History of the World Series – 2001
By Michael Knisley
The Sporting News
Comebackers!
The Diamondbacks won an unforgettable World Series by matching the Yankees’ strengths: confidence, resilience and starting pitching
Somehow, Steve Finley laughs. Almost laughs, anyway. Certainly, he grins, an ironic, can-you-believe-it grin out there in center field at Yankee Stadium, near the monuments and plaques to all those Yankees greats – Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio and all the others.
Scott Brosius’ long fly ball to left clears the fence with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning to tie Game 5 of the World Series. Inconceivably, Finley’s Diamondbacks blow another lead. This is the worst sort of development for the Diamond-backs, a backbreaker for a team with designs on a world championship. And Finley É grins!
“It was almost comical,” he says. “I cracked a little smile, saying, ÔThis is unbelievable.’ I just put my head down and listened for the crowd. I was hoping it was going to go foul. But they started cheering, and I knew it was gone. I said, ÔHere we go again.’ “
Then the memory of another World Series pops into Finley’s mind. It’s 10 years ago, the 1991 classic between the Braves and the Twins, a seven-game Series that went the distance and more for closure. Finley, then a member of the Astros, watched that one from home, but he remembers how it played out: Jack Morris and John Smoltz, two of the best pitchers of the day, hooked up in a memorable Game 7, a 10-inning Game 7, in the Metrodome.
Here is why Finley recalls it at this particular moment – in center field at Yankee Stadium near the end of Game 5: The home team won every game.
And, though the outcome of the game still is in question, he knows where the Diamondbacks are going from Yankee Stadium. They’re going home. Home is where Randy Johnson will pitch Game 6 and Curt Schilling Game 7 against the Yankees’ Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens. Four of the best pitchers of this day.
“Our pitchers have shut them down in almost every game,” Finley says in the wake of that Game 5 loss. “We’ve shut this team down for the whole Series. I know they’ve scratched out two wins in a row, but we feel confident in ourselves. We can beat them. We can make this Series run like it did in ’91. The Twins did it then. We can do it, too.”
It is exactly that sort of thinking that made the Diamondbacks the new world champions, a stake they claimed with Sunday night’s 3-2, bottom-of-the-ninth heart-thumper of a Game 7. That win at Bank One Ballpark meant that for the first time in four years, the National League had produced a team confident enough, savvy enough, seasoned enough to stand up to the mighty Yankees in a World Series. In the Diamondbacks, the National League also finally had produced a team with starting pitchers able to match the Yankees’ highly regarded rotation.
The four starters Arizona manager Bob Brenly sent to the mound – Schilling three times, Johnson twice and Brian Anderson and Miguel Batista once each – had a combined earned-run average of 1.43. As a team, the Yankees hit .183 in the Series, the lowest average ever in a seven-game Series.
Schilling and Johnson, the Series co-MVPs, six times (counting the Big Unit’s relief appearance in the Series finale) in seven games? No wonder the Yankees didn’t hit.
“Right now, I don’t think there’s anybody that can rearrange a lineup as well as these two guys can,” Yankees manager Joe Torre says. “It really affects your thinking on the other side.”
There were 67 innings in this World Series, including one extra in Game 4 and three extras in Game 5. The Yankees had a lead in just eight of them.
Where New York’s other recent World Series opponents – the Braves twice, the Padres and the Mets – all flinched in the face of the Yankees legend, Arizona stared right back, even after two gut-wrenching, late-inning losses in Yankee Stadium. Even after, according to Brenly, “some of the most ungodly timely hitting (by the Yankees) you are ever going to see in your life.”
How did Arizona do it? By smiling in the face of adversity. By taking a page from Derek Jeter’s book. Jeter, the unofficial Yankees spokesman, preached throughout the Series about taking things one game, one at-bat, at a time. There is no such thing as momentum in the playoffs, Jeter said, even after the Yankees’ three wins at home. The Diamondbacks apparently paid attention.
“This is a very tough situation for our team,” said right fielder Reggie Sanders after New York’s second consecutive improbable comeback in Game 5. “But in baseball, we have to move on. I never thought it would happen the first time, let alone the second. But it did. Now we get to go home with our fans, so we can get the karma going with us. Those guys are probably thinking that we’re down. But we’re not down at all.”
