![]() 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. The first three started every World Series game in 20. From 2004 through 2010, the Royals took Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer and Colón within the first four picks of the draft. That is how it was for Colón, who never quite broke through with the other top Royals draft picks of his era. Without the homer, perhaps, Sprague would have stalled out, buried on a roster of win-now veterans. 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. 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. Sprague freed his mind to put his plan into action. “You think about the movie ‘For Love of the Game’ - clear the mechanism.” “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. 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. He would hunt the low fastball and belt the first one he saw. Sprague considered taking a pitch but thought better of it. He’ll try to get you to chase a high fastball, Mulliniks told Sprague, so make sure to get him down in the zone. 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 spent most of the season there in 1992, coming to bat just 50 times for Toronto, with one home run.Īn 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 Blue Jays had started to sour on him as their third baseman of the future and told him to try catching in Triple-A. “I’m thinking, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ like playing slow-pitch softball.”īut while Unser’s heroics fulfilled his goal of mastering life on the bench, Sprague’s helped him escape that fate. “He took so much sting out of the bat with his slow, slow changeup,” says Unser, who hit left-handed. 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. 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. In 1979, he became the first player ever to have pinch-hit homers in three consecutive plate appearances. Unser returned to the Phillies for a two-year master class as a pinch-hitter. If you’re going to hang around this game, it would be nice to figure it out a little bit.’” And then I said, ‘Wait, you’ve got a family to support. ![]() “I wanted to get out my aggression and show ’em I could kill the ball. “I just went up there and hacked,” he says. By 1978, Unser had become a frustrated reserve with the Montreal Expos, all but useless as a pinch-hitter (3 for 38). They had gotten McGraw six years earlier in a trade that sent Unser, their center fielder, to the Mets. The Phillies won their first in 1980, when Tug McGraw struck out the Royals’ Willie Wilson to end Game 6. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. When Rhodes died, in 2009, Willie Mays told The Sporting News that he’d never had a better friend. He drank whiskey with the Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, who adored him. 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 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. Rhodes was a true baseball character, born in Alabama as James Lamar Rhodes but known better for his nickname in his adopted hometown. ![]()
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