The 1991 World Series: Twins and Braves in Five One-Run Games
The 1991 World Series paired two teams that finished last in 1990. Minnesota beat Atlanta in seven games, five by a single run, ending with a 1-0 tenth inning. A game-by-game account with the context.
The 1991 World Series matched the Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves, two teams that had finished last in their divisions the year before. The Twins had gone 74-88 in 1990 and the Braves 65-97. A year later they met in October, and over seven games they produced a Series that is still often ranked among the best ever played: five of the seven games were decided by a single run, three went extra innings, four ended on the last swing or the last pitch, and the home team won every game. The Twins won in seven, and the seventh game ended 1-0 in the tenth inning.
The numbers explain why the Series felt so tight. Atlanta actually outscored Minnesota, 29 runs to 24, and still lost, because 14 of those runs came in a single blowout and the other six games were decided by margins no larger than three runs. In a year when the average major league team scored 4.31 runs per game, the two clubs averaged about 3.8 per game in the Series, and the pitching on both sides was the story.
This account follows the two teams' 1991 seasons, the seven games in order, the plays that decided them and the reasons the Series is remembered. Standings, scores and award winners come from the historical record; the game-by-game details are matters of the historical record, and I have kept to the ones that are well documented.
From last place to the World Series
The 1990 standings in the historical data are the premise of the story. In the American League West, Oakland won 103 games and the Twins finished seventh and last at 74-88. In the National League West, Cincinnati won the division and went on to sweep Oakland in the World Series, while the Braves finished sixth and last at 65-97. Neither team looked ready to contend in 1991.
Minnesota improved by 21 wins, to 95-67, and won the American League West by eight games over the Chicago White Sox (87-75). Atlanta improved by 29 wins, to 94-68, and won the National League West by a single game over the Los Angeles Dodgers (93-69). The Braves' climb was the larger of the two. It was the first World Series in which both teams had finished last in their divisions the season before.
The league championship series were close, too. The Twins beat Toronto four games to one in the American League Championship Series, and the Braves beat Pittsburgh, which had won 98 games, four games to three, in the National League version. When the Series opened, the Twins were the more experienced club: they had won the title in 1987 with several of the same players. The Braves were the story of the sport, a young team led by pitchers who were still in their twenties.
The two clubs
Minnesota was built on a lineup of veterans around Kirby Puckett, the center fielder who had become the face of the franchise, with Kent Hrbek at first base and Chili Davis as the designated hitter. Chuck Knoblauch, a rookie second baseman, won the American League Rookie of the Year Award in 1991. Scott Erickson won 20 games, tied for the league lead with Bill Gullickson, and Jack Morris, a veteran right-hander who had signed with his hometown club as a free agent, was the ace. Tom Kelly was the manager.
Atlanta was built on pitching and on a lineup that had grown up together. Tom Glavine won 20 games and the National League Cy Young Award. Terry Pendleton, a third baseman who had come over as a free agent, won the National League Most Valuable Player Award with a batting-title-winning .319 average. John Smoltz and Steve Avery were young starters; David Justice, Ron Gant and Mark Lemke gave the lineup power and speed. Bobby Cox managed the team; he had run the front office as general manager until John Schuerholz took that job after the 1990 season.
On paper neither team was dominant, which is partly why the Series was so even. The Twins had Puckett and Morris; the Braves had Pendleton and Glavine. Both had come from nowhere in a single season, and neither had a clear edge.
Games 1 and 2 in Minneapolis
The Series opened at the Metrodome, the Twins' indoor stadium, a loud and enclosed building where the crowd waved white Homer Hankies. Minnesota won Game 1, 5-2, and Game 2, 3-2, to take a two-games-to-none lead. Minnesota had the home crowd and the last at-bat, and it used both.
