Classic Comeback

Thanks to a historic Game 6 rally, the never-say-die Angels stunned the Giants in seven to win the first World Series championship in their 42-year history

By Tom Verducci

Issue date: November 4, 2002

The San Francisco Giants brought their custom-bottled champagne, 20 cases of bubbly with their logo and WORLD CHAMPIONS inscribed on the label. Attendants in the visiting clubhouse at Anaheim's Edison Field began unpacking the bottles and placing them in giant tubs of ice during the top of the seventh inning of Game 6 of the World Series last Saturday night. Shortstop Rich Aurilia walked into the clubhouse after his at bat that inning and saw the champagne beginning to chill. I He had witnessed such an inviting tableau once before. It was in Colorado, in September 1998, when the Giants were one victory from clinching a wild-card spot. They blew a lead, though, and the champagne had to be packed away; San Francisco lost a one-game playoff to the Chicago Cubs the next day.

But this was as close to a mortal lock as there could be, especially after second baseman Jeff Kent smacked a two-out, run-scoring single that inning off Anaheim Angels wunderkind righthander Francisco Rodriguez to put the Giants ahead 5-0. Kent normally plays baseball with such a wooden bearing that he fairly throws off splinters. But even he, in triumphant salute, vigorously pumped his fist a few steps after leaving the batter's box.

Inside the clubhouse, laborers furiously ran TV cables and unsheathed rolls of two-inch-wide brown masking tape to hang protective plastic sheeting over the Giants' lockers. No team had ever blown a five-run lead in a potential World Series clincher. The party was nigh. "You start counting the outs," rightfielder Reggie Sanders said.

The countdown stood at eight after starter Russ Ortiz retired Garret Anderson on a grounder for the first out of the seventh. Yes, it was a lock. Ortiz had given up nothing but an infield single, and manager Dusty Baker had a rested bullpen. His team had scored 15 unanswered runs in its past 10 times at bat. A lock? Right. The surest thing since Dewey.

"You never know," Angels centerfielder Darrin Erstad kept saying in the dugout, to no one in particular but for the benefit of everyone. "You just never know."

Graham Greene wrote that "champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector." On this cool autumnal evening champagne didn't have to pass the lips of any Giant to reveal two undeniable truths: that the World Series, constrained by neither time nor imagination, is the most spectacular trapdoor in sports, and that the Anaheim Angels have established themselves as one of the greatest rally teams the game has ever known.

For little more than 24 hours later, in a corner of that same Giants clubhouse, Game 7 starter Livan Hernandez sat on a folding chair, wearing underwear, a T-shirt and shower shoes, weeping into a white sanitary sock. All around him his teammates spoke in whispers, if at all. The inventory: 20 cases of unopened champagne, 25 cases of heartache.

What happened in between the bubbly on ice and the Giants' getting iced was the most unlikely comeback from the brink of elimination in all 98 World Series ever played. Yes, it's true that half the teams in the past six World Series that were no more than six outs from a championship have watched it go up in smoke. (The Giants joined the 1997 Indians and the 2001 Yankees.) What demolition experts will tell you, however, is that no two implosions occur in exactly the same way.

The Angels became the first team ever to rally from five runs down to stave off defeat in a World Series, storming to a 6-5 win. On Sunday they completed the reversal of fortune with a 4-1 triumph in Game 7.

This was, after all, the Fall Classic of 2002, a palindrome of a World Series in which it was impossible to tell backward from forward. It will be 110 seasons before another numerically reversible year occurs, and perhaps even longer than that before another team wins with the tenacity that Anaheim did. "As long as we have an out," Erstad said, "we have a chance." The Angels won a world championship after trailing in all three of their postseason series and after trailing in six of the seven World Series games.

The Angels won the first championship in their 42-year history by overcoming San Francisco's otherworldly leftfielder, Barry Bonds, who achieved more with fewer swings than anyone else in World Series history. No one has ever reached base more times (21), drawn more walks (13) or prompted more intentional walks (7). Bonds's on-base (.700) and slugging percentages (1.294) were the highest for any player in a Series other than four-game sweeps. No statistics were available, however, for the amount of mental energy he sapped from the Angels.

"He wore me out, so I can't imagine what it was like for the pitchers," Anaheim pitching coach Bud Black said. "I was thinking two innings ahead all the time with him, anticipating his spot in the lineup and hoping we'd get guys out ahead of him. It just so happened that most of the time we got him up with nobody on base, or it was early in the game if there was."

