Raising Arizona

Led by fireballers Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, the long-in-the-tooth Diamondbacks kicked up their heels and jumped on the Yankees for a 2-0 World Series lead

By Tom Verducci

Issue date: Sports Illustrated, November 5, 2001

One warm, clear thought came to Luis Gonzalez as he floated joyfully around the bases last Saturday night upon hitting a home run in his first World Series game, a game he didn't reach until he was 34 years old and had played 11 full major league seasons: backyard Wiffle ball. It occurred to Gonzalez, the Arizona Diamondbacks leftfielder, that he had done this before, though as a kid in Tampa he had used a plastic bat and his imagination to hit his Series home run.

To the New York Yankees the World Series may seem like air or water, just another staple of life. The Diamondbacks, however, a team loaded with aging players who needed patience and Celebrex to finally reach the Fall Classic, remind us that the World Series is as precious as a boy's dream. The World Series is a sugarplum.

'Twas the night before Game 1 when Gonzalez, nestled in his bed in his Scottsdale house, awoke and looked at his digital clock, certain he'd been asleep for two hours or more. The clock mocked him. Only 10 minutes had passed since he last had checked. "It was like that all night," Gonzalez said after Game 1. "Not because it was a matter of being nervous. It was a matter of being excited. I wound up getting only a couple of hours of sleep."

A wired Gonzalez reported to Bank One Ballpark at 10:30 a.m. -- nearly seven hours before the first pitch. First baseman Mark Grace had already been there for a half hour. "Had to," Grace said later that day. He explained that he had been so jumpy, "my old lady kicked me out of the house." Gonzalez and Grace were two of nine Diamondbacks who had spent at least 10 years in the big leagues without getting to the World Series.

Grace is 37, stocks Celebrex (an arthritis pain reliever) in his locker and spent 13 years on rock-pile duty with the Chicago Cubs before signing with the Diamondbacks as a free agent last December. He normally spends October playing golf in Arizona with former big leaguers like Vince Coleman, Chili Davis and Bob Melvin, who are happy to have his company. ("They know I write big checks after the 18th hole," Grace said.) On Saturday night he stood on the third base line and felt the hair on his arms stand up and a chill shoot through his body as Jewel sang The Star-Spangled Banner to the accompaniment of fireworks.

"'The rockets' red glare' -- that's when it really hit me," Grace said. "I thought, You know what? This is pretty damn exciting. This is pretty damn cool. It was a better feeling than I ever, ever imagined."

The 97th World Series, which started later in the year than any other, will go down as one worth waiting for. It wasn't only that you'd have to go all the way back to the third World Series, in 1906, to find more brilliant pitching over the first two games of a Fall Classic than that provided on Saturday and Sunday by righthander Curt Schilling and lefthander Randy Johnson, the Diamondbacks' version of Drysdale and Koufax. It was also because almost everywhere you turned, another wrinkled Arizona elder who had seemingly driven up in an Airstream was fulfilling a lifelong dream.

The Yankees may have had a 58-to-1 edge in world championship rings owned by players on the Series' rosters (second baseman Craig Counsell, who homered in Game 1, had the Diamondbacks' lone ring, won as a member of the 1997 Florida Marlins), but Arizona, with 9-1 and 4-0 victories, ended the weekend with a two-games-to-none lead. (Games 3, 4 and, if necessary, 5 were scheduled for Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.) The Diamondbacks accomplished their weekend sweep using only one player younger than 31 -- outfielder Danny Bautista, 29, who drove in Game 2's first run with a second-inning double.

No moment better captured what the World Series meant to the National League champions than when righthander Mike Morgan entered to pitch the eighth inning of Game 1. Morgan, 42, is so old that he and Warren Spahn have a common teammate, Rico Carty. (No, not at the same time.) "I want to be the white Satchel Paige," says Morgan, who made his major league debut in 1978, one week after graduating from high school. Paige was also 42 when he appeared in his first World Series, in 1948.

Morgan typically spends his Octobers running a hunting expedition company outside Ogden, Utah. Last Saturday, though, Doc, Cal, E-man, Z-man and the rest of his Lost Creek Outfitters brigade kept an empty bunk for him on the Green River and watched on a borrowed TV hooked up to a generator as Morgan inherited a 9-1 lead from Schilling. Morgan hurried excitedly through his warmup pitches, only to have home plate umpire Steve Rippley tell him play would be held up until a typical World Series extra-long batch of between-innings TV commercials had run its course. With time on his hands Morgan peered into the stands behind home plate.

"I never do that, but I did this one time," Morgan said. "I got a peek at my wife, my two little girls, my mom and an empty seat for my dad, whom we lost last November. He was watching from a better seat upstairs. My mom, Nellie, is 60 years old and about four feet tall. I caught a peek of her crying. Her boy's out there still pitching. I'm in the Fall Classic. I've been playing this game for 23 years, and here I am with the whole world watching. What a feeling."

Morgan retired, in succession, Paul O'Neill, Chuck Knoblauch and Derek Jeter, who have 13 world championship rings among them. Lefthander Greg Swindell, making his World Series debut at the tender age of 36, took care of the final three outs of the three-hitter. The 34-year-old Schilling (102 pitches) had hardly broken a sweat, leaving him available to start twice more in the Series.

