Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (28 page)

The Twins were holding one of their usual pregame meetings to review the opposing lineup when Kelly asked Morris how he would pitch to a particular hitter. Morris gave his answer.

“All right,” Kelly said, “we’re not going to do it that way.” He then gave orders that contradicted Morris.

“Now,” Kelly said, “anybody have a problem with that?”

“Yeah,” Morris snapped. “Why the f--- did you ask me?”

“That’s not important,” he said. “We’re going to do it this way.”

Morris says, “T.K. wanted to show everybody—and I loved him for this—that he was in control.”

Now, with the World Series on the line, Kelly was testing Morris again. He seemed to be saying somebody else would pitch the 10th inning. The pitching coach grabbed Kelly by the arm and said, “T.K., he said he’s fine.”

Kelly turned. He looked Morris in the eye.

“I can pitch,” Morris said.

Kelly paused, then said, “Oh, hell. It’s only a game.”

“He was giving me the chance to take myself out,” says Morris. “But I think he wanted me to look him in the eye and say, ‘I’m not going nowhere. This is my game.’”

So Morris pitched the 10th inning, the only starting pitcher to do so in the World Series since Tom Seaver, one of his heroes, did it in 1969. He pitched as if it were a balmy Florida afternoon in spring training, and he was fresh and full of vigor. Again he zipped through the inning with only eight pitches. He had pitched to eight batters since Pendleton hit that double, and none of them got the ball out of the infield. It made no sense. A 36-year-old pitcher, 283 innings into his season, working his second straight game on short rest, throwing 10 shutout innings … and he was getting
stronger
.

“Without question,” MacPhail says, “it is the most impressive pitching performance I have ever witnessed, and, remember, I watched Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game.”

The bullpen phone remained still. Morris was prepared to go back out for the 11th, but Minnesota loaded the bases with one out against Alejandro Pena in the last of the 10th. Kelly sent Gene Larkin to pinchhit.

“They’re pulling their outfield in,” home plate umpire Denkinger said to Larkin. “I believe you could hit one over their heads.” Larkin said nothing.

Weeks later, at a White House reception, Denkinger asked Larkin, “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Replied Larkin, “Yep. But you know what? My mouth was so dry I couldn’t talk.”

Larkin hit the first pitch over the leftfielder’s head, and Gladden danced home with the game’s only run. Never before or since had a run been so difficult to come by in a World Series game. Morris—his warmup jacket on, ready to pitch all night if he had to—was the first player to get to home plate, waving Gladden in.

There is a scene on the videotape in which Kelly first spots Morris in the clubhouse after the game. Kelly seems to be fighting back tears as he rushes toward his pitcher, then embraces him with a long, tight hug.

“Now,
that
…” Morris says, choking up as he watches the tape. He lowers his head, gathers himself and continues, “… that is worth more than any trophy or ring. To have the respect of your manager, your teammates … . What is greater than that?”

THE GAME has changed. Complete games, Morris’s badge of honor, are more than twice as rare now as they were in 1991. Only twice in the 116 World Series starts since Morris’s Game 7 has a pitcher thrown a shutout (Curt Schilling in 1993 and Randy Johnson in 2001). The next Jack Morris, Smoltz, isn’t even a starting pitcher anymore. He’s a closer. Smith is retired, raising a family in an Atlanta suburb. The Braves asked him last year to attend one of their promotions at Turner Field in which former team members sign autographs for fans. Smith was heckled there by some fans about 1991 and the Knoblauch decoy. He vowed he would not return. “I feel like an outcast,” Smith says. “I’m the one they identify with losing that Series.”

Says Smoltz, “Many times in sports guys are falsely accused of being the reason a team lost. This is one. We had men on second and third, nobody out, and we did not score ….”

Morris was 39 years old—with 10 wins by August—when Cleveland released him in ’94. He squeezed in his starts that year between visits to a wheat and barley farm he had purchased in Montana after the ’91 World Series. He lost $1 million that year. He made money with a bumper crop the next year, the only year of sufficient rain. He lost money for several more years until he sold the farm. “No matter how well you fertilized, how well you prepped the fields, you had to rely on Mother Nature,” Arvid says.

It is not in Morris’s blood to rely on anyone or anything. He did not make many friends in the game. He received one job offer in baseball after retiring: $50,000 to be a coach in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the Toronto minor league system. He passed on it. Last season Detroit invited him to spring training as a special instructor to work with its pitchers. He saw firsthand how much the game has changed. “I expected them to care like I care,” he says, “and they didn’t.”

Though he still lives in the Minneapolis area, Morris is mostly associated with Detroit—this season he will work 40 Tigers games as a broadcaster. He never pitched again for the Twins after that Game 7. He exercised his option for free agency and signed with Toronto, becoming baseball’s highest-paid pitcher. Then he again pitched his team into the World Series, in 1992, and pitched against the Braves again, though poorly in Game 5. He gave up a grand slam—to Lonnie Smith. Smoltz was the winning pitcher. Morris knew that a night like Oct. 27, 1991, would not happen again.

“Other than my kids being born, I can’t remember anything that meant more to me,” Morris says. “It was the epitome of everything I’d ever tried to achieve in my life. And yet within 24 hours this sadness came over me, knowing I might not be back in Minnesota and I might not ever pitch a game like that for the rest of my life…. I wish everybody could experience what I experienced that day. The joy. Total joy. The world would be a better place if everybody could feel that at least once.”

