In his new book, Tyler Kepner digs into the history of the Fall Classic, including a look at unheralded players who stepped up for their teams at exactly the right time.
Don Larsen was 89 years old for his final pinstriped embrace at Yankee Stadium. It was Old-Timers’ Day in 2019, and Larsen rose from a wheelchair by the first base coach’s box in the Bronx. He clutched a walker as three tiers of cheering wafted over him like summer breeze, gently pushing Larsen to the gathering of legends on the infield. There to greet him were David Cone and David Wells, the only other Yankees to throw perfect games.
“That’s pretty impressive,” said Geoff Blum, watching from above home plate in the broadcast booth of the visiting Houston Astros. Blum never pitched, but he was perfect in his own way. He batted one time in the World Series — for the White Sox in 2005 — and slugged a home run. It broke a tie in the 14th inning of Game 3 in Houston, and the next night Chicago completed a sweep.
The standard for one-and-done World Series homers, of course, will always be the Game 1 blast by a hobbled Kirk Gibson for the Dodgers in 1988. But Gibson was soon to be named the N.L.’s most valuable player and had also starred for the Tigers in the 1984 World Series. This was Blum’s only shot at glory.
Blum has company, though, among unheralded players who delivered the very first time they grabbed a bat on that stage. Dusty Rhodes, Del Unser, Ed Sprague and Christian Colón all came off the bench with their teams tied or trailing, with no prior experience in the World Series. All came through, with Rhodes and Unser doing so more than once.
Dusty Rhodes
Rhodes was a true baseball character, born in Alabama as James Lamar Rhodes but known better for his nickname in his adopted hometown. He played for the last six New York Giants teams, through 1957, and settled on Staten Island, working for many years as an engineer on a tugboat. He was dry by then, but as a player he proudly called himself “a 12 o’clock guy in a 9 o’clock town,” a reference to his minor league days in Des Moines, Iowa. He drank whiskey with the Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, who adored him.
When Rhodes died, in 2009, Willie Mays told The Sporting News that he’d never had a better friend. The two shared the spotlight in the opener of the 1954 World Series against Cleveland, Mays with his game-saving catch off Vic Wertz’s deep drive in the 8th and Rhodes with his game-ending three-run homer off Bob Lemon in the 10th.
It was really a pop up, traveling only 270 feet or so and nestling just inside the nearby right field foul pole to give the Giants a 5-2 victory. In Game 2, Rhodes struck again off another future Hall of Famer, ducking a brushback pitch from Early Wynn as a pinch-hitter in the fifth, then scoring Mays with a game-tying single.
Rhodes homered onto the right field roof in the seventh, then lashed a two-run, pinch-hit single in Game 3. He did not play in Game 4 — “It was just as well,” he told Ira Berkow, many years later. “I was drinking to everybody’s health so much that I about ruined mine” — but his teammates finished a sweep, humbling the 111-win Indians to give the Giants the last of their five titles in New York.
Del Unser
The Phillies won their first in 1980, when Tug McGraw struck out the Royals’ Willie Wilson to end Game 6. They had gotten McGraw six years earlier in a trade that sent Unser, their center fielder, to the Mets. By 1978, Unser had become a frustrated reserve with the Montreal Expos, all but useless as a pinch-hitter (3 for 38).
“I just went up there and hacked,” he says. “I wanted to get out my aggression and show ’em I could kill the ball. And then I said, ‘Wait, you’ve got a family to support. If you’re going to hang around this game, it would be nice to figure it out a little bit.’”
Unser returned to the Phillies for a two-year master class as a pinch-hitter. In 1979, he became the first player ever to have pinch-hit homers in three consecutive plate appearances. The next fall, he had a crucial pinch hit in the pennant clincher in Houston and did it again in Games 2 and 5 of the World Series. Both hits came off Kansas City’s soft-tossing, submarine-style closer, Dan Quisenberry, who faced 43 batters in the 1980 World Series and struck out none.
“He took so much sting out of the bat with his slow, slow changeup,” says Unser, who hit left-handed. “I’m thinking, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ like playing slow-pitch softball.”
Unser doubled off Quisenberry in the eighth inning of a Game 2 win, singled again off him in a Game 4 loss, then delivered the biggest hit in the series: a double down the first-base line to tie Game 5 in the ninth. The Phillies stole that game and took the series in six.
Ed Sprague
Pinch-hitting was in Unser’s genes; with the Tigers in 1944, his father, Al, hit a pinch-hit grand slam to beat the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth. Sprague also had a big-league father — Ed Sr., a pitcher — and was familiar with high stakes: He won the College World Series twice at Stanford and Olympic gold for the United States in 1988.
But while Unser’s heroics fulfilled his goal of mastering life on the bench, Sprague’s helped him escape that fate. The Blue Jays had started to sour on him as their third baseman of the future and told him to try catching in Triple-A. He spent most of the season there in 1992, coming to bat just 50 times for Toronto, with one home run.
An afterthought on the World Series roster against Atlanta, Sprague came to bat with one on and one out in the ninth inning of Game 2. The Braves had Jeff Reardon — then baseball’s career saves leader — on the mound, and Sprague consulted a teammate, Rance Mulliniks, who had faced Reardon often.
