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

  Years ago, when Joe Montana was as All-Pro quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, he rallied his team for a last-minute victory at Candlestick Park. When reporters asked Montana about one of the pivotal plays, when he evaded a blitzing defender coming from his blind side, he smiled that Cheshire Cat grin of his and said, “Didn’t you guys recognize that move?”

  Puzzled looks all around. Nobody knew what he was talking about.

  “It’s an old basketball move,” Montana explained. “Spin away from your man, remember? You guys forget I was a pretty good basketball player too. They offered me a college scholarship in that too.”

  Perhaps only a pitcher like Tom Glavine would really understand.

  ———

  It takes two to have a pitching duel, and Kevin Tapani soon proved to be Glavine’s equal in Game Two of the Series. He was nicked for a single run in the second inning and another in the fifth, when Minnesota native son Greg Olson doubled, went to third on Mark Lemke’s groundout, and then scored on Rafael Belliard’s sacrifice fly. After that, though, Tapani shut down the Braves’ offense.

  While Glavine dominated as the game went into the later innings, Tapani continued to match him on the scoreboard, zero for zero. Lying in the weeds, going about his job without a lot of fanfare had always been Tapani’s way. Raised in Escanaba, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, Tapani played baseball in a land where the winters were so long that the high school season really didn’t happen. There was only time left for American Legion ball, later in the short summers, for Tapani to show his stuff. “Everyone dreams about playing in the majors,” he once told the Sporting News, “but I never thought I’d get a chance. Almost no one else from there had ever done it, so I didn’t think about it. Baseball was just for fun.”

  Somehow Tapani received a scholarship offer to play at Central Michigan after turning heads at a tryout camp the Los Angeles Dodgers held. In 1986 Oakland drafted him in the second round, and he signed with the Athletics. After pitching at four levels of the A’s system (Medford, Modesto, Huntsville, and Tacoma), Tapani became part of a three-team, eight-player deal that saw reliever Jesse Orosco go from the Mets to the Dodgers and starting pitcher Bob Welch move from Los Angeles to Oakland. For the next two seasons Tapani rose through the Mets’ minor-league system. At the trading deadline in 1989 he came to Minnesota along with David West and Rick Aguilera in the deal that sent Frank Viola to the New York Mets. After another brief stint in the minors, Tapani was called up for good and finished fifth in the American League Rookie of the Year balloting, behind winner Sandy Alomar of the Cleveland Indians. In 1991 he finished seventh in the Cy Young balloting, behind Roger Clemens and teammates Scott Erickson and Jack Morris, who finished second and fourth, respectively.

  Tapani, unlike many young pitchers, didn’t suffer any delusions of grandeur. He knew his personal limitations, and according to Twins pitching coach Dick Such, he stayed within himself and didn’t try to overpower hitters when he got behind in the count. At his best, as he was on this evening in late October 1991, Tapani attacked hitters with a methodical, measured approach. In that way he was a lot like Glavine. Neither pitcher was overpowering. At their best, though, they could make even major-league hitters look downright foolish.

  “I’ve got to control their bat speed and keep them from getting good swings,” Tapani once explained. “I know my pitches are hittable.”

  At his best Tapani was a poor man’s Catfish Hunter. He could be roughed up some, even give up the occasional long ball, but he would invariably work through the tough patches and do what was needed to win.

  “He almost always could command his fastball, which goes a long way toward winning in the big leagues,” said Twins catcher Brian Harper. “And he had a real plus-major league changeup too.

  “Tap could throw his change to right-handers and left-handers, and most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to throw it at any time. Some pitchers try to spot that pitch, only throw it when they think they may have a big chance at success. But Tap had real confidence in that pitch. He would throw it any time, to anybody.”

  Such was the case, Harper remembered, in the top of the eighth inning. Belliard surprised the Twins by laying down a bunt up the third-base line on a 1–2 count. Lonnie Smith then sacrificed Belliard to second base, and the Braves now had the go-ahead run in scoring position. Terry Pendleton followed with a slow dribble to the right side. Kent Hrbek fielded it and threw on to first base, with Tapani covering. But in a bang-bang play, first-base umpire Drew Coble ruled a sliding Pendleton safe. (Replay showed it was the correct call.) That put men on first and third with only one out. Next up was up Gant, who was 4-for-7 to this point in the series.