The team’s flight back to Phoenix, according to several Diamondbacks, was anything but doom and gloom. They slept. They watched the in-flight movie, America’s Sweethearts. They thought about Game 6.
This was a wonderful World Series, maybe even an unforgettable one. It featured four one-run games, two extra-inning games and that ungodly timely hitting. It was appealing enough to draw viewers to Fox’s broadcasts in unexpected numbers, reversing a downward spiral that saw last year’s match between the Yankees and the Mets become the lowest-rated World Series ever.
This time, though, in the wake of the attacks on September 11, New Yorkers, as well as baseball fans around the country, seemed to affix a sort of healing property to the Yankees as they squeezed past the A’s in the Division Series, then dispatched Seattle in the ALCS. Torre disavowed any connection between the destruction in lower Manhattan and the goings-on in the Bronx, but allowed, “It makes us feel good that we are finally able to provide some satisfaction to people, because during that time right after the tragedy, it was a helpless feeling sitting at home and being of no use whatsoever.” That feeling would return in Game 6, a 15-2 Diamondbacks’ blowout that might have shaken a lesser team’s sense of self. That would come on the heels of two games in which the Yankees’ magic was never more perceptible. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 4 and Arizona ahead 3-1, the Diamondbacks’ 22-year-old closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, threw a belt-high fastball that Tino Martinez hit over the center field fence, tying the game. Then Jeter won it with another home run off Kim in the 10th.
The next night, Brosius hit the homer that Finley learned was fair by the sound of the crowd. The similarity of the situation to Martinez’s long shot went beyond eerie and into the realm of the inexplicable. It took the Yankees another three innings to win; but when they did, they had a 3-2 edge in the Series. That second great escape even amazed the team that made it.
“Regardless of how well we’ve been pitched or how tough the pitcher is on the mound,” Yankees reliever Mike Stanton said afterward, “we just keep going up there with confidence in ourselves. But as much as we have confidence in ourselves, it’s kind of hard to believe that most of the times we get in one of those situations, we get the job done.”
Or so it seemed, until Game 7, when Schilling faced Clemens. One of those pitchers, Clemens, is the sure Cy Young Award winner in the American League. The other, Schilling, will win it in the National League (if Johnson doesn’t). Through five innings, Schilling and Clemens may as well have been Morris and Smoltz from 10 years ago. The game was scoreless.
By the ninth, the Yankees were up, 2-1, and Mariano Rivera, the most unhittable closer in baseball, the surest of sure things who had converted 23 straight postseason save opportunities beginning in 1998, was in charge. But there went the Diamondbacks, with their own great escape, with their own ungodly timely hitting. Mark Grace, Tony Womack and Luis Gonzalez singled. In between, the Yankees committed their third error of the game – how likely was that? – and when the dust cleared, two runs, the winning runs, the World Series-winning runs, had scored. And as the Diamondbacks stormed the field in celebration, there was another player thinking of that 1991 World Series, as Finley did a few days earlier. Stanton, then a member of the Braves, pitched in the eighth and ninth innings for Atlanta in Game 7 that year but watched helplessly from the dugout as the Twins pushed a run across in the bottom of the 10th and won it.
“The thing I remember the most about that Series was just how loud it was in the Metrodome,” Stanton recalls on Saturday night after Game 6 last weekend. “That was back before they put up all those partitions in the outfield. You had 60,000 people in there, and the place is tiny. It was as loud as I’ve ever heard a place.” Someone asks him whether Bank One Ballpark approaches that noise level. “Not even close,” Stanton says. “These are rowdy fans, but this isn’t the Metrodome.” On Sunday in Game 7, Stanton pitched a scoreless two-thirds of an inning in the seventh for New York. Then he had to watch again from the visitors’ dugout as the home team came back and won. As pinch hitter Jay Bell crossed the plate with the winning run, the noise in Bank One Ballpark may not have reached Metrodome level. But it was loud enough to hear, probably all the way to Minneapolis. TSN
