If you think about it, and Pittsburghers old enough to remember try very hard not to, team director of publicity Jim Lachimia had the best view of anyone who cared about the Pirates on that night 30 years ago. He was close enough to the action to hear it, smell it, almost taste it. He could not really see what was happening, though. It was for the best.
Those who witnessed the bottom of the ninth of the final game of the last chance the Pirates ever might have of reaching the World Series never will forget, and are none the better for it. Whether they were watching in a local bar or a roller rink or by themselves on an analog television, it is a high-def memory that continues to haunt. It represented, in the most pragmatic sense, the death of big-league contention in the city after more than a century of wonder.
Baseball had gifted to Pittsburgh the ancient excellence of Honus Wagner, Pie Traynor and the Waner brothers, the home-run shows of Ralph Kiner, the dignified supremacy of Roberto Clemente, the jovial leadership and majestic power of Willie Stargell.
And now, for the three seasons from 1990 through 1992, there had been this young, dynamic, accomplished squad led by slugger Barry Bonds and ace righthander Doug Drabek. Each year, the Pirates had won the National League East. After falling short of reaching the World Series the first two years, and after losing three of the first four games of 1992 National League Championship Series to the Atlanta Braves, they had rallied to force a Game 7 and held a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the ninth. They were three outs away from the champagne celebration that was waiting in their clubhouse.
“It was a defining moment for where the Pirates were headed,” Mark Madden told The Sporting News. He grew up on Pittsburgh sports, joined the staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and now hosts an afternoon sports talk program on 105.9 The X. “Everybody knew it was now or never, because the reality of keeping big-money players in Pittsburgh – it was so evident it wasn’t going to happen.”
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Bob Pompeani was completing only the first of his four decades as sports anchor at the city’s powerful KDKA-TV, and he recognized a massive change in the Pittsburgh sports scene was inevitable.
“I knew we were all headed in this area where no one was going to be able to afford — or there was an unwillingness to afford — some of these guys. Specifically Bonds,” Pompeani told TSN. “So I think everyone knew this was a chip you had to cash in.”
Baseball had changed in an instant as that powerful team was being constructed by general manager Syd Thrift. On Dec. 10, 1988, the Yankees sold their local television rights for $500 million over 12 years to Madison Square Garden’s cable network. That was just short of $42 million a year. With the Cubs and Braves powered at the time by cable superstations, with the regional sports channel carrying the Pirates still not even a decade old, with the team owned by a consortium of Pittsburgh-area businesspeople because no one else wanted to buy it, there was no apparent appetite within management for competing in the free-agent market. In 1991, there were two teams with a $30 million payroll. In 1992, there were 15. And the divide between the big markets and smaller markets only has grown.
| Before (1963-92) | After (1993-2022) | |
| World Series titles | 2 | 0 |
| Division titles* | 9 | 0 |
| Losing seasons | 10 | 27 |
* - 24 seasons (Division play started in 1969)
First baseman Sid Bream, who’d played 147 games and batted .270 in 1990, wanted desperately to stay with the team but did not draw a competitive offer and left for Atlanta. After the 1991 season, lefty John Smiley, who’d won 20 games, was traded for prospects. Star outfielder Bobby Bonilla left to sign for $29 million with the Mets. And once the 1992 season was done, Bonds and Drabek would be eligible for free agency. It was over. But not until it was over.
Now associate editor at Baseball Digest, Lachimia had left the press box along with his Pirates boss, vice president of public relations Rick Cerrone, after Drabek had closed out the Braves in the bottom of the eighth. To that point, Drabek had given up five hits, struck out five and not allowed a runner to reach third base.
“We go down to the clubhouse, and the plastic is on the lockers, and the champagne is on ice in those big laundry carts,” Lachimia told TSN. “We were told Tim Wakefield was going to be the MVP, and Rick’s job was to get Tim Wakefield out to the MVP trophy presentation. My job was to go behind home plate after the game and get Mark Sauer, who was the president, and Ted Simmons, who was the general manager, and bring them inside for the presentation of the National League trophy.
“Because I had to go behind home plate as soon as the game was over … that inning was pretty complicated. So when we got the second out, I went to the dugout. There was a landing, and then a few more steps to go up to the dugout; I was on that landing. It was kind of tough to see. It was like looking out the window in Laverne & Shirley’s apartment. I heard the crack of the bat … I didn’t really see Bonds pick it up … I got up a couple more steps and looked toward home plate, and the Braves were already celebrating.”