  With the count, 2–1, Tapani spotted a fastball on the outside corner. Gant, who was trying to pull the ball, popped up the offering behind home plate, and Harper barely tracked it down against the padded blue wall. Now there were two down.

  “But who’s up next?” Harper recalled years later. “David Justice—the absolutely last guy we wanted to face in that kind of situation.”

  Tapani and Harper huddled on the mound, with the catcher asking the right-hander what pitch he had the most confident in. Tapani told him that he wanted to use the fastball to set up the changeup. After Justice worked the count to 3–2, Tapani decided to roll the dice. Until this point in the at-bat, Tapani had been changing speeds and working the Braves’ slugger consistently low and away. Now Tapani went away one last time. Yet this time the pitch was up, almost at shoulder level.

  Justice pulled slightly off the ball, barely hitting it off the end of the bat. It became a fly ball to Dan Gladden in left field, and Minnesota and Tapani had wriggled free again, leaving another goose egg on the scoreboard.

  “In looking back on things I don’t know how I got out of that,” Tapani recalled. “I just battled my way through it. Thankfully, Harp was thinking right along there with me. I mean, Gant and Justice? You cannot be predictable as a pitcher with hitters like that coming up. They will hit it out of the park if they can guess what’s coming. I was thinking this and then that, always mixing it up, and my catcher was with me every step of the way.”

  In his understated way Tapani regularly did the right thing at the right time. One of my favorite stories about him occurred a decade later, in the frightening aftermath of 9/11. He was coming to the end of his baseball career by then, pitching for the Chicago Cubs. When the planes struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, Tapani began to receive worried phone calls from the Twin Cities, where he still made his home. After receiving permission from management, Tapani drove the seven hours north to talk with his kids, who were then ages ten, six, and four.

  The night he arrived the family all bunked down in the parents’ bedroom, a big slumber party that reassured everyone. After a few days at home, with the kids back to their old selves, Tapani returned to playing baseball.

  ———

  In 1991 the sport was on the verge of several sweeping changes. Some of them, notably in ballpark construction, would be for the better. Yet on many other fronts—labor unrest, a precipitous rise in performance-enhancing drugs, the lack of patience in what became our “fix it now” culture—baseball was headed for the cliff. That’s why this season, specifically this Series, will always be remembered fondly among baseball pundits and aficionados.

  “In a lot of ways it will always be this sweet spot in time,” said Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau, who worked with CBS Sports for the 1991 Series. “Not only did this one Series have everything you ever wanted in terms of pressure games and great performances, you also look back on it fondly because of what was to come, the challenges the game would soon face.”

  The previous spring the baseball owners had locked the players out of training camps for thirty-two days. Salary arbitration became the focal point of the dispute, with more problematic issues—a pay-for-performance system and a salary cap—also discussed. Ownership now saw a salar
y cap as a way, perhaps the only way, ballclubs in such smaller markets as Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Minnesota could compete. The players union, led by Donald Fehr, viewed such measures as a way for ownership to balance their books on the backs of the players.

  Twenty-five years earlier Marvin Miller had taken charge of the Major League Baseball Players Association and transformed the organization into arguably the strongest union in the land. A former official with the United Steelworkers Union, Miller was adept, often acerbic in his dealings with baseball ownership, and the MLBPA grew in power while unions nationwide lost much of their clout.

  “There’s no question he did an outstanding job for the players,” said Lee MacPhail, former American League president and Andy MacPhail’s father. “Certainly, when he took over, the players weren’t getting their fair share of the returns. If I had any criticism of Marvin at all, I didn’t think he has any great feel for the game itself. His concerns have been strictly getting as much as he can for the players.”

