Blue Jays have chance to recreate Joe Carter’s World Series magic 32 years later

We’ve done this before — a Game 6 of the World Series in Toronto — and we’ll do it again on Friday night. As was the case the first time, the Blue Jays are up 3-2 in the series, this time against the Los Angeles Dodgers, and thus one win from the title. This raises the possibility, a tantalizing one for Jays rooters and those partial lightning-strike moments of high importance, that it will all happen again. 

It’s not likely, and indeed it’s quite unlikely. That’s the nature of such a precise set of circumstances required to make it all happen. Still, to quote a film about a misunderstood furry woodland creature who wanted only to love and be loved: What one man can do another can do. That man is Joe Carter. That other man is whoever wants the titan’s burden of hitting a walk-off home run in Friday’s Game 6. 

First, though, Mr. Carter. It was in the final moments of that first Game 6 in Toronto back in 1993 that he barged his way into baseball history. They trailed the Philadelphia Phillies 6-5 going into the bottom of the ninth at SkyDome. On the mound was Phillies lefty closer Mitch Williams, who had saved 43 games during the regular season. He was capable of the occasional meltdown, but that was mostly because of his serialized control problems. What he didn’t do was give up home runs — just three allowed in 62 innings that season and a total of just eight allowed in 169 ⅓ innings combined from 1991-92. File that thought away. 

The peerless Rickey Henderson worked a leadoff walk off Williams, but Devon White flew out to left-center for the first out of the frame. Paul Molitor then lined a single to center that advanced Henderson to second. That brought up the hero of our story.  

Williams, working from the stretch, fell behind 2-0 against Carter, but then Carter watched a fastball down the middle — Williams didn’t throw especially hard, but he hid the ball exceptionally well — and swung over a slider that would’ve been ball three to even the count. At this point, Carter was expecting another slider. Williams shook off Darren Daulton’s call for the slider for which Carter was watching and instead went with the fastball. 

The pitcher took a slide-step toward the plate and in customary fashion completed his delivery with what looked like something between slipping on the ice and beginning a breakdancing routine. Sixty feet away, Carter — who had been 0 for 4 in his career against Williams, 0 for 3 in Game 6, and 0 for his last 7 overall — tracked the pitch at knee level and lashed the bat as the ball cut late toward Williams’ glove side. The rest, the end, was zipper-quick:  

Touch ’em all, Joe. You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life, went Tom Cheek’s rhapsody on the microphone. Joe did indeed touch them all, and the Blue Jays were repeat World Series champions once he did. Indoor fireworks, you’ll note. 

As for Williams and the fastball that became his millstone, he lamented only the execution, not the choice. “The only thing I ever regret in that Series is that I didn’t throw the ball in a full motion. I threw it from a slide step,” Williams said in a documentary about the ’93 NL champs (via Bill Ladson). “Needless to say, I don’t have trouble getting the ball up and away. That’s where that pitch was supposed to be. I jerked it down and in to one of the few right-handed hitters you don’t miss down and in. … That was my only regret.”

Carter, an artisan of the scorching pull-side foul ball, managed to keep this one fair, and as a result it was one of the most important home runs in baseball history. Thanks to Baseball-Reference, we can put a number on that importance. They provide us with a metric called Championship Win Probability Added, or cWPA. Here’s how B-Ref defines it: 

“Just as single-game win probability added (WPA) measures how a player impacts their team’s chances of winning a game, cWPA measures how a player impacts their team’s chances of winning the World Series.”

cWPA is expressed as a percentage, and that percentage is how much a player — or, in this instance, a single event — improved (or worsened) the likelihood that the player’s team will win it all. Here, then, are the 10 biggest home runs in MLB history as measured by cWPA: 

Carter’s one swing, as you can surmise from the above, took the Jays’ chances of winning the 1993 World Series from 69.72% all the way to 100%. It got all the way up to 100% because, as you know, Carter ended the series with his home run. Only one other time has the World Series ended on a walk-off home run, and that was in 1960 thanks to Bill Mazeroski of the Pirates. 

So, yes, there’s a brief but decidedly legendary history of World Series Game 6s in Toronto, and Friday night’s Dodgers-Jays collision gives us an opportunity to make it even more legendary. If the hosts are tied or chasing in the bottom of the ninth, who knows, perhaps a right-handed Jays cleanup hitter (Alejandro Kirk or Bo Bichette) will victimize a fastball from a lefty reliever who features hard stuff, a slider, and occasional control problems (Anthony Banda perhaps) and give us Joe Carter all over again. Probably not, but, you know, what one man can do another can do.  

Look, in a very real way the Jays don’t want to have another Game 6 miracle. They’d prefer to go out Friday night and drub the Dodgers by a tally of 11-0 or thereabouts. Fraught moments and tense situations are best appreciated in retrospect, after the peril has passed. In the moment, they are just that — fraught and tense. The Jays would surely love to take a pass on all that and just breeze to their third championship in franchise history. If, though, Game 6 occasions a reprise of what happened some 32 years ago, then baseball will be richer for it. 

All eyes on you, Toronto.