He’ll try to get you to chase a high fastball, Mulliniks told Sprague, so make sure to get him down in the zone. Sprague considered taking a pitch but thought better of it. He would hunt the low fastball and belt the first one he saw. A double play would have ended the game and sent the Blue Jays back to Toronto in an 0-2 hole, yet Sprague felt strangely calm.
“It was probably one of the most relaxed at-bats I ever had in my career, one that was completely in the moment,” he says. “You think about the movie ‘For Love of the Game’ — clear the mechanism.”
Sprague freed his mind to put his plan into action. He got a first-pitch fastball down the middle, just below the belt, and hammered it into the left field seats, over a sign marking the spot of Hank Aaron’s record 715th home run. The Blue Jays won, 5-4, and after they took the title in six, Sprague got something better than a ring: a job in the starting lineup.
“Cito grabbed me at the airport after the White House trip, and he says, ‘Hey, we traded Kelly Gruber, do you want to go back to third?’” Sprague said, referring to Manager Cito Gaston. “And I’m like, Pat Borders is the catcher, he’s the World Series M.V.P. —‘Yeah, I want to go back!’”
The Blue Jays sent their farm director and a top instructor to California, where Sprague lived, for three days of off-season training at third base. Sprague spent the rest of the decade as a regular at that position and never forgot the gesture: He became the Athletics’ farm director in 2019 and says he tries to care for Oakland prospects the same way Toronto cared for him.
Christian Colón
Without the homer, perhaps, Sprague would have stalled out, buried on a roster of win-now veterans. That is how it was for Colón, who never quite broke through with the other top Royals draft picks of his era. From 2004 through 2010, the Royals took Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer and Colón within the first four picks of the draft. The first three started every World Series game in 2014 and 2015. Colón had one at-bat.
He was left off the roster in 2014 despite getting the game-tying hit — and scoring the winning run — in the wild-card victory over Oakland. In the 2015 postseason, Colón sat for the first 15 games. He got his only shot in the 12th inning of Game 5 of the World Series at Citi Field, with one on, one out, and the Royals trying to clinch the title.
On the mound was the Mets’ Addison Reed, a pitcher Colón had faced in college and an off-season workout partner in California. Reed threw five sliders in a row, and Colón lined the last into left field, breaking a tie and sparking a five-run rally that unplugged New York City.
“I’m in the on-deck circle and it’s super loud, and I’m thinking: ‘Breathe, you’ve done this before, talk yourself through it, let’s go, compete, all right,’” Colón says. “I get the hit — and I can literally hear myself yelling and screaming.”
Colón had played in Triple-A for four years. He was 26 years old, and when the Royals lost second baseman Ben Zobrist as a free agent, Colón seemed a natural fit to take over. But a different prospect, Whit Merrifield, took advantage of the chance, and by the end of the decade Colón had bounced through four other organizations.
He never earned the salaries of the other top Royals prospects, but he has a crown tattooed on his chest, “Champs 15” inked on his left forearm, and a ring that reminds him of the opportunity he seized.
“I can lay down at night and know that I gave to the organization,” Colón says, in the Cincinnati Reds’ clubhouse before a late-September game in 2019. “I didn’t take from it — I gave, and that really makes me feel good.”
Geoff Blum
As for Blum, he took something from the Astros with his big swing in 2005: a win in the first World Series game ever played in the state of Texas. He had spent most of the season with San Diego, where he and his wife, Kory, had newborn triplets. The Padres were in first place on July 31, and with the children finally out of the neonatal intensive care unit, Kory was at the ballpark for the first time all season. This was what Blum had wanted all year: playing at home, with his wife and new daughters safe and sound.
Then a club official tapped him on the shoulder in the clubhouse before the game. The White Sox’ manager, Ozzie Guillen, had made an impassioned plea for Blum, and the Padres had traded him to Chicago. Blum broke down in tears as he told his wife, who gave him clear instructions.
“Two things,” she said. “Get your sleep and win a World Series.”
Blum followed orders. He signed right back with the Padres before Thanksgiving but made his stay in Chicago count in Game 3 of the World Series, near the end of its record 5 hours and 41 minutes. He had entered the game in a double switch and was due up third in the top of the 14th against the Astros’ seventh pitcher of the game, Ezequiel Astacio. Blum quickly assessed the situation: With sluggers Jermaine Dye and Paul Konerko up before him, he would probably have to bunt.
Instead, the bases were empty after a single and a double play. Blum greeted Astros catcher Brad Ausmus, his former teammate, with some friendly banter at the plate. That relaxed Blum, who expected the Astros to pitch him away. He would try to flick a ball to left field, he thought, but Astacio missed down and in.
“Right in the sweet spot,” Blum says. “That’s just a natural groove for my left-handed swing, and I hammered it.”
Blum crossed the plate and blew a kiss to Kory — though she was actually in the wives’ lounge — and the White Sox commemorated the moment as part of a two-sided championship monument outside the main entrance to U.S. Cellular Field. Blum’s home run swing is preserved in bronze, facing the glassed-in reception area. He visits every year when the Astros come to town.
“You have to go through the downstairs lobby to get to the media elevator, and I glance to my right every time and see that statue,” Blum says. “I can’t believe it to this day.”
THE GRANDEST STAGE: A History of the World Series
By Tyler Kepner
336 pp. Doubleday. $30.
Copyright 2022 © by Tyler Kepner
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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