I need to talk to you about the time Torii Hunter stole a home run from Barry Bonds at the 2002 All-Star Game
I need to talk to you about the time Torii Hunter stole a home run from Barry Bonds at the 2002 All-Star Game
By Terry Horstman
But first I need to tell you what I hate about the 2002 All-Star Game
I hate that the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie because that is all anyone seems to remember about it. As both the American League and National League managers breezed through their respective pitching staffs with the score knotted at 7–7, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced in the middle of the 11th inning that the game would end in a tie if the National League didn’t get a run across the plate. They didn’t, and it did, marking only the second time ever the Midsummer Classic ended without a winner, the first since 1961.
The 2003 All-Star Game started a run of 13 consecutive MLB All-Star games that determined which league’s representative in the World Series would get home-field advantage. “This time it counts,” read several taglines promoting the game. This ill-advised wrinkle of the game ultimately came to an end, but will forever serve as the official milestone marker of professional sports leagues attempting to ‘save’ their respective all-star games.
I hate that the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie because I hate that baseball’s power brokers saw an opportunity to line their pockets with even more money by finding a way to turn a game that’s supposed to be a celebration into a game that “counts.” The eleven innings of the 2002 All-Star Game may not have decided a clear winner on the scoreboard at Miller Park in Milwaukee that day, but the play on the field was definitely a celebration of all the great things baseball is and can hope to be.
There were many great plays on the field, but I’m thinking of one play in particular.
Bottom of the 1st. Two outs. Nobody on. Boston Red Sox ace Derek Lowe on the mound, and San Francisco Giants’ all-world slugger Barry Bonds at the plate looking at a 1-1 count. Bonds got a pitch he liked and smacked it to deep right-center, the ball surely destined for the soil beyond the outfield walls of Milwaukee’s hitter-friendly yard.
The ball came close to touching down in home run territory, but it never got there. It’s important to remember why. It’s important to remember Minnesota Twins Torii Hunter was the man playing center field.
The Minnesota Twins: Get To Know ‘Em!
I hate that the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie because I fucking hate Bud Selig, the commissioner who made the decision to call it a draw.
To truly understand the exploits of Torii Hunter playing center field in the 2002 All-Star Game, we need to first go back to the public perception of the Minnesota Twins before Opening Day in 2001. Not only had the team failed to reach the playoffs every single season since their iconic victory in the 1991 World Series, but they entered the 2001 season having eclipsed the 90-loss mark in each of the previous four years. The ‘Metrodome Magic’ that blessed the team on their way to World Series wins in ‘87 and ‘91 had long run dry, and contention for so much as a division championship appeared to be several years away.
Besides hardcore fans, many baseball-loving Minnesotans didn’t know much about the Twins’ opening day roster heading into the 2001 season. I sure didn’t. I knew of guys like pitcher Brad Radke and outfielder Matt Lawton, each with one all-star appearance to their names and both were quality players as well as fan-favorites, but not franchise-altering superstars. The rest of the roster held the alluring possibility of potential synonymous with youth, but recognizable names were few and far between. The Twins own promotional campaign for the 2001 season was literally punctuated with the tagline, “The Minnesota Twins: Get To Know ‘Em!”
The language was as self-deprecating as it was self-aware. It didn’t immediately cure fans of the inherent apathy from four years worth of nearly triple-digit losses, but the authenticity of the campaign played well locally. If the young Twinkies also played well, then it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome (the fucking worst stadium in baseball) packed, loud, and vibrant once again.
Also at play in 2001 was Bud Selig’s infamous ‘Contraction Plan.’ As baseball’s head honcho, Selig targeted the Twins and the Montreal Expos as prime candidates for contraction, a fancy word for ‘erasure.’ The move would eliminate the two franchises from Major League Baseball along with all the financial commitments that came with running professional baseball teams in the great sporting cities of Minneapolis and Montreal and award the owners of both teams with hefty buyouts.
On top of the recent spell of losing, there were a few other factors that made the Twins a particularly juicy, low-hanging fruit for Selig to exploit. The aforementioned Metrodome, a facility outdated by multiple decades before it even opened in 1982, was not exactly a summertime hotspot in the Twin Cities. The combination of bad baseball and even worse indoor conditions saw the Twins plunge to the bottom of the league attendance rankings. Whether the Twins could ever turn it around on the field, and secure funding for a new stadium off the field, apparently wasn’t a project Selig had time for.
