Lemke Goes From Zero to Hero

Baseball is the most forgiving of games--fail now and there’s always another at-bat, another inning, another game--and Tuesday night in the bottom of the 12th inning at Fulton County Stadium, the World Series pardoned another.

Mark Lemke could have been Bill Buckner. He could have thrown away the Series by failing to pick up Chuck Knoblauch’s ground ball.

There it was, sharply struck, bouncing crisply toward his glove, a sure double-play ball that was going to preserve a 4-4 tie and enable Atlanta reliever Mark Wohlers to wriggle out of the top of 12th.

Ball heads for glove.

Ball hits heel of glove.

Ball skitters onto the outfield grass, sending Minnesota’s lead runner, Dan Gladden, to third base, Knoblauch to first and the legend of Mark Lemke onto a different kind of Atlanta Brave chopping block.

A 3-0 World Series deficit awaited the Braves, just 90 feet away. Let Gladden score here and it’s time to start thinking about February and pitchers and catchers reporting to West Palm Beach. Prevent Gladden from scoring? The mission seemed improbable, with Kent Hrbek and Kirby Puckett, the hammer and tongs of the Minnesota batting order, due up with only one out.

Wheels were spinning from dugout to infield.

Lemke, a .225 career hitter who’s supposed to be the good-glove half of the Atlanta second-base platoon, could only wince and wonder: “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

Bobby Cox, the frazzled Atlanta manager, could only wonder how to clean it up.

Cox first decided to change pitchers. He should have changed second basemen, but the damage already was done and relief second baseman Jeff Treadway was not available, having pinch-hit three innings earlier.

As Cox asked for the ball from Wohlers, Lemke scrounged up the courage to look his teammates in the eye. “I knew it wasn’t the end of the world,” Lemke insisted. He said he knew when he “looked around the infield, at (Terry) Pendleton and (Jeff) Blauser and (Brian) Hunter, and they just told me, ‘We’re not down, you’re not down, so let’s go.’ ”

What a time for Lemke to get lucky.

Cox brings in Kent Mercker to pitch to Hrbek. Mercker strikes out Hrbek, looking, with a fastball on the inside corner.

Cox brings in Jim Clancy to pitch to Puckett. Clancy intentionally walks Puckett to bring on the fifth spot in the Twins’ lineup, which by this late moment, is occupied by the pitcher, Mark Guthrie.

Minnesota’s bench is depleted--all eight reserves have played--so Twins’ Manager Tom Kelly has to pinch-hit with a pitcher, Rick Aguilera, who actually faced live pitching as recently as 1989, when he pitched for the National League’s New York Mets.

Clancy retires Aguilera on a stunningly well-hit fly ball to center field, ending the inning, and Lemke’s sigh of relief is drowned out only by the war-whoops of 50,000 Tomahawk Heads.

Minutes later, the Braves have David Justice on second base with two outs. Greg Olson is at the plate, Lemke is on deck.

Wheels keep spinning. Suppose Aguilera walks Olson. Suppose Lemke has a chance to win it.

“I wasn’t thinking that I had to redeem myself there,” Lemke would say later, “but I thought it’d be a pretty good idea if I did.”

Full count to Olson.

Aguilera misfires.

Olson walks.

Now it’s Lemke, one more time.

A switch-hitter, Lemke stepped into the left-hand batter’s box against Aguilera, a right-hander. In the left-hand box, Lemke is not on firm ground, owning but a .219 regular-season batting average from that side.

He fouled off a pitch, which helped relieve some tension. “That settled me down a little,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Hey, you don’t need to hit a home run here. Don’t even try.’ That got me out of that frame of mind.”

With the count 1-1, Aguilera threw a fastball away. Lemke swung again and went the same way with it--away.

Bat met ball and, even more surprisingly, ball landed in left field, several feet in front of Gladden. Justice rounded third and was waved home. Gladden’s throw bounced into the glove of catcher Brian Harper.

Justice beat the tag by sliding below the tag. Braves win, 5-4.

Mark Lemke--from zero to hero, just like that.

“That hit couldn’t have happened to a better player,” Cox said once he reclaimed his breath. “He’s the original dirt player, out at the park early every day. He’s the type of player who makes his manager very proud.”

If very nervous along the way.

Lemke was able to laugh afterward, a sign of the times. Asked if he thought Justice could score once he hit the ball, Lemke said sure--”As long as he touched third base, I was happy.”

Justice had missed it before, in the National League playoffs, and lived to see another day. By missing and then connecting Tuesday night, Lemke was simply traveling a well-trodden road.

His single didn’t end the longest game in World Series history; the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers played 14 innings in 1916. But it ended the longest inning of Lemke’s life.

Early this morning, that life was still worth living.