Down to the Last Pitch

by Tim Wendel

  Minnesota workhorse Jack Morris pitched ten scoreless innings in Game Seven and was named the 1991 World Series MVP.

  (MINNESOTA TWINS)

  Looking back on things, Brian Harper wished that Puckett had stayed closer to the game after being forced to abruptly go to the sidelines because of his vision problems. The catcher remembered being “emotionally done” when he hung up his uniform in 1995. “But Kirby’s situation was different from any of the rest of us,” Harper said. “He woke up one day, and his playing career was over. Just like that, it was over. He sure would have had more good years before the glaucoma. That had to be hard for him.

  “I think he would have eventually gone into coaching. Obviously, he was struggling with a lot of things. Still, I had heard he was going to get with a nutritionist for his weight. He was ready to turn things around.”

  Chili Davis wasn’t sure coaching—somehow staying in the game—would have helped. “That’s tough to say,” he said. “The only thing I wish for him is that he was peaceful when he went. As far as hanging in the game? He brought so much to the game already. I mean the man did enough.

  “I’m glad he’s in the Hall. He belongs in the Hall. He went through a couple of ordeals in Minnesota after his playing days ended. He had moved to Arizona to try and start his life over again.”

  Ron Gardenhire added, “Puck would have been great as a roving instructor. He would have enjoyed going to other cities, talking to everybody, from the outfielders on how to play the ball to talking to base runners about what to look for. The way he was I don’t know if he could have tempered himself to coaching every day with the same outfit. He was so full of life and always going, always trying to see what was next. The grind of a full-time coaching for him? That would have been too hard for him, I’m afraid.”

  In March 2006 Puckett suffered a stroke and died soon afterward at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. He was forty-five years old.

  Several of his closest friends in baseball—Davis, Dan Gladden, Ken Griffey Jr. among them—gathered at the hospital and said their goodbyes, even though Puckett was on a respirator by that point.

  “By then he couldn’t hear us anymore,” Gladden recalled. “Everything was working, except the mind was gone. But we were able to say good-bye—each of us in our own special way.”

  Davis added, “The only thing I wish is that I’d had the opportunity to spend more time with him after he moved down from Minnesota, before he passed. I talked him to him right around the Super Bowl that year. Dan Gladden was in town, and we called him up, and we were going to go by and see him, but he said he was busy. . . . It never happened, and the next thing I know Gladden is calling me, telling me that Puck had had the stroke.”

  A public memorial service for Puckett drew fifteen thousand to the Metrodome, the site of his biggest moment in baseball. At first Torii Hunter was scheduled to speak, along with Kent Hrbek, Tom Kelly, Al Newman, Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, and Andy MacPhail. But in the end Hunter had to beg off. “What do they want me to do?” Hunter said. “Cry?”

  Garth Brooks, a huge Puckett fan, couldn’t even bring himself to attend. The country music star wasn’t sure he could make it through the event without breaking down as well.

  Only a few years before, Major League Baseball had wanted to eliminate the Twins as a major-league franchise through contraction. The former superstar had visited the state legislature, urging support for a new downtown ballpark. With Puckett’s death, efforts for a new stadium soon gained momentum.

  “Over the last week I’ve found myself closing my eyes and replaying all the times I spent with Kirby,” Ripken said, “whether it was on the field [or] off the field. I found myself replaying the emotions over and over again. You know what happened? I started to feel better.”

  When it was Tom Kelly’s turn to speak, he asked all of his former players in attendance to stand with him during his remarks. Their ranks included Jack Morris, who was seated next to Rod Carew.

  Certainly there were tears, but there was laughter too. MacPhail urged that the crowd consider the memorial service as a celebration too. In that spirit, video clips were shown on the Jumbotron, including Puckett’s 1997 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, in which he read the show’s nightly Top Ten. On that evening it listed the ways his name was mispronounced. Among those were Englepuck Kirbydink, The Puckett Formerly Known as Kirby, Turkey Bucket, and even Kent Hrbek.

