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

  Harper remembered Kelly reminding Morris that he had already thrown more than one hundred pitches and that he was pitching on three days’ rest.

  Morris told him Kelly again, “I’m not coming out of the game. There’s no way I’m coming out of this game.”

  Harper sat back, watching all this unfold, and thought to himself, ‘This is going to be interesting.’ Kelly briefly huddled with pitching coach Dick Such and then walked back Morris.

  Those eavesdropping recalled their skipper saying, “Okay, big guy, go get ’em.”

  Then Kelly turned and muttered, “Oh hell. It’s only a game.”

  In essence, Kelly went totally against the book. The strategy then—and now—would be to go to the bullpen. Managers want the odds in their favor. They love to study the matchups—better to have a right-handed pitcher throw to a right-handed batter, for example. And, of course, pitch counts have become paramount. More so today than at any time in baseball’s history, a manager cannot be faulted if he lifts his starting pitcher late in a game. After all, a quality start has been defined as six innings and allowing no more than three earned runs, and as a result, many pitchers aren’t expected to finish what they started.

  “That may be one of the biggest changes, probably not for the better, since the day when I pitched,” Nolan Ryan said. “Back then a starting pitcher took responsibility. He wanted to and was expected to begin and end a game, no matter what it took. That’s something we’ve lost over the years.”

  Former big-league pitcher Jim Kaat, who was a sideline reporter for CBS Sports in the 1991 Series, said Morris “just talked or even bullied his way into staying in that game. He simply declared, ‘This is my game,’ and nobody could take it from him.

  “In looking back on it that’s something that’s often misunderstood when it comes to today’s game. Some pitchers have this surge of adrenaline—they can really smell the finish line, and it doesn’t matter how many pitches they’ve thrown. In times like that pitch counts don’t mean anything. You’ve got to let them try and finish things off. That said, I’m pretty sure Jack Morris was the only one Tom Kelly would have broken the rules for. He wouldn’t have let Kevin Tapani or Scott Erickson talk him into something like that.”

  In looking back at this moment in Game Seven Morris said, “[Kelly] put his ass on the line by leaving me in there, and you don’t realize it at the time. You start reflecting back on the reality of the situation, and even me, if I was managing I’d say to myself, ‘Man, I’ve got Rick Aguilera, who’s done a pretty damn good job. What do you do here?’ And he did something 99 percent of the baseball world wouldn’t do.”

  For the first time in World Series history three games had gone into extra innings, and Morris was still very much a part of this one. If anything, the veteran right-hander appeared to be getting stronger as the game went into extra innings, as he became the first starting pitcher since Tom Seaver in 1969 to continue past the ninth inning in the World Series. Morris set the Braves down in order in the top of the tenth on only eight pitches, and Kelly had already decided his staff ace would go out for the eleventh—if things went that far.

  “A lot of times you attend a sporting event . . . and not realize at the time how sensational it is,” Jack Buck told his national television audience. “You look back and say, ‘I’m glad I was there. That was something.’ Tonight, it’s so apparent that this is one of the most remarkable baseball games ever played.”

  The longtime voice of the St. Louis Cardinals, Buck had called just about everything in baseball and also was the radio voice for Monday Night Football. This would be his last World Series for television.

  Soon Buck’s voice rose in excitement as Dan Gladden led off the bottom of the tenth inning with a broken-bat drive to the outfield. When the ball hit high in front of Brian Hunter, Gladden kept going, sliding into second base with a double.

  “The bat broke on the handle, about six inches above my hands,” Gladden remembered. “It was a little flare in front of Hunter and Gant, and I was digging right out of the batter’s box.

  “I was going for second as soon as I realized that the bat had broken. I know I surprised some people, even some in my own dugout, but I had played in that ballpark long enough to know where the ball was going and what would probably happen next on that turf. I knew I was good unless it was somehow caught, and I really didn’t see that happening. By that point, frankly, I was tired of playing too. I had to get to second base somehow—just try to end things.”

  Puckett later said, “That was Dan Gladden—all or nothing.”