Geography also played a part in the deal. Selig, a Milwaukee product and owner of the Brewers before he became commissioner, would never admit it, but disposing of the Twins would create a massive hole for the availability of Major League Baseball in the Upper Midwest. If the Twins didn’t exist, could baseball fans in Minnesota and the Dakotas adopt the Brewers as their own and make annual pilgrimages to Miller Park and pay homage to the statue of Bud Selig that stands outside its gates for love of the game and in the name of regional stewardship? Probably not, but who knows, Selig’s work history with Minnesota’s closest geographic competitor was impossible to ignore.
The owner of the Twins, Carl Pohlad, also reportedly wanted out of owning the club and would have made a hell of a lot more money in a contraction buyout than he would have by continuing to own the team. All Pohlad ever did was proclaim that “no one wants to keep baseball in Minnesota more than I,” and then embark on another plan that directly involved the Twins leaving Minnesota. An unsuccessful attempt to sell the team in 1997 to North Carolina businessman Don Beaver, who would have moved the team to the Winston-Salem area, was barely out of the rearview mirror by the time contraction talks came up and Selig owed Pohlad a favor from when Tempus Investment Corp., a company controlled by Pohlad, lent the Brewers $3 million in 1995. A dark time in baseball when many clubs were scrambling for money in the wake of the 1994 players’ strike.
Loans between owners and clubs were explicitly forbidden by Major League Baseball’s own rules, but the owners were never going to agree to punish their own billionaire brethren. Nothing came of the sleazy and nefarious business dealings between Pohlad and Selig, and by the time 2001 rolled around, contraction was officially on the books and both Selig and the league had all but led the Twins and the Expos to baseball’s gallows.
By the end of 2001, the owners voted in favor of contraction by a vote of 28–2. The dissenting votes of course cast by the ownership of the Twins and the Expos, with Pohlad meaninglessly putting his name on the right side of history on paper after years of actively trying to ensure professional baseball in the North Star State met its demise.
Had the owners got their way, the Twins and Expos would have disappeared like a baseball pitched to Barry Bonds up in the zone. The players on both teams would likely have gone into a pool to be divvied up among the remaining 28 teams in some kind of sick, twisted, reverse expansion draft. Sports owners usually do get their way too. They are the first ones presented with the championship trophy after championship victories for reasons beyond any rational thinking human. But they didn’t get their way this time. Pushback from the Major League Baseball Players Association and a court injunction that ruled the Twins must honor their lease, which called for at least one more season at the Metrodome, stifled their plans and the contraction dreams of the game’s greediest and sleaziest individuals ultimately crumbled. The number of teams in the league would remain at 30, and the Twins would remain in Minnesota for at least one more season under the Dome’s off-white Teflon sky.
Here’s what no one predicted: the 2001 Twins were fucking good.
This is an essay about the 2002 All-Star Game, and 2002 is of course the year of the Moneyball Oakland A’s, and everyone who’s seen Moneyball knows the role that another very good Twins team played in that story, but it’s impossible to talk about the 2002 All-Star Game, the 2002 Twins, Torii Hunter, or even Barry freaking Bonds in 2002, without first mentioning the incredible ride of the 2001 Twins.
The team’s plea for Minnesotans to come out to the Metrodome to check out the Twins and ‘Get To Know ‘Em,’ worked. Fans flocked to the Metrodome for its balmy indoor April weather, ‘Dome Dogs,’ and iconic Malt Cups (as much as the Dome sucked, it never gets enough credit for the concessions, which were always on point) and the Twins rewarded the fans by standing alone in first place in the AL Central. Sports Illustrated responded to the Twinkies’ hot start by putting Matt Lawton on the cover of the magazine with the headline, ‘Do You Believe in Miracles? All the first-place Twins have to do is hang on for another six months.’
No one takes summers for granted in Minnesota. After a long cold winter, and after a long and impossible-to-predict spring that often qualifies as second winter, summer in the North Star State is a gift as cherished as it is fleeting. While kids in other cities got to spend their summers at ballparks under the sky and stars, watching the game they loved played by players they loved even more, a breeze in their hair and a progressing sunburn on their skin; we Minneapolis kids had to choose. It was either the summer breeze, or watching the Twins in climate-controlled AC. The feel of natural grass under bare feet, or starting at astroturf dyed neon green so bright it hurt your eyes. Beach chairs in the sand, or plastic blue seats nailed into a cement cavern that didn’t even face the right direction.