  By 1990 Miller had stepped aside, replaced by Fehr, who proved to be just as capable when it came to hard-nosed negotiations. The owners were often represented by their six-member Player Relations Council, which included Chairman Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers, Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, Fred Wilpon of the New York Mets, John McMullen of the Houston Astros, Fred Kuhlmann of the St. Louis Cardinals and Carl Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins.

  “The owners wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock,” agent Tom Reich said. “To go back to that time before Marvin. Of course, Don Fehr had no intent of ever letting that happen.”

  In the end the lockout of 1990 concluded after three weeks. Instead of playing thirty spring training games, most clubs played fifteen. Although there was some grumbling about lost gate revenue for Cactus and Grapefruit games, overall losses were minimal. The season began on time, and soon most players and owners forgot about the shutdown. Yet the lockout had drawn Tom Glavine into union affairs. He explained that he “hated the feeling of waiting for someone to call.” So the left-hander moved closer to the flame of labor relations and what would soon be an epic showdown between the players and owners. Although most players avoid labor issues at all costs, Glavine became the Braves’ player representative, succeeding Dale Murphy. By 1994, when deep-seated labor acrimony and distrust on both sides caused the World Series to be canceled, he was the union’s National League representative. He and David Cone became the public face for the MLBPA on television and in the papers.

  “Fans were ticked off seeing my face on TV all the time,” Glavine told USA Today’s Erik Brady. “I was associated with the problem. It was a kill-the-messenger thing. The thing about it is I was just trying to do my job.”

  Whether he was on the mound or at the negotiating table, Glavine didn’t shy away from confrontation. Even though his best weapon was a changeup, a pitch of real deception, he threw it with a poker face and with as much resolve as any fireballer that brings the high heat: Here it is. Try to hit it. Just try.

  ———

  In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the score still tied at two apiece, third baseman Scott Leius led off for the Minnesota Twins. Raised in Yonkers, New York, Leius had grown up a diehard Yankee fan, and his favorite player was Mike Pagliarulo. “I was a big fan of Mike’s,” Leius said. “I watched how he played defense. He was one of the best ever, in my opinion.”

  In one of the ironic twists that baseball often offers, Leius ended up platooning at third base with his boyhood hero during the 1991 season. Coming out of spring training, Twins manager Tom Kelly struggled to find a roster spot for Leius, a shortstop at heart. Soon the only choice was the team giving him a crash course at third base.

  With only a handful of games left in spring training, Kelly decided to try a platoon system, with Leius and Pagliarulo at the hot corner. The left-handed Pagliarulo would hit against right-handers, and Leius would go against left-handers and back up Greg Gagne at shortstop. The only wrinkle was that Leius had never played third base in his life, at any level, even going back to Little League. “When I was a kid I was a center fielder, pitcher, and shortstop,” Leius said. “I can’t recall ever playing third base before that spring training.”

  Despite that, he joined Kelly at a back field in spring training, with coaches Terry Crowley and Dick Such taking turns snagging his throws from third base. Things went well enough that first afternoon, but it wasn’t until the following morning, when Leius was riding the bus up to Dunedin, Florida, for a spring game against the Toronto Blue Jays, when he realized how far things had gone in a hurry. Greg Gagne, the regular shortstop, wasn’t on this road trip, and when Leius saw the line card, the number five, for third base, instead of the number six, for shortstop, was penciled next to his name.

  “At first I thought, ‘Five. What in the hell is five?’” he recalled. “Then I saw that Al Newman was playing shortstop. That’s how I learned that I was getting my first start at third base. I didn’t know if I was really ready or not.”

  Despite the uncertainty, Leius remained determined to make the big-league ballclub. “I saw an opportunity and I went for it. I wasn’t complaining. They were giving me a chance to make the team, a real good team, and I wanted to hold up my end of the deal to show that they were right, that I could do this.”

  Chuck Knoblauch, who was Leius’s roommate, said the two of them “were both happy to make the team at first, but we wanted to do more than that. Both us wanted to prove that we could help the team.”

  Leius and Pagliarulo combined to hit eleven home runs and drive in fifty-six runs at third base during the regular season, and both won accolades for their defense.