  Chuck Knoblauch, who was next up, was told to bunt Gladden over. When the rookie let the first pitch, a fastball from Atlanta reliever Alejandro Peña that split the heart of the plate, go by for strike one, Kelly muttered, “Bunt the damn ball.”

  On the third pitch Knoblauch did his job, laying down a bunt to the third base side that Pendleton had no choice but to throw on to first for the inning’s first out. With the winning run standing on third base, Braves manager Bobby Cox decided to intentionally walk Puckett and then Hrbek, making for a force play at every base. Once again a team found itself with the bases loaded and praying for some kind of miracle to keep the game going.

  “I knew they would walk Puckett, and I wasn’t surprised when they walked Hrbek too,” said Gladden, who now stood at third base, only ninety feet away from ending the series for good. “There was no other way to play it really. So here we were again. Bases loaded, and we’d see if one of these teams could finally score a run.”

  Jarvis Brown, who had come into the game as a pinch-runner in the ninth inning, was the next Twins hitter due up. Brown had appeared in only thirty-eight games that season, hitting .216. Kelly decided he could do better and once again went for a more experienced hand.

  Gene Larkin had been swinging a bat, warming up for what seemed to be hours in the runway leading back to the hometown clubhouse. The only problem was that Larkin’s left knee was so swollen that he could barely run. If he hit one on the ground, he could have been slower than the Braves’ Sid Bream heading down to first—setting up a sure double play.

  “The tendinitis was really bad,” Larkin recalled. “By that point of that season I couldn’t play defense or run the bases hardly at all. If anything, I felt fortunate to be in uniform frankly. I could have easily been left off the [World Series] roster.”

  The knee flared up during the American League Championship Series with Toronto, and the Twins’ brass seriously considered leaving Larkin on the sidelines. Yet manager Tom Kelly liked Larkin’s grit, how he methodically approached each and every at-bat, even if his knee was killing him. At first glance Kelly and Larkin appeared to have little in common. The Twins’ manager was a baseball lifer, and his pinch-hitter had once been a big man on campus. Before breaking in with the Twins in 1987, Larkin played at Columbia University. A diehard Yankee fan, he reminded some Gotham fans of Lou Gehrig, who had also once played on the Upper West Side. The son of a retired New York City police officer, Larkin broke through his senior year, breaking or tying thirteen school batting records, including Gehrig’s for most home runs. The major leagues, as is often the case, proved to be a more difficult scenario for a collegiate star. Larkin became a role player, and even though he hit a career-best .286 in 1991, he appeared in only ninety-eight games that season. And now, after all that, he had a chance to win it all for Minnesota.

  “When they did walk Hrbek, I knew I was getting the call,” Larkin remembered. “It was nothing extraordinary in how it happened. TK just called my name, and I went up there. But I’ll tell ya in the on-deck circle my knees were shaking, and when I’m walking to the batter’s box I’m still shaking. You cannot tell when you see it on replay, but I was as nervous as an athlete can be right then.

  “But the funny thing was, once I stepped into the batter’s box, a sense of calm came over me. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been in a situation like that before. Certainly not as big as that—seventh ga
me of the World Series. But I took a deep breath, and mentally I was telling myself that I had to hit the first pitch fastball that Peña gave me. I didn’t want to get into a situation where it was two strikes and the umpire could come into it. I didn’t want to leave it to the umpire to make a tough call on an outside or inside pitch.”

  For his part home-plate umpire Don Denkinger did try to encourage Larkin, at least a little bit, by telling him that the Braves were moving their outfielders in and the Twins’ pinch-hitter had a good chance to drive one over their heads. Larkin was too nervous, too dry in the mouth, to reply.

  “Peña’s history was that he liked to get ahead of the hitter,” Larkin said decades later. “With the bases loaded, he doesn’t want to walk me. His best pitch was a fastball. And fortunately for me he threw a fastball up and out over the plate, which is the perfect pitch to put a fly ball into play. It would have been a routine fly ball if the outfield was at normal depth.”

  Of course, the Braves’ outfield had to play in, ready to throw to the plate and cut off the lead runner and the winning run.