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‘We were torn up’
It was the Pirates who gave Sid Bream his opportunity to be a genuine big-leaguer. He fought in the early 1980s to break in with the Dodgers, but not until Bream was shipped to Pittsburgh in September 1985 did he start getting regular at-bats. He moved directly into the lineup and played nearly every game that remained, then 154 the following year, at age 25.
Bream was from Carlisle, just 190 miles up the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pittsburgh quickly felt like home, even more so as the team got good. In 1990, he was the everyday starter at his position and hit .270 with 15 home runs as the Pirates won their first division title in 11 years. The National League Championship Series with the Reds ended in six games, Pittsburgh’s last chance a ninth-inning smash to right field by Carmelo Martinez that Cincy's Glenn Braggs plucked off the top of the fence.
“The very next day after we got beat, the management, executives for Pittsburgh, came out in the paper and said, ‘Sid Bream is our first priority to sign for the 1991 season.’ So my wife and I were ecstatic, thinking we were going to get a little bit of a long-term deal,” Bream told TSN. “We’re going to be here. We’ve got a great team. We’re going to get back there again.
“And through negotiations, they didn’t even get close to market price on me, let alone anything more for being their priority. At that point in time, free agency opened up and the Braves gave me a great offer. They said, ‘You need to make a decision, because if you don’t come here, we’ve got to go find somebody else.’ And so my wife and I decided that evening to go to the Atlanta Braves. We were torn up. We cried most of the night that night, thinking we were leaving the Pittsburgh Pirates.”
Bream was close with his Pirates teammates, in particular Drabek. Bream and his wife, Michele, were godparents for Drabek’s children. The Breams were exactly where they wanted to be. It was obvious the only reason to leave was money, and maybe they could find a way to stay.
“So the next morning I got on the phone with Jim Leyland, my skipper. And I asked him, ‘Am I bound to this contract?’ He said, ‘You’re not bound to the contract; you haven’t put your name on it.’ I called my attorney. He spoke to me, trying to talk me out of doing what I was going to do. He said, ‘Sid, what happens if they sign you and they trade you down to Atlanta? You’re going to look like an idiot.’ I said, ‘Great thought. Let’s go back to them and ask for a no-trade deal.’ And they said no.
“I said, ‘Man, if I’m your first priority, I really hate to see what your last one is.’ ”
And Bream became a member of the Atlanta Braves. A pretty darned good one, at that. He was hitting .287 near the end of June 1991 and on pace to hit more than 20 home runs. “I really had a great chance to go to the All-Star Game, but coming around third base in Philadelphia, I hit the bag and jarred my knee. It put me on the disabled list for a little while,” he said.
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When he returned, though, with the pitching staff starting to rock and third baseman Terry Pendleton playing at an MVP level, the Braves surged from five games over .500 on August 3 to a 94-68 finish to win the NL West by a single game over the Dodgers.
In that season’s NLCS, the Pirates held a 3-2 series lead, but Andy Van Slyke looked at a called third strike — with the tying run at third base — for the final out of their 1-0 loss in Game 6. Smiley gave up three runs in the first inning of Game 7, and the Braves advanced to the World Series. Bream had batted .300 in eliminating the Pirates.
His right knee would continue to bother him through the 1992 season, but he still played regularly, hit 10 home runs, batted .261. It affected his ability to charge bunts and to run the bases, and “I couldn’t stop and start the way I had done before.”
He played in all seven games of the NLCS, though, and batted fifth in Game 7. He managed a double off Drabek in the seventh, one of the few Braves to get that far before their final at-bat. He knew he’d get another swing when the ninth started and he was due up third, after Pendleton and powerful David Justice.
“We had done it so many times. I knew there was no question we could get it done,” Bream said. “Obviously, Doug Drabek was pitching a masterful ballgame and not allowing a lot of stuff to go on. But I spoke with Terry Pendleton a couple of years at an event about that game. As I sat up on stage with him, he looked out in the audience and said, ‘I want you to know something: I knew we were going to win that ballgame.’ That was the first time I ever heard him say that.
“I’m glad he did, because I certainly didn’t.”
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‘One pitch away from winning’
As the ninth inning began, Drabek was aware of his situation. Three more outs, and the World Series would welcome the Pirates.
The first ever Series included the Pirates, all the way back in 1903, and though they lost that one they returned a half-dozen times, winning all but one of those championships, most recently with the “Fam-a-lee” squad of 1979. If they didn’t make this one, when could they even imagine having a chance?
