The Field Of Dreams Project

[Nick Soulis]

THE BOY FROM THE ALLEGHENY TURNS BACK THE TIDE OF TIME
Maddox and Willis Carry Pittsburgh's Deadball Warriors Past the Ghosts of a Broken Champion in Seven Unforgettable Games

There are moments in the long history of this game when a young man arrives on the scene so suddenly, so completely, and with such a serene disregard for the weight of what is being asked of him, that the old men in the press box look at one another and say nothing, because nothing adequate exists to be said. Nick Maddox of the Pittsburgh Pirates is twenty years old. He has thrown, across two complete game performances in the most important series his club has played, eighteen innings of shutout baseball against a Florida Marlins club that scored six hundred and sixty-seven runs during the regular season of their year. He has done this without apparent effort, without visible anxiety, without once suggesting that the moment was larger than the man.

In a just universe, this would be impossible. We do not live in a just universe. We live in a baseball universe, which operates by entirely different laws, and in this universe Nick Maddox walked into Sun Life Stadium in Miami with his team trailing three games to one and facing the end of everything, and he threw a complete game shutout on a hundred and thirty-six pitches in the October heat, and then he came home to Exposition Park and did it again in Game Six with the same calm authority, and the Pittsburgh Pirates forced a Game Seven, and on Wednesday afternoon Vic Willis finished what Maddox had started, and sixteen thousand souls along the Allegheny River celebrated something they will tell their grandchildren about.

Let us speak of Willis, because the stopper deserves his paragraph. Thirty-one years old, twenty-one victories in the regular season, and the kind of pitcher who regards the complete game not as an achievement but as an expectation. Willis threw nine innings in Miami in Game Five to keep Pittsburgh alive, surrendering one earned run and nothing else of consequence. He came back to Exposition Park for Game Seven and threw nine more, giving up two runs against a Florida lineup that had been one of the tournament's most disciplined offensive clubs all series long. He did not overpower anyone. He simply refused to be beaten, which is a different thing entirely and in many ways a more admirable one.

The Florida Marlins deserve a paragraph of their own, because this correspondent has been in enough press boxes to know that fifty-four victories in a season does not produce the kind of baseball this club played for seven games. Jim Leyland is a manager of the first order, a man who understands that the greatest resource in any dugout is not talent but belief, and he installed that belief in a club that had been stripped of its championship roster before the winter snow had melted. Jesús Sánchez threw the game of his life in Game One. Kirt Ojala was magnificent in Game Two. Matt Mantei was untouchable in five appearances, surrendering not a single run across the entire series. These men came to Pittsburgh and Miami and gave everything they possessed against one of the finest deadball clubs the National League has ever produced, and they fell short by a margin so thin that a differently bounced ball here or there might have changed the entire story.

Honus Wagner requires a paragraph, as Honus Wagner always requires a paragraph. The greatest shortstop who has ever played this game hit one sixty-seven through the first four games of this series and three hundred across the final three, which is precisely the kind of arithmetic that defines a career rather than a series. He doubled home the first run of Game Seven. He stole five bases. He is thirty-three years old and he is still the most complete player in baseball, and when the moment demanded that he be what he is, he was.

Fred Clarke managed this series the way he manages every series — with patience and conviction and an absolute refusal to deviate from the principles that have made his Pittsburgh club what it is. He trusted a twenty year old pitcher with his team's season twice. He trusted Vic Willis to close it out in a Game Seven on the road in Miami and then again at home. He constructed a lineup that put the ball in play, manufactured runs, and made the other team execute, and when the other team did not, Pittsburgh scored. That is the deadball game at its finest, and Clarke has been playing it at its finest for longer than most men in this tournament have been managing.

The Field of Dreams Tournament has given us many things. It has given us matchups that strain the imagination, performances that defy expectation, and moments that remind us why this game holds its grip on the human heart across generations and across eras that should have nothing to say to one another and turn out to have everything to say.
Nick Maddox is twenty years old. He has eighteen tournament innings and zero earned runs and a Series MVP award that belongs in whatever passes for a trophy case in 1907 Pittsburgh. Somewhere in the Florida clubhouse Jim Leyland is telling his players the truth about what they accomplished, and the truth is considerable.

The Allegheny runs on. The corn stands tall in Dyersville. The tournament continues.

It always continues.

