Miracle on Grass

by David Fanucchi

Mientkiewicz’s tears are my lasting vivid memory of that USA Baseball gold medal victory. An improbable team captured America’s attention. A collection of promising prospects like Ben Sheets and Roy Oswalt had their careers propelled, while those who never tasted success in the major leagues, like Mike Neill and John Cotton, enjoyed their greatest baseball moment.

Two premier executives, Sandy Alderson and Bob Watson, spent a year targeting players, cajoling major-league organizations into loaning top prospects for the month, and, in the waning years of pre-drug testing in MLB, ensuring all potential USA players could pass the stringent testing administered at the Olympic Games.

were to be held in Sydney, Australia in just over a year. For the United States, they would be represented in the baseball tournament by the first-ever group of professional-level players to don the Team USA uniform.

The headline in the Winnipeg Free Press the next morning called it “The Miracle on Grass.” Canada’s upset win over Team USA in baseball was the talk of the entire country and the toast of the town. Every news channel had highlights of Andy Stewart’s home run, and then Clapp’s game-winning bloop single, along with the red-and-white on-field celebration that ensued.

Their most important and competitive event each summer was the USA vs. Japan Collegiate All-Star Series: a series of five games played against the best Japanese players of the same age. Every year, the location of the series would rotate between the USA and Japan, and the home team almost always won the best of five matchups. Although it was often very competitive, the home crowd and the familiar surroundings usually gave one team the edge.

Neill’s career path to the major leagues had taken an unexpected turn one year earlier, during his initial stint in the big leagues with the A’s, when he was sidelined by an injury. After being drafted out of Villanova University in 1991 by Alderson, who at that time was the Oakland general manager, Neill’s career had been on a steady climb, and he found himself in the majors during a call-up in the summer of ’98. But during his first week in the show, he was in left field playing in a game in Oakland against the Cleveland Indians. When a fly ball was lifted into shallow outfield, he and Miguel Tejada converged on the ball together but collided, and Neill separated his shoulder on the play. He was placed on the disabled list and never returned to the A’s lineup the rest of the year.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Cuba was literally unbeatable. The machine went 18-0 across the span of two Olympic Games (1992 in Barcelona and 1996 in Atlanta), and from 1984 to 1999, the Cubans captured seven straight World Cup titles.

would draw less interest from MLB scouts. This matchup between the USA and Cuba in front of a sold-out stadium was being shown on national TV in Canada, but was nowhere to be found on satellite signals in the USA. Gillick and Seiler—using late ’90s cell-phone technology—would end up reporting a scoring update every couple of innings, back to all of the MLB executives through the Commissioner’s Office in New York City.

against a Brazilian team made up mostly of the sons of Japanese auto dealers and builders who lived in Brazil and were now citizens.

Because the game was not seen as a huge ticket draw, and because the host country Canada was playing against Cuba in the main stadium, the USA-Brazil game was contested at the secondary facility being used, called Stonewall. In reality, it was the equivalent of any average Midwestern city’s high school baseball field found across America. It had a nice grass field, metal bleachers down each line above the dugouts, and a tiny press box.

“I told my wife, because she started to ask me, ‘Tommy, why do you want to do this?’ and I told her because 25 years from now, there’s going to be a quiz: ‘Who’s the only manager to ever win a World Series and an Olympic gold medal?’ and I told her that was going to be me,” said Lasorda. “And she said, ‘Well, you don’t even know who your players are,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care, I just need them to be alive.’

That was the main topic of conversation about the Olympics; the Cuban team had won every existing tournament that they participated in. So all I asked was ‘Did they ever lose one game?’ and of course they had, so I said, ‘Well then, they’ll lose another one when we get to them.’ That was my primary motivation and my purpose in wanting to be the manager of the USA Olympic team, was to beat Cuba.”

One player who was identified early in the process as a very solid choice was Pat Borders, who was a two-time World Series champion with the Toronto Blue Jays and the MVP of the 1992 Series, when the Jays defeated the Atlanta Braves. During the spring of 2000, Borders was with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and it was looking as if he would be playing most of the season at triple-A Durham, making him eligible for the Olympic team. “Here was a player that had so much experience behind the plate, we thought that would be a tremendous asset to the young pitchers we would have on the squad,” said Watson. “If Pat was going to be available, I think we all considered him highly, because of his veteran presence.”

