Down to the Last Pitch

by Tim Wendel

  Pitcher Mark Grant on the Atlanta bench, sidelined for the 1991 season with a shoulder injury, watched Morris in Game Seven and thought about what could have been. Drafted in the first round, tenth pick overall, by the San Francisco Giants in 1981, this right-hander also fell under the tutelage of Roger Craig, but Grant hadn’t been able to fully master the split-finger fastball. In addition, Grant saw how his elbow often tightened up after he threw the pitch. That’s what made Morris’s performance in Game Seven so amazing to Grant—he knew how painful and how difficult the split could be to throw, especially for strikes.

  “Jack Morris’s split was the probably the best ever,” Grant remembered. “[Hall of Famer] Bruce Sutter’s was right there with it. . . . It can be a devastating pitch.”

  This is also true sometimes for the catcher as much as the batter, because a split invariably results in pitches in the dirt. In Game Seven Morris wanted Braves hitters to chase that wicked breaking ball that dropped like a stone as it neared home plate. So it wasn’t surprising when a passed ball by Twins catcher Brian Harper in the top of the third inning moved the Braves’ Rafael Belliard to second base with one out. After walking Lonnie Smith, Morris again bore down, getting Terry Pendleton to fly out to left field and then inducing Ronnie Gant to chase another split, which he grounded weakly to Gagne at shortstop.

  “Jack was locked in, able to get out of trouble, and when a pitcher is on like that, you get excited playing behind him,” Gagne said. “You tell yourself to just do your job. He’s on—just back him up and make the plays that come your way. You may be playing in Game Seven of the World Series, with the whole world watching, but it’s not like you have to do things out of the ordinary. You just need to remember to do your job.”

  Cantankerous, outspoken, a bear to be around, especially on the days that he pitched, Morris rarely suffered fools gladly. Most players have their jersey number scribbled on the inside of their caps, usually on the bill. That assured everyone got the right lid when heading back out to take their positions. Instead of number forty-seven, however, Morris’s cap sometimes was inscribed with “A” for derriere. Still, the team became his refuge during the 1991 season. The right-hander was going through a divorce and spending time away from his two sons. “The clubhouse was my family,” he said years later. “It was my peace of mind. It was my serenity. It was everything to me.”

  By 1991 Morris had earned a reputation as big-game hurler who regularly pitched to the situation at hand. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he began his career in Detroit in 1977, helping the Tigers to that championship in 1984 and going 198–150 in fourteen seasons in the Motor City before signing with Minnesota as a free agent. In the 1980s Morris won 162 games, the most by any pitcher in the big leagues, and in another time this would have resulted in a big payday for the right-hander. Although he expected a bidding war for his services following the 1986 season, instead everything dissolved into a series of noncommittal meetings. At one point the pitcher expected to sign with his hometown Twins within a week. When Andy MacPhail begged off, telling the local newspapers he needed “to do some homework” and perhaps compare Morris with eventual Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven, it appeared that Morris would then sign with the New York Yankees. In the end, though, no contracts ever materialized. What Morris didn’t know at the time was that baseball ownership had conspired to not sign other team’s free agents. In other words, it was a classic case of collusion.

  Morris, Roger Clemens, Tim Raines, Doyle Alexander, and Ron Guidry were among the stars who returned to their old ballclubs that offseason for a relative pittance as the average major league salary actually declined before the 1987 season. The Major League Baseball Players Association filed a grievance, and arbitrator Thomas Roberts eventually ruled that the owners had violated the basic agreement with the owners.

  Morris would be forced to stay in Detroit for another four seasons before signing an incentive-laden contract with Minnesota before the 1991 season. But he wouldn’t forget about missing out on a major contract, and some of his teammates believed that became a defining moment for him. Starting, finishing, and winning the game were the only things Morris believed in. In essence, they became his personal bottom line and perhaps the only thing he could control in the game after the collusion cases of the mid-1980s.