Bonds came to bat 11 times with runners on, but only once after the fifth inning. (He was 2 for 4 in those spots, plus the seven intentional walks.) The Angels threw him 112 pitches -- 73 balls and 39 strikes. He swung the bat only 25 times in 30 plate appearances, resulting in four fouls, seven misses and 14 balls in play. He ripped eight hits among those 14 balls he put into play, including four home runs of at least 418 feet. "I didn't realize how good he is," Angels bench coach Joe Maddon said. "He squares up the ball every time he swings the bat. This guy is different than everybody else."

"He changes the way the game is played," Giants assistant general manager Ned Colletti said. "Basically, it's the equivalent of triple-teaming Michael Jordan. Whatever questions people had about him in the postseason, he put them all to rest."

But Bonds and the Giants lost the Series because they could not hold off the Angels any more than a small stack of sandbags can repel raging floodwaters. "Give credit to the Angels," San Francisco G.M. Brian Sabean said after Game 7. "It was their time. You can't kill them. They're like the three-headed hydra: You get one and there's still more coming at you. They always had something percolating. They take every at bat like it's their last."

"I hope," Erstad said, "there were kids watching with their fathers, and their fathers told them, 'Watch the way that team plays.' It's refreshing to see that. One reason we were such a great rally team was that we were all on the same page. That's very rare in professional sports."

Said Maddon, "These guys play the game the way that Abner Doubleday wrote it up."

Doubleday was never this mischievous. Anaheim, after all, returned home for the weekend down three games to two after two straight bizarre losses in San Francisco. In Game 4 the Giants trailed 3-0 in the fifth inning against rookie John Lackey when pitcher Kirk Rueter and centerfielder Kenny Lofton reached base on singles that traveled a total of about 75 feet. Rueter topped a ball in front of home plate that snaked away from Lackey with backspin, and Lofton dropped a double-breaker of a bunt that crossed from fair to foul territory and -- just as third baseman Troy Glaus grabbed it with his bare hand -- back to fair when it touched the white foul line.

It was the first rally in World Series history that could have been measured with a yardstick. This wasn't just little ball, it was Putt-Putt ball. You half expected the hits by Rueter and Lofton to go through a mini windmill or a clown's mouth. But they started a three-run rally that tied the game, and San Francisco went ahead 4-3 in the eighth on an RBI single by David Bell.

Though Ramon Ortiz, the Angels' Game 3 starter, was in line to pitch Game 7, Black told Lackey after that Game 4 loss, "We may need you to go in Game 7." Said Lackey, "I'll be ready."

The Giants won the next night, too, in a 16-4 laugher. They were particularly giggly about Darren Baker, the three-year-old batboy and son of the manager, who ran toward home plate to retrieve a bat just as Snow was scoring on a triple by Lofton. Snow, in midstride, grabbed the kid by the front of his jacket and dragged him out of danger as Bell came barreling home. Only the night before, the boy had run onto the field while a throw from the outfield was still in play, having skidded to the backstop. "I'm just glad he didn't get hurt," Aurilia said. "If we lost the game or something happened, we'd all be looking at it in a different way."

It was after Game 5 that Black told Lackey that he'd certainly get the start if there was a Game 7. Publicly, the Angels expressed concern about a case of tendinitis in Ortiz's right wrist but kept quiet about the decision to give the ball to Lackey. Privately, they trusted Lackey's cool, no-nonsense demeanor over Ortiz's streak of excitability. "John's a cowboy," Black said.

The decision seemed moot by the seventh inning of Game 6. So certain were the Giants of victory that when Baker removed Russ Ortiz after singles by Glaus and Brad Fullmer with one out in the seventh, he asked the pitcher if he'd like to keep the ball as a souvenir. So Ortiz walked off with the game ball -- with eight outs to go in the game.

Baker brought in Felix Rodriguez to pitch to Scott Spiezio. It was the at bat that not only turned the World Series around but also defined Anaheim's relentlessness. Rodriguez winged eight pitches at up to 97 mph in the sequence, and Spiezio missed none of them. He took three for balls, fouled off four and smacked the last one into the second row of the rightfield seats for a three-run homer. "The ball was in the air long enough for me to say a prayer that it would go out," said Spiezio. "And it did."

Hallelujah, and heaven help the Giants. The Angels hold foul balls in high esteem. They began spring training with a 40-minute hitters' meeting in which manager Mike Scioscia and hitting coach Mickey Hatcher sold them on the importance of situational hitting -- not a difficult sell when your situation in the previous season was 41 games out of first place. Spring training games were regarded as live rehearsals. Foul balls were noted with great enthusiasm.

