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It may not have been the shot heard 'round the world. But it definitely was the shot heard 'round North America. No, it may not have been Bobby Thomson vs. Ralph Branca, names forever linked in baseball lore as the game's classic hero and goat. But Joe Carter vs. Mitch Williams will forever have its own special niche when baseball's storied moments are recounted.
Thomson's home run off Branca is, of course, regarded as the most spine-tingling event in baseball history. It came in the deciding game of the 1951 National League playoffs, with Thomson clubbing a three-run, bottom-of-the-ninth homer off Brooklyn's Branca, the blow lifting the New York Giants to a 5-4 triumph and the NL pennant.
The Carter-vs.-Williams scenario unfolded in a momentous setting, to be sure -- the World Series. With Carter and his Toronto teammates leading the '93 Series by a three games-to-two count over Philadelphia but trailing 6-5 in the ninth inning of Game 6, the Blue Jays went to bat against Williams, the Phillies' ace reliever.
Lit up in a sorry relief performance in Game 4 of the '93 fall classic, Williams, the frenetic one, was nonetheless entrusted with protecting the Phils' precarious lead in Game 6. With his team three outs from deadlocking the Series, Williams lived up to his "Wild Thing" sobriquet by walking the first batter he faced, Rickey Henderson, on four pitches. Devon White flied out to left field, but designated hitter Paul Molitor followed with a single to center.
With a SkyDome throng clamoring for the Blue Jays to wrap up the Series, Carter strolled to the plate. A run producer par excellence -- he was coming off a 121-RBI season and had driven in 893 runs in the last eight years -- Carter proceeded to work the count to 2-2. He then rocketed Williams' next delivery over the left-field fence.
Bedlam.
Toronto had won its second straight World Series, the 8-6 victory making the Blue Jays the first team since the Yankees of 1977-78 to repeat. The Canadian-based club could rightly be called "North America's team."
"They haven't made up the word yet ... to describe what the feeling is," said Carter, who had flung his helmet into the air and made a euphoric dance around he bases. "You want to see the reaction of the fans. You want to see he reaction of your teammates. Once the ball went over the fence, it was something you could not believe."
On the scale of believability, it certainly was one for the books. In the 89 previous Series, none had ended on a come-from-behind home run. In fact, only one game in 531 Series contests had ended in such a manner, with Los Angeles' Kirk Gibson supplying those theatrics in the opener of the 1988 Series.
Phils Manager Jim Fregosi stood by his man, Williams, who had recorded 43 regular-season saves but wound up with a 20.25 earned-run average in the Series. "As I told him after the game," Fregosi said, "he's the one who got us here."
It was all reminiscent of Thomson's smash off Branca -- but not quite as compelling, all things considered, since the Blue Jays would have lived another day even had they lost. Not so the '51 Giants. Without question, the blow also brought back memories of Bill Mazeroski's Series-winning homer for Pittsburgh in 1960, a ninth-inning smash against the Yankees that snapped a 9-9 tie in Game 7.
The Phillies, surprise pennant winners in the National League after finishing last in the NL East in 1992, showed remarkable grit throughout 1993. And never was their clawing, battling nature more evident than in the World Series.
Staring at a 5-1 deficit entering the seventh inning of Game 6, the Phils were given up for dead in most quarters. But Kevin Stocker drew a leadoff walk against Dave Stewart and Mickey Morandini followed with a single. Lenny Dykstra, merely phenomenal at the plate and in the field in this Series, then homered to right -- it was his fourth homer of the Series -- to pull the Phils within one run.
Toronto Manager Cito Gaston summoned Danny Cox from the bullpen, but the muscular righthander was ineffective. The Phils tied the score when Mariano Duncan singled, stole second and then scampered home on Dave Hollins' single. After a walk and a single filled the bases, pinch-hitter Pete Incaviglia hit a sacrifice fly off Al Leiter and, suddenly and stunningly, Philadelphia was on top, 6-5. The lead held up until the fateful ninth.
The Phillies, who had received considerable guff all season because of their seedy physical appearance, proved down the stretch and in the League Championship Series that they were anything but a shabby group of competitors. Having dismissed the heralded Atlanta Braves in six playoff
games, they bolted to a 2-0 lead in the first inning of Game 1 of the World Series and later led 3-2 and 4-3. But Toronto tied the game at 4-4 on White's fifth-inning home run and seized the lead when John Olerud went deep in the sixth.
Toronto then salted the game away with three seventh-inning runs -- Roberto Alomar contributed a two-run double -- and won 8-5 at SkyDome. Leiter, whose strikeout of John Kruk with the bases loaded in the sixth inning was a key to the outcome, got the victory.
In Game 2, Jim Eisenreich belted a three-run homer off Stewart in the Phils' five-run third and Dykstra made two glittering catches -- crashing into the center-field wall on both occasions -- as the Phils knotted the Series with a 6-4 victory. For good measure, Dykstra drilled a bases-empty homer in the seventh inning.
Gaston then shook things up in Game 3 at Philadelphia. With the designated-hitter rule not in effect in the NL champs' ballpark, Gaston decided to send the AL batting champion, first baseman Olerud, to the bench against lefthander Danny Jackson and replace him with Molitor, Toronto's hot-hitting, 37-year-old DH.
All Molitor did in response was crack a two-run triple in the first inning and a solo homer in the third and go 3-for-4. The Blue Jays frolicked, 10-3, with Alomar and Tony Fernandez knocking home two runs apiece.
Game 4 was either a World Series classic or an autumnal disaster. It depended on your point of view. With Milt Thompson belting a three-run triple in the first inning and driving in five runs and Dykstra poling two homers in a four-RBI night, the Phillies took a 14-9 lead after seven innings in a contest marked by 31 hits and 14 bases on balls. The game typified the horrendous pitching throughout most of the Series, with Jays pitchers finishing with a 5.77 ERA and Phils hurlers fashioning a 7.57 mark.
The Jays, whose batting order featured the league's 1-2-3 hitters of '93 (Olerud, Molitor and Alomar) and really had no weakness, landed a six-run haymaker in the eighth, an outburst capped by Henderson's two-run single and White's two-run triple, and held on to win, 15-14, in the highest-scoring game in postseason history. Also, the game took a Series-record 4 hours, 14 minutes to complete.
Now trailing three games to one and having suffered a crushing defeat in Game 4, the Phils seemed ripe for the taking. Guess again. Curt Schilling, for one, was having none of that.
Schilling doled out only five hits in Game 5 and, in a remarkable departure from the offensive pyrotechnics of Game 4, the Phils stayed alive with a 2-0 victory. And it was back to Toronto.
Molitor, who finished with a .500 batting mark against the Phillies and won Most Valuable Player honors in the Series, tripled home a run in Toronto's three-run first in Game 6. His bases-empty homer in the fifth staked the Blue Jays to a 5-1 lead, setting up the Phils' furious comeback in the seventh and, eventually, the Joe Carter-vs.-Mitch Williams confrontation in the ninth.
No, Carter vs. Williams wasn't quite of the magnitude of Thomson vs. Branca on the October thrill-o-meter. But it will do until something better comes along -- which might not be for decades.
World Series Moment:
