To explain the significance and lingering nature of one pitch among the 314 thrown in Game 1 of the 1998 World Series, former Padres pitcher Mark Langston tells a story.

That offseason, Langston was hunting for drywall in a Home Depot when he got “the stare.” He’d seen it again and again, the moment when someone matched his face to the unforgettable moment he was involved in on baseball’s biggest stage.

As an older woman approached, Langston prepared his talking points about “the pitch” … a 2-2 beauty that sliced through the heart of the plate to Tino Martinez with the bases loaded in the seventh inning of a tie game against the mighty Yankees.

He would say he began to walk off the mound because he thought it was a no-brainer. He would explain that, yes, it was and always will be an inning-ending strike in his mind. He would acknowledge that the blame for the next pitch, the one Martinez deposited in the upper deck of right field, rested on him and him alone.


“Are you the young man who put the drywall in at my house?” she said.

Langston laughed.

“I was so ready for that question, because people came up to me and asked me about it all winter,” he said. “Strangers would walk up and say, ‘Hey, you got screwed. That was a strike.’ To this day, I still get random people come up and say, ‘That was a strike.’

“But I’ve never had someone come up to me and said, ‘Well, that was close but it was a ball.’ I’ve never had that conversation.”


On the 20th anniversary of the Padres reaching the World Series — the second time ever, one of just five postseason runs in franchise history — a single pitch remains vivid.

This isn’t a “what if” about the series and how a pitch that probably never should have been thrown could have changed everything. The Yankees had won the most games in American League history at that point, entered the Series as favorites and eventually steamrolled the Padres by a combined score of 26-13.

It’s about those sports moments that stick with us forever, the ones that stubbornly remain a part of the October conversation — from clubhouses to bar stools.

In San Diego, it’s The Pitch.


A strike? ‘One-hundred percent’

Umpire Rich Garcia was a combat engineer in the Marine Corps who spent much of his service time playing middle infield for the No. 1 team based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. As he frames it, “My wife likes to say, the only wars I was involved in were beanball wars.”

Garcia, who also called the Padres’ 1984 World Series against the Tigers, was positioned behind the plate as Langston’s mental wheels churned. In the only postseason of his 16-year career, the left-hander was asked to get the Padres out of an inning that moments earlier included a three-run, tying homer by Chuck Knoblauch off Donne Wall.

“It was 2-2 and I had feeling he was going to sit on a breaking ball because that’s the count I normally throw breaking balls,” Langston said. “So I threw a fastball.”

Then, nothing.


“What I remember about it, a couple times before, (catcher Carlos) Hernandez kept pulling the ball (to frame pitches),” Garcia said. “I told him at least twice, maybe three times, ‘Don’t pull the ball. Catch the ball. If it’s a strike I’ll call it, but don’t pull it.’

“On that pitch, he caught the ball down. I’m not saying it wasn’t a strike, but he caught the ball down and brought it up. So if he’s bringing it up, I thought it had to be a ball. I’m not saying it wasn’t a strike, but …”

Hernandez, not surprisingly, recalled the situation differently.

“If you see the way I received the pitch, I just let my glove go to the movement of the ball,” he said. “It wasn’t like too many catchers who, it’s two feet away and they pull it back in. That was my technique I used my whole career.


“Maybe I moved my wrist, but I didn’t move my shoulder. I didn’t move my elbow.”

Was it a strike?

“One-hundred percent,” Hernandez said.

The Kevin Brown decision

On the telecast, analyst Tim McCarver summed up the drama of the call that wasn’t.


“Very close,” McCarver said. “It catches plenty of plate. It’s just a question of whether it was high enough.”

From the Padres dugout, there was no question at all.

“I’ll never forget it,” former Padres manager Bruce Bochy said Monday. “It was right there. Right there. The camera was on me and I said, ‘You’ve got to be (expletive) me.’ It wasn’t even borderline. That was definitely a strike.

“From the dugout you can’t tell in and out but you tell the height. After seeing it on replay, it was a great pitch. He was struck out.”


The next pitch from Langston was up … and out, a game-clinching blast into the bellowing Bronx night.

“Go back and look at it,” said Langston, now a broadcaster for the Angels. “I’ve seen it plenty of times. It crosses above the knees. To me, Richie Garcia missed it, there’s no ifs, ands and buts about it.

“But like I’ve always said, the 3-2 pitch was on me.”

Garcia, now retired and living in Clearwater, Fla., remains noncommittal. Like all umpires, however, he cringes about the attention shifting away from the players. Careers and ballpark legacies, they realize, too often are defined by the ones people thought they got wrong, rather than the thousands they got right.


“I don’t like that it happened,” he said. “I don’t like that it turned out that way. But that’s the game of baseball. If Tino had popped up, nobody would be talking about that pitch. Unfortunately for me, I guess, it was a grand slam.

“It could have been a strike, but he moved the glove.”

The inning, a seven-run unraveling that erased the Padres’ 5-2 lead in the 9-6 loss, still conflicts Bochy. He was second-guessed for pulling All-Star Kevin Brown, who piled up a career-high 257 strikeouts that season on the way to finishing third in Cy Young voting.

A dugout chat with Brown changed everything.


“Kevin Brown had the flu,” Bochy said. “Earlier in the game, he got smoked by a ball off the shin. When he was going out in the bottom of the seventh he said, ‘I’ll be honest, if I get in some trouble, I might need some help.’ He never said something like that before. Kevin was gassed.

“For me, it’s tough. I took Kevin out and that’s where things went awry. I had to wear that. But we had the conversation before the inning started.”

None of the debate over the pitch changes the fact that the Padres squandered a three-run lead. None of it alters the painful reality that the win-probability percentage, one out into the seventh inning, hovered at a robust 89 percent. And none of it erases the blowout in Game 2 or sweep that followed.

The chance to pressure the Yankees, though, vanished.


“A Game 1 victory on the road would have had a profound impact on our team confidence and expectations,” argued former Padres President Larry Lucchino. “At that moment, I felt it was a clear strike and costly miscall. Over time, I am only more convinced.”

Bochy agreed.

“If we win that game, who knows?” Bochy said. “You talk about believing in yourself, getting some momentum and putting some pressure on the other team. You never know.”

The playoff run offered unique context, Langston argued.


“We were underdogs in every series we played,” he said. “We were underdogs against the Astros, big underdogs against the Braves. Momentum is massive.”

Just ask the Yankees.


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bryce.miller@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @Bryce_A_Miller