— Filed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 1907

[Nick Soulis]

Series #267

1988 Minnesota Twins vs 1951 Washington Senators



THE 1988 MINNESOTA TWINS
Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota
91-71 | 2nd Place, American League West



The 1988 Minnesota Twins arrived at the Field of Dreams as one of the most complete offensive clubs in the tournament's modern era bracket. Managed by Tom Kelly — whose tournament record of 4-1 marks him as one of the shrewdest skippers in the draw — this club led by Kirby Puckett's historic .356/.375/.545 season, one of the finest individual batting lines any position player has brought to the Field of Dreams. Puckett's 234 hits, 24 home runs, and 121 RBI earned him a third-place MVP finish and a Gold Glove in center field. He was not alone. Kent Hrbek slashed .312/.387/.520 with 25 home runs and 76 RBI. Gary Gaetti posted a .301/.353/.551 line with 28 home runs and 88 RBI, earning his own Gold Glove and a 22nd-place MVP vote. Dan Gladden provided speed and grit at the top of the order with 28 stolen bases. As a team, the Twins scored 759 runs, hit 151 home runs, and batted .274 — a lineup with genuine thunder from top to bottom, playing in a Metrodome that in 1988 carried park factors that favored hitters. They drew over three million fans, the best attendance in baseball that season.

The pitching staff was anchored by Frank Viola, who in 1988 delivered one of the great Cy Young seasons of his era — 24 wins against 7 losses, a 2.64 ERA, and 193 strikeouts across 255.1 innings. Allan Anderson, just twenty-four years old, complemented Viola brilliantly with a 2.45 ERA of his own, going 16-9 and leading the American League in that category. The bullpen was closed out by Jeff Reardon, who converted 42 saves with a 2.47 ERA across 73 innings — a genuine shutdown presence at the back of the staff. The team ERA of 3.93 and 897 strikeouts reflected a pitching operation built on command and efficiency rather than raw overpowering stuff. In their previous tournament appearances, Twins clubs have gone a combined 8-5, with Tom Kelly personally responsible for four of those wins. This 1988 edition may be the franchise's most dangerous entry yet.

THE 1951 WASHINGTON SENATORS
Griffith Stadium, Washington, D.C.
62-92 | 7th Place, American League



The 1951 Washington Senators finished seventh in an eight-team American League, 62 wins and 92 losses the official verdict on a season that was harder than it looked from the outside. Their Pythagorean record of 68-86 suggests a club that was genuinely better than their record indicated — unlucky in close games, inconsistent in stretches, undone at times by a pitching staff that surrendered 764 runs over the course of the season. Managed by Bucky Harris — the most active skipper in tournament history with 37 series managed and a record of 14-23 — the Senators were not without talent. Eddie Yost, just twenty-four years old, was their most valuable player by a significant margin, posting a remarkable .283/.423/.424 line with 126 walks, 109 runs scored, and 4.1 WAR. His plate discipline was extraordinary for the era. Gil Coan hit .303 with 9 home runs and 62 RBI from center field, adding 3.2 WAR. Irv Noren contributed .279 with 8 home runs and 86 RBI in right, and Mickey Vernon hit .293 with 87 RBI at first base — a quietly productive offensive core that could, on their best days, put runs on the board against anyone.

The pitching staff was a study in respectable effort against difficult odds. Bob Porterfield was the club's most effective starter, going 9-8 with a 3.24 ERA across 133 innings — the kind of performance that on a better club might have earned him double-digit wins comfortably. Connie Marrero, forty years old and still competing at a high level, went 11-9 with a 3.90 ERA and completed 16 of his 25 starts — a workhorse in the truest sense. Sandy Consuegra provided versatility as a starter and reliever, logging 146 innings with a 4.01 ERA. The bullpen featured Tom Ferrick, whose 2.38 ERA across 41.2 innings was the staff's best mark. Washington's franchise record in the tournament stands at 5-14 — a history of close calls, early exits, and occasional upsets that keeps Bucky Harris and his men relevant despite the odds. This 1951 club arrives as significant underdogs. In this tournament, that has meant very little.

[Nick Soulis]

THE SPORTING SCENE
By Grantland Rice

PUCKETT AND THE GHOSTS OF GRIFFITH STADIUM
Special Correspondent to the Field of Dreams Tournament
Dateline: Minneapolis, Minnesota — October 1988

There is a young man from Florida who plays center field for the Minnesota Twins with a joy so unrestrained, so genuinely and completely felt, that to watch him take the field is to be reminded of why this game was invented in the first place. His name is Kirby Puckett. He is twenty-eight years old. He hit .356 this season and collected 234 base hits and drove in 121 runs and played his position with the grace of a man who cannot quite believe his good fortune at being paid to do this. He is, in the plainest terms available to this correspondent, a ballplayer.
He will need to be every inch of that against what is coming.
For the Washington Senators of 1951 are not the club their record suggests. The standings showed sixty-two victories and ninety-two defeats when the season drew to its close, and a man reading only those numbers might be forgiven for thinking Bucky Harris brought his club to Iowa to make up the numbers. He would be wrong to think it. The Senators scored 672 runs in a season when runs were not easily come by. They played, by the cold mathematics of the Pythagorean method, like a sixty-eight and eighty-six ball club — better than their record, better than their reputation, and better than at least several teams who have already been sent home from this tournament in considerably fewer games than their partisans expected.