“Obviously, you knew what was at stake, but you’re so into the game and what’s been going on and what you’ve been doing, it was more about just trying to get outs than what’s ahead,” Drabek told TSN. “I threw my curveball a lot. Pitches were working. It wasn’t like it was dominating, but defense helped out, and it was basically just trying to throw strikes and try to get outs.”
What happened on that night never would in today’s baseball, and not just because it involved the Pirates playing one of the season’s biggest games. Drabek entered the ninth having thrown 120 pitches, and yet there never was any question he would take the mound to pitch the ninth. Of the 37 games in the 2021 postseason, there was not a single complete game. That was the plan for the Pirates, though, and it might have worked.
Drabek would have to carve his way through the heart of the Braves’ order, starting with Pendleton. On a 1-1 count, Drabek threw a fastball far enough inside that if the batter was able to catch up to it, at worst it should have been a long, loud foul ball. Pendleton, though, got around quickly enough his shot sneaked inside the right field line for a double.
“Nine times out of 10, that ball would end up hooking,” catcher Mike LaValliere told TSN. “That one stayed straight.”
In baseball parlance, that run meant nothing. Drabek instead focused on Justice, and the second pitch was grounded toward second base, where Gold Glover Jose Lind moved to his right to gather it. Lind was an elite defender with exceptional range who had committed only six errors in 745 chances during the regular season. He botched less than 1 percent of his opportunities to make a play. This one went off his glove.
“If you would ask anybody on the team and say, ‘Who do you want a ground ball hit to?’ you’re going to pick Chico,” Drabek said. “It was just one of those things.”
At that point, though, there had been two batters, and they had produced two of those things. This was not going well. And when Drabek walked Bream on four pitches that weren’t close, that ran counter to everything that had happened previously. Leyland had to abandon Plan A and call for closer Stan Belinda.
Belinda did OK. He got Ron Gant to line out hard to left field, a sacrifice fly scoring Pendleton with the run that was starting to matter more because there still were two guys on base — runs that could tie and win the game for the Braves. With Damon Berryhill at bat and a 1-1 count, Belinda dropped a sinker over the inside corner that appeared to reach the plate near the waist. It was called a ball. “Just missed,” was how CBS’s Sean McDonough described it. At 3-1, Belinda’s pitch seemed to slide directly over the inside corner. “Oh so close,” McDonough said. The bases were loaded.
“There were some close pitches that obviously we wanted that weren’t called,” LaValliere said. “But that’s not the umpire’s fault. It’s not like I’m laying blame on him. It was a combination of a number of things. But during the game, we had a chance to score more runs.”
Of course. The disintegration of the dream did not begin in the bottom of the ninth, even though it still was in reach. LaValliere led off the seventh inning with a base hit, and after Lind lined out and Drabek put down a sacrifice bunt that got LaValliere to second, the Braves walked the bases loaded. Van Slyke hit a fly ball to deep right-center, but it was caught for the third out.
In the eighth, Bonds slapped a single into right field. Orlando Merced replaced him at first after a fielder’s choice. Jeff King then drilled a double into the right corner, where it caught a hard bounce directly to Justice, who gathered the ball before Merced even reached third base. Coach Rich Donnelly waved him home, a regrettable decision. Though Justice’s throw was six feet up the line, Berryhill easily fielded the ball and tagged out Merced. LaValliere would have been hitting with teammates on second and third and one out. Instead, his line out to left ended the inning.
So the Pirates’ lead stood at only a single run, no more, with a Braves runner at every base, when Brian Hunter approached. Belinda got him to pop out to second base on the second pitch, and the World Series again started to seem very possible. Any out would do, and the player coming to the plate, Francisco Cabrera, had played 12 games and batted 11 times all year, only once in the series. Leyland had run the Braves’ Bobby Cox down to the very edge of his bench, to the catcher whose primary job was to warm up relievers in the bullpen.
“They still were one pitch away from winning,” Pompeani said. “Jim Leyland has told me, subsequently, that was maybe the best managing job he’s done, because he got them to their final batter, who was Francisco Cabrera. And I remember, the day before, going down there and we were talking to them. And Cabrera was talking about how lucky he was to be there.
"Leyland, I guess, thought: I worked this bench down to where I got this guy up. It’s a perfect situation. He hasn’t batted. He’s just their last-ditch effort.”