  The real Kent Hrbek couldn’t help but smile at this. “The people of Minnesota are losing an icon,” Hrbek later said. “Paul Bunyan was big. Puck’s as big as Paul Bunyan around here. He’s still right alongside him.”

  Outside of the Twin Cities the baseball world briefly came to a stop that day. The White Sox’s Ozzie Guillen watched the ceremony on television and wept. “I think Dave Winfield said the right thing,” Guillen said. “[Puckett] was the only player in the history of baseball everybody loved.”

  Years later Hrbek joked about how so many cats and dogs and kids in this part of the world were named Kirby. Hrbek may have been a native son, a guy who went on to stardom in his hometown, but he played second fiddle to Puckett.

  “And I loved every minute of it,” he said.

  ———

  All of it—the promise, the catch, the triple—would be remembered as prologue to Kirby Puckett’s at-bat against Charlie Leibrandt in the bottom of the eleventh inning.

  When that changeup rose up in the zone, Puckett did just enough to drive it over the fence. Near second base, as he circled the diamond, Puckett pumped his right arm several times, yelling “Yeah, yeah!” His home run trot became instantly as memorable as Carlton Fisk’s sixteen years earlier in another Game Six.

  “I figured it was out because I always watch the outfielders,” said Ron Gardenhire, who was the Twins’ third-base coach on this evening. “They were following it, but they weren’t catching up to it. Then you start looking at the fans standing up, raising their eyes, and I was just kind of backing down the line after Puck hit it.

  “The more I watched, the more I started to get myself in fist-pump mode. I was getting myself in line to shake his hand.”

  Chili Davis waited with the rest of teammates at home plate, watching Puckett round the bases, almost in disbelief by what had transpired.

  “I don’t care what people may say about Kirby Puckett these days, but I will always have a place in my heart for him,” Davis said decades later. “He’s my favorite player, my favorite teammate—ever. No ifs, ands, or buts. The guy was very giving. He livened up the locker room every day he was there. You’d never really see him have a bad day. If I said, ‘Puck, I need something.’ He’d say, ‘Dog, it’s in my locker. Get it. Take what you need.’”

  Rounding third base, the Metrodome now complete bedlam, Puckett saw Gardenhire, who had both hands raised in the air. Puckett slapped them and continued on. “We were about as happy and as pumped up as you can be,” Gardenhire recalled.

  The Twins players poured out of the dugout, forming a half-circle at home plate. Backup catcher Junior Ortiz was there to greet Puckett, with Dan Gladden and Kent Hrbek right behind him, and Davis ready to hug his friend. When the slugger touched home plate the Twins gathered around him, forming a pile of humanity that briefly concealed their star player from view. When Puckett broke away from the crowd, walking toward the dugout, he raised his fist again in the air. After slapping hands again with Ortiz, he greeted hitting coach Terry Crowley and then hugged manager Tom Kelly.

  Game Six remains a testament to Puckett’s ability to rise to the occasion as a ballplayer. His triple back in the first inning drove in Chuck Knoblauch with the game’s first run, followed by his leaping catch up against the Plexiglas, robbing Ron Gant of extra bases only a few feet away from where he would later put his game-winner. With that home run Puckett joined Carlton Fisk, Dusty Rhodes, Tommy Henrich, Eddie Mathews, Kirk Gibson, and Bill Mazeroski as hitters who won a World Series game with one swing
of the bat. In addition, he became the first player to collect a sacrifice fly, a triple, and a home run in a World Series game.

  “I never hit a game-winning home run,” Puckett told a group of reporters on the field after the game. “Not that I can remember. Other guys have done it all around here—Dan Gladden, Herbie. I couldn’t believe it. I finally did something I said I was going to do.”

  After midnight, deep in the bowels of the Metrodome, Braves manager Bobby Cox was questioned about using starting pitcher Charlie Leibrandt in relief. “Why not Charlie?” Cox replied. “He’s faced Puckett before. He keeps the ball down. He’s a fifteen-game winner. Charlie just got a ball up and Puckett hit it hard.”

  Braves catcher Greg Olson remembered hoping that when the ball left Puckett’s bat it would glance off the fence and somehow stay in play. “But I had a feeling as soon as he hit it there was going to be a Game Seven.”

