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

  Asked whether the Twins could pull off a repeat of 1987, Hrbek replied, “I certainly hope that déjà vu strikes again.”

  Throughout the three-game stretch in Atlanta, Hrbek had received threatening phone calls at the team hotel, and in the stadium Braves fans chanted his name and continued to boo him because of the wrestlemania incident with Ron Gant back in Game Two.

  “I know he has been a little quieter the last few days,” Kelly said. “I don’t know if it’s affected him, but I know it’s affected his family.”

  Certainly Tina Hrbek, Kent’s mother, had had her fill of Atlanta. She became especially rankled by signs at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium that read, “Hrbek is a Jrk.”

  “You know, every player gets hassled now and then,” she said, “but I didn’t like them picking on the family name.”

  Organizations pride themselves on turning over every stone in the search for talent. Yet sometimes the best players can be found right next door. Such was the case with Kent Hrbek. Perhaps that’s why he was as eager as anybody in a Twins uniform to return to Minnesota.

  Born in May 1960, the season before the franchise vacated Washington, DC, and headed north to become the Twins, Hrbek grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, so close to the old Metropolitan Stadium that he could see the lights from his bedroom window. Despite the proximity, a young Hrbek usually attended games only on Mondays because on those days tickets were just a dollar. Growing up, Hrbek watched such Twins stars as Tony Oliva, Zoilo Versalles, and Harmon Killebrew. Like most kids back in those days, Hrbek played several sports, eventually deciding to concentrate on baseball. He didn’t enjoy football’s five days of practice to play just one game a week, and with basketball he seemed destined to foul out most of the time. (Undoubtedly, Ron Gant would agree.) Even though Hrbek played a ferocious left wing in hockey, his father, Ed, urged him to go with baseball. It helped that first base opened up on the Kennedy High squad in Bloomington about the same time.

  Although the left-handed slugger often hit for power, few scouts took notice. It wasn’t until a concessions manager at the old Met told scout Angelo Giuliani about the homegrown talent that the Twins decided to draft Hrbek in the late rounds of the 1978 draft. “He was a seventeenth-round pick who would have been a first-rounder if people would have known about him,” Giuliani said.

  Indeed, Hrbek didn’t stay in the minor leagues for long. He hit .379 for Visalia, at that point the best average anywhere in professional baseball, and led the California League in slugging and on-base percentage too. Those numbers resulted in Hrbek becoming one of the few players to make the jump from Class A ball to the majors. He made his Twins debut in Yankee Stadium, where his twelfth-inning home run defeated New York. His meteoric rise soon got everyone’s attention in the baseball world, with even Reggie Jackson chatting him up.

  In 1982, Hrbek’s first full season with the Twins, he hit twenty-three home runs, with ninety-two RBIs, and finished behind the Orioles’ Cal Ripken for American League Rookie of the Year. Unfortunately, by the end of his storybook season amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, had claimed his father’s life. Years later Hrbek described that season as “a high point and low point for me.”

  By the 1991 World Series Hrbek could see the end of a fourteen-year career that had made him a fan favorite in the Twin Cities. As a free agent, he signed for millions less to stay in his hometown. Whereas the Twins of this era were often considered Kirby Puckett’s team, Hrbek played a strong role in the clubhouse. “He was the hometown guy,” Greg Gagne remembered. “We were in his town, playing in front of his fans, and it gave all of us kind of a comfort zone. For a long time he was the heart of the Minnesota Twins.”

  Gene Larkin added that Hrbek “just tried to enjoy every minute of his time in the big leagues. Obviously, he felt pressure being the hometown boy helping the Twins win. When he got to the park he thought baseball, and when he left the park it was over. He had done what he could do. Then he would try to forget about it and not think about it until he came to the park again the next day.”

  That proved to be increasingly difficult, however, in the 1991 Series. Not only did the lumbering first baseman hear the catcalls in Atlanta, but he and rest of the Twins knew they were on the verge of losing four consecutive games and, with it, the world championship. In the postgame discussions Kelly spoke briefly about how he hoped the Twins fans would “retaliate” in kind for Game Six for the abuse that Hrbek had received in Atlanta.

