August 30, 1990: White Sox catcher Ron Karkovice huffs and puffs to sink Twins with inside-the-park grand slam

To some observers, the 1990 major-league baseball season seemed at times like a 162-game formality, a steady march toward the Oakland A’s winning their third straight American League pennant and repeating as World Series champions. Sports Illustrated, Athlon’s Baseball, The Sporting News Baseball Yearbook, Inside Sports Baseball Preview, and Baseball Digest all agreed that everyone else was “Chasing the A’s,” “The A’s are the best team in the majors, right?”1 or similar sentiments.

Another universal prediction was that the AL West Division’s cellar belonged to the Chicago White Sox. The consensus opinion was that the roster – with the exception of 42-year-old Carlton Fisk – was too young and inexperienced to compete in 1990.

But while the A’s lived up to expectations, the White Sox exceeded them. By the end of April, they settled into second place, occasionally nipping the heels of the Athletics, but always watching their quarry pull away.2

In August White Sox fans still had hope that their team might pull off an upset. With the trade deadline looming at the end of the month, the White Sox opened a homestand against Oakland on August 20 with an 11-1 drubbing that saw A’s center fielder Dave Henderson lost to injury; Chicago won the series two games to one and was 5½ games back. Two more wins over the California Angels followed before a heartbreaking loss sent the White Sox spiraling. One strike from a shutout, Chicago closer Bobby Thigpen allowed Lee Stevens’ game-winning three-run homer, and the White Sox lost to rookie Joe Grahe a day later.

But seeing the last-place Minnesota Twins on the schedule for four games kept some White Sox faithful clinging to the hope that a Monday-Thursday sweep in the Metrodome might be enough to prompt Chicago’s front office to make a key trade or two.

The Twins had their own bad luck that season. On July 17, they’d turned two triple plays in one game – something no other team had ever done – and still lost. Five days later, they gave up zero earned runs, yet, thanks to five errors, lost a 10-6 decision to the New York Yankees, the team with the worst record in the majors.

White Sox fans nearly saw a sweep, but not the one they wanted. Minnesota took the first three games of the series, outscoring Chicago by a combined 25-7, effectively ending any remaining playoff fantasies.

But it was two key trades made by Oakland before the series finale that felt like nails in Chicago’s coffin.

On August 29, the Athletics replaced the injured Dave Henderson with three-time Gold Glove winner Willie McGee, who was in the midst of his best season since he won MVP honors in 1985 and might have been in consideration for the award again if his St. Louis Cardinals hadn’t been in last place.3 But the real dagger in the hearts of White Sox fans was the A’s trade with the Texas Rangers for Harold Baines. Drafted by Chicago in 1977, the four-time All-Star had called Comiskey Park home for nine years and was still beloved on the South Side.4 Some speculated that A’s manager Tony La Russa may have engineered the trade as a personal vendetta, revenge for when the White Sox had fired him four years earlier.5

The next afternoon, Minnesota sent David West to the mound. The lefty retired leadoff hitter Sammy Sosa. Phil Bradley walked and advanced to second on a weak grounder from Iván Calderón, but was left stranded on a called third strike to designated hitter Frank Thomas, batting .313 in the first month of his big-league career.

White Sox starter Jack McDowell was riding the hottest streak of his career to date. In his previous five games, McDowell was 4-0 – and nearly 5-06 – with an ERA of 1.54, allowing just 32 baserunners and only seven runs in 41 innings. After spending all of 1989 in the minors to deal with an arthritic hip, he was finally looking like the ace Chicago had hoped for when they drafted him fifth overall in June 1987.

After getting leadoff hitter Dan Gladden to ground out to third baseman Robin Ventura, however, McDowell’s aura of invulnerability faded a bit. He surrendered a single to Nelson Liriano, then teed up a pitch that Kent Hrbek launched more than 400 feet into the right-field upper deck for his 20th home run of the year. Gary Gaetti got aboard on an error and Gene Larkin drew a walk before McDowell escaped the inning lucky to be down only 2-0.

“That’s probably the least amount of stuff I’ve had in a while,” he later confessed.7

West and McDowell each retired the next six batters they faced. Chicago was hitless until Bradley led off the fourth with a line-drive single to right. Calderón followed with a double to left but Gladden got to it quickly enough to keep Bradley from scoring. Thomas then worked a 3-and-1 count into a walk to load the bases.

Unlike earlier innings, West was falling behind in the count, and it was costing him. Now, the southpaw attacked the strike zone and sent Carlos Martínez back to the bench on just three pitches. He continued to throw strikes, getting ahead 1-and-2 to Ron Karkovice, better known for being one of the game’s best defensive catchers than for his bat.8

Karkovice made contact with West’s fourth offering, smacking a line drive toward the outstretched glove of Greg Gagne for what seemed a sure inning-ending double play once the Twins shortstop snagged the drive and doubled up Calderón at second. “I saw it go straight to the shortstop, and I said, ‘No way!’” Karkovice recalled, worried that he’d killed the team’s rally.

Instead, the ball sailed just beyond Gagne’s reach and into the alley of left-center field. “I think I may have nicked it a little bit,” Gagne said.9 Ironically, playing for a double play – with Gagne in a few steps looking to turn a grounder into two outs – had cost the Twins a double play when he wasn’t in the ideal position to catch the liner.

