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

  On the recommendation of Paul White, the esteemed editor of Baseball Weekly, I flew into Tampa, drove down the Gulf Coast, and stopped by the White Sox’s longtime spring home in Bradenton and then the Texas Rangers’ complex in Charlotte, Florida. But Paul urged me to reach Fort Myers as soon as I could and check out the two teams there, the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins. He felt the Red Sox, who had won the American League East the previous year, would certainly contend again in our first season of publication. The Twins, however, were more of an afterthought after having finished last in the AL West, twenty-nine games behind Henderson’s Athletics.

  I arrived in Fort Myers the following evening. After setting up at the local Holiday Inn I decided to swing by the Lee County Sports Complex, where the Red Sox and Twins played their spring home games that season. The place was brand new, as the Twins had moved over from antiquated Tinker Field in Orlando and were on their way to posting a 21–10–1 record that spring.

  Even though no games were scheduled that evening, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a bat hitting a ball after I parked the rental car. Somewhere, somebody was taking some serious after-hours batting practice. No lights were on above the grandstand, and the noise came from deep inside the ballpark. Curious, I walked to the front gate, which was locked down tight. Yet just up the first-base line I found an open door. Following a dark corridor, I heard the smacks of a bat hitting horsehide.

  Up ahead of me was a hint of light, which grew brighter as I drew closer. Eventually I turned the corner into a small room, where netting hung down from the ceiling and the whir of a pitching machine systematically propelled the next baseball to the far end of the batting cage. A half-dozen ballplayers were gathered around the far end, hooting and hollering as they took turns hitting in the cage. I recognized Kent Hrbek, Chili Davis, and Dan Gladden. Taking huge cuts, seemingly too big a swing for a guy his size, was Kirby Puckett.

  “Who are you?” Puckett shouted at me, letting the next ball pass by, where it hit with a dull thud against the protective matting.

  I told them I was with Baseball Weekly, the new national publication. Perhaps they had heard of it.

  “I’ve seen it,” Hrbek said dismissively. “You have to do better than putting that piss-ant Rickey Henderson out front.”

  “They’re going with the familiar faces,” Puckett said, labeling the next pitch into the mesh above my head. I wondered whether he was aiming for me.

  “Same old, same old,” Davis complained.

  “Don’t give the man a hard time,” Puckett said, ready to take another swing. “That’s probably who your bosses assigned you to do, ain’t that right?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Guys, I hate to say it,” Puckett continued. “But we’re nothing until we do something again.”

  “We won it all in ’87,” Hrbek said.

  “And finished dead last year,” Puckett said, lacing another line drive. “It’s like anything these days—we have to prove ourselves all over again.”

  Puckett exited the batting cage and Hrbek took his place.

  “But Baseball Weekly, man, you have to ask yourself something,” Puckett continued.

  I shrugged, not sure what he was talking about.

  “How many teams are taking BP at this hour?” Puckett asked.

  “Probably none,” I replied.

  “Exactly,” Hrbek said, tattooing the ball with the same efficiency that Puckett had demonstrated moments earlier.

  The Twins began to laugh among themselves.

  “We are sick pups,” Hrbek said. “No night life for us.”

  “It’s because we love to rake, hit that ball,” Puckett said. “Look at my hands,” he said, holding up a paw. “Blister upon blister.”

  For the most part Puckett loved to play this role—the bubbly, exuberant guy who was just happy to be here, playing baseball for a living. Ted Robinson, the Twins’ television play-by-play man in 1991, can recall only a few times when Puckett lowered his guard. One such instance occurred that season in New York, where the Twins played the Yankees soon after Los Angeles police had repeatedly beaten Rodney King .

  “The ballclub had been told to ride the team bus, no cabs or subway, to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. It was a precaution after what happened in LA,” Robinson said. “On the field before the game Puckett was asked about the incident and he said, ‘Why they’d have to hit him so many times?’

  “Kirby didn’t talk about serious politics that much. But I couldn’t help thinking he just gave us a small glimpse into his life. What it’s like to be a black man, a prominent black athlete, in this world.”