  “In the games that we’ve been here, there’s been a lot of flashbulbs going off when we were at bat and calling Hrbek a cheater,” the manager said. “They’re trying to do whatever they can to distract us. Hopefully, our fans will counter in a similar way when we get home.”

  Now things were beginning to sound like a professional cage match.

  Still, as it grew late after Game Five in Atlanta and both teams packed up to return to the Twin Cities, the discussion turned to a more pressing concern—the Twins’ slumbering attack. One game away from elimination, Puckett was hitting only .167. As a team the Twins were batting .218 after averaging .276 in defeating the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series.

  “All I have to do is hit one ball hard,” said Puckett, one of the last Twins to leave the visiting clubhouse that evening.

  How he hungered to once again hear the distinctive sound of a baseball well hit and dare to wonder whether it had enough to clear the outfield fence. For Puckett knew as well as anybody that if he could square one up, it could make all the difference now.

  ———

  Game Six

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1991

  AT HUBERT H. HUMPHREY METRODOME

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  By the bottom of the eleventh inning things had gotten to the point at which Kirby Puckett believed he could predict the future. Leading off the inning, Puckett told teammate Chili Davis, who was in the on-deck circle, that his services would no longer be needed in this game, one that would be remembered as one for the ages. If Atlanta’s latest reliever, left-hander Charlie Leibrandt, got his changeup up in the strike zone, he told Davis he was going to end it right here and now.

  Legend has it that Puckett said something like, “You listening, Dog? It’s going to be all over. We can’t have another game like we did down in Atlanta, where TK runs out of players and has to ask poor Aggie to bat. I’m going to take pitches, I tell ya, Dog. Take pitches until that changeup of Leibrandt’s rides up in the zone. It’s going to rise, I tell ya, Chili Dog, and when it does I plan to do something about it.”

  With that, Kirby Puckett stepped up to the plate, with the score tied at 3–3. No matter that until this point in the 1991 World Series the Twins’ star had just five hits in twenty-one at-bats and hadn’t demonstrated much patience at the plate. He had struck out twice against Leibrandt back in Game One. Yet as Chili Davis and the rest of the baseball world looked on, Puckett did begin to wait Leibrandt out. Waiting for that changeup to rise in the zone.

  Decades later Davis remembered that he and Puckett were indeed jawing with each other before this epic World Series at-bat. But it is funny how things can be played up, warped beyond recognition over the years, especially when something of real consequence takes place. Davis, who was as close to Puckett as anybody on the 1991 Twins, recalled their conversation quite differently from what was later chronicled, even by Puckett himself.

  “We were barking at each other,” Davis agreed. “But we were barking at each other because at first Puck wanted to bunt.”

  Bunt?

  Davis and I were speaking across one of the tables in the Oakland Athletics’ clubhouse, where the ex-slugger now worked as the team’s hitting coach.

  “You heard what I said,” Davis smiled. “Puck at first was all set to bunt his way on. Believe it or not, he came up to me and said, ‘Dog, I’ve got this game plan. Tell me what you think. I don’t hit these soft throwers like Leibrandt very we
ll.’

  “Now you have to remember that Puck could really bunt. He had a good chance of bunting for a hit. So he’s all excited and telling me, ‘I’ll get one down and then I’ll steal second. You hit these guys—better than me. Take it to the gap, and I’ll score the winner. That will be the ballgame.’”

  With that Davis leaned back in his chair, remembering this moment from decades ago, and shook his head. How did he respond after hearing Puckett’s grand plan? This scheme to get on with a bunt?

  “I told him, ‘That’s a bad plan, Puck. These people didn’t come here to watch you bunt. Not now. Not on this night.’”

  Emphatically Davis urged Puckett to swing away. Telling him that one good knock could end this ballgame, here and now. That is what the two of them are seen discussing in the footage of Game Six. Davis recalled ending the conversation by telling the Twins’ star not to swing at anything down in the strike zone.

  “Look for something up,” he told Puckett. “Don’t chase that changeup of Charlie Leibrandt’s. Don’t try to pull him. Just try to put the ball in the gap.”