  “Once I put the bat on the ball, I knew it would be far enough out into left field to drive Danny from third base,” Larkin remembered. “It was going to carry over Hunter’s head, and I didn’t have to worry any more about running. Right then and there I knew we were going to win the game and be World Series champions. There’s no greater feeling than when you know that’s about to happen to you, to your team.”

  As soon as Gladden saw the ball leave Larkin’s bat, he raised a fist in the air, and when the ball bounced off the Astroturf, past Hunter in left field, he headed for home. There he stomped on the plate with both feet and the first one to greet him was Morris, the Twins’ starting pitcher, who still held his glove and hat in his hand.

  “Somebody had to go home a loser,” Morris said years later, “but nobody was a loser in my mind.”

  John Smoltz said that the “bottom line was who was going to run out of nine lives first.”

  Gladden added, “What was great about Game Seven when you look back on it is that pretty much everybody in both lineups had a chance to be the hero and drive in a run on a night when only one run was needed. Everybody who stepped into the batter’s box had the opportunity—top to bottom in both batting orders for both teams. We played and played and finally somebody did it, somebody finally came through.”

  In finally deciding this series for the ages, the hero ended up being Gene Larkin, a guy who many in the Metrodome and those watching on television least expected. A guy who could barely run down the line to first base drove in the winning run in the perhaps best World Series ever played.

  “When I look back on it, I think I was swinging the bat for every average or even below-average player who ever played this game,” Larkin said. “I just got the chance to come through.”

  The players themselves were reluctant to clear the field after Gladden crossed home plate as the Braves’ Terry Pendleton hugged Shane Mack and Kirby Puckett while Tom Kelly talked with Ron Gant. A scene that was as close to hockey’s shaking of hands before the Stanley Cup is awarded briefly unfolded. In the Twins’ clubhouse Commissioner Fay Vincent declared this “was probably the greatest World Series ever played,” and the Twins soon afterward broke into an impromptu rendition of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” Players on both teams talked about how the World Series trophy could have been, perhaps should have been split in half—that’s how close and well played these handful of games, almost each one with its own particular hero or two, had been. In the end, of course, the hardware stayed in the Twin Cities, and with winter coming on hard, everyone involved was left with memories of the last fine time in baseball.

  ———

  Epilogue

  After the 1991 World Series both cities held downtown parades for their respective ballclubs. Nearly 750,000 attended the event in Atlanta, and fans there had to remind themselves that their beloved Braves had actually lost. In reality the two teams were at the crossroads, with one destined to fade to the ranks of also-rans to the point of almost ceasing operation, whereas the other would soon be regarded as a perennial contender.

  The Twins finished second to the Oakland Athletics in 1992, and Tom Kelly would manage through the 2001 season. As baseball began to divide into two distinct categories of teams—the haves and have-nots—the Twins finished about .500 only twice during the new era in baseball.

  A decade after the Twins won the World Series the baseball owners voted twenty-eight to two to downsize the number of teams at the big-league level. Two teams—the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos—were slated to cease operations before the 2002 season. The decision reversed nearly a half-century of expansion and would have been the first time since 1899 that teams had been disbanded at the major-league level.

  But the Major League Baseball Players Association pushed back, calling the decision “most imprudent and unfortunate” in a statement.

  Dan Gladden, who had scored the winning run in the 1991 World Series, predicted the Twins would still be playing in Minneapolis for years to come. He remained convinced even though Twins ownership wanted Commissioner Bud Selig to eliminate the ballclub in exchange for a contraction payment.

  In the end the Expos moved from Montreal, where they were averaging fewer than eight thousand fans a game in the deteriorating Stade Olympique, to Washington, DC, and became the Washington Nationals. The Twins stayed in Minnesota, where the construction of a new outdoor ballpark, Target Field, bolstered their attendance.

