Down to the Last Pitch

by Tim Wendel

  ———

  The Braves had chances to pull ahead in Game Three, but they were admittedly playing a few bricks shy of a load. Their running game, which had been a chief weapon during the regular season, remained stuck in neutral during long stretches of the postseason. The major reason? Otis Nixon, who led the team with seventy-two bases, was sidelined after testing positive for drugs.

  Back in July the Braves’ center fielder was first caught for cocaine. Commissioner Fay Vincent studied the results and decided not take any action at that point because the data was inconclusive. “The test was very, very marginal,” Vincent told USA Today. “We looked into it, interviewed Otis, and concluded the best course was to give him a chance which it seemed to us he had earned by his conduct over the years.”

  Unfortunately for Nixon and, ultimately, the Braves, the superb center fielder soon failed a subsequent random drug test, and Vincent had no choice but to suspend him for sixty days. That meant Nixon missed Atlanta’s final eighteen games of the regular season as well as the playoffs and World Series.

  “We coped with the loss of a lot of key players this year,” Braves general manager John Schuerholz said at the time. “We’ll try to do the best we can to cope with this.”

  With Nixon atop the batting order, the Braves offered an effective blend of speed and power. Not only did he steal seventy-two bases in 1991, but the switch-hitter also hit .297, with an on-base percentage of .371. On this ballclub he was the perfect table-setter for the big bats of Terry Pendleton, Ron Gant, David Justice, and Sid Bream.

  When Pendleton signed with the Braves during the offseason, coming to Atlanta after seven seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, he did so because the Braves’ young pitching staff impressed him, and Schuerholz and Cox had assured him that the ballclub “would go out and get the pieces that were necessary to compete.”

  “[The Braves] had a young Ron Gant, a young Jeff Blauser, a young Dave Justice,” Pendleton said. “Probably the final piece to the puzzle came when we got Otis Nixon. That was huge, because we really needed a leadoff hitter.”

  With Nixon out of the lineup for the 1991 postseason, Ron Gant took over defensively in center field, and Lonnie Smith moved into the leadoff role. The latter was nicknamed “Skates” for his misadventures in the outfield and on the basepaths. In addition the Braves were missing another valuable cog with the postseason in full swing, as two-sport star Deion Sanders had to report to the Atlanta Falcons’ football camp. During the Braves’ stretch run for the divisional title Sanders came through, though, especially with a pivotal home run against Pittsburgh in late July. Ironically, Sanders would rework his contract in 1992 so he could play the entire season with Atlanta and participate in that year’s World Series against Toronto, in which he would bat .533 with two doubles and four runs scored despite playing with a broken bone in his foot. “Neon Deion” may have been a part-timer in baseball, but the Braves certainly could have used him in the 1991 World Series.

  Sanders, for one, came to Nixon’s defense after the suspension made headlines. “This man was having the best year of his career, a free-agent year, the team’s winning, he had an outside chance at the MVP and the man already gets drug tests three times a week,” he told the New York Post. “They were on his bandwagon just a couple of days ago when he was driving in runs and doing it for the team and now they say it was drug-aided.”

  Speed can be the great equalizer in any sport. Deployed correctly, a fast team has the definite edge over a slower one. Yet many coaches seemingly distrust the concept, fearful that speed will disappear when a team needs it the most. The Orioles’ Earl Weaver, for example, believed in pitching, defense, and the three-run homer. Rolling the dice on hit and runs, stolen bases, and putting the runners in motion wasn’t his way. Perhaps that’s why somebody like Alan Wiggins didn’t fit in during his final seasons when he was in Baltimore. Or perhaps it was simply that drugs had already eaten away too much of him by that point in his career.

  No doubt that Wiggins had wheels. In his seven-year career, 1981–1987, he hit only .259 but stole 242 bases in 631 games for a 38.4 percentage. In comparison, all-time stolen-base leader Rickey Henderson stole 1,406 bases in 3,081 for 45.6 success rate. But, of course, Rickey was unabashedly the greatest of all time. Among the game’s top base stealers of all time, Lou Brock stole 938 bases in 2,616 games for a 35.9 percentage, whereas Ty Cobb sported a 29.6 rate, and Honus Wagner 25.9. The Braves’ Otis Nixon would finish his seventeen-year career with a mark remarkably similar to Wiggins’: 36.3 percent.