  Puckett finally made it up the long stairwell from the field to the Twins’ clubhouse. Once he was there he sat down in front of his locker, shaking his head. “Man, oh, man,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Gene Larkin remembered Jack Morris, who was scheduled to be Minnesota’s starting pitcher in Game Seven, saying, “Now it’s my turn to do my job. Kirby did his job.”

  In fact, Morris had already set the stage for Game Seven by telling the media, “In the immortal words of the late, great Marvin Gaye, ‘Let’s get it on.’”

  “After Game Six, when we went back in the clubhouse, we were at ease,” Gladden recalled, “because we looked over and there was Jack Morris, and you could tell that he was already getting his game face on. You just knew he was going to pitch us a great ballgame the next night.”

  Well past midnight, after the television cameras had thinned out in the home clubhouse, CBS’s Pat O’Brien drifted by Puckett’s locker. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a roll of greenbacks and jokingly held them out for the Twins’ star.

  “There’s more where that came from,” O’Brien said.

  “Well, give it here,” Puckett said, playing along with the gag.

  With a smile, O’Brien slid the cash back into his pocket. On this evening it became the only play Puckett let slip away.

  For the first time since 1987, when the Twins defeated the St. Louis Cardinals, the World Series was going seven games. For those watching at home on television, many of them could close their eyes and still picture Kirby Puckett swinging for the fences against Charlie Leibrandt and then running hard out of the batter’s box, hustling as he rounded the first-base bag. Only when the Twins’ star saw the ball somehow fall into stands did he raise his arms toward the heavens in celebration.

  Fans would long remember what had happened this evening. How one individual, arguably the best-known ballplayer on either team, had risen to the occasion. And the best part? This Series still had one more game to play. As announcer Jack Buck told the national television audience, “And we will see you tomorrow night.”

  ———

  Game Seven

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1991

  AT HUBERT H. HUMPHREY METRODOME

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  The Braves’ Mark Lemke best summed up the mood of both teams before the decisive Game Seven. “It seems every game we’ve played since the last week of the season was the seventh game of the World Series,” he said. “Might as well play in the seventh game of the World Series.”

  As Jack Morris warmed up, Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” appropriately played over the Metrodome sound system, and when stadium announcer Bob Casey warned the sellout crowd that there was no smoking inside the facility, Kent Hrbek one last time pantomimed smoking a cigarette and then shaking his index finger disapprovingly. As the fans roared, he then pretended to slug back a beer, following that recommendation with a big thumbs-up.

  In the six previous games the Twins usually scored in the early innings, and the longest wait for the first run to go up on the scoreboard occurred in Game Five in Atlanta, when the Braves struck for four the fourth inning. And of course, that contest eventually became a 14–5 laugher. Yet early in Game Seven both teams realized that the respective pitchers were in control. Right-hander Jack Morris had been the Twins’ Opening Day starter, the starting pitcher in the 1991 All-Star Game, against the Braves’ Tom Glavine. Morris had pitched the first game of American League Championship Series and the first game of this World Series. On this evening, with a 6–1 record already in postseason play, his split-finger fastball displayed a lot of life.

  Morris loved to throw the pitch, which darted down at the last moment, when he got ahead in the count. As a result, the Braves’ hitters told themselves to be patient: try to stay out of two-strike situations because Morris would often then go with the split, which soon appeared unhittable this evening.

  Atlanta did mount a threat in the second inning, when David Justice singled to center field. Running on the pitch, he went to second on Sid Bream’s groundout. With one out, the Braves had a runner in scoring position, and they almost brought him around, and then some when Brian Hunter hit a line drive down the left-field line that just hooked foul. After that close call Morris struck him out with a high fastball and then induced Greg Olson to pop out to second baseman Chuck Knoblauch.

  “From then on you could tell that Jack had it going,” Twins shortstop Greg Gagne recalled. “All of his pitches had great movement in Game Seven. Especially that split of his.”