  In the meantime the Braves made it to the World Series again in 1992, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in another classic postseason championship series. This time the Braves lost the championship to the Toronto Blue Jays in six games. Before the 1993 season free-agent pitcher Greg Maddux, the defending Cy Young winner, joined the Atlanta staff. The five-year, $28 million deal was the kind of signing that was now beyond the Twins’ reach. Even with Maddux on board, the Braves would lose to the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series.

  After realignment shifted Atlanta to the NL East, the Braves finished second to the Montreal Expos in 1994, as the long-simmering labor acrimony between the owners and players boiled over, canceling the World Series. The following season the Braves again reached the World Series and downed the Cleveland Indians to capture Atlanta’s first title. With Bobby Cox at the helm the Braves reached the playoffs in fourteen consecutive seasons.

  “I always wondered what would have happened had we won [in 1991],” Mark Lemke said. “Would we have gotten fat and happy, soft? It left the hunger there. You think about it. I don’t believe Minnesota did anything after that. It kept going on for us.

  “I know we’d like to have won more World Series, but boy, that certainly started one heck of a run that I don’t think will ever be duplicated.”

  In 1997 the Braves moved into a new stadium, which was originally built for the 1996 Summer Olympics. The facility was named after owner Ted Turner. (By late 2013 plans were afoot for the Braves to move into a new stadium in neighboring Cobb County.) Meanwhile the Twins relocated to Target Field in 2010. The outdoor facility was constructed in downtown Minneapolis, within blocks of a light-rail network, and was hailed as perhaps the best of the new retro ballparks, which began with the opening of Camden Yards in Baltimore.

  Decades later Pendleton, Lemke, and other members of the 1991 Braves couldn’t help but think that the better team had somehow lost. While Smith’s base-running blunder became the play many remembered, others pointed to Cox’s loyalty to Charlie Leibrandt, in which the Atlanta manager started him in Game One and brought him out of the bullpen to try to close out the Series in Game Six. The Braves also had starter Scott Erickson on the ropes in Game Six but roughed him up for only three runs. Then there were the improbable home runs by the Twins’ Greg Gagne in Game One and Scott Leius in Game Two. Big flies hit by individuals who were afterthoughts on most scouting reports were reminders that pretty
much everyone in the Braves’ batting order struggled except for Lemke at .417, Rafael Belliard at .375, and Pendleton at .367. In comparison, Ron Gant and David Justice, the two players on the front of the 1991 Braves media guide, combined to hit .263 and only two home runs, both by Justice.

  To this day Pendleton, who in any other Series could have driven the deciding run, won’t admit that the Twins were the better team that season. “There was no better team than us in baseball in 1991,” he said.

  Lemke won’t go that far. “It’s hard to say if we should have won, but we sure had our chances,” he said. “We needed to take a road game, and we just couldn’t do it. Time after time it looked like we were about to break through against them.”

  So what helped tipped the balance? As Pendleton feared, the last guy Atlanta wanted to face in a winner-take-all Game Seven was Jack Morris. And then there was the setting. Professional athletes aren’t supposed to be influenced by any home-field advantage. Yet in 1991 where the games were played had a profound impact. Not only did both teams rise to the occasion in front of their hometown fans, but the difference in the stadiums—one indoor, the other outside—also became the background noise and major concern for whoever was the visiting team.

  “[The Metrodome] had to be the toughest home-field edge I’ve ever encountered,” Lemke added. “It wasn’t just the noise and those hankies, but that roof sure could wreck havoc with the best of ballplayers and teams.”

  Jim Kaat, who played in two World Series, 1965 and 1982, and covered another half-dozen more, including the 1991 World Series for CBS, said he never witnessed a more “significant home-field advantage” than the Metrodome.

  “I don’t know if the Twins win . . . without playing four games there,” he said. “Being there reminded me of when we’d used to go into the Astrodome. The place was so different that by the time you adjusted, you were leaving after losing a few.

  “I don’t know if the Braves were the better team, but I could see how they felt they were. That Atlanta team had everything except a quality closer. If you put somebody like Mariano Rivera on that club, they would have been unbeatable. That’s not to be critical of the guys they had. A pitcher like Charlie Leibrandt was a real veteran, but he wasn’t your prototypical closer.