  Only a few years before, on the 1984 San Diego Padres, another manager, “Trader” Jack McKeon, had seamlessly employed Wiggins’s talent. With Wiggins as the leadoff batter on that team, Tony Gwynn hit .351 behind him and secured his first National League batting title. As a team, the Padres won the pennant, advancing to the World Series, where they lost in five games to the Detroit Tigers and Jack Morris, then their staff ace.

  McKeon said that Wiggins “became our catalyst in 1984. He was a good kid who ran into problems. When we lost him it took three years to find another second baseman [Roberto Alomar] and five years to find another leadoff hitter [Bip Roberts].”

  Former Padres shortstop Garry Templeton later told the San Diego Union that Wiggins “was one of the best sparkplugs any club ever had.”

  Unfortunately, Wiggins missed the 1985 opener at Dodger Stadium and was soon admitted to a drug rehabilitation center. When Padres owner Joan Kroc refused to allow Wiggins to rejoin the team, McKeon was forced to trade his speedster to Baltimore.

  From a baseball standpoint, Kroc’s stand made little sense and ran counter to the working agreement between the players and owners. Yet she remained adamant that Wiggins had to go, that he would never play in a Padres uniform again.

  “The game of baseball was not something she was very familiar with. The business side, even less,” Padres executive Dick Freeman once told San Diego Magazine. “If I said, ‘Oh, she was great to work for and it was a piece of cake,’ I wouldn’t be telling the truth.”

  On the East Coast Tony Attanasio, Wiggins’s agent, said his client’s new teammates soon ostracized him, and as a result, he turned to drugs anew. The Orioles would finish the 1986 season with a 73–89 record. As they began to struggle, Weaver told his players to steer clear of the media; he would do all the talking with the Fourth Estate. At the same time in world events Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi had drawn an imaginary “Line of Death” in the Mediterranean Sea, telling US forces to stay away. Wiggins, who regularly read the Wall Street Journal beyond the sports section, joked around the batting cage that Weaver had drawn a line of death between the Orioles’ ballplayers and the media. For his trouble, Attanasio said, Wiggins was literally beaten up by his new teammates.

  “After that Alan said he couldn’t play for them, and who could blame him?” said Attanasio, whose clients have included Goose Gossage, Bobby Valentine, Reggie Smith, Steve Howe, and Ichiro Suzuki. “Here was a guy who could have been the best second baseman Baltimore ever had. A guy who could run and field and hit. Instead, they didn’t want anything to do with him. They shunned him.”

  Soon Wiggins was back doing drugs, and he shared needles as part of his addiction. His family believes that’s what led him to become the first major-league player to die of an AIDS-related illness (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), which took him in early 1991. Wiggins’s death was another pebble thrown into the vast pool called sports that soon sent major waves throughout society by the end of that particular year. Even among those playing on the biggest stage later that season, Alan Wiggins’s death wasn’t forgotten.

  The Braves’ Terry Pendleton remembered that he would speak with Wiggins when either one of them were on base—the one taking up his defensive position in the field, the other looking to stretch his lead. “It was, ‘How you doing?’ That kind of thing,” Pendleton said. “I really didn’t know him, but I knew him as a player, the speed and talent that he brought
to the game. Unfortunately, he got into the wrong thing. He could have had a great baseball career.

  “I was saddened by [his death]. It shocks you when anybody—ex-player, ex-teammate—passes away. It shocks you because we all think we’re still twenty-five years old. But we’re not.”

  Former teammates Steve Garvey and Lee Lacy as well as Attanasio and Freeman attended Wiggins’s funeral. Although Candice Wiggins was just three years old at the time, the day remains one of her earliest memories. She can still close her eyes and see the Calvary C.M.E Methodist Church in Pasadena, California, packed to overflowing, and she will never forget how frightened everyone was.