  “I’ve been in many games with him where he’d give up a four- or five- or six-spot in the first two innings and refuse to come out of the game,” said Kirk Gibson, who was Morris’s teammate in Detroit and another victim of collusion. “He’d walk in the dugout and say, ‘I’ve never lost with ten.’ We’d win, 9–8.

  “Or if he’s out there and it’s the eleventh inning and we’re up by six runs and he has to give up four to win, he’s certainly not coming out of the game.”

  Such an approach didn’t lead to the best of numbers at times. Morris finished his career with 254 victories but a 3.90 ERA, leading to debate whether he deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Still, within the game Morris was regarded as one of the best of his era.

  “The pitcher who best fits the description of a workhorse today is Jack Morris, Detroit’s ace for so long,” Nolan Ryan wrote in his book Kings of the Hill, which came out shortly after the 1991 World Series. “The standard is going to be 250 innings, and Morris has been good for that nearly every season. He got to finish a lot of games with the Tigers because Sparky Anderson trusted him even more than he did his bullpen. That’s remarkable when you consider that Willie Hernandez, the Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player in 1984, was their stopper.”

  Twins bullpen coach Rick Stelmaszek remembered when Morris was going through that bitter divorce in 1991, “and by August, I was siding with his wife. But he was a competitor to the max. He was the pitcher of the eighties. If he had good stuff, he’d just laugh at you, and if he didn’t, he’d battle you and figure out a way to beat you.”

  Ron Gardenhire’s locker was located near Morris’s for the worst-to-first season in the Metrodome. “So I got a first-hand look, day after day, about how he went about his business,” the third-base coach remembered. “Nobody loved the big game, with it all on the line, more than Jack.

  “If a start didn’t go his way, he’d be growling about it for days afterward. He wasn’t fun to be around then. But he’d find a way to eventually laugh it off and move on, and then he’d start getting focused on the next start, and nobody was better at that part of the process.

  “He’d concentrate, do his homework, know the tendencies and weaknesses of every hitter he would face. He was a pretty serious guy and the most intense guy I ever came across in the game. Game Seven, with it all on the line? That was a perfect situation for him.”

  Heading into Game Seven, Morris had pitched 273 innings—246 2/3 in the regular season and 26 1/3 in the postseason. The workload left his manager, Tom Kelly, wondering how much he had left—how many more innings could he pitch at such a high level?

  For his part, Morris felt no trepidation about fatigue or being on the mound in the biggest game in years. “It’s going to sound wrong, but I knew everybody was watching, and how much fun is that?” he told Bob Costas decades later. “I mean, I pitched games in Cleveland when there were 250 people in the stands—and 200 of them related to somebody on the field and the rest were only there for the beer. So I remember those games, and to be on a stage when the whole world is watching, if you don’t relish that, you’re in the wrong business.”

  ———

  In the fall of 1991 John Smoltz’s best pitch was the fastball, which he complemented adeptly with a slider, changeup, and curveball. No sign of a split at that point in his career. That Smoltz was about to go against his boyhood idol must have bordered upon the surreal for him and his family. Growing up, he was raised to be a polka player, not a big-league ballplayer. By the age of four he regularly played accordion in his father’s band, the Sorrentos. His mother gave lessons, his uncle owned a music store, and young John competed in contests, playing in rec
itals and in the family band throughout southern Michigan. As the oldest child, he remembered being “the anointed leader of the next generation of proud accordionists.”

  Within a few years, though, Smoltz announced that his dream was to be a professional baseball player and that he needed to stop playing music. “I don’t know if I can adequately explain how big a deal it was for my parents to let me quit the accordion,” he wrote in his autobiography, Starting and Closing. “This was like the oldest son shunning the family business, and not because he wasn’t capable, but because he wasn’t interested. It was clear I had inherited the same musical gene that my parents were blessed with, and to my family it was a tough pill to swallow. My mom says to this day that she really thought her uncle was going to disown her and our entire family for allowing me to quit.”

