How long was Game 3 of the 1997 World Series? So long that Bobby Bonilla thought he’d lost it Tuesday night, only to discover that he’d helped win it Wednesday morning.
In case you went to bed at a reasonable hour–and if you didn’t, why not?–rest assured the Cubs might not be that far from a Fall Classic, after all. The final was Marlins 14, Indians 11.
Somewhere, if indeed he knows how, Albert Belle is smiling.
For a while there, well before the milk trucks began their appointed runs, it seemed that the Indians had everything in order. This born-again city had a baseball buzz, the Tribe was back in the Fall Classic, and there wasn’t a single fair-weather fan at beautiful Jacobs Field for obvious reasons. The wind-chill factor upon the first pitch was 29 degrees.
However, comma, by the time the last pitch was delivered–4 hours 12 minutes hence–an apparently tidy victory unraveled into an unsightly setback for the Indians, who not only lost their home-ice advantage in this tournament but some of that postseason mystique.
During previous sneak attacks on New York and Baltimore, the Indians pounced on mistakes to create rallies that produced goofy runs. They scored twice on a wild pitch. They even scored once on their own bungled squeeze bunt. Team-of-destiny stuff.
Tuesday night, it was more of the same. The Marlins hit three home runs. The best weapon for the Indians was the bat on the shoulder. And when they weren’t walking around the bases, they let the Marlins handle the ball. It was ugly, yet effective. How about that Cleveland uprising in the fourth inning? Three runs, one hit, one error.
Even when Jim Thome finally managed complete contact for a rocket home run in the fifth inning, it was preceded by yet another flawed bit of fielding. Al Leiter, the Marlins’ starting pitcher, failed to follow a bouncing ball back to the mound for a second time. Early, Leiter’s error begat two unearned runs. Here, Sandy Alomar’s tap was deemed a single. In any case, it was 7-3 for Cleveland.
If there could be a turning point in a monstrosity such as this game, it might have been in the bottom of the seventh, when Thome drilled another shot to right center. Going, going, gone, until Gary Sheffield stretched to the top of the wall for a fabulous catch. He batted in five runs and might have saved one there.
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Bonilla, with two errors and one ailing hamstring, walked to begin the Florida ninth. Darren Daulton singled to center, where Marquis Grissom came up firing. He aired it out, throwing to third on the fly, but the ball grazed the shoulder of Bonilla, who limped into a slide. When the ball wound up in the photographers’ cage, Bonilla was awarded home plate.
By the time Florida was finished, the parking lots were more crowded than the stands. The Indians kicked it around, and the Marlins didn’t even have to kick the extra point. They got seven runs, and suddenly the Cleveland bullpen that had worked so brilliantly during the playoffs looked vincible.
“Neither of these teams has to apologize for being in the World Series,” declared Indians manager Mike Hargrove, “but that was not good baseball. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”
Daulton and Jim Eisenreich–both of whom homered for Florida–begged to differ. They were members of the Philadelphia Phillies, who lost Game 4 of the 1993 World Series to Toronto 15-14.
That must have been where Dave Wannstedt got the idea to go for the win instead of the tie.