“But it was neither one of those two guys that impressed me that night. The Astros had recently moved a pitcher up from single-A by the name of Roy Oswalt, and he threw for Round Rock that night and was absolutely phenomenal. He was lights out, I think he struck out Cust four times and won the game. I went up and asked Nolan Ryan, who was the owner and GM of the Round Rock club at the time, what he knew about this kid, and Nolan really liked him a lot. So I went home and called Astros GM Gerry Hunsicker to see if he’d make Oswalt available to us. When he agreed, I went back to the Committee the following week on the conference call and told them that this kid could make our team right now.”

performance-based decision-making process than a tools-based process. We didn’t need prospects on this team that were going to project to be a great major-league player in two or three years. We needed guys that were solid players right now, who had actually performed at a higher level. There were too many guys on the list that were ‘toolsy’ players that hadn’t performed well enough, being favored over other guys that had put up great numbers that season.”

That player ended up being John Cotton, who was not even on the list of 39 players that the Committee was using the week prior. A veteran in his 12th minor-league season, Cotton was having the best year of his career at triple-A Colorado Springs, hitting .328 with 16 homers and 62 RBIs. A left-handed bat, he had less power than Johnson but more versatility, and was being looked at as a designated hitter and backup outfielder. It remained to be seen whether he would make it to Sydney, but he was going to get the chance, as the Committee chose Cotton as their last player above the cut line.

“We were playing on the road at Sacramento, and Marcus Jensen was a teammate of mine at the time that the USA roster was being announced, and players started finding out that they’d been selected,” said Mientkiewicz. “Marcus had gotten a letter in the clubhouse and confirmation from USA Baseball that he had been invited to go with the team to Australia, and I did not. So consequently, I was extremely disappointed.”

Phillies Assistant GM Ruben Amaro was pissed. He wanted Rollins on the team. He had called me and highly recommended the kid, and really wanted him to have that experience on our club, and when we didn’t take him, he called me back and said, ‘You missed it. You know, this kid would be great for you. I’m really upset. I thought he would be on the team.’ He

“If they have the same attitude about going there as I have,” Lasorda said of his players, “then you’re going to see a bunch of guys that really want to win.”

“The Olympics are something special to me,” he said that day in San Diego. “I’ve done everything in the game of baseball. I started from the bottom as a player and I reached the major leagues as a player. I started at the bottom as a manager and I reached the major leagues as a manager. And then I was fortunate enough to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. This is even greater. This is the utmost right here. This is a tremendous chapter in my life. There ain’t nobody that’s going to take it any more serious than me.”

As part of the Team USA baseball delegation, Major League Baseball sent public relations executive Pat Courtney from their Commissioner’s Office to assist with the media attention and overall coverage of the American team. Pat and I would work side-by-side throughout the month-long journey, focused on maneuvering Lasorda in and out of the dozens of interview requests we were going to

When Cobb reported that back to the MLB Commissioner’s Office, they immediately dispatched their highest level field-maintenance and ground-crew guru: a former Baltimore Orioles field supervisor named Murray Cook. “Cook was absolutely critical,” said Cobb. “He was able to get those fields into playable shape for all of these professional-level prospects to compete on, to where they weren’t worried about bad-hop grounders or stepping into holes in the outfield. He did wonders over there, not just on the Gold Coast, but in Sydney, to the main baseball stadium and secondary facility as well.”

“I had missed a start later in the minor-league season in Indianapolis, right as the Olympic Team was about to be selected, because my right shoulder had been a little sore, not a lot,” said Sheets. “And I thought, oh man, no way am I going to let on to Tommy and the Team USA people that I was still hurting a bit. When we got to San Diego, everybody else was throwing bullpens at the workout, and I didn’t. I hadn’t thrown since the last time I pitched in a game in Indy. So I decided to let it rest, and maybe go over to Australia and then try to line myself up for one of the later exhibitions. I just needed a little rest, it had been a long year, a lot more throwing than I had ever done. And the Brewers wouldn’t have known that my shoulder

“If you want to do something bad enough, you’re willing to take the chance. You think you’re pretty invincible, you can get away with it, and I wanted to play,” said Sheets. “I wanted the opportunity to go out there and compete, and to be a part of something like that was going to be pretty special. As a competitor, I’ve always wanted to be the guy that’s given the ball with everything on the line, you know.” So after four games, Lasorda and company