  Years later Robinson said that Puckett was “one of those great half-full people,” meaning that “the glass was always half-full with him.”

  Others sometimes weren’t as convinced. Ann Bauleke, who chronicled the Twins so well for the City Pages in Minneapolis during this period, recalled Puckett as being “most generous with his time. He spent hours with me.” Still, she added that the Twins’ star “always kept up a wall. . . . I don’t think he let many people in. He was big hearted and really did carry the team with his bat and his glove, and he was fun—quick-witted, a smart tease, not with the usual sophomoric stuff that can go on.”

  Rick Aguilera remembered that Puckett was the first Twins player he met after coming over in the midseason trade with the New York Mets in 1989. The pitcher will always treasure that moment. “The Twins were on the road, playing the Yankees in the Bronx, and the game had already started by the time I got there,” Aguilera said. “I went in the clubhouse and got my uniform on. I walked down the runway to the dugout and stood there on the ground level, right where you have the two or three steps up to the dugout.

  “I was standing there, watching the game, and Puckett had just grounded out. He ran back to the dugout, disgusted with himself, and then he saw me standing there. He walked down the steps and shook my hand, called me Aggie, and welcomed me to the Twins. I couldn’t believe it. Here was the face of the Twins. He had just grounded out, pretty upset with himself, and then he went out of his way to bring me on board.”

  That’s one of things we expect from our heroes, isn’t it? A common touch that transcends the every day and can reach out to so many. Perhaps this is why some individuals step so easily into the hero’s role, whereas others battle for admiration and rarely receive much adulation or even respect.

  About a four-hour drive away from the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis, north by northwest along Interstate 94, lies Fargo, North Dakota, where Roger Maris grew up. The slugger was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, the most famous native son after Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan. Whereas the enigmatic singer-songwriter and cultural icon adroitly kept fame at arm’s length and somebody like Kirby Puckett, at least when he was in uniform, seemed to revel in all the attention, Maris never really warmed to the flame of celebrity. The E Street Band guitarist and SiriusXM disc jockey “Little Steven” Van Zandt once said that the home run hero “may be textbook on how not to handle to fame.”

  Early in Maris’s life the family moved to Fargo, and driving across the northern Plains, it can be easy to dismiss the region as flat and somewhat predictable—little more than a patchwork of September wheat and sugar beets. Yet down here at ground level the land can rise and fall like waves out on an inland sea. The wind echoes down from the Canadian border, rippling everything that stands in its path.

  In 1991 Maris was given a measure of respect as baseball’s Statistical Accuracy Committee moved his sixty-one home run season of 1961, once and for all, ahead of Babe Ruth’s sixty home run campaign accomplished in 1927. Commissioner Ford Frick supposedly hung an asterisk on Maris’s accomplishment because it occurred in a season with twelve more games that Ruth’s. Actually, there was no real asterisk. The two magnificent seasons—sixty-one and sixty—were simply listed separately in the record book.

  The debate assured that fans knew more about the record and supposed controversy than the
y ever did the man. No matter that Maris played in the World Series seven times or that he was a fine all-around player, as good with the glove as he was with a bat in his hands. Or that despite hitting sixty-one home runs in 1961, an accomplishment that some once again consider the all-time record for the most home runs in a season, dismissing the steroids era of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and others, Maris didn’t find his way into the Hall of Fame. In all likelihood he never will be enshrined in Cooperstown. That seemingly goes with the territory for a guy who was never comfortable in the spotlight, never as quick with a joke or a quote as such Yankee teammates as Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle.

  To catch a glimpse of Maris, one must walk the wide streets of Fargo and talk with old friends and family members, who are sometimes as reluctant as he was to rehash the glory days and what could have been. Although this slugger retired to Florida and died in Houston at the age of fifty-one, he came home to be buried in a small cemetery on the northern edge of town. There he lies under a Manchurian ash tree, close to Kenny Hunt, his boyhood friend and another major leaguer from these parts. In the Holy Cross Cemetery Maris’s tombstone is in the shape of a ball diamond, with the inscription, “61 in ’61—Against All Odds.” “My heart has always been close to Fargo and North Dakota,” Maris once said.

