SIMMONS: Blue Jays' '92 World Series team was one for the ages
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When Dave Winfield walked to the plate early Sunday morning in Atlanta 30 years ago, he was carrying a .116 career World Series batting average and the hopes of an entire baseball nation resting on his magnificent shoulders.
The double he hit down the left field line, scoring two runners in the 11th inning of Game 6 — the winning hit in the 1992 Series, the first championship for the Blue Jays, and the first for any Canadian team outside the National Hockey League — came in his final at-bat of his only season in Toronto.
Winfield was won and done as a Blue Jay. And all these years later, with the anniversary on Monday and Tuesday from a game that started on a Saturday and ended after midnight, like so many sporting stories over time, his presence and his prominence have grown larger than even he was.
His story, like the story of the famed ’92 champions, is so much about singular individual moments from a title team so filled with memories and emotion, with so many of the details forgotten over time. And far too many goodbyes.
That was it for Winfield in Toronto. One year, one championship, one cry for noise — and so long.
That was it for Tom Henke, such an important Blue Jay from a historical sense, who tried to close out the win in the ninth and wasn’t able to pull it off. A few days later, he was told he wouldn’t return.
That was it for David Cone, the starting pitcher in Game 6, and for Jimmy Key, the winning pitcher that famed morning: That was Key’s ninth season with the Jays. He lived through the chase for eight years. He took his ring and went to the Yankees. Henke went to Texas. Winfield went home to Minnesota.
It is said too often in professional sports that when you win a championship, you will walk together for the rest of your life. The Blue Jays won a championship. Almost half of that team walked together and then walked away, or was pushed out, or entered free agency or — like Pat Tabler and the injured Rance Mulliniks, one-time fixtures with the Jays — played their last big-league games in ’92.
If anything symbolizes the singular and unique Blue Jays championship of ’92, it is that everyman catcher Pat Borders was named World Series MVP. Normally, this is something a Reggie Jackson would win, or a Sandy Koufax or Roberto Clemente. Roberto Alomar had won the MVP in the American League Championship series. He, like Jackson, Koufax and Clemente, is in the Hall of Fame. The only Hall of Fame you might find Borders in is the Humble Man’s Hall.
But that year, that time, that team, he was the part of the glue that helped provide four one-run victories in a tight and dramatic Series against the Atlanta Braves.
The Blue Jays had a bullpen that playoff season unlike any they’ve ever had before. They had Henke closing and Duane Ward setting up. They had starters like Key, David Wells, Todd Stottlemyre working out of the ’pen, and the rookie Mike Timlin on the deepest relief crew in franchise history. Nineteen-plus relief innings pitched that Series: One earned run given up. That was statistically startling then and now.
The Jays won because of a ninth-inning pinch-hit home run by rarely used Ed Sprague in Game 2. If they don’t get that hit, that win, there may not have been a parade later. If they don’t get a spectacular circus catch by the brilliant Devon White in Game 3, they may not have won. They needed a great start, his last as a Jay, from Key in Game 4. This wasn’t about any one player. This was about everyone.
They won, they celebrated, the great managerial-business team of Pat Gillick and Paul Beeston so emotional, the field manager Cito Gaston, finally all of them could call themselves champs. They would all return for a second championship in 1993. But almost half of the ’92 team was gone by the time the next spring arrived. And that makes the second title all the more fascinating.
The Jays may have won back-to-back World Series, but the two teams couldn’t have been more different. They had Manny Lee starting at shortstop in ’92 and the popular Kelly Gruber at third base. Their last games as Jays were played in Atlanta. That was also the end for the injured Blue Jays great Dave Stieb, in his first long run in Toronto. He made the journey possible, yet he wasn’t much part of anything but the celebration in ’92. And it was the end for Boomer Wells, who left in free agency.
Other Jays said goodbye as well after the ’92 Series, including Candy Maldonado, who had been central to so much of what the Jays accomplished down the stretch and in the playoffs. But champions and championships in pro sports live forever in their own way.
They don’t get there without the Alomar home run in Oakland the round before and without the Sprague home run and without the White catch and the Key start and a bullpen unlike any other.
The 1992 Blue Jays did something Toronto had never done before and has rarely done since. The Jays won again in 1993. The Raptors won the NBA title 26 years later. Those are the only North American big-league championships for Toronto in the past 54 years.
For so many of the players of that ’92 title team, it was won and done.
And then a lifetime to celebrate a Canadian baseball victory for the ages.