Willingly spending your approximate eight minutes of summer inside to watch baseball in a miserable structure that wasn’t even designed for baseball is a choice. It was a choice that could not be defended when it also meant watching most of the Twins teams of my childhood, but by the time the 2001 team came around, a team affectionately known to me as ‘The Contraction Kids,’ the choice became a formality. Summertime sun could wait, the Metrodome and our first-place team was a’calling!
An absolutely stacked team in Cleveland eventually caught up to Minnesota and took that season’s AL Central crown, but with 85 wins, three all-stars, and unmeasurable untapped potential, the Twins sent a message to the rest of Major League Baseball. Contraction be damned, the team was young, fun, and full of talent. Lawton teamed with Hunter and Jacque Jones to form the self-proclaimed ‘Soul Patrol’ outfield and were routinely featured in the ‘Web Gems’ segment of Baseball Tonight on ESPN. The team used the No. 1 pick in that year’s MLB Draft in June on hometown catching prodigy Joe Mauer (who turned out to be pretty good, you betcha!). Lightning-fast shortstop Cristian Guzmán led the league in triples for a second consecutive year and earned his first All-Star appearance. Starting pitchers Joe Mays and Eric Milton earned their first All-Star selections as well and teamed up with Radke to give the Twins one of the most solid rotations in all of baseball. They may not have won the division or made the playoffs, but at the end of the season and on the brink of erasure, the 2001 Minnesota Twins gave Twins’ fans everywhere something they hadn’t had since the release of Little Big League in 1994; a reason to believe, and the team’s promotional campaign eventually changed from “Get To Know ‘Em” to “Gotta See ‘Em.”
A small statistical footnote: Hunter led the Twins in homers in 2001 with 27, the same year Bonds broke the all-time record with 73.
Nothing but Raindrops
After we got to know ‘em, it didn’t take long for us to learn to love ‘em and perhaps no member of that era of Twins baseball was more popular than Torii Hunter, who earned Gold Glove honors for the first time in 2001 and repeated as a Gold Glover every single season for the rest of the decade. No. 48 in your programs, No. 1 in your hearts, and an F8 on your scorecard every time a baseball was hit in his general direction.
I hate that the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie because it certainly would not have ended in a tie if anyone other than Torii Hunter were playing center field for the American League in the first inning. I hate that, but still, I love that the 2002 All-Star Game was played in Milwaukee, because although his Contraction plan had been all but foiled at that point, Selig still had not received suitable comeuppance for what he tried to do to the Twinkies (he still hasn’t, if we’re being honest), and I love that the American League’s starting center fielder at the All-Star Game in Selig’s hometown, in a stadium that has a statue of Selig himself in front of it, and on Selig’s old field, took the field in the Twins’ classy pin-striped away grays with ‘Minnesota’ across his chest.
All of this was on my 14-year-old mind in the middle of the summer in 2002. My beloved Twinkies avoided erasure, but were still seeking their first playoff appearance since 1991. A team that often lost 94 games a year, I did not yet know the end of this season would bring the taste of 94 wins and the first AL Central title of my lifetime. I did not yet know the run they would make would conjure spirits of a World Series run I was old enough to be alive for but too young to remember. I was aware of another pretty good small-market and low-payroll team in Oakland, even if I was not yet aware of the term ‘Moneyball,’ but I did not yet know a book would be written about the how and the why of their goodness and that their historic winning streak would come to an end at the hands of my beloved Twinkies and that their championship dreams would also come to an end at the hands of my beloved Twinkies. I did not yet know about the Hollywood film that would come out about that team 10 years later, and in that film, the Twins would serve as the ultimate villains (even though the Yankees are truly the ultimate villains, in any story really), but the filmmakers would also change Game 5 at the Coliseum from a day game to a night game and they would also make Eddie Guardado more jacked than Jose Canseco.
I just knew my favorite baseball team still had the right to exist and the young man patrolling center field for my favorite baseball team was a human highlight reel, roaming the warning track with a glove touched by the gods that had a chance to snag any ball that wasn’t leaving this planet.