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‘I still think I got him’
One of the beauties of sport is that for every dream that is destroyed, there is another realized in its place. When Cabrera stood in against Belinda and yanked a 2-1 pitch into a large hole between short and third, with Justice scoring easily and Bream jumping on contact at second base and using every fragment of speed in his diminished legs to beat Bonds’ throw from left field, two players had their names etched into baseball history: one of them a solid major-leaguer whose career lasted a dozen years, the other a journeyman who played fewer than 200 games.
“After the seventh inning, I was ready, because I know anything could happen,” Cabrera told TSN from the Dominican Republic, where he resides while hoping to get another stateside baseball coaching job. “If it’s a situation where he needs me to pinch-hit, he’s going to call me. So I was prepared. I had a bat in the bullpen. I was one of not too many who would be in the bullpen with a bat, because I don’t think it was legal.
“Doug Drabek, he was throwing a lot of breaking pitches. If I had a chance to go hit, my thinking was, ‘I’m going to hit the breaking pitch.’ I was preparing mentally to be ready when I got to home plate. Then they took out Drabek and I said, ‘Wow, now I have to change my plans.’ ”
When Cox sent him to hit for Jeff Reardon, who’d pitched the ninth for the Braves, Cabrera was looking “for one pitch to hit.” Belinda had a sidearm delivery that caused the ball to sink and, when successful, to be hit on the ground.
In a 2-0 hole, Belinda offered a pitch across the heart of the plate, perhaps thinking the take sign would be on. Cabrera had been trusted to swing and jumped on it, but too quickly and the ball jetted into the seats down the left-field line. “I was really pissed off,” Cabrera said.
At 2-1, Cabrera expected he’d see a fastball, and one came his way. He hit it on the ground, indeed, but it was properly placed and struck too firmly for shortstop Jay Bell to field it.
“When I hit the double, Doug Drabek tried to pick me off twice at second base. They had an understanding as far as where I was as far as my knee was concerned,” Bream said. “I also knew Stan Belinda wasn’t going to attempt to throw back to second base, so I was able to get a better lead.
“As I got my secondary and Frankie hit the ball, my foot was coming down, and I was off to the races. I have no clue whether or not … I have never seen a video of whether or not he was waving me on. I don’t remember one bit of seeing his arm. My focus was: There are two outs, you put the pressure on the defense and you take off.”
Bonds was playing a fairly deep left field at the time, and when the ball whizzed into left field he was able to grab it from the ground and step into the throw, but it was up the first-base line. LaValliere grabbed the ball in his mitt and whirled to attempt the tag.
“It’s a tough throw. He was going away from home plate, having to change his momentum. The throw was 6-8 feet off line. It wasn’t like it was in the stands. I still was able to kind of capture it and dive,” LaValliere said. “I still think I got him. I had some friends, when I was doing some announcing with ESPN, go ahead and take a look at it. Not enough angles, so it was inconclusive.
“As far as I’m concerned, Sid slid with a bent-leg slide. When you do that going into bases, there’s no problem because bases are an inch or two in the air, so you slide right into it. Home plate — level with the ground, so you can’t dig your spikes in. To this day, I think he was out.”
Bream still lives in the Pittsburgh suburbs. He wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to stay there. He encounters Pirates fans who remember that night. "Most of it is all fun," he said, "but there have been some individuals that were hard to take."
Occasionally over the years, Bream and LaValliere have appeared together at card shows to sign autographs. “He’ll put on his side, ‘He was out.’ And I’ll say, ‘Sorry, Spanky, I was safe,’ ” Bream said. “There’s no question in my mind my foot was on the corner of home plate before he tagged my back foot.”
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‘... It’s hard to have hope’
Although the players with the ’92 Pirates knew significant changes were coming, there was enough belief in the players beyond Bonds, and in Leyland as a manager, that not everyone saw competitive collapse as inevitable. Drabek even fought to stay with with the team.
“It was kind of obvious that things could really change,” Drabek said. “I wanted to stay, even knowing it would be a different team. We liked Pittsburgh. We liked where we were living.
“I know a lot of people think that I made the choice, but it was more or less, ‘All right, we’re not in it anymore.’ It was a long process. Nothing budged or worked out, and then it was them saying basically, ‘We’re going to move on.’ ” Drabek signed a four-year deal with the Houston Astros.
LaValliere was the team’s player representative at the time, and knew enough to be angry. When he was released the following April, after catching 92 games in the 1992 season and allowing only four passed balls and committing three errors, he was “surprised to say the least.” He still had two more years on his contract.
