WORLD SERIES / ATLANTA BRAVES vs. MINNESOTA TWINS : Old Man Still Has the Stuff

I was beginning to think neither one of them could win it.

It was either the greatest seventh game of the World Series ever played--or a study in ineptitude.

It was won by--are you ready?--a guy named Eugene Thomas Larkin, a kind of reserve outfielder, the unlikeliest hero on the 25-man roster of the new World Series champions.

But, no. Larkin simply got the fly ball that finally won this exhausting exercise in extra innings after batter after batter in the earlier innings failed to get the ball out of the infield with the winning run on third.

But, let me tell you about the guy who really won this World Series. The guy who won the World Series is a throwback, a guy who comes out of the sharpen-your-spikes, slide-into-your-grandmother, who-told-you-that-you-could-hit-me? era of the grand old game.

You look at Jack Morris and your mind goes back to the tobacco-chewing, poker-faced, here-hit-this pitchers of bygone eras. The Grover Cleveland Alexanders, Christy Mathewsons, Burleigh Grimeses, Lefty Groves.

Like them, Morris is a crusty, crafty individual who gives no quarter and asks none. He’s mean, mustachioed, competitive. A batter is his natural enemy. He goes after one like a coyote on a stray deer.

There was some suspicion this old-timer was a little over the hill. He is 36 years old. The fastball was a little slower, the forkball didn’t always fork, the curve had a little less bite.

But, I can tell you what kind of a pitcher Jack Morris was. In the late ‘80s, when he was winning World Series games and pitching no-hitters for Detroit and he became a free agent, you knew the owners were colluding when the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner didn’t empty out the vault to get Jack Morris.

You didn’t need a court hearing. If Steinbrenner didn’t go after Jack Morris leaking money, you knew George was tied up, bound and gagged in a closet somewhere by the other owners.

Then, Morris’ star waned. But not his spirit. He was as cussed and ornery as ever. His record fell to 6-14, 15-18. His earned-run average soared.

But, Minnesota signed him as a free agent and, if his arm was older, the man attached to it was smarter. And meaner.

Home plate belongs to Jack Morris. The batter is an intruder. They are to be blown over, tricked, befuddled, returned to the dugout. He hates them.

He put together another very good year. He put the Twins in the World Series. He is fourth among active pitchers in career victories (246), fourth among actives in strikeouts, fifth in total innings pitched and fifth in career shutouts with 26.

And, it all seemed to come back to Jack Morris this year. The zest was still there and so were the pitches. He won 18, lost 12, had an ERA of 3.43 and pitched 11 complete games.

He won Game 1 of this Series with seven sterling innings. Game 4, he went six innings and left with the score tied. The team lost in the ninth.

Pitching in the seventh game with only three days of rest seemed a lot to ask a 36-year-old with a history of arm trouble. The Minnesota manager hoped for seven or eight innings.

Jack Morris gave him 10. It was his finest hour, as gutsy a performance as any of the legends of the mound ever gave.

In the eighth inning, it seemed the jig was up. The manager, Tom Kelly, came to the mound. Atlanta had opened the inning with a single and a double. “That’s enough, Jack!” he told his pitcher. “Good Lord! You’ve done enough! Give me the ball!”

Morris shook his head. “I told him I was fine. I said I’d got a lot left, and we don’t play tomorrow.”

Manager Kelly left the mound, shaking his head. “He said, ‘T.K., I’m fine.’ I said, ‘What the hell, it’s just a ballgame.’ I left him in. You’re going to tell Jack Morris what to do?”

Jack Morris intentionally walked Atlanta’s great young hitter, David Justice, then got Atlanta’s Sid Bream to hit into an inning-ending double play.

He mowed Atlanta down in the ninth and 10 innings.

Minnesota is champion of all baseball today because of Jack Morris. “I had a good fastball and I went right after ‘em,” he recalled after the game. “About the sixth inning, my forkball started to come around.”

Somehow, watching Jack Morris pitch sent the mind back to the guys who used to pose for the baseball cards with those squared hats and high cuts. The guys with the barbed-wire whiskers and the sneer on their faces as they came in with pitches they knew would surprise the young hitters.

The youngster arrayed against him, John Smoltz, is a kid who was fond of telling the press Jack Morris was his idol when he was a kid growing up in Michigan. Far from being flattered, Morris was infuriated. Smoltz was no autograph-seeking fan. He was the sworn enemy.

Smoltz matched him pitch-for-pitch most of the night. But he didn’t get any give from his idol.

It was a great game and a great Series. But, it was both because Jack Morris came in with the kind of performance they write poems about--the old bull out there staving off the young bull--and, as a matter of fact, a whole herd of young bulls, because the Atlanta lineup was full of wild-swinging young bucks who kept getting stood on their heads by this old gaffer with the mean look and the meaner fastball.

They’re celebrating in the streets of the Twin Cities tonight, blowing horns, popping corks and dancing on car tops because old Jack knew he had one more World Series championship performance in that old arm. And was mean enough to coax it out.