On This Day: October 24, 1992 — Toronto Blue Jays Win First World Series

Forty-one-year-old Dave Winfield had played in the World Series once before, in 1981 with the Yankees, and gone 1-for-22. Eleven years and two knee surgeries later, with two outs and two men on in the top of the 11th at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he lined a 1-2 pitch from Charlie Leibrandt down the left-field line. Devon White and Roberto Alomar both scored. Twenty minutes later Mike Timlin threw out Otis Nixon at first base, and Canada had its first World Series champion.

A Rematch Nobody Saw Coming in Game 1

The 1992 World Series paired a Blue Jays team built on Pat Gillick’s trades — Alomar, Joe Carter, and Devon White had all arrived via trade in the previous two years — against an Atlanta Braves club that had gone from worst to first in the NL West just a year earlier. Toronto had never won a postseason series until that October, having blown three-run leads in the ALCS in both 1989 and 1991. Atlanta had the reigning Cy Young winner in Tom Glavine and a lineup anchored by Terry Pendleton and David Justice, and had come within one win of the 1991 title before losing Game 7 to the Twins.

Through five games the series had gone back and forth. Toronto won the opener behind a shutout bullpen effort, Atlanta evened it in Game 2, and by Game 5 the Braves had forced a return trip to Atlanta with a 7-2 win. That set up Game 6 on October 24 as a potential closeout for the Blue Jays or a Game 7 for the Braves — the kind of single-elimination pressure neither team’s World Series resume had tested yet.

Game 2 of that series had already produced one of the stranger moments in World Series history. During the pregame ceremony at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on October 18, a U.S. Marine Corps colour guard carried the Canadian flag upside down through the entire national anthem, the maple leaf pointed the wrong way the whole time. The error wasn’t caught until after the ceremony, the Commandant of the Marine Corps issued a formal apology, and for Game 3 back at SkyDome the Marines were given the Canadian flag again — this time right side up, with the RCMP carrying the Stars and Stripes alongside them. It became a minor diplomatic footnote to a series that was already being watched as a referendum on baseball crossing the border for the first time.

The World Series logo at home plate during the 1992 Fall Classic — the first time the Series had been played outside the U.S.

Nine Innings Weren’t Enough

Jimmy Key started for Toronto and Steve Avery for Atlanta, and both starters pitched into the sixth before the bullpens took over. Ed Sprague’s pinch-hit home run off Jeff Reardon in the ninth tied the game at 2-2 and sent it to extra innings — the second time in the series a Blue Jays pinch-hitter had delivered a tying homer late. The Braves had every chance to end it in the bottom of the ninth and again in the tenth, stranding runners both times against a Toronto bullpen that had been the best in baseball all season.

Roberto Alomar, the eventual series MVP runner-up, had been the Blue Jays’ most consistent hitter all October, reaching base in every game of the Series. His speed on the bases forced mistakes all series long, the kind of pressure that doesn’t always show up in a box score but shows up on tape.

Roberto Alomar’s aggressive baserunning was a constant thread through the 1992 Series.

Winfield’s Double and the Final Out

In the top of the 11th, Devon White walked and Alomar singled him to third. With two outs, Winfield worked the count to 1-2 against Leibrandt before driving a line drive down the third-base line that one-hopped the bag and rolled into the corner. Both runners scored, and Toronto led 4-2. It was Winfield’s first career extra-base hit in a World Series game — in his 12th career World Series contest.

Atlanta answered in the bottom of the inning. Jeff Blauser and Lonnie Smith hit back-to-back singles off Timlin, Pendleton grounded out to move the tying run to third, and a David Justice sacrifice fly cut the lead to 4-3. That brought up Otis Nixon with two outs and the winning run on second. Nixon squared to bunt, pushed it toward Timlin, and the pitcher fielded it himself and ran to first for the final out rather than risk a throw. Pat Borders, the Series MVP who hit .450 across the six games, sprinted out from behind the plate and leapt into the celebration pile at the mound.