  Although the initial reports said her father had died of respiratory failure from lung cancer, many in attendance knew better. Soon it came out that her father was the first major-league ballplayer to die because of AIDS.

  “It was a very scary time,” Candice recalled. “There was a lot of fear because of AIDS, and people back then knew so little about it. Back then some people felt you could get it by breathing. Just breathing.”

  ———

  Looking back on Otis Nixon’s absence from the Braves’ lineup, his suspension underscored a growing problem the national pastime had with drugs during this period—performance enhancing or otherwise—and the owners’ and players’ inability to agree on a way to effectively test for them. Steroids wouldn’t make major headlines for a few more seasons. Yet the signs were there, with little in place to curb their escalating use. According to José Canseco’s book Juiced, steroids were being used in baseball as early as the mid-1980s. His Oakland Athletics, with fellow Bash Brother Mark McGwire, would soon become a major focus for such activity. No matter that Peter Ueberroth proclaimed baseball to be drug-free before he stepped down as commissioner in 1989, PEDs were becoming a huge part of the sports scene overall, and they would soon be blamed for football player Lyle Alzado’s premature death in 1992. Through it all Major League Baseball couldn’t agree on an effective formal policy. In most cases the Major League Baseball Players Union opposed random testing. For example, the only way Nixon was caught for cocaine was because he tested positive as part of an earlier rehab program. Originally arrested in 1987 while playing at Triple-A Buffalo, Nixon had pled guilty to obstruction. Those drug charges were dropped, but the ballplayer was required to begin a rehab program that later resulted in the sixty-day suspension.

  “The only thing I know is we knew [Nixon] was on an aftercare program when we acquired his contract,” Braves GM John Schuerholz said in 1991.

  In large part baseball wasn’t able to focus on steroids and drugs because of the growing labor storm. Owners and players couldn’t agree on the framework for a new collective bargaining agreement, let alone a standardized drug policy. In testimony years later on Capitol Hill, MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred said, “No one believed that there was significant steroid use in the game at the time,” adding that “economic issues” took precedence over a stronger drug policy.

  Canseco recalled that the owners’ attitude bordered on, “Go ahead and do it.”

  As a result, more players took the overall dysfunctional situation as permission to dabble with steroids. In the summer of 1994 the owners would lock out the players, resulting in the World Series to be canceled for the first time in ninety years. “It really, really spread like wildfire after that,” Andy Van Slyke said. “Very few people say this, but steroids saved baseball and made a lot of players rich today. And everybody, it seemed, was drinking from the juice by the midnineties.”

  Well, maybe not everybody. Rickey Henderson, Canseco’s teammate and the game’s all-time base stealer, claimed he didn’t know about steroids back then. “They kept that [stuff] a secret from me,” he told the New Yorker in 2005. “I wish they had told me. My God, could you imagine Rickey on ’roids? Oh, baby, look out!”

  (Henderson was the first professional athlete I ever encountered who talked about himself in the third person, as in “Rickey is in a bit of a slump, but he’ll be good” or “Rickey slides head first because it’s closer to the ground. That way Rickey doesn’t get hurt.”)

  In the spring of 1991 I had been in the Phoenix area, making the rounds of the training camps. I finished the American League previews I was responsible for and, more importantly, established better contacts throughout the league. I told anybody who would listen that I was writing for a new publication, Baseball Weekly, which would be published nationwide beginning in a few weeks by USA Today.

  But through those days in the desert one baseball star eluded me. In fact, he wasn’t sitting for interviews with anyone. And he was the guy I needed the most—Rickey Henderson.

  Even though the A’s outfielder would soon begin the regular season only three bases away from breaking Lou Brock’s all-time stolen base record, Henderson had gone public earlier in spring training about wanting to renegotiate his contract. As a result, Henderson said crowds booed him throughout Arizona early in 1991. The superstar blamed the media for this debacle and refused to talk with any of us.

