Transcripts

SPEAKER: My memory, strongest memory of the post-World Series 87 parade was poor, unfortunate Kate Moos sitting out on the corner of, I guess it would have been 7th and Wabasha, absolutely frozen stiff reporting in on a cellular phone on a regular basis. Bill Wareham, you've been covering the Twins here. You cover that parade back in '87? I'm trying to remember.

BILL WAREHAM: No, somehow I was out of that loop and I ended up spending an hour or so standing by myself on my own time up there watching it. So I enjoyed it as a fan as opposed to a reporter type.

SPEAKER: Well, you have had both the most wonderful and the most awful job here for the last three weeks into this postseason. Very little sleep, lots of travel time, lots of two o'clock in the morning conversations with ballplayers. What do you find yourself thinking back on now that the Twins have actually pulled this off?

BILL WAREHAM: I keep going back to some of the plays we saw here. I mean, who can forget Kirby Puckett's home run? I want to say yesterday, but it was two days ago. Who can forget Gene Larkins? I mean, let's not forget that. I remember Scott Erickson's performance two nights ago where, boy, he wasn't in control, but things just seemed to fall his way. I remember somewhere along here in the League Championship Series, Chuck Knoblauch sliding across home plate and his helmet coming over his face and him tipping it back. It's stuff like that that I remember.

SPEAKER: Yeah. What does a World Series look like from the inside as opposed to from the outside? Most of us saw this thing on TV. Some people were lucky enough to catch a game or two with the dome. What's it like on the inside?

BILL WAREHAM: I think you find yourself getting a little closer to the thing because you end up talking to the players every day. One of the hardest things I find, and they remind you of this at least once every game, press areas are for working press only. There is to be no cheering, no clapping, anything like that. And it got pretty-- it got pretty routine after a while to put on the reporter hat and look at this objectively cock an eyebrow at the replays on the scoreboard and act very serious and say, well, that was a very good call, even when the Twins were out, that sort of thing.

However, I did yesterday in the first inning when Dan Gladden scored, I caught myself clapping just once. It wasn't even a multiple clap. I just put the hands together once and then I crossed them at my arms and tucked my hands under the armpits for the rest of the game.

SPEAKER: Yeah. It's awfully difficult to put this series in perspective, but here we had the Commissioner of Baseball not 5, 10 minutes after the game was over last night, calling this perhaps the greatest World Series of all time.

BILL WAREHAM: Well, it was beyond enjoyable. It was-- it was hair-raising at times. It was gut-wrenching. If you had any inclination to bite your fingernails, they were down to nubs by the end of this thing because, I mean, we had, what, three extra inning games, five 1 run games. That blowout was a relief, even though the Twins lost. I mean, you didn't have to sit there and sweat for 13 innings.

SPEAKER: It was the one night during the whole series I got a decent night's sleep.

BILL WAREHAM: Yeah. I wish I could say the same.

SPEAKER: But I could give up on it early. Well, Bill, what a great job you have.

BILL WAREHAM: I had a good time. I had a good time. Now I think I'll nap for November.

SPEAKER: There you go. Minnesota Public Radio's Bill Wareham has been following the Twins in this drive to the 1991 World Series Championship.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- (SINGING) Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today.