  Soon enough Puckett began to believe in what Davis was saying. For a moment Puckett became the flock and Davis the preacher man until those roles suddenly pivoted, with the Twins’ superstar breaking into one of his legendary riffs, telling his friend Chili that of course he could hit that fickle changeup, especially if it dared rise up in the strike zone.

  The whole plan and brash talk almost went out the window when Leibrandt’s first pitch—a changeup, naturally—sailed low across the plate, only to have home plate umpire Ed Montague call it a strike.

  “That pitch really scared me,” Davis recalled. “It was maybe knee high, maybe, and it got the strike call? So now I’m worried that I gave Puck the wrong advice. I’m thinking if Leibrandt throws you another one of those, you’ve got to swing, Puck.”

  Somehow the Twins’ slugger remained patient at the plate, even with so much on the line. After that first pitch sailed in low for a called strike, the next one was too high. Ball one. Then came another changeup from Leibrandt, and this one, thankfully, was called low for ball two by Montague.

  With the count 2–1, Leibrandt tried to fool Puckett with another changeup, this time on the outside half of the plate. Puckett was waiting on it, though, and he put a good swing on the offering. As the ball began to carry toward left-center field, the sellout crowd and the Twins in their dugout rose, with everybody trying to gauge whether it would have enough power to carry out of the ballpark.

  From his vantage point in the on-deck circle, Davis couldn’t believe what his friend had pulled off. “Puck waited him out,” he said more than twenty years later, drumming his fingertips briefly on the clubhouse table. This particular at-bat remained as clear as anything that ever happened to him in the game. “Leibrandt puts a ball up in the zone, and the next thing I knew Puck hit it. . . . Whether or not it would clear that Plexiglas atop the outfield fence, that was the question from where I was watching. That was the only question in my mind.”

  Confident that he had hit it hard but unsure how far the ball would carry, Puckett took off, running hard out of the batter’s box, heading toward first base. Thus began a journey around the diamond that many will never forget and one that the Twins’ best player would arguably never recover from.

  ———

  If ever a game was a story unto itself, Game Six was. In Puckett the Twins had a leader in talk and action. In the first inning he had tripled home a run and later scored. In the third inning, with a runner on, he made a terrific leaping catch up against the Plexiglas fence, denying the Braves’ Ron Gant of a home run.

  “If he hadn’t made that catch,” teammate Gene Larkin said, “we might have lost the World Series right there.”

  Before Game Six, after the Twins had been swept in Atlanta, now one loss from elimination, Puckett called an impromptu players-only meeting back in Minneapolis. There he told his teammates, “Jump on board, boys. I’m going to carry us tonight. Don’t even worry about it. Just back me up a little and I’ll take us to Game Seven.”

  Larkin recalled the Twins being “in a bad way” after the three consecutive losses in Atlanta. “Not many guys can talk the talk and walk the walk, but Kirby always could for us. We knew he was going to do something special and here it was—on the biggest stage.”

  Puckett’s interactions with his teammates were rarely so serious. When he was around one of the team mottoes was, “Everybody has a price,” said Dave Winfield, who came to the Twins in 1993. One time, after a game in Oakland, Puckett bribed the driver of the team bus to take everyone to a barbecue place “right in the middle of the ghetto,” Winfield remembered. Chicken and ribs never tasted so good, and everyone got back to the hotel safely.

  Once, the Twins had a bat boy Puckett nicknamed “Little Snoop.” The Twins’ star offered the kid $600 to shave off his large Afro. At first Little Snoop refused, but Puckett kept passing the hat in the Twins’ clubhouse until the pot climbed to $800. The bat boy agreed to the haircut, and Puckett took the first pass at that head of hair and then pretended that the electric clippers had somehow broken.

  “The kid looks in the mirror, and this big Afro has a strip right down the middle,” Puckett recalled. “Little Snoop says, ‘Oh, my mamma’s going to kill me . . . she’s going to kill me.’”