“I think we were pretty fortunate that the media didn’t catch on to it at all,” said Courtney. “We did a nice job keeping it quiet, and the hotel didn’t want the publicity either. We simply went about our business as if nothing had happened, and asked the players to do the same.” Borders, Mientkiewicz, and

Once all of the games were finished on the Gold Coast, Kelley moved his work station to the hotel in Sydney and began working in his personal room, which the crew dubbed the “High Performance Center.” There, Kelley would file the footage he would receive twice daily; each player on every team would have his own tape, and each team was color coded so that Larson, Moesche, and Walton could analyze the tendencies of pitchers or look for weaknesses in opposing hitters. This was the information that would be critical in helping Lasorda understand what he was up against, going into each game. As Team USA was settling into the Village, and the staff was getting used to maneuvering around the overly congested Sydney

“I think if we had been off-site from the Village, it would have been difficult for us to bond together as a team like that,” said Young. “To be able to see all those other athletes in different sports going about their daily routine, I think it was helpful to us as well. Just being around that atmosphere and hanging our American flag up outside our house, and naming our apartment ‘Club 99,’ we were having such a great time, and we hadn’t even started playing yet.”

Former Milwaukee Brewers All-Star Dave Nilsson played in Japan this year so that he would be available for the Olympics, though he was released in August after struggling with back pain and a .180 average with Chunichi. The team will have six players with major-league experience.

RHP Daisuke Matsuzaka, a 19-year-old who leads the Pacific League in wins and strikeouts, will head the pitching staff. The

Doosan Bears third baseman Dong-Joo Kim also offered power. That year, he hit the longest homer in the history of the KBO, an estimated 160-meter (520-foot) shot that landed on top of the subway station in front of Seoul's Olympic baseball stadium.

The most recognizable industrial leaguer on the Olympic team was Nihon Life Insurance right hander Masanori Sugiura. Sugiura pitched Japan to an 11-2 upset win over Kris Benson and Team USA in the semifinals of the 1996 Olympics, then started again the next day in the gold-medal game versus Cuba. Sugiura gave up five runs in 1 2/3 innings, receiving a no-decision as Cuba won 13-9.

And so on a gloriously sunny and bright afternoon in Sydney, Lasorda sent his ace to the mound—Ben Sheets—to face the ace from Japan: Daisuke Matsuzaka. It was slated to be a tremendous pitching matchup, as the media had predicted for several days leading up to the game that these two strong right handers would end up dueling one another.

Matsuzaka stayed on the mound, as he was still hitting 93-94 mph on the stadium’s radar gun in the ninth inning at the 120-pitch mark. Team USA failed to score, and the game went into extra innings, just as their opening game at the Pan Ams in Canada had.

“If you don’t like Ben Sheets, you don’t like Christmas.

The Cubans, who used their top three starters and perhaps their top arm, settled for the Olympics’ first no-hitter. Right hander Norge Luis Vera started and threw five innings, striking out six. Pan Am Games hero Jose Contreras threw an inning in relief, striking out one, while flame-throwing 20-year-old Maels Rodriguez and his 99-mph fastball struck out three in the seventh.

Oswalt was helped primarily by the left side of his defense. Shortstop Adam Everett handled five chances flawlessly, none of them routine plays. And in the seventh, he made a pair of splendid diving plays to his left to short-circuit a Korean rally.

Against Korea, he more than atoned. Oswalt loaded the bases in the sixth on two walks and a single by Kim Dong-Joo. With an 0-2 count, Korean shortstop Park Jin-Man lashed a one-hopper to Kinkade’s right. He stepped, dived, and stopped the ball, tagged third base and threw to first, for the inning-ending double play.

In the biggest upset in Olympic baseball history, the Netherlands (2-2) defeated two-time defending gold-medal champion Cuba, 4-2, handing the Cubans (3-1) their first defeat ever in 22 Olympic baseball games.

The Dutch won behind eight quality innings by Oregon native and former San Francisco Giants farmhand Ken Brauckmiller, a right hander who scattered seven hits and three walks while striking out just two. The Dutch got all the runs Brauckmiller needed in the third inning, against Cuban right hander Norge Vera, who was the MVP of Cuba’s Serie Nacional in the winter while going 17-2, with a 0.97 ERA.