Bucky Harris has managed a baseball game since 1924. He managed the old Senators to a World Series championship in his very first season as a skipper, a boy wonder of twenty-seven who somehow persuaded a collection of seasoned professionals to follow him into the fire. He has been managing ever since — through lean years and lean decades, through rosters built on hope and rosters built on stars, through every variation of circumstance a baseball life can produce. He is not a man who is impressed by the opposition's reputation. He has seen too much for that.
He will face Tom Kelly, who has managed in this tournament with a quiet authority that his record of four wins and one loss reflects precisely. Kelly is not a man who says much. He does not need to. He builds a lineup, sets a rotation, and trusts his players to execute. In Frank Viola he possesses the finest left-handed pitcher currently active in the American League — twenty-four victories, an earned run average of two and sixty-four hundredths, a Cy Young Award that no serious observer would dispute. In young Allan Anderson he has a second starter who led the American League in earned run average at two and forty-five. In Jeff Reardon he has a closer who converted forty-two saves and who does not, as a rule, surrender leads once he has been handed them.

And yet.

This correspondent has watched baseball long enough to know that the ledger of talent does not always balance the way arithmetic suggests it should. Eddie Yost drew one hundred and twenty-six bases on balls this season. One hundred and twenty-six. He crossed home plate one hundred and nine times. He is a third baseman who understands something about patience that most men never learn — that the purpose of a plate appearance is not always to swing the bat, that a walk is as good as a single in the right moment, that the pitcher who cannot find the strike zone with a man like Yost at the plate is already in trouble before the first runner reaches base.
Gil Coan hit .303 in center field. Mickey Vernon drove in eighty-seven runs from first base with the quiet efficiency of a professional who does not require praise to perform. Bob Porterfield went nine and eight with an earned run average of three and twenty-four — numbers that on a better club would have meant fifteen wins and a reputation considerably larger than the one he currently carries. These are ballplayers. They are not famous. They are not celebrated. They are present, and they are ready, and they have nothing whatever to lose.

The series opens at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, that great domed cathedral of Minneapolis where the crowd noise builds to something that has unnerved visiting clubs for years. The Senators will walk into that noise on the first pitch of the first game and discover very quickly what this tournament asks of the underdog. It asks everything. It always has.
This correspondent will be watching. He suspects the rest of the baseball world would do well to watch along.
The best teams in this tournament are the ones still playing. Washington is still playing.

— Grantland Rice, Field of Dreams Special Correspondent

[Nick Soulis]

Series #267

1988 Minnesota Twins vs 1951 Washington Senators



SERIES 267 — GAME 1
Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota
MY OH MY — PUCKETT WALKS IT OFF AS TWINS STEAL THRILLER IN TEN

Washington 1951 Senators 2
Minnesota 1988 Twins 3 (10 innings)

For eight innings neither club could push a run across, Frank Viola and Bob Kuzava locked in a scoreless duel that had the Metrodome crowd restless and both dugouts searching for an opening, and then the ninth inning delivered everything at once. Mickey Vernon led off the top half with a single and Sam Mele followed with a two-run double off Viola that broke the silence and sent Washington to the dugout with a two-nothing lead and six outs to protect — a lead that Bucky Harris, with his bullpen, had every reason to believe he could hold. Bob Ross came in to close it out and instead watched Greg Gagne turn on the first pitch he liked and drive it over the fence with a man aboard, a two-run home run that tied the game at two and sent nineteen thousand people at the Metrodome to their feet in an instant. Extra innings. Reardon held Washington scoreless in the tenth, and then Kirby Puckett stepped in against Ross, took one pitch, and hit it into the seats — a solo walk-off home run that ended it three to two and left the Metrodome shaking from the turf to the rafters. Minnesota takes Game One, but Washington led this game in the ninth inning and came within six outs of stealing it.

KEY PERFORMERS

Kirby Puckett, CF, MIN — 1-4, HR, RBI, BB, 2 K — solo walk-off home run in the 10th; the only hit that mattered
Greg Gagne, SS, MIN — 1-4, HR, 2 RBI — two-run shot in the 9th that erased Washington's lead and forced extras
Frank Viola, SP, MIN — 8.1 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 3 BB, 6 K — brilliant for eight innings before surrendering the lead in the ninth
Jeff Reardon, CL, MIN — 1.2 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 1 K — stranded inherited runners, held Washington off the board in the 10th
Bob Kuzava, SP, WSH — 7.1 IP, 6 H, 0 ER, 2 BB, 5 K — kept Minnesota scoreless deep into the game on 108 pitches
Sam Mele, DH, WSH — 1-4, 2B, 2 RBI — the two-run double that broke the scoreless tie and gave Washington the lead
Mickey Vernon, 1B, WSH — 2-3, BB — the single that started Washington's ninth-inning rally


Series: 1988 Minnesota leads 1-0
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