Gonzalez had snapped a 1-1 tie in the third inning with his two-run homer, the result of a misplaced pitch by New York righthander Mike Mussina that illustrated Mussina's lack of command on this night. Though catcher Jorge Posada had called for a 1-and-2 fastball away, Mussina, working on eight days of rest, threw one that tailed over the inside half of the plate. "It felt like high school," Mussina said about throwing balls where they could be readily hammered, "but in high school they don't hit them as hard. Having so much rest affected me. I got on the mound four times in between starts, but it's not the same as throwing in a game."

Not since the 1961 Yankees boasted Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle has a team with a 50-home-run hitter won a world championship. Gonzalez is trying to end that streak. He smashed 57 dingers during the season and through Sunday had tacked on another three in the postseason -- this from a former lightweight hitter whom the Detroit Tigers traded to Arizona after the 1998 season for outfielder Karim Garcia, a prospect who never panned out. "And," Gonzalez emphasized, "the Tigers kicked in half a million dollars to get rid of me."

In Arizona, Gonzalez adopted a wide-open batting stance, a weight-training regimen borrowed from former Houston Astros teammate Jeff Bagwell, a heavier (33-ounce) bat recommended by Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra and the patience required of a father of three-year-old triplets. "I used to stress out more," Gonzalez says. "Now I have three little ones to chase around. You learn what's really important."

With those changes he blossomed into a power hitter. "The best part," says Grace, who played with Gonzalez on the Cubs in 1995 and '96, "is he's become a superstar and he's stayed one of the nicest guys in the game. He's the same guy he was when he was a crummy player."

After Gonzalez's homer the Diamondbacks broke open Game 1 with five unearned runs stemming from errors by rightfielder David Justice and third baseman Scott Brosius. Grace delivered the final two runs with a double in the fourth inning. "We spread the wealth," Grace said. "A lot of dreams came true tonight."

Game 2, on Sunday, was Johnson's turn to realize his dreams of glory. The 38-year-old Big Unit, who spent most of his career scowling even at his own teammates on the days he pitched, was so relaxed before his first World Series start that he joked with fellow Diamondbacks about their picks for that day's NFL games. "He's not the mummy he used to be when I got here," said Schilling, who was acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies in a trade last season.

"Shhhh," Johnson said to a reporter. "I'm supposed to be mean and nasty. Don't let the word get out."

So at ease was Johnson that, after pitching the seventh inning of a tense 1-0 game, he walked into the clubhouse office of director of team travel Roger Riley and joked, "Well, I didn't think we were going to score nine runs again." Third baseman Matt Williams soon made the rest of his night more comfortable by blasting a three-run homer off gallant lefthander Andy Pettitte.

Johnson became the oldest pitcher to throw a shutout in the World Series. He gave up only three hits and one walk while striking out 11, tying a record set by the Los Angeles Dodgers' Sandy Koufax in 1963 of 411 strikeouts in the regular season and postseason. New York's righthanded hitters jackknifed in fear as Johnson pounded the inside corner with 93-to-96-mph fastballs on many of the 25 pitches called for strikes. "You give up on that ball inside," New York rightfielder Shane Spencer said after the game, "because he can throw 89-mph sliders that keep running in at you. He kept hitting his spots."

"He was so good I thought he was going to throw a no-no," Schilling said of Johnson. "When they got a hit in the fifth" -- a single to right by Posada -- "I turned to somebody in the dugout and said, 'That's when you know you're facing a stud: when an opposite-field single in the fifth qualifies as a rally.'"

Until last weekend the Yankees hadn't been held to three hits in a World Series game since 1963, when the Dodgers' Don Drysdale shut them down in Game 3. In throwing back-to-back three-hitters, the Arizona staff became the first to allow only six hits over the first two games of a Series since the 1939 Yankees shackled the Cincinnati Reds behind Red Ruffing and Monte Pearson. Only Three Finger Brown and Ed Reulbach of the '06 Cubs did better, permitting the Chicago White Sox five hits.

Just call the Diamondbacks' duo Schilling and Thrilling. Arizona moved to within two wins of a world championship because its two aces -- "1A and 1A," Morgan calls them -- this year were 50-13 through Sunday. (The rest of the staff was 51-60.) After Schilling won Game 1, centerfielder Steve Finley gladly turned over the baseball he'd caught for the final out to Jerry Colangelo, the Diamondbacks' managing general partner. Following Game 2, Colangelo approached Johnson about obtaining the souvenir of that final out, which Counsell had given Johnson after catching Jeter's soft liner. Johnson had waited too long for this. He wasn't about to relinquish the ball. "My first World Series start? A shutout? Against the Yankees?" he said. "That's pretty good."

Johnson took home the ball, along with something else that seemed almost as tangible for him and his teammates. "When I'm done with my career," he said, "I'll always be able to look back and say I played in the World Series. I made it. That's all any player would want to say."

"This is pretty damn exciting," Grace said. "It was a better feeling than I ever, ever imagined."

"That's when you know you're facing a stud: when an opposite-field single in the fifth qualifies as a rally."

Issue date: Sports Illustrated, November 5, 2001