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When Dave Winfield arrived at home plate early Sunday morning in Atlanta 30 years ago, he had a career World Series .116 batting average and the hopes of an entire baseball nation rested on his magnificent shoulders.
The double he hit on the left field line, scoring two runners in the 11th inning of Game 6 – the game-winning hit of the 1992 series, the first championship for the Blue Jays and the first for any Canadian team in outside the National Hockey League – entered his last at bat of his only season in Toronto.
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Winfield was won and made as Blue Jay. And all these years later, with the anniversary on Monday and Tuesday of a game that started on a Saturday and ended after midnight, like so many sports stories over time, its presence and notoriety has become more bigger than himself.
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His story, like the story of the famous 1992 champions, is so much about the singular individual moments of a title team so filled with memories and emotions, with so many details forgotten over time. And far too many goodbyes.
That was it for Winfield in Toronto. A year, a championship, a cry for noise – and so long.
That was it for Tom Henke, such a historically significant Blue Jay, who tried to close out the win in the ninth and couldn’t pull it off. A few days later, he was told he was not coming back.
That was it for Game 6 starting pitcher David Cone and Game 6 winning pitcher Jimmy Key: It was Key’s ninth season with the Jays. He lived hunting for eight years. He took his ring and went to the Yankees. Henke went to Texas. Winfield returned home to Minnesota.
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Too often it is said in professional sports that when you win a championship, you will walk together for the rest of your life. The Blue Jays won a championship. Nearly half of that team walked together and then left, or got kicked out, or entered free agency or — like Pat Tabler and the injured Rance Mulliniks, one-off games with the Jays — played their last big games. league in 92.
If anything symbolizes the Blue Jays’ singular and unique championship of 1992, it’s that catcher Pat Borders was named World Series MVP. Normally it’s something a Reggie Jackson would win, or a Sandy Koufax or Roberto Clemente. Roberto Alomar won the American League Championship Series MVP title. He, like Jackson, Koufax and Clemente, is in the Hall of Fame. The only Hall of Fame you might find Borders in is the Humble Man’s Hall.
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But that year, that time, that team, he was part of the glue that helped deliver four one-point wins in a close, dramatic series against the Atlanta Braves.
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The Blue Jays had a bullpen this playoff season like they never had before. They shut down Henke and installed Duane Ward. They had starters like Key, David Wells, Todd Stottlemyre working out of the bullpen, and rookie Mike Timlin on the deepest relief team in franchise history. More than nineteen relief innings kicked off this series: an earned run dropped. It was statistically surprising then and now.
The Jays won on a rarely used ninth-inning home run from Ed Sprague in Game 2. If they don’t get that hit, that win, there may not have been a parade later. If they don’t get a spectacular circus hold by the brilliant Devon White in Game 3, they may not have won. They needed a good start, his last as Jay, from Key in Game 4. It wasn’t just one player. It was about everyone.
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They won, they celebrated, the great managerial-commercial team of emotional Pat Gillick and Paul Beeston, field manager Cito Gaston, finally everyone could call themselves champions. They would all return for a second championship in 1993. But nearly half of the 1992 team was gone by the time the following spring arrived. And that makes the second title all the more fascinating.
The Jays may have won the World Series back-to-back, but the two teams couldn’t have been more different. They had Manny Lee starting at shortstop in 1992 and the popular Kelly Gruber at third base. Their final games as the Jays were played in Atlanta. It was also the end for injured Blue Jays Dave Stieb, on his first long run in Toronto. He made the trip possible, but he didn’t do much for anything other than the 1992 celebration. And that was the end for Boomer Wells, who left in free agency.
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Other Jays also said goodbye after Series 92, including Candy Maldonado, who had played a pivotal role in much of what the Jays achieved during the streak and in the playoffs. But the champions and championships of professional sports live forever in their own way.
They can’t do it without Alomar’s home run in Oakland the previous round and without Sprague’s home run and without the white catch and the key start and a bullpen like no other.
The 1992 Blue Jays did something Toronto had never done before and rarely done since. The Jays won again in 1993. The Raptors won the NBA title 26 years later. These are the only major league North American championships for Toronto in the past 54 years.
For so many players on that 1992 title team, it was won and done.
And then a lifetime to celebrate a Canadian victory in baseball for the ages.
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