  A museum to the man can be found at the West Acres Shopping Center, a few miles from downtown Fargo. A seventy-two-foot-long, ten-foot-high showcase stands along the hallway to the parking lot, around the corner from the Sears store. The display includes Maris’s Gold Glove and Sultan of Swat awards. The West Acres mall had 2 million visitors a few years back. How many came to view the Maris memorabilia and watch the footage of him hitting his record-breaking home run and how many came to shop at the CVS remains anybody’s guess.

  Born Roger Maras in Hibbing on September 10, 1934, the family changed the spelling of the family name when he was eighteen years old. “I was told it was because of the last two letters, A and S. You know how you put them together and how it sounds,” said Orv Kelly, who knew the home run hero in high school and, in later years, helped organize the annual charity golf tournament in Fargo that bears Maris’s name. “Nobody wants to be teased like that from the fans. The family changed it, and that was it.”

  Don Gooselaw, another boyhood friend, remembered being in the Navy and searching for Maras, not Maris, in the Sporting News. “It threw me that I couldn’t find him,” Gooselaw said. “But when I came home on leave, somebody told me the family had changed the spelling. That was all I ever made of it.”

  Once asked about the name change on a team questionnaire, Maris simply answered, “Immaterial.”

  Maris once said that his brother, Rudy, really had “more enthusiasm about sports than I did.” Rudy Maris was a year older and Roger would tag along to sandlot games in the empty lots near the train tracks and roundhouses in the area. At Shanley High School the brothers played football, basketball, and baseball. Shanley ran a single-wing offense, patterned after the famed University of Michigan attack of the time. Rudy threw the ball and Roger ran it. In fact, Roger set the state record for five touchdowns in a single game, against Devils Lake in 1951. The scores came on an eighty-eight-yard run, ninety-yard kickoff return, forty-five-yard punt return, thirty-two-yard run, and a twenty-five-yard interception return. “God, he loved to hit,” Kelly recalled. “Rog was a cornerback [on defense], and nobody I ever saw could come up to the line [of scrimmage] as fast as him and just rip people. It got to the point where other teams simply stopped running the ball to his side of the field.”

  Such play attracted the attention of legendary football coach Bud Wilkinson at the University of Oklahoma. Maris was offered a scholarship to play football for the Sooners, and he rode the bus for an entire day from Fargo down to Norman. One story has it that when no one from the university was there to meet him, Maris boarded the next bus back home. But several high school friends maintained that Maris did stay in Norman, at least for a day or so, before he decided more time in the classroom wasn’t for him.

  Fresh out of high school Maris signed with the Cleveland Indians and broke in with the hometown Fargo-Moorhead Twins, where he was the rookie of the year. Four seasons later he reached the majors, playing in Cleveland and then in Kansas City. He was traded from the Athletics to the Yankees—one of fifty-nine players involved in fifteen different deals between the two ballclubs in the late 1950s. His first year in New York (1960), Maris hit 39 home runs, drove in 112 to lead the American League, and won his first Gold Glove. He and Mickey Mantle suddenly were the best one-two punch in baseball, with the Yankees reaching the World Series the next four seasons. But none of it could compare with the year Maris put together in 1961.

  Incredibly, through the first ten games of that memorable season, Maris hit just .161. Mantle, the favorite of the New York fans and the front office, already had six home runs before Maris hit his first, the only one he would hit in the month of April. Management asked Maris whether he was having trouble at home. Maris told them no, and besides, it was none of their business. The front office had his vision checked. When the results showed nothing unusual, Maris was told that the organization didn’t care how many hits he got—after all, there were plenty of singles hitters in the game. No, what the brass wanted were homers, dingers, the precious long ball. Give us the sweet snap of the bat hitting that ball.

