103 Wins and Nothing to Show For It: The 1993 Giants and the Race That Forced Baseball to Invent the Wild Card
Barry Bonds hit .336 with 46 homers. Two starters won 20 games. The team won 103. And on October 3 in Los Angeles it all died, 12-1, with a 21-year-old rookie on the mound and Mike Piazza circling the bases twice.
Thirty-three years later I still cannot talk about 1993 without my jaw tightening. This was not a fluke team. This was not a team that got hot and hung around. The 1993 San Francisco Giants won 103 baseball games, and they did not play a single inning in October, and the way it ended was so cruel that Major League Baseball changed the entire structure of the postseason because of it. That is the part people forget. The Wild Card exists, in large part, because of what happened to us.
The Team We Built That Winter
Start with the offseason, because the whole thing was set up like a fairy tale. Barry Bonds, the best player alive, son of Bobby, godson of Willie Mays, came home on a six-year deal worth $43.75 million, the biggest contract in the sport at the time. Dusty Baker got promoted from hitting coach to manager. And Bonds delivered exactly what a franchise dreams about: a .336 average, a league-leading 46 home runs, 123 RBI, and his second straight MVP award. Matt Williams was mashing at third. Will Clark was still at first. Robby Thompson was the best second baseman nobody outside the Bay talked about.
The pitching was every bit as good. Bill Swift went 21-8. John Burkett went 22-7. They remain the last pair of Giants starters in the twentieth century to each win twenty games in the same season. Rod Beck slammed the door in the ninth with that arm hanging loose off the mound like it was broken. This club was constructed to win a World Series, and for most of the summer it looked like it would.
Ten Games Up in July, and Then the Braves Started Running
On July 22 the Giants led the National League West by ten games. Ten. In any other season, in any structure that exists today, that team clinches in mid-September and rests everybody for a week. But this was the last year of the two-division format, first place or go home, no second chances, no consolation prize, and behind us was the Atlanta Braves with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Steve Avery and John Smoltz.
Then Atlanta went and got Fred McGriff from San Diego on July 18. He showed up at the ballpark on July 20 in the middle of a game against St. Louis with the Braves down five runs, walked into the clubhouse, and by the sixth inning he had hit a two-run homer. The press box literally caught fire that night. From that point Atlanta played like a machine. Glavine finished 22-6, Maddux 20-10, Avery 18-6, and a rotation that good with a bat like McGriff added to the middle of it does not lose many games in August and September.
And we did not hold. The Giants stumbled through a 6-15 stretch down the back half. Ten games up in July turned into a dead heat in October. Both teams walked into the final day at 103-58. One hundred and three wins apiece with one game left. There has never been a race like it since, and by rule, there never can be.
October 3, 1993, and the Decision I Will Never Forgive
Here is where I need everyone to understand exactly how this ended, because if you only know the score you do not know the crime. Atlanta was home against the expansion Colorado Rockies. We were at Dodger Stadium. The Braves won 5-3 and got to 104. All we had to do was win one baseball game in Los Angeles and force a one-game playoff.
Dusty Baker handed the baseball to Salomon Torres. A 21-year-old rookie. Eight big league starts to his name. The most important game in twenty years for that franchise, on the road, in Dodger Stadium, with the entire season in the balance, and the ball went to a kid who had barely unpacked. I have heard every defense of it for three decades. The rotation was lined up that way. Swift and Burkett had thrown. The kid had pitched well enough in September. I do not care. You had 103 wins in your pocket and you sent a 21-year-old into that furnace. Torres got four outs past the third and left with five walks on his line and three runs allowed. Five walks in three and a third innings. He was terrified, and anybody could see he was terrified, and the man who was supposed to see it best was the one who put him there.
Then Mike Piazza did the rest. The Dodgers rookie catcher, in a game his own team had nothing to play for besides ruining ours, hit two home runs, numbers 34 and 35 of his season, including one on the first pitch he saw leading off the fifth off Dave Burba into the right-field pavilion. There is no baseball justification for that. A last-place team playing spoiler, a rookie catcher having the game of his life, and 103 wins gone in a 12-1 humiliation on a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. The Dodgers celebrated like they had won something. In their world, they had. Thirty-three years later I would still very much like to have a word with Mike Piazza about it.
They Changed the Rules Because of Us
Here is the piece that turns a heartbreak into a historical grievance. On September 9, 1993, while that race was still going on, the owners voted to blow up the format. Three divisions per league instead of two, and a Wild Card, defined as the best team that did not win a division. It was scheduled for 1994, then the strike wiped out the end of that season and the Wild Card did not actually get used until 1995.
Run the 1993 standings through the format that was already approved and sitting there waiting. The Giants are in. Comfortably. It is not even a discussion. One hundred and three wins would have been the best non-division-winning record in baseball, which is the literal definition of the thing they had just voted to create. We were the argument. We were the exhibit they held up. The very last season before the second chance existed, the team with the second-best record in all of baseball packed its bags on the first Sunday in October and watched Philadelphia beat the Braves in the NLCS.
The 1993 Giants are the only National League team in the divisional era to win 100 or more games and miss the postseason entirely. That is the record we hold. Not a pennant, not a title, a footnote about cruelty.
What It Cost, and What It Still Means
Think about what that team never got to find out. Bonds at 29, in his absolute prime, with Williams behind him and two 20-game winners in front of a rested Beck, in a five-game series. Nobody in that 1993 field wanted any part of that. The Phillies, who went on to the World Series, would have been a coin flip at best against that rotation. Instead Bonds' first Giants postseason did not come until 1997, and San Francisco waited until 2010 to finally win the thing, seventeen years and an entire generation of fans later.
And there is the other layer people forget: that franchise had nearly been sold and moved to Tampa Bay a year earlier. The new ownership group saved it, signed Bonds, drew people back to Candlestick, won 103 games, and got nothing. If you want to know why Giants fans of a certain age carry permanent scar tissue, it is not just 2002 and Game 6. It starts here, on October 3, 1993, in Dodger Stadium, with a terrified rookie on the mound and Piazza rounding the bases.
Every time a modern team backs into October at 84-78 through the Wild Card, some part of me remembers that the whole mechanism was voted in during the exact season that would have saved the best Giants team most of us ever saw. Baseball fixed the problem one year too late for us. That is 1993 in a sentence: a hundred and three wins, a rule change written in our blood, and not one inning of October to show for any of it.
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