  That was well and fine with most writers. After all, speaking with Rickey Henderson could be a bit like listening to a combination of hip hop and haiku. But I needed fresh quotes from the “Man of Steal.” The premiere issue of Baseball Weekly would have Henderson on the cover, and I had been assigned the story. Everybody else could wait out Henderson’s latest snit—except me.

  That afternoon in Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the Athletics’ spring home, Henderson started the game in left field against the Seattle Mariners. By the middle innings Oakland manager Tony La Russa began to sub out his regulars, replacing them with rookies or journeymen who needed another audition under the Arizona sun before their station for the season was decided upon. Henderson ran in from left field to a smattering of boos and cheers. As he did so, I slowly walked to the back of Municipal’s open-air press box. I was trying to be nonchalant, acting like I was heading to get another hot dog or ice cream swirl. But my notebook was in my back pocket, and as soon as I came down the steps of the press box I picked up the pace, heading for a door behind the stands that led down to the A’s clubhouse.

  Downstairs nobody was in sight at first. But then coming around the corner was Rickey Henderson himself. He had a towel fastened around his waist and another draped around his neck. Even though he was thirty-three years old at the time, he had the physique of a guy in his midtwenties—defined torso, thick shoulders, and thick, cable-like legs.

  When Henderson saw me he turned in one movement, ready to escape to the areas of the clubhouse that were off-limits to the media.

  “Rickey,” I shouted.

  But he kept going.

  “I don’t want to talk about your contract. I want to talk about you about to break Lou Brock’s record.”

  Thankfully, Henderson stopped in his tracks and looked over his shoulder back at me.

  “Nothing about the contract?”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “I just want to talk about you and Brock’s all-time stolen base record.”

  Henderson considered this for a moment.

  “Just about Rickey and Lou?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Just about you and Lou—the two greatest base stealers of all time.”

  “Rickey and Lou?”

  “Yes, this is for USA Today,” I said, not wanting to complicate things by explaining about a publication that hadn’t made the newsstands yet.

  “Rickey and Lou,” Henderson again said, pulling up a stool in front of his locker. He motioned for me to sit down next to him. “Rickey would like that.”

  So we spent the next half-hour talking about Rickey’s upbringing in the rough streets of Oakland and how in high school he sometimes raced the team bus to the next neighborhood game to build up his legs. Once he was between the lines he remembered to come home with a dirty uniform or else his mother wouldn’t believe that he had even gone to the game. As a result, if he hadn’t done much on the basepaths on a p
articular afternoon, he would go back out on the field, “sliding in the dirt” after the final out.

  In the early 1990s the national pastime once more mirrored the world around it. Even when the conversation wasn’t about money, it somehow came back to the all-mighty dollar. Although I kept my word and didn’t bring up the contract hubbub, Rickey Henderson couldn’t help but comment on the booing he had heard an hour or so earlier. Granted, it was hard to feel sorry for a guy making $3 million annually. Yet Henderson wasn’t among the top twenty-five in salaries as this season began. He felt he had no choice but to complain—even threaten to hold out for a higher wage.

  “This should be my golden moment, but I’ve gotten so much heat about my contract,” Henderson said as more of his teammates began to file into the A’s clubhouse. “I’m not even thinking about Lou Brock or his record. This is maybe the most important thing of my life. What I’ve played years for. But with all this other stuff going on, breaking Brock’s record could be kind of hollow.”

  He glanced around the room before adding, “The last year and half I was the best anybody can be. They say they can’t renegotiate, but that’s crazy. In baseball right now there are no rules when it comes to money and contracts. No rules about anything except what happens out there on the field.”

  ———

  Without Otis Nixon and Deion Sanders in uniform, no high-quality speedster like Rickey Henderson at the top of the lineup, the Braves needed new heroes in the 1991 Fall Classic. With novelist Stephen King looking on in Atlanta, the bottom part of the Braves’ lineup began to step up. Catcher Greg Olson, second baseman Mark Lemke, and shortstop Rafael Belliard would eventually go 4-for-11 in Game Three, with three runs batted in, as the heart of the Braves’ order batted only 2-for-16.