"It was like a game, in which the coaches kept track of fouls," shortstop David Eckstein said. "It's called getting to the next pitch. The more pitches you see, the more likely you'll get something good to hit."

No team struck out fewer times this year than the Angels did (805). They won the wild card with a franchise-record 99 wins and eliminated the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins with 10-hit innings in each playoff series clincher. "There is no third of their order that you want to see," Colletti said. "They were as good as the reports said coming into the Series. Every time I looked at my scorecard, I'd think, Jeez, when does it get easy? It never did."

Even after Spiezio's home run, San Francisco still had a two-run lead with six outs to go, and Baker had his endgame scripted exactly as he wanted it: Tim Worrell for the eighth and Robb Nen for the ninth. But then Erstad did some rewriting, whacking a mistake of a changeup from Worrell for a leadoff homer in the eighth.

The waters kept raging: a single by rightfielder Tim Salmon and then a bloop single by Anderson that Bonds chased as if playing leftfield on roller skates. With runners at second and third, Baker summoned Nen, a palindrome closer in a palindrome Series who had a chance to save the first and last games. Symmetry and a hanging slider took a beating. Glaus drilled a two-run double, and just like that -- the sixth hit in eight at bats for Anaheim -- the champagne had to be hidden from sight in the San Francisco clubhouse. Workers were still hustling to remove cables and an awards platform as the Giants trudged back up the two flights of stairs and two ramps to their lockers. They were silent when, according to one player, Nikolai Bonds, the 11-year-old son of the leftfielder, groused, "We were up 5-0. How did we lose that game?" Said the player, "Nobody wanted to hear that." When reporters entered, masking tape still ringed the room like wainscoting.

"I can't remember anyone going through our pen the way they did," Worrell said.

Added Sanders, "I don't think we let it get away. They just fought. What they did to us was amazing. That was like a nightmare. It could have been over, but they fought back."

An ashen Peter Magowan, principal owner of the Giants, was insulted and spat upon as he left Edison Field. He ate a late dinner and then had trouble sleeping. "My wife, thank goodness, had sleeping pills," he said. "I take them about three times a year. This was a sleeping-pill game. A few sleeping pills."

The World Series does not grant mulligans. San Francisco's window to win its first world title since moving westward in 1958 had been slammed shut, even if the Giants did take a 1-0 lead in the second inning of Game 7. Hernandez spit the lead right back, with two outs and nobody on base, walking Spiezio and surrendering a double to Bengie Molina. It marked the seventh time in the Series that Anaheim answered with a run in its next at bat after the Giants had scored. "We needed a stop," Aurilia said, "and we couldn't do it. They did it to us the whole Series."

An ineffective Hernandez yielded a three-run double to Anderson in the third inning without getting an out. Lackey -- the first rookie to win a Game 7 in 93 years -- Brendan Donnelly, Francisco Rodriguez and Troy Percival gave nothing to the Giants the rest of the way. Later, while the Angels were soaking themselves with their own supply of champagne, Black sat with Scioscia in the manager's office and said with a laugh, "How did we do that?" Not once did an Anaheim starting pitcher throw as many as six innings.

"You know how we did it?" Black decided. "When we needed to pitch well, we did. And when we didn't pitch well, our offense picked us up."

Said Aurilia, "What I'll remember about this Series is Game 6.

I'll remember that we lost Game 6. They just beat us in Game 7. There's a big difference."

It wasn't a museum-quality World Series. It was a slapdash, entertaining collage of home runs (21), extra-base hits (45) and runs (85), Series records all. It was the modern game, two second-place finishers slugging it out in the shadow of a faux rock pile (the comedian Robin Williams took one look at Edison Field's Disneyfied landscape and called it "a miniature-golf course on steroids") while fans created a racket by smacking together inflatable sticks.

The din was never so great as it was at 8:19 PST on Sunday night, when Lofton, batting with two outs in the ninth, stroked a high fly ball into centerfield. As Erstad glided under it, suddenly he could not hear the noise from the crowd. He heard nothing except for one clear voice. It was the voice of his father, Chuck. It was not coming from the stands, where his father watched. It was coming from his childhood, far back to when his father taught him how to catch.

"Use two hands," is what he heard.

Said Erstad later, "That's what came to me. It had never happened before, but I heard him. It was pretty neat."

And so the World Series ended as Doubleday would have liked, the Angels playing textbook baseball to the very last out.

Issue date: November 4, 2002