Entering the 2002 All-Star Game, Barry Bonds had only hit one home run in his 10 previous All-Star appearances. His pace in 2002 was far short of the 73 bombs he hit the year prior, but still flirted with the league lead. He finished the year 11 shy of Alex Rodriguez’s MLB-leading 57 homers, but still took home the second of his eventual four consecutive National League MVP honors.
Bonds thought he opened the scoring of the 2002 All-Star Game when he connected with Lowe’s pitch. I’m sure Bud Selig watching from the stuffy confines of his old owner’s box thought so too. I’m sure just about everyone in the stands at Miller Park thought he did, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver calling the game for Fox thought he did, and Ichiro Suzuki playing right field for the American League definitely thought he did. Everyone watching the game thought Bonds’s blast to right center field was gone.
I should amend that to: almost everyone watching the game thought it was a home run. Twins fans watching the game saw Torii track it, attack it, and knew it was a different kind of ‘no-doubter.’
The catch itself was incredible, if a tad pedestrian by Torii Hunter standards. He timed the jump perfectly, went up with his glove hand, and calmly plucked the ball from the other side of infinity and brought it back inside the ballpark. Ichiro, who had the best view, just smiled. Hunter clearly wanted to smile too, but tried to suppress at first, as if robbing a God of a home run was a daily occurrence. He kept his cool for a second, but after an encouraging shove from Ichiro, the enormity of what he’d just done, of who he’d just denied, took over and the 25-year-old from Pine Bluff, Arkansas burst into laughter as he jogged back towards the infield with the ball tucked into his glove.
But the best part of the moment by far was the reaction of Bonds. The best player on the planet looked shocked for a moment, then as he slowed his trot between first and second, just smiled and shook his head. He jogged towards Hunter, went in for a high-five, and then wrapped his arms around him and lifted him off the ground and above his shoulders. There was nothing more than respect intended by Bonds in the playful embrace, but there was still something significant in it; Bonds playing in his 11th All-Star Game lifting up Hunter playing in his first. Arguably the greatest player of all time literally and figuratively doing more to lift up our franchise than any of the league’s perfumed bureaucrats at Rockefeller Center ever did. The Minnesota Twins had already turned the page away from losing and extinction towards sustainability and winning, but it wasn’t until the 2002 All-Star Game that the arrival of their new era was announced to the world. Minnesotans should always be grateful to Barry Bonds for the part he played in the moment.
In his very next at-bat, Bonds blasted one to the upper deck in right field. Much deeper, and much, much further to right field than his first. A fair ball crushed to a spot as far away from Hunter as possible. I have no problem interpreting that as another sign of respect from the game’s all-time home run leader, though I still hate that the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie, I’ll always love Barry for that.
Every time I make the 335-mile drive from Minneapolis to Milwaukee and watch the Twins or any other team play the Brewers at their great ballpark once known as Miller Park, I always take a minute to gaze out to the wall in right-center. As soon as I find the exact spot, I replay Torii’s picturesque robbery of Bonds in my mind and smile. I trace his steps after the catch to the outskirts of the infield where Bonds was there to greet him, tease him, hug him, and toss him, and just laugh. Every single time. I never forget to take a moment for one of my favorite moments when I find myself in the stadium that held the 2002 All-Star Game.
And I never, ever forget to say “Go fuck yourself, Bud. Contract this!” when I walk past that damn statue on my way in and out of the stadium that held the 2002 All-Star Game.
Terry Horstman played basketball throughout his childhood in Minneapolis and grew up to become the all-time lowest-scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. A dubious record, but one that can never be broken. He’s a Minnesota Lynx beat writer for The Next and a co-host of The Belligerent Beavs podcast. His essays have been published by Flagrant Magazine, Taco Bell Quarterly, The McNeese Review, among others and he once Googled ‘submission guidelines for The New Yorker.’ He is a co-founder of the sports-themed literary journal the Under Review and has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Hamline University. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis.
Mark Mosley is a public school 7th grade math teacher. He draws baseball cards when he is not driving his son to baseball or his daughter to gymnastics. His cards can be seen on Twitter @mosley_mark, on Instagram @idrawbaseballcards, and can be purchased at https://idrawbaseballcards.bigcartel.com/
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