Gladden and center fielder John Moses both chased after the ball as it bounded and rolled across the artificial turn to the outfield wall. Moses got there first, as runners crossed the plate and Karkovice came around second. “When I saw the ball heading into the alley,” Karkovice later explained, “I thought I had a chance for a triple.”

But when Moses went down to nab the ball, his foot slid on the warning track and got wedged under the fence. He couldn’t stand up.

In desperation, Moses lobbed the ball toward Gladden – who’d turned his attention to the infield, oblivious to his teammate’s predicament until the ball landed several feet in front of him. “When [Moses] went to get the ball, I just figured he would throw it in,” Gladden said later.

“He wasn’t even looking at me,” Moses recalled understandingly. “It shouldn’t be too much for him to expect me to stand up … to do at least that.”

Karokovice had his back to the play, so he relied on third-base coach Terry Bevington to signal whether he needed to slide. Instead, he was wildly waving him home. “The guys said when I rounded third, my face was beet-red,” the big catcher later said with a laugh.10 “I was huffing and puffing by the time I got home.”11

West was able to shake off the setback and retire the next two hitters. And his teammates struck back in the bottom of the inning. With two outs, rookie Paul Sorrento belted his third career home run deep to right-center, making the score 4-3.

Neither starter allowed another run. West left after six innings; McDowell lasted through eight. But in the ninth, Chicago manager Jeff Torborg went to the bullpen for Thigpen to get his 44th save. The right-hander was three saves short of Dave Righetti’s four-year-old major-league record of 46. With more than a month to go, it seemed inevitable that Thigpen would not only break the record but pass the 50-save mark.12

After Larkin hit a line drive into Calderón’s glove and Harper smacked a grounder to shortstop Scott Fletcher for the next to last out of the game, Sorrento gave Twins fans a glimmer of hope with a line-drive single into left field. The rookie was replaced by the speedier Shane Mack at first, but the pinch-runner could only watch as the first pitch Moses saw from Thigpen popped up high and landed safely in Fletcher’s glove to end the game.

Despite this White Sox win and 20 more in their remaining 33 games, they never got closer than 5½ games from first the rest of the season, finishing nine games back of 103-win Oakland. Chicago’s record of 94-68 represented six more wins than the AL East Division champion Boston Red Sox and the third most in the majors.

Oakland was swept in the 1990 World Series by the 91-win Cincinnati Reds.

Minnesota finished last in the AL West with a record of 74-88. The next season the Twins won the World Series, the first champions to ever go “worst to first.”

Acknowledgments

This article was reviewed by Troy Olszewski and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Ron Karkovice (Trading Card Database)

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, Retrosheet.org, and broadcast footage of Karkovice’s home run on MLB.com.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MIN/MIN199008300.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1990/B08300MIN1990.htm

Notes

1 Tim Kurkjian, “Chasing the A’s,” Sports Illustrated, April 16, 1990; Moss Klein, “A.L. Has the DH, Fenway Park and the A’s …,” The Sporting News, April 1, 1990: 10.

2 The 2-0 Chicago-Milwaukee Brewers game on April 11 was postponed because of snow. The A’s lost to the Twins that night, giving Chicago a half-game lead in the standings. Neither team played on the 12th, so when Oakland beat the Seattle Mariners and Chicago lost to the Cleveland Indians on April 13, the A’s took a half-game lead and would remain atop the division for the rest of the season. (The postponed game was rescheduled as the first game of a doubleheader on August 2 and was the major-league debut of Frank Thomas for the White Sox.)

3 McGee didn’t get any votes for MVP in either league, but he did win the NL batting title. He was batting .335 when he was traded and had more than the requisite number of plate appearances to be in contention despite having no NL at-bats in all of September.

4 Baines returned for two more stints with the White Sox during his 22-year career, including his final two seasons. When he was enshrined in the Hall of Fame, it was with a White Sox cap on his plaque.

5 La Russa got his managerial start with the White Sox in 1979. The team fired him after a 26-38 start to the 1986 season, his eighth with the organization.

6 McDowell had thrown a three-hit shutout for eight innings in the game that the White Sox lost to the Angels on Lee Stevens’ homer off Bobby Thigpen on August 25.

7 Andrew Bagnato, “Sox Skid Ends in Grand Style,” Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1990: 4-1.

8 Under hitting coach Walt Hriniak, Karkovice had shown considerable improvement since 1989, but that was a low bar. For example, in what was expected to be his breakout sophomore season in 1987, he’d infamously racked up 40 strikeouts while reaching base only 15 times before the White Sox shipped him back to Triple-A Hawaii. The next season, 1988, he hit just .174 in the majors, with 20 hits versus 30 K’s.

9 Jeff Lenihan, “Sox Slam Twins,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 31, 1990: 1C.

10 Tim Kurkjian, “Inside Baseball, Sports Illustrated, September 3, 1990: 143.

11 Bagnato, “Sox Skid Ends.”

12 Thigpen shattered Righetti’s record, finishing the season with 57 saves. His record stood for 18 years, until Francisco Rodríguez saved 62 games for the Angels in 2008. As of 2025, Righetti’s mark of 46 saves has been surpassed 43 times and tied another nine. Both the American and National League saves leaders had over 46 saves in 2024 (AL: Emmanuel Clase, 47; NL: Ryan Helsley, 49).