The 1993 baseball season was a historic one in two different ways. It was the final year where no wild-cards made the playoffs and there were just two divisions per league. And it produced the first repeat champion in fifteen years.
The Toronto Blue Jays brought home a second consecutive World Series title and did so with just the second walkoff home run to ever end a Fall Classic. The repeat title was a fitting conclusion to a ten-year era of Blue Jay excellence and stamped them as a dynasty.
Meanwhile, the National League produced baseball’s last epic pennant race—one where two genuinely outstanding teams battled tooth and nail over a six-month season knowing that only the winner would go on to the playoffs. The Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants were each 100-win teams. They were each fueled by huge acquisitions prior to the season. And they battled to the final day of the season before the Braves prevailed.
Perhaps the intensity of the pennant drive left Atlanta drained, because they were victims of an upset in the National League Championship Series. The Philadelphia Phillies had taken control of the NL East early on and kept challengers in the Montreal Expos and St. Louis Cardinals at arm’s length the rest of the way. The Phillies, with Curt Schilling making his first appearance on the October stage, knocked off the Braves and won the National League pennant.
The South Side of Chicago celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the franchise’s first AL West title, by winning a second one. The White Sox produced the American League’s MVP and Cy Young Award winner and outpaced a good Texas Rangers team to reach the playoffs.
Toronto didn’t have a cakewalk to get to the playoffs. The Detroit Tigers, with a potent offense, produced the last winning team in the great managerial career of Sparky Anderson. And the New York Yankees, after five years of non-contending play, sent the league a message they were on the way back. The Tigers pushed the Jays early in the year and the Yankees applied the heat down the stretch.
It all added up to making 1993 a seminal year for major league baseball. The links below take you to articles about the 10 teams referenced here. You’ll read about their key players and how their seasons unfolded. Then there are game-by-game narratives of the ALCS, NLCS and World Series. Taken collectively, these 13 articles are the way to re-live the spring, summer and fall of 1993 through the prism of its most consequential teams.
READ ABOUT THE 1993 TORONTO BLUE JAYS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 ATLANTA BRAVES
READ ABOUT THE 1993 SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES
READ ABOUT THE 1993 CHICAGO WHITE SOX
READ ABOUT THE 1993 DETROIT TIGERS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 NEW YORK YANKEES
READ ABOUT THE 1993 MONTREAL EXPOS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 TEXAS RANGERS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 ALCS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 NLCS
READ ABOUT THE 1993 WORLD SERIES