  The split-finger fastball was a modification of the forkball, which was used to great success by Bullet Joe Bush in the 1920s and Elroy Face three decades later. The forkball was held more in the palm of the hand, while the split-finger was often wedged between the index and middle fingers. It was thrown with the same motion and arm position as the fastball. In the 1980s not only Morris but also Roger Clemens, Dave Stewart, Mike Scott, Donnie Moore, Bruce Sutter, and nearly everybody on the San Francisco Giants pitching staff threw the split or modified forkball with relative degrees of success. If the slider had been the pitch of the sixties, the split-finger soon became known as the pitch of the eighties.

  Sports Illustrated called it the “newest of the substitute spitters,” following in the contrails of the curveball (allegedly originated by Candy Cummings in the 1860s), the screwball (perfected by Christy Mathewson and then executed so well by Carl Hubbell and, later, Fernando Valenzuela), the spitball itself (outlawed in 1920), and then the knuckleball, the slider, and even the circle changeup. Basically, all of these pitches, when thrown effectively, complement the fastball. A batter cannot be ready for a little high heat and some kind of breaking ball at the same time. Even a difference of six miles per hour between offerings can be enough to keep a hitter off balance and make a pitcher a winner.

  The split-finger proved to be easy to learn and, back in the day, came with its own stirring advocate, Roger Craig. Standing six-foot-four, with an upbeat folksy manner, Craig believed only in God, country, and his longtime wife, Carolyn, more than the beloved split-finger. A right-hander, he had pitched for a dozen years in the big leagues, winning titles with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and St. Louis Cardinals. Still, Craig didn’t discover the split-finger fastball in time to save himself as he lost a league-high twenty-four games and twenty-two games in consecutive seasons with the New York Mets before they were ever Amazin’. It wasn’t until after his playing days were over that Craig stumbled upon the pitch that would change his life and the career of so many others as well.

  In the winter of 1980 Craig was teaching at the San Diego School of Baseball. Most of his students were teenagers, and he wanted to come up with a breaking ball they could quickly use in games. That’s when Craig tried the variation on the forkball, shifting the ball slightly away from the palm and throwing it with a fastball pitch motion that many of students could duplicate. The rest, they say, is history. Not only did Craig’s kids soon gain mastery of the pitch, but when he joined the Detroit Tigers as Sparky Anderson’s pitc
hing coach the next season, he brought the inspiration along with him.

  In the Motor City Craig’s first disciples of the split were Milt Wilcox and Jack Morris. The Tigers won the World Series in 1984 and led the league in team ERA. Morris had two complete-game victories in that Fall Classic and later said that the split-finger fastball “turned me into a strikeout pitcher.”

  Despite widespread success, many in baseball soon became concerned about the pitch. Anderson maintained that if a pitcher threw the split too much, his fastball could lose velocity. “In the beginning it was so wonderful because it was a freak thing for the hitters,” the Tigers’ manager said. “But once you throw it, throw it, throw it, the hitters sit there and watch, and it’s no longer the same pitch.”

  Craig strongly disagreed with his old friend. After leaving Detroit, Craig became manager of the San Francisco Giants in 1985. I met him the following season when I first began covering baseball for the San Francisco Examiner in the Bay Area, and I never found a more delightful person to talk baseball with. By that point Craig had become such an evangelist for the split-finger that he received a half-dozen or more calls weekly from across the country about throwing the pitch. The ballclub put together a question-and-answer form letter, ROGER CRAIG TALKS ABOUT THE SPLIT-FINGERED FASTBALL, which was sent to pitchers at all levels, including the major leagues.

  In time Anderson and other critics of the split pretty much carried the day. Almost a quarter-century after the “Worst to First” World Series between the Twins and the Braves, the number of major-league pitchers throwing the split-finger fastball had dropped markedly, with Roy Halladay, Dan Haren, Jonathan Papelbon, and Koji Uehara among the star hurlers still using it on a regular basis. Such ballclubs as the Reds, Padres, Rays, Twins, and even Craig’s old ballclub, the Giants, advised their younger pitchers to try another secondary or breaking pitch. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon said the pitch “put a lot of pressure on the elbow.”