  On the surface Smoltz’s decision didn’t make much sense. Unlike his accordion playing, Smoltz was entirely self-taught when it came to sports. He didn’t attend camps or have expert instruction. Instead, he watched games on television, usually his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers, and threw a rubber ball against a brick wall at the family home in Lansing, Michigan. There, he had sketched out a strike zone with tape. About the only advice he received came when one of his deliveries missed its mark and hit the aluminum screen door. Only then would his mother yell at him to throw strikes.

  If music was the common thread in the Smoltz household, baseball came a close second, though. Smoltz’s grandfather worked at the old Tiger Stadium for more than thirty years, first on the grounds crew and then in the pressroom. As a boy Smoltz listened to the Tigers games on the radio and made several trips to Detroit every summer to see his heroes in person. Throwing a rubber ball against the brick wall, Smoltz often imagined himself pitching in the big leagues, and it was always the postseason, usually the deciding game of the World Series that he held in his mind. So as Smoltz began his warm-ups on this evening in the Metrodome, he felt a sense of déjà vu. Not only was he in the Fall Classic for real, but he was also going up against his boyhood hero, longtime Tiger Jack Morris.

  Any butterflies disappeared as Smoltz stood with the rest of the sellout crowd, listening to seven-year-old Jacqueline Jaquez belt out the national anthem. Years later Smoltz said something clicked after he heard the rendition. In his mind he was back at the brick wall back home in Michigan, ready to live out his dream.

  “No one could catch me,” he recalled. “I took a rubber ball and I imagined it. So when I was getting ready to go out there and do it, I was right where I wanted to be.”

  That Smoltz was here, starting Game Seven, had as much to do with the power of the mind as anything else. He had gotten off to a terrible start in 1991, going 2–11. Time after time things would unravel in a hurry on him, to the point that once runners reached base, he began to expect them to score. He wasn’t injured or suffering from any mechanical flaw; his delivery remained fundamentally sound. What he was dealing with, he later recalled, was “a complete collapse of confidence.”

  Braves manager Bobby Cox and general manager John Schuerholz suggested that Smoltz see a sports psychologist, and the pitcher began to meet with Dr. Jack Llewellyn during the 1991 All-Star break. Their sessions had nothing to do with a shrink’s couch and baring one’s soul; instead, they usually met at Llewellyn’s house, often shooting pool and just talking. Soon the psychologist suggested that the videotape personnel from the team assemble a highlight reel for the pitcher. The final result ended up being about two minutes of the right-hander at his best on the mound, and after it was assembled, Smoltz began to watch it repeatedly.

  “The very next game after the tape was made I faced that same moment on the mound that had owned me all season,” Smoltz later wrote. “Runners were in scoring position and things were on the verge of getting ugly. But this time I thought about the tape: I saw myself overcoming adversity in the past, and I didn’t let myself think I couldn’t do it. I stood there on the mound and dug in deep.

  “I made the adjustment in my mind, and I faced adversity in front of me. And not only did I face it my first time out, but I nailed it my first time out, pitching my way out of a jam and keeping runs off the scoreboard for the first time in what seemed like all year.”

  Soon Smoltz didn’t need the VHS tape anymore. He could picture his personal highlight tape in his mind and go to it whenever he needed. As a result, Smoltz turned his season around, going 12–2 in the second half of the regular season and picking up two victories against Pittsburgh in the National League Championship Series.

  Mental imaging and mind games have long been an integral part of sports, even though few athletes like to talk about it publicly. In the days leading up to the coming Sunday’s game quarterback Fran Tarkenton would visualize the game plan until he was “running whole blocks of plays in my head.” Gold-medal decathlete Bruce Jenner said he used to dream of running the fifteen hundred meters, his sport’s final event, and he always crossed the finish line winning the overall competition. Golfer Jack Nicklaus claimed he “never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie.”

  Life coach Jim Fannin once explained that “Visualization works because your subconscious mind does not know the difference between fantasy and reality”—hence, the philosophy that to do anything of merit and consequence, you first have to imagine it.