“That was the biggest hit of my career,” said Meulens, who had spent part of the season in Korea before finishing the year in the Mexican League. “To have done that against Cuba, it was great satisfaction.

Dutch coach Pat Murphy replaced his starter with Faneyte, who pitched in the Dutch domestic league. Faneyte then induced three straight groundballs from pinch-hitters Gabrielle Pierre and Javier Mendez, and center fielder Yobal Duenas, to notch the save and pull off the monumental upset. “Rikkert’s got ice water in his veins, he’s just a strike thrower, so we knew he could do it,” Murphy said. “This is really, really special. I’m really proud of this team and the way they believed. For Rikkert and Robert, I’m happy for them after all they’ve meant to Dutch baseball, to get a win like this late in their careers.”

“I’m worried to death about the Italians,” said Lasorda, deadpanning after the game. Then he turned serious, adding, “The Cuba game showed that anything can happen in this tournament. I told our team, if you take anyone for granted, they can knock you on your rear end. We didn’t come this far to lose. This is bigger than the World Series to me. Soon, all of America will know our players’ names, because they’re playing for what’s on the front of their jersey, not the name on the back.”

Catcher Pat Borders, a 12-year major-league veteran, wasn’t normally the type to gush. But since first catching the staff at Team USA’s practice in San Diego, he hadn’t been able to help himself. “You could put these guys in the big leagues right now,” said Borders, “and they wouldn't embarrass themselves.”

On the heels of a 134-game winning streak at major international tournaments, Cuba had now lost games in four of the last five such competitions. At the ’99 Pan Am qualifier for these Olympics, the Cubans had tanked their last round-robin game against Canada, so that they would not have to face Team USA in the Pan Am semifinal. It worked, as Cuba beat Canada 3-2 in the semis, then beat the United States with Jose Contreras to win the Pan Am gold.

But the incidents didn’t end there. With Cuba leading 5-0 in the bottom of the eighth, they had pinch-runner Yobal Duenas at second base. When he rounded third and headed for home on a base hit, he came in sliding spikes-high on Team USA catcher Pat Borders as he awaited the throw. Borders went down writhing in pain, as the nasty slide had been one last message from the Cubans that this wasn’t over. Borders had to be helped off the field by Team USA medical personnel after the collision, and although X-rays taken after the game were negative, Borders’ left ankle had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit. “When I saw the collision happen, I thought Pat had broken his ankle,” said Dr. Dicke. “So when the X-rays said there wasn’t a fracture, I knew it had to be a bad strain, which it was. And I was very doubtful that he was going to be able to come back and play at the level that was needed for the medal round.”

South Africa had lost its first five games by a combined score of 58-5, but got a pair of solo home runs from right fielder Ian Holness, including a game-winning shot in the 10th off Dutch closer Rikkert Faneyte.

Abernathy had shined both offensively and defensively for the red, white, and blue. Yet given his outstanding play on the field, Lasorda still couldn’t seem to get his name right, calling the young second baseman “Trent” instead of “Brent” the entire time the team was together. “Maybe he wanted to keep calling me Trent, because he liked the way I was playing,” said Abernathy. “I didn’t mind, as long as we were winning.”

The 1999 Pan American Games, which had marked the first time USA Baseball used pros, was considered to this point to have been the best international baseball tournament ever held. Pros also comprised teams from Canada, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, among others. As deep as that tournament was, observers said that this tournament was better. “The pitching here in Sydney is much better than the Pan Ams,” said Tony Bernazard, the former major leaguer who was working for the MLB Players Association. “The Far East teams, Japan and Korea, have much better pitching than teams like Canada did. These teams have major leaguer talent on their rosters. Maybe the bottom teams weren’t as good as in the Pan Ams, but the top teams here are all very strong.”

in seven-plus innings. But Contreras and Kindelan were better. Kindelan upped his batting average to a robust .387 with two home runs and 11 RBIs over 31 at-bats in Sydney. “Kindelan is the best hitter in the world, so I knew to be well prepared for him,” Kuroki said. “But the pitches were a little high, so he hit them. He’s not easy to get out.”

Japan would be forced to attempt to keep its streak of being the only team to win a medal in every Olympic baseball competition since 1984 (when baseball was still a demonstration sport) by sending ace righty Daisuke Matsuzaka to the mound in the bronze-medal game. September 26, 2000 – Homebush Bay