“I have talked to a few people, and it was somebody that was above the general manager range that I must have pissed off,” LaValliere said. “I was pretty outspoken whenever they didn’t sign Doug, because they were flat-out lying.”
There essentially is no contemporaneous Pittsburgh newspaper account of any of this. During the spring and summer of 1992, the Teamsters who delivered The Pittsburgh Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike against the possibility of a downsized work force. Neither paper was active to document the Penguins’ 1992 Stanley Cup victory, the Steelers' revival under new coach Bill Cowher nor what stands as the most devastating defeat in the city’s sports history.
Tim Kurkjian, with Sports Illustrated at the time, wrote a piece headlined, “The Cruelest Game,” explaining that a baseball postseason series had never before ended with the team that was ahead losing on the game’s final pitch
There’s been lots written since. Madden did a column for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in June 2020 ranking it as the “most agonizing” loss for the city. In 2011, Anthony Defeo wrote a piece for SB Nation with the headline, "The Most Depressing Loss Ever".
A 2018 Twitter poll from 93.7 The Fan's Andrew Filiponi offered three “worst” loss options, including the Steelers in the 1994 AFC Championship game to the Chargers and the Penguins in the ’93 playoffs to the Islanders. The loss to Atlanta in ’92 drew 59 percent of the 3,085 votes.
“I don’t pretend to even know the feeling, but in ‘Saving Private Ryan’, at the very end, when Tom Hanks is almost deafened by the sound of bombs and completely numb – that’s what it felt like,” LaValliere said. “Whenever I saw that particular scene, at the end, it was like, ‘Wow, that was it.’ ”
Waiting to host a postgame show on KDKA, Pompeani was in the hallway outside the Pirates’ clubhouse trying to watch on a not-proximate-enough TV as the final half-inning was transacted. He said the first thing he heard was someone shouting to get the champagne out of the Pirates locker room over to the Braves’.
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“That was a weird night,” he said. “And going in the clubhouse, especially in that circumstance — one pitch away from meeting Toronto in the World Series — and you’ve got to go in and ask how they felt, talk about what went on in that inning, how your life changes drastically on that one pitch — all that kind of stuff. It was right there.”
Madden was watching at a bar in Plum Borough, the Pittsburgh suburb that produced ESPN’s Pat McAfee. The place was packed with Pirates fans, and every television in the place was tuned to the game. When Bream slid across the plate, Madden said, “The place went from noisy to deathly silent. … It was just shock. Just absolute shock.”
Everyone knew what it meant. That would be the last game Bonds played for the Pirates, though they weren’t quite done with him. Later on, Van Slyke would tell MLB Network that he’d motioned for Bonds to move closer to the infield to make a potential throw to the plate less demanding. It became a popular theory among Pirates fans, who grew to despise him despite his two MVP awards with the team. When Bonds visited with the Giants, fans booed his every appearance in Pittsburgh.
“I think it’s been overwrought,” Madden said. “I think the real villain in that ninth inning was Chico Lind.”
Gary Morgan was a teenager at the time and was at a friend’s birthday party at a roller rink. “We were all mad they had this birthday party when this game was going on,” he told TSN. “We were standing by the booth watching on this little TV. The party was happening behind us, but we weren’t paying much attention.”
Morgan now hosts a podcast that focuses on Pittsburgh baseball, the “Pirates Fan Forum.” From the time he was 15 until he was in his mid-30s, the Pirates endured 20 consecutive losing seasons. There’ve been only three winning records, total, as he aged into his 40s, and the team has gone 486 games under .500 since Bream slid across home plate. Baseball has operated without a salary cap system similar to what enabled the city to be competitive in football and hockey, with the Steelers winning two Super Bowls and the Penguins three Stanley Cups. The Pirates reached the 100-loss mark each of the past two seasons. Baseball remains the sport, though, that demands Morgan's attention.
“Hopeful is kind of the definition of being a fan. Otherwise, the New York Jets wouldn’t have any,” Morgan said. “Of course I’m hopeful. I do see good things being done, and you can always hope that a GM is going to do things different or the owner is going to see the light or that the league is going to change and make competitive balance something that is important.
“If I really have true optimism, it has a lot less to do with the Pirates and a lot more to do with the league. If the league doesn’t see what they’re doing as unsustainable, then it’s hard to have hope. Because I think the Pirates can get very close, but getting over the edge will be very difficult, unless something changes.”