  But not that long ago such mind games were kept strictly hush-hush. In 1991 sports shrinks and plumbing the mental side remained downright radical to many players, coaches, and, certainly, fans. Smoltz became one of the first pro athletes to go public with how a psychologist helped him raise his game. Cameras began to be trained on Llewellyn in the stands for Smoltz’s starts. Some were convinced that the shrink was somehow flashing secret signs to the pitcher. None of it was true, of course, and Smoltz admittedly waited too long, well into the following season, before setting the record straight. Still, the power of the mind was on display in Game Seven as both starting pitchers settled in.

  In the bottom of the second inning the Twins put two men on with two out, and Smoltz got Mike Pagliarulo to ground out. An inning later Dan Gladden doubled and then moved to third. Smoltz ended the threat by striking out Game Six hero Kirby Puckett.

  On this night, going against his boyhood idol, Smoltz found that he could match Morris pitch for pitch. Both proved adept at wriggling out of jams, and soon a series of zeroes began to stretch across the scoreboard inside the Metrodome.

  ———

  While Smoltz had his personal highlight reel going on, Morris at times embraced being both a native son and a hired gun on this evening in Minneapolis.

  In the top of the fifth inning Mark Lemke singled to right field—his tenth hit of the series. As expected, Rafael Belliard followed with a high-hopper sacrifice bunt, and just like that, the Braves were back in business, with a man on second and one out.

  Lead-off hitter Lonnie Smith, always one for surprises, decided to bunt too. After taking a wild hack for strike one, Smith laid one down along the third-base line. Twins third baseman Mike Pagliarulo was playing deep, and his throw pulled Hrbek off the bag, as Smith slid into first base for some reason. When the dust cleared the Braves had men on first and third base, with one out.

  Terry Pendleton, who was 4-for-9, with runners on base to this point in the series, stepped in to face Morris. Even though the Metrodome had grown so loud by this point that Morris could understand his teammates only by reading their lips, he later said he never felt more at peace, more determined about what he had to do. Morris had grown up in the Twin Cities, as disappointed as everyone else in town when the Vikings lost four Super Bowls during the 1970s. He was tired of his hometown teams losing the big game, so he told himself that a Minnesota team wasn’t about to drop one this time, not with him on the mound. Decades later, he said, “I never had so much will to win a game as I did that day.”

  On the mound Morris’s mannerisms became more de
liberate, forcing Pendleton to briefly call timeout. After Pendleton stepped back in, Morris placed a split-finger fastball on the outside corner. Pendleton popped it up, not deep enough to score Lemke.

  With two away, Ron Gant came to the plate. Although the Braves’ outfielder was struggling at the plate, Morris knew nobody outside of Justice could “ruin his day” faster than Gant. In the regular season the Braves’ slugger had hit 32 home runs and driven in 105 runs. The inscription inside his cap had nothing to do with “A”; instead, Gant’s message read, “I Will. I Can. I Am.”

  Working carefully, Morris bounced a 1–2 pitch in the dirt, and Harper wasn’t able to field in cleanly. The ball bounced well in front of the plate toward Morris, who couldn’t resist throwing to third base in an attempt to pick off Lemke. Pagliarulo snared the ball, with Lemke getting back to the base safely. As Kelly shook his head in the Twins’ dugout, Morris decided to throw over to first base in attempt to get Smith. In the end both base runners were safe, and the Twins somehow kept the ball in the infield.

  Gant worked the count to 3–2. Throughout the game both starting pitchers voiced their displeasure at times with home plate umpire Don Denkinger. His strike zone wasn’t exactly generous on this evening. But when Morris hit Harper’s glove on the outside corner, Denkinger raised his arm in the air. Gant had struck out for the final out, and Morris celebrated by windmilling his arm around as the hometown crowd roared. Of all the innings Morris pitched in 1991, he was never better than in this one.

  In early innings Morris had gotten by with a good fastball and slider. He remembered his changeup and split not being all that sharp early on. But the split-finger, his best pitch, “came back around in the sixth [inning], and it was a very effective pitch in the late innings,” he said.