The play that Braves fans remember from Game 2 came on the bases. With Ron Gant on first, Kent Hrbek, the Twins' first baseman, tagged him as he stood at the bag, and Gant's foot came off it. The umpire ruled Gant out, and the argument over whether Hrbek had lifted him off the base ran for years. The call stood, the Twins won by a run, and the Series moved to Atlanta with Minnesota ahead.
Games 3, 4 and 5 in Atlanta
Three games in Atlanta turned the Series around. The Braves won Game 3, 5-4, in 12 innings, the longest game of the Series, with the winning run scoring in the bottom of the twelfth. They won Game 4, 3-2, again in their last at-bat. Then they won Game 5, 14-5, in a blowout that put Atlanta ahead three games to two.
Game 5 is the reason the Braves outscored the Twins for the Series: the 14 runs were nearly half of Atlanta's total of 29. The rest of the Series was a pitcher's duel. Remove that one game, and Atlanta scored 15 runs in six games while Minnesota scored 19. It is a useful reminder of how much a single game can distort a short series.
By then the Braves were a game from the title, and the Series was heading back to Minnesota, where the Twins had to win both games. They had not won a road game in the Series, but they had won every game at home.
Game 6 and Kirby Puckett
Game 6 belongs to Puckett. The Twins' center fielder made a leaping catch against the Metrodome wall in the third inning, taking an extra-base hit away from Atlanta. Then, in the bottom of the eleventh inning, with the game tied at 3-3, he hit a home run that won it 4-3 and sent the Series to a seventh game.
It was the kind of performance that gets a player remembered long after the numbers fade. Puckett had already been an All-Star and a champion in 1987; in 1991 he became the player whose swing kept the Series alive. The home run ended the second extra-inning game of the Series, after Game 3 in Atlanta.
Game 6 also marked the third time in the Series that a game had ended on a walk-off hit or home run, after Game 3 and Game 4 in Atlanta. That pattern, with each team winning its home games in the final moments, is the reason the Series is described the way it is.
Game 7: Morris and the tenth inning
The seventh game was played on October 27 in Minneapolis. Jack Morris started for Minnesota against John Smoltz, who was 24, and neither team scored for eight innings. Smoltz pitched into the eighth inning without allowing a run. Morris, who had been given the ball by Kelly, kept pitching.
The decisive moment of regulation came in the eighth. Atlanta's Lonnie Smith singled to start the inning, and Terry Pendleton hit a long double into the gap. Smith hesitated at second base, apparently fooled by the Twins' middle infielders, and could only reach third. Atlanta then loaded the bases but could not score: Gant grounded out, Justice was walked intentionally, and Sid Bream hit into a double play. The Braves had put runners on second and third with none out and came away with nothing.
Morris stayed in the game for the tenth inning and finished with a complete-game shutout, one of the great pitching performances in postseason history. In the bottom of the tenth, Dan Gladden led off with a double, a bunt moved him to third, the Braves walked two batters intentionally to load the bases, and Gene Larkin, a pinch hitter, lifted a fly ball over the drawn-in outfield. Gladden scored, and the Twins won 1-0.
Morris was named the Series Most Valuable Player. The game is often listed among the greatest ever played, in part because of the pitching and in part because the stakes could not have been higher.
The strategy inside the tenth inning
The finish of Game 7 is a compact lesson in late-inning baseball. With a runner on third and fewer than two outs, a team can bring the infield in to cut off the run at the plate, or leave it back and concede the run for an out. In the tenth inning of a scoreless game there is no reason to concede anything, so the Braves did the sensible thing: they walked Puckett and Hrbek on purpose, creating force plays at every base, and pulled the outfielders in so that a medium fly ball could not score the runner from third.
The cost of that plan is that a fly ball hit over the outfielders' heads, even a weak one, ends the game. That is what happened. Larkin, sent up as a pinch hitter, did not need to hit the ball hard; he needed to hit it in the air to the part of the field where nobody was standing. The same trade-off, outfielders in against outfielders back, appears in every tied game with a runner on third, and it is worth watching for in the next one you see.