  Now, in the late innings of Game Two, Leius wasn’t sure how to approach his at-bat against Tom Glavine. He spoke with Crowley, asking him what he should do, but the hitting coach refused to give him specific instructions, a refusal Leius later appreciated. “That’s what made Terry a great coach,” Leius recalled. “He never told you what to do. I was a hitting coach later in my career, and I learned you have to let guys figure it out for themselves. Be there, but they’re the ones up there, against the pitcher.

  “His advice was great: ‘Know what you want to hit and get after it. If it happens to be the first pitch, so be it.’ I mean I was just looking to get on base. Everybody knew I wasn’t your prototypical home-run hitter.

  Stepping in against Glavine, Leius decided that the Braves’ left-hander would probably work him like Tapani had done in the top half of the eighth to the Atlanta hitters: some hard stuff away and get him to chase the change. Leius told himself to be ready. The main goal was to simply get on—a walk, hit . . . anything.

  “Glavine had all his pitches going, so I had to find a pitch I could do something with. Not necessarily hit a home run, but see if I could hit the ball hard,” Leius remembered. “When you’re facing a guy like that, who’s been so dominant in a ballgame, you don’t want to fall too far behind. If that happens, the chances are he’s going to get you.

  “So I was lucky. He put a fastball out over the plate, pretty much where I was looking for it, and I was fortunate enough to put good wood on it.”

  The Twins’ rookie drove Glavine’s first pitch just over the Plexiglas atop the left-field fence at the Metrodome. The drive settled a few rows into the stands, and the game had turned again. Moments after nearly taking the lead against Tapani, the Braves now trailed, 3–2.

  Although Leius was a relative unknown to most fans, his improbable home run didn’t surprise his teammates. “Like I say, ‘Every night it’s somebody different’,” Kirby Puckett explained. “All season long different people have been stepping forward. Scott’s done it before, and we knew he’d do it again sometime soon.”

  Staff ace Jack Morris said Leius’s homer was another example of matters going the Twins’ way in 1991: “This is the kind of team that we were,” he said. “It was the kind of thing that wins championships.”

  After his dr
amatic hit, back in the Twins’ dugout, Leius had to be prodded to take the first curtain call of his professional career. “I didn’t know what to do,” he remembered. “Puck said, ‘You better go out there.’ I just wanted to think about going back out to play defense, finish things off and take Game Two.”

  After giving up a single to Greg Gagne on the pitch after Leius’s home run, Glavine soon settled down. Even though Gagne went to second on a balk, the Braves’ starter got Knoblauch and Puckett to then ground out. So heading into the top of the ninth inning the Braves somehow found themselves trailing by a run.

  With one swing of the bat, from an improbable source at that, the Twins were now in position to go two games up in the series. Closer Rick Aguilera came in from the bullpen to start the top of the ninth inning. Before the game Minnesota manager Tom Kelly had reassured the media that Aguilera would be ready if needed, even though he had closed out Game One the night before.

  Although relief pitchers had been deployed in baseball for some time, their role became more specialized in the seasons leading up to the 1991 series. New York Giants manager John McGraw occasionally went with right-hander Claude Elliott to shut down the opposition as far back as 1905. In the 1950s knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm began putting up impressive numbers in relief, peaking with twenty-seven saves for the Chicago White Sox in 1964. Thanks in large part to manager Earl Weaver, Steve Dalkowski appeared destined to be the game’s first bona fide closer, at least as we envision him today—a hard-throwing guy who could strike out the side with the game on the line.

  In 1962, at Class A Elmira, Weaver simplified things for the bespectacled fireballer, telling Dalkowski to only throw his fastball and slider and to only throw as hard as he could when Weaver whistled from the dugout. (That signal came only when there were two strikes on the batter.) In the second half of that season Dalkowski, who rarely exhibited much control up to this point in his career, walked only eleven batters in fifty-two innings. The following spring, in Grapefruit League action, he struck out eleven batters in seven and two-thirds innings. Just like that the myopic left-hander with the thick Coke-bottle glasses was slated to head north with the parent club as the Baltimore Orioles’ short-relief specialist.