Pat Borders, who hit .450 across the six-game Series, was named World Series MVP.

Pandemonium at Fulton County Stadium

The dogpile at the mound was as chaotic as any World Series celebration in recent memory. Timlin, barely able to stand after the throw, got buried first. Carter, Borders, and the rest of the bullpen converged within seconds, and by the time the TV cameras found Cito Gaston — the Blue Jays’ manager, the first Black manager to win a World Series — he was being mobbed in the third-base dugout by players who had waited through two straight ALCS collapses to get there.

What made the win resonate beyond the box score was who was on that field. Gillick had assembled the roster through aggressive trades rather than a farm system, and the result was baseball’s first true international championship team — American, Canadian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican players together, representing a country that had never before produced a World Series winner. Gaston’s title made him the first Black manager to win a World Series, a fact that got comparatively little national coverage at the time but has only grown in significance since — three decades later, he remains one of only a handful of Black managers to ever lead a team to a championship.

The Blue Jays dogpile at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium moments after the final out.

SkyDome Watched on the Big Screen

Back in Toronto, more than 45,000 fans had packed SkyDome to watch the road game on the stadium’s video screen — the same building that had hosted Games 3, 4, and 5 that week. When Timlin stepped on first base, the dome erupted as if the team were standing on the field in front of them. Fans waved Canadian flags next to American ones, acknowledging a team built from both sides of the border wearing the same uniform.

Fans inside SkyDome watched Game 6 on the stadium screen and celebrated as if they’d been in Atlanta.

Toronto Took the Streets

Outside SkyDome, the celebration spilled onto Yonge Street almost immediately. Police estimated close to half a million people filled the downtown core overnight — strangers hugging, horns blaring for hours, pickup trucks crawling down the strip loaded with fans waving flags out the windows. It was the kind of spontaneous citywide party Toronto hadn’t seen and, outside of the Blue Jays’ repeat the following October, hasn’t fully matched since.

A fan’s handmade sign on the street that night summed up how the city felt: “My Canada includes a World Series.”

Fans rode through downtown Toronto waving flags out of car windows into the early morning.

The Team That Did It Twice

None of it was a fluke. The Blue Jays came back the following season with largely the same core — Alomar, Carter, Molitor replacing Winfield at DH — and beat the Phillies in six games, with Joe Carter’s walk-off home run in Game 6 making Toronto the only team since the 1977-78 Yankees to win back-to-back titles. No team has repeated since. Winfield, who’d waited his entire career for a championship, left as a free agent that winter and signed with the Minnesota Twins, close to where he grew up — he’d gotten his ring, and he wasn’t chasing anything else.

The 1992 Series also closed out a stretch of unusually dramatic Octobers. Two years earlier, the Cincinnati Reds had swept the heavily favored A’s in four straight, and the year before that the Series had been interrupted entirely by the Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area. Baseball in the early ’90s kept finding ways to make October memorable, and Winfield’s double against a team that had never lost its nerve all series is still one of the cleanest examples.

What stands out looking back is how little luck was involved. Toronto out-hit Atlanta over six games, got a historically good MVP performance from a backup-caliber catcher in Borders, and leaned on a bullpen deep enough to survive extra innings twice in the same series. Gillick’s roster-building strategy — trade for proven players rather than wait on prospects — got validated in the most public way possible, and teams have copied pieces of that blueprint ever since.

Sources

• Winfield’s Double Gives Jays World Series Title — National Baseball Hall of Fame, on Dave Winfield’s 11th-inning hit.
• 1992 World Series Game 6 Box Score — Baseball-Reference, full play-by-play and stats for the October 24, 1992 game.
• 1992 World Series — overview of the full six-game series between the Blue Jays and Braves.
• Highlights of Blue Jays’ Back-to-Back World Series Wins — CP24/Canadian Press photo archive of the 1992 and 1993 championships.
• Ed Sprague’s Blow Squares World Series After Canadian Flag Snafu — SABR Games Project, on the Game 2 upside-down flag incident.