twins/mlb

The team with a snowball's chance didn't melt, and late Sunday night
one had the distinct feeling that somewhere a very warm place had
frozen over.

The Twins had defied decades blackened by political poundings, Super Bowl beatings and all the numbers that couldn't possibly have added up to a World Series title.

As the theme blared beneath the Teflon lid, the Twins proved that for one more night they were indeed Supermen as they scored a 4-2 victory over St. Louis before a record 55,376 for the first world championship in Twins history.

The script, it seemed, had been penned weeks ago. No team won at home as often and when the Series limped North, the Twins insisted it would go no further. Appropriately, it did not. For the first time in 85 World Series the home team won all seven games, and for the second time in three years the Cardinals watched a 3-2 lead vanish beneath a home crowd's thunder.

It ended as all other important games had. Twins lefthander Frank Viola, the Series' Most Valuable Player, had fought out of the second inning when three straight Cardinals singles pushed the Twins behind 2-1.

But this was not the talented-but-immature pitcher whose potential always had been lost in the final results. This was the man who a day earlier had urged his teammates to come back and win Game 6 because "I want the ball." Although four pitchers warmed up in case of collapse, Viola hung tough before turning it all over.

"I told Frankie I was very proud of him," Twins manager Tom Kelly said. "He did an outstanding job. He knows, like we all know, Jeff Reardon gets the ball in the ninth. That's the way we've done it all year, and that's the way we were going to do it tonight.

"We weren't going to go away from our plan. When the ninth inning comes around, Reardon comes in. Frankie understands that's the way we do it. I told him again, I was very very proud of him, but here comes Reardon."

Reardon, the man who reflects the soul of a team that died late and often a year ago, walked out of the Twins' dugout to start the ninth. The crowd shook the building that has come to symbolize the unlikely rise of a franchise born from losing. The fans stood, screaming as they have for months when Reardon strolled to the mound, always the last of nine players onto the field.

Instead of slowing, waiting for the drama to play itself out, they remained standing, screaming, waving and pounding the floor of a cement structure that must have crumbled just a little.

"It looked like it was one of his (Kelly's) toughest decisions," Viola said. "I'm sure he would have felt worse if he would have left me in and I would have lost. But Reardon's been closing the door all year. He might as well do it in the seventh game of the World Series." Tom Herr led off the ninth, lifting a short fly to center. Kirby Puckett, his back as close to the wall as any center fielder in the game, rushed on. One gone.

Reardon paused, looked around the infield. The noise, by now deafening, hit another crescendo when pinch hitter Curt Ford popped out to Gary Gaetti at third. Two gone.

St. Louis had talked about coming back here. "There will be no seventh game," manager Whitey Herzog had said. Then there were Herzog, his coaches and even a few players wondering how a team so bad on the road could be so good at home. They looked for flashing lights, hinted at something blatantly unfair. But there remain no answers.

"Even though we lost three in a row in St. Louis, we weren't really down," said Twins shortstop Greg Gagne, who drove in the game-winning run in the sixth. "We still felt we could win at home."

With two outs Reardon looked into the stands. It was over before it was over. Willie McGee fouled off one pitch, then two before a ground ball headed toward Gaetti. It had to end this way. Gaetti, a member of the once-haunted Class of '82, fired to Kent Hrbek, the kid who grew up watching hundreds of losses at Metropolitan Stadium before playing in 102 of them in '82.

They write books with endings that aren't this good, but fact once again proved more compelling and unlikely than fiction. Kelly, who spent years in the minors as a player, had failed where Gaetti and Hrbek had just succeeded. But he couldn't let a game that had consumed his life, and that of his father, get away.

"I was with my coaches, and a few clubhouse boys I'm very close to were crying in the excitement, so I stayed with them," said Kelly, who remained in the dugout during the on-field celebrating. "I get a lot of enjoyment out of watching the players jump around on top of each other. I watched them in the minors jump up and down, and I don't think I'll change. It's just enjoyable to me to see them celebrate." Long before the celebrating, calls by two umpires had made them the center of attention.

Television replays showed that plate umpire Dave Phillips blew a call that took away a Twins run in the second. First-base umpire Lee Weyer missed two calls, one that resulted in a Twins run in the fifth and one that took St. Louis out of the sixth inning.