The 1991 season around the Series
The Series was played in a year that belonged to hitters in the record book and pitchers in the standings. Jose Canseco and Cecil Fielder tied for the major league home run lead with 44 apiece, and Fielder drove in 133 runs. Paul Molitor collected 216 hits, the most in the majors, and Julio Franco won the American League batting title at .341. Roger Clemens won the American League Cy Young Award with a 2.62 earned run average, and Dennis Martinez of Montreal led the National League at 2.39.
None of those names reached the World Series, which is part of the point. The 1991 Series was decided by the two teams that built their seasons around steadiness, not by the players who led the leaderboards, and the best individual performances of the Series came from a pitcher and a center fielder, Morris and Puckett.
Seven games in one table
| Game | Winner | Score | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Minnesota | 5-2 | Minneapolis | Twins take the lead |
| 2 | Minnesota | 3-2 | Minneapolis | One run |
| 3 | Atlanta | 5-4 | Atlanta | 12 innings, one run |
| 4 | Atlanta | 3-2 | Atlanta | One run, last at-bat |
| 5 | Atlanta | 14-5 | Atlanta | The only blowout |
| 6 | Minnesota | 4-3 | Minneapolis | 11 innings, one run, Puckett home run |
| 7 | Minnesota | 1-0 | Minneapolis | 10 innings, one run |
The pattern is unmistakable. Games 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 were all decided by one run. The home team won every game, a feat that had happened only once before, in the 1987 Series, which the Twins also won. Neither team won on the road, and the Series came down to whether Minnesota could hold serve in its own park for the last two games. It did.
Why the home team won every game
The Series' road pattern is the most discussed feature of the matchup. It was partly coincidence, since a seven-game series between evenly matched teams will sometimes split perfectly by site. But there were real reasons for the home edge.
The Metrodome was a loud, enclosed stadium with a white roof that could make fly balls hard to pick up, an artificial surface and a crowd that treated every pitch as an event. Atlanta's crowd had its own ritual, the tomahawk chop. A short series amplifies any home edge, because one swing or one call can decide a game.
Statistical context helps too. In 1991 the average major league team scored 4.31 runs and hit 0.80 home runs per game, and this Series ran well below the first number. When runs are that scarce, one swing or one baserunning mistake can decide the whole game, as it did in the eighth inning of Game 7.
What the Series changed
The 1991 World Series became a benchmark for later classics. When fans argue about the best World Series of the modern era, it is often mentioned alongside the 1986 World Series, the 1975 World Series and the 2001 World Series.
For the Braves, the loss was the beginning rather than the end. The club won its division in every full season from 1991 through 2005 and became one of the most consistent organizations in the sport, built around the pitchers who came of age in 1991. The Twins won their second title in five seasons and then declined; the club did not return to the World Series in the historical data through 2025.
Puckett's career ended because of glaucoma, which took the sight in his right eye in the spring of 1996 after his last season in 1995, and he went into the Hall of Fame in 2001. Morris was elected by a veterans committee in 2017 and inducted in 2018.
Common questions
Who won the 1991 World Series? The Minnesota Twins, four games to three over the Atlanta Braves.
Was it really worst-to-first? Yes. Both teams finished last in their divisions in 1990: Minnesota at 74-88 and Atlanta at 65-97. Both won their divisions in 1991.
Who was the Most Valuable Player? Jack Morris, the Twins' starting pitcher, who pitched ten shutout innings in Game 7.
Where can I read about other famous Series? For other Series with famous finishes, read The 2004 Red Sox: Down 3-0 and the End of 86 Years and The 2016 Chicago Cubs: Ending 108 Years of Waiting.
How can I read the box score of a game like Game 7? How to Read a Baseball Box Score explains how.
Where to go next
For current standings and results, visit the standings page, and browse the playoffs and World Series topic page for more postseason stories. The full record of the 1991 season is in the historical record, and the official history of every World Series is at MLB.com.