  Raised in south Chicago, the youngest of nine children, Puckett loved to play baseball and said that the game kept him off the mean streets. Despite being a star third baseman for Calumet High School, he received only one scholarship offer, from Miami-Dade Junior College in Florida, which he decided was too far away from home. Instead, he found work for a time putting down carpet for the new Thunder-birds, which rolled off the line at the local Ford plant. At a tryout camp he caught the eye of Dewey Kalmer, the coach at Bradley University in Peoria, who offered him a scholarship. With the Bradley infield already set for the season, Puckett moved to the outfield and led the team with eight home runs in his lone season at the school. When Puckett’s father died, the ballplayer transferred to Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois, so he could be closer to home. But before really getting started at Triton, Puckett played for Quincy in the Central Illinois college summer league.

  Baseball was barely operational in the summer of 1981, as the major leagues were on strike. Owners wanted compensation for the loss of free-agent players to other teams. The players considered this an attempt to undercut the recent gains in free agency. Play stopped for fifty days, costing 712 major-league games, and as a result most clubs didn’t pay for their scouts to do any traveling.

  Jim Rantz, the Twins’ assistant farm director, spent his free time watching his son, Mike, play for Peoria in the summer league. That’s how he happened to be in stands when Puckett’s Quincy team took the field. Rantz remembered Puckett collecting several hits and making a great throw from center field to nail a runner at the plate. The best part? No other scouts were in attendance.

  Rantz compiled a glowing report about Puckett, and the Twins made the neophyte outfielder their first pick (the third overall) in that year’s draft. Puckett rose through the Twins’ farm system, leading the Appalachian League in batting average and hitting safely in his first sixteen games in the Single-A California League. From there, in 1984 he jumped two minor-league rungs to the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens. Although Tom Kelly, who was a minor-league coach at the time, told the front office that Puckett was ready to play in the majors right now, the Twins waited until May, when the Mud Hens were in Maine and the Twins were in southern California to call the prospect up officially. When Puckett’s connecting flight in Atlanta was delayed, he landed at Los Angeles International Airport several hours late. He took a cab to Anaheim, where the Twins were about to take the field against the Angels. With less than $20 in his pocket, Puckett had to beg for more change in the Twins’ clubhouse to pay the $83 cab fare. As they say, everyone has his price.

  Due to the delay, Minnesota manager
Billy Gardner had already scratched Puckett’s name from the starting lineup. After sitting that night Puckett made the most of his major-league debut as he singled four times the next day, becoming only the ninth big-league player in the twentieth century to break in with four hits. From there Puckett never looked back, hitting .296 his rookie season and leading the American League in hits in his fourth season, quickly becoming an integral member of the Twins’ World Series run in 1987. Standing only five-foot-eight, willing to chat up anybody about just about anything, Puckett became a crowd favorite, both home and away.

  “Everywhere we went Kirby got as many cheers or sometimes more than the teams we were playing,” Greg Gagne said. “People loved to watch him play and just carry on.”

  Brian Harper added, “Kirby was an unbelievable hitter. We would shake our heads at some of the things he would do. He loved to practice and work hard. And he also made it easy for TK to manage because he hustled all the time. Here was the star of the team and running everything out, so it was easy for the manager to make sure everybody else did their jobs.”

  Kent Hrbek added, “When things aren’t going well, sometimes it’s tough to go to the ballpark. But when you’d walk into the park and Puck was there, you’d have to smile. When he was in a room he brightened it up.”

  Back in the spring of 1991 I made deadline with the Henderson profile, and the inaugural issue of USA Today Baseball Weekly was on newsstands, with a scowling picture of Rickey sharing the cover with a smaller one of Bo Jackson and an even smaller one yet of President George “Poppy” Bush, whose Yale baseball teammates remembered him in our “Nostalgia” section.

  From Arizona I returned east, spending the last two weeks of spring training in Florida. To this point my only experience covering baseball had been as the “swing man” for the San Francisco Examiner, switching back and forth between the local Giants and Athletics. Truth be told, I knew much more about the National League, but my initial beat for Baseball Weekly was the junior circuit. So the remaining weeks of spring training were more of a fact-finding mission, a quick effort to get up to speed on the teams in the American League.