer Rick Aguil
era remembered being impressed by Kelly’s calmness through it all. “Many of us kept waiting for this big team meeting prior to the playoffs or even during the World Series, that kind of thing. But he just went along like it was business as usual. Why make this bigger than it is? We already knew how big playing in the World Series was.

  “In keeping things going along, he didn’t create anxiety for the players. That’s what I saw from TK and the staff back then. I don’t remember sensing any panic after the games in Atlanta. There was no more anxiety. We battled well. We almost won Games Three and Four, and we got blown out of Game Five. Now we were going home to the Dome, which was already in the Braves’ heads. So we knew there was a little bit of advantage there for us. Why panic? That was really TK’s message to all of us.”

  Certainly what nobody wanted to hear about in the visiting clubhouse was that the franchise, between its tenure in Washington and the Twin Cities, had now lost fourteen consecutive World Series games on the road. That dated back to 1925 and Walter Johnson’s Washington Senators.

  Instead, Kelly was asked whether he could convince his players that a defeat, either by 1–0 or 14–5, was still just one loss. “I don’t think it’s easy,” he replied. “We’re off track.”

  The Twins’ players would agree with their manager’s assessment. Team leader Kirby Puckett said he didn’t fault Kelly for trying to get Davis’s bat (with its twenty-nine home runs and ninety-three runs batted in the regular season) into the lineup despite the accompanying defensive liabilities.

  “You can’t blame TK,” he said. “You can’t take anything away from him. He’s done this sort of thing all season long.”

  Kent Hrbek, who put up twenty home runs during the regular season, had only three hits in sixteen at-bats so far against Braves pitching. For his trouble, Kelly had demoted him to the seventh spot in the Minnesota order.

  “Maybe we win at home because of the fact that we don’t have a pitcher in the lineup and we get to use the lineup that got us here,” Hrbek said. “We’ll be fine once we get home. That’s what I think anyway.”