  Maris got the message, and throughout the rest of the season he was remarkably consistent. Maris hit eleven home runs in May, fifteen in June, thirteen in July, eleven in August, and with the press now dogging his every move and hanging on his every word, he hit nine in September and one more to break the Babe’s record in October.

  “The only peace I had by the end was in-between the lines,” Maris said years later. “As a ballplayer, I would be delighted to do it again. As an individual, I doubt if I could possibly go through it again.”

  Back at the museum inside the West Acres Shopping Center, a boy stood with his father, taking in the showcase exhibit. The kid stared at the flickering black-and-white image of Maris circling the bases after his record-breaking hit, head down, running at a machine-like clip. The kid leaned in closer, fogging the glass.

  If some careers are as regular as tomorrow’s dawn, then Maris’s was like a comet flashing overhead. For a few months it filled the night sky with brilliance, and then it was gone. In essence, Maris had several good seasons and one stellar one. His sixty-one home runs were twenty-two more than his next best season. In fact, Maris averaged less than twenty-three home runs over his twelve-year career. But what he accomplished, though it was so fleeting, had a certain solidness and even class to it. Too many ballplayers today seem to gaze a bit too long after the ball is sent soaring toward the fence, acting as though they were atop of the world when, of course, nobody enjoys such a vantage point for very long.

  ———

  With his leaping catch against the Plexiglas and driving in two of the Twins’ first three runs, Kirby Puckett had certainly backed up his big talk before the game. But one thing he couldn’t do was pitch the ball. Slugger of the moment? Sure thing. A starting pitcher who could carry Minnesota far into the game? That fell to Scott Erickson on this night. The Twins, with only a three-man rotation, came into Game Six desperate for an extended performance from their starter. Kevin Tapani had gone only four innings in the last loss in Atlanta, and the Twins’ bullpen was extended, perhaps overly so.

  Though Erickson was a shadow of his midseason self, the twenty-game winner went six-plus innings, surviving on breaking stuff, with help from some great defense behind him. Not only did Puckett make a leaping catch for the ages on Ron Gant’s blast, but left fielder Dan Gladden ran down Sid Bream’s opposite-field line drive with two on, and third baseman Scott Leius leaped to snare Brian Hunter’s line drive.

  “This was the last game of the year for me,” Erickson said, “so I tried to go out there and give it all I had.”

  Twins pitching coach Dick Such said Erickso
n “didn’t have his good stuff. But Junior [Ortiz] kept saying that his ball was moving, so we stayed with him.”

  Puckett’s great catch made that decision easier. “It went farther than I thought it would,” Erickson said of Gant’s blast. “He hit a breaking ball. I was just happy the way it turned out, that Kirby caught it.”

  Sometimes we don’t fully comprehend or acknowledge the power of time. We want to believe that it remains regimented, methodical, always logical in how it unfolds on the land. But often time runs away from us, speeding up in a heartbeat, gazing back at us like a mischievous child, and before we realize it the years have flown away from us. Perhaps that’s what happened to Kirby Puckett.

  “You have to remember that for so long Minnesota was the land of the also-rans,” said John Rosengren, a local writer and Minnesota native. “From the North Stars to the early Twins to the Vikings, this was the land of second place. We were always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

  “That changed when the Twins first won in 1987, and then it changed forever when they won again in 1991. And who was the guy at the center of both of those teams? That teddy bear of a guy, Kirby Puckett. The player who always had a smile for everybody.

  “So when the sad, sad ending happens to Kirby Puckett it just breaks your heart that much more. Because here’s the guy who helped give us that wonderful feeling in 1987 and again in 1991, in particular his performance in Game Six when he almost single-handedly won it for us. When he’s the one who falls from grace, it really hurts.”

  The way Puckett played that evening, the capacity crowd chanting his name, waving those white Homer Hankies, anybody with a heart would freeze-frame it all. In a perfect world this would be the lasting memory of a Hall of Fame player who so many in baseball loved. Unfortunately, this moment of greatness and grace ran away from us far too soon as well, leaving things in a jumbled mess between this night and the events to come.