On that Sunday morning when Morris woke up and knew he would win Game 7, an old baseball wizard with gleaming white hair and a twinkle in his eye awoke with a similar premonition. Anderson, Morris’s old skipper, met his friends for his daily game of golf that day in Sunset, Calif. The boys were talking about how the Braves would win the Series. The man with the white hair laughed. “Tell you what to do,” Anderson told them. “Go home and get your bankbook. Clear it out and send it to Vegas. Morris is pitching. He will beat Smoltz. I promise you that.”

“How do you know?” they said.

“Boys, I know that guy,” Anderson said. “He’s an animal. If he doesn’t have a real challenge, he’s liable to give up six runs. But don’t get him in a position where you challenge him.”

Anderson laughs when he tells the story. “[Jack] was the last of them,” he says. It was 12 years ago. Another era. “When you talk to Cactus Jack, tell him he’s still the meanest man I ever met.”

Postscript: I met Morris for this story once over beers and then another time in a hotel suite, where we watched a tape of the game as he took me through it pitch by pitch. Cactus Jack wasn’t mean at all. He was friendly, honest and, above all, proud. It still is the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen, and deconstructing it through the eyes of Morris was as much fun as watching it unfold in real time.

JUNE 23, 2003

The greatest leadoff hitter of all time beat the bushes, trying to get back to the
majors—and still left ’em laughing at every stop

R
ICKEY HENDERSON WAS BORN ON CHRISTMAS DAY
, 1958, in the backseat of a ’57 Olds on the way to a hospital in Chicago. He was fast from the very beginning. There are certain figures in American history who have passed into the realm of cultural mythology, as if reality could no longer contain their stories: Johnny Appleseed. Wild Bill Hickok. Davy Crockett. Rickey Henderson. They exist on the sometimes narrow margin between Fact and Fiction.

“A lot of stuff [people] had me doing or something they said I had created, it’s comedy,” Henderson says. “I guess that’s how they want to judge me, as a character.”

Nobody in baseball history has scored more runs, stolen more bases, drawn more walks or provided more entertainment (some of it unintended) for so many teams than Rickey Henley Henderson, the greatest leadoff hitter ever, a superstar so big that his middle and last names became superfluous. Rickey is the modern-day Yogi Berra, only faster. Whereas Berra contributed a new noun to the English language
(Yogiism)
, Henderson inspired that classic rejoinder muttered by many a manager, teammate, sportswriter or, especially, general manager come contract time: “Rickey is Rickey.”

“I don’t know how to put into words how fortunate I was to spend time around one of the icons of the game,” says Padres All-Star closer Trevor Hoffman, a teammate of Henderson’s in 1996, ’97 and 2001. “I can’t comprehend that yet. Years from now, though, I’ll be able to say I played with Rickey Henderson, and I imagine it will be like saying I played with Babe Ruth.”

The legend of Henderson is real, all right, as real as the check-cashing service with the metal security gates on Broad Street in downtown Newark, which is about all the local color there is in the neighborhood of the mostly empty Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium, home to the Newark Bears of the independent Atlantic League—and, at the moment, to Henderson.

“We need to shift the ballpark to another location or something,” he says.

At age 44 the future first-ballot Hall of Famer is here on the wrong side of baseball’s tracks, not to mention those of New Jersey Transit, whose cars clackity-clack a pop fly away from his leftfield post. He signed with the Bears and came to downtown Newark for one last shot at the major leagues, which makes him, in every sense, an urban legend.

Speaking of cashing checks….

Once in the late 1980s, the Yankees sent Henderson a six-figure signing-bonus check. After a few months passed, an internal audit revealed that the check had not been cashed. Brian Cashman, then a low-level executive with the club, called Henderson to ask if there was a problem with the check.

“No problem,” Henderson said. “I’m just waiting for the money market rates to go up.”

And speaking of money….

Over 24 seasons in the major leagues, Henderson never spent his meal money. Before each trip players get an envelope filled with cash equal to the daily rate as negotiated by the Players Association ($73 this year), multiplied by the number of days on the road. Henderson would take the envelopes home and put them in shoe boxes. Whenever his daughters, Angela, now 18, Alexis, 11, and Adriann, 9, did well in school, Henderson would allow them to choose an envelope from a shoe box, a little game he called Pick It. The jackpot was getting an envelope from one of those 13-day, four-city trips. The girls would keep the money.

“They do what they want with it,” he said. “It gives them motivation for their school and something to do, like a job.”

Rickey’s Best Lines about Money

1. “If they’re going to pay me like [Mike] Gallego, I’m going to play like Gallego.”

2. “All I’m asking for is what I want.”

ON THE SUBJECT of contracts….

Henderson signed a minor league deal last year with the Red Sox that included an invitation to spring training and a $350,000 salary if he made the team. After he played his way onto the Boston roster with an impressive spring, Henderson groused that the Red Sox were underpaying him. Interim general manager Mike Port reminded Henderson of the conditions he had agreed to.

“Oh, that?” Henderson replied. “I canceled that contract.”

Says Port, “It was the first and only time I’ve ever had a player tell me he canceled his contract.”

Red Sox president Larry Lucchino telephoned San Diego G.M. Kevin Towers, asking how Towers had appeased Henderson during their contract squabbles in the past. “I was on the golf course late in spring training one year when Rickey called to close a deal,” Towers says. “I was putting, and my wife took the call. I said to her, ‘Ask him what he wants.’ She said, ‘He wants a living allowance.’ And I did it. That’s how we closed the deal.”