The last time I spoke to Terrance Gore, he was a world champion.
We were standing on the field at Minute Maid Park on Nov. 2, 2021, as the Atlanta Braves celebrated an improbable World Series run. I caught sight of a baby-faced smile I recognized from covering the Kansas City Royals years before. Gore grinned and greeted me, as if eager to see a familiar face while surrounded by teammates he hadn’t spent much time around.
“Is this No. 3 for you?” I said.
“It sure is,” he replied.
Across eight big-league seasons, Gore recorded 16 hits. He drove in only one run. He never hit a home run. But he collected three World Series rings, thanks to his speed and his self-awareness, first with the Royals in 2015, then as a member of the 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers, and again with Atlanta.
From the day he arrived in professional baseball, Gore understood his utility as a player might be limited. He decided to make the most of it. He embraced his role as a part-time performer, a player called into action for postseason teams solely so he could pinch run. He crackled with life, first as the kid brother of those Royals teams, and later as a journeyman bouncing from contender to contender in search of a base to steal.
All of those qualities made the news on Saturday morning of his death, at the age of 34, so heartrending. He was survived by his wife, Britney and three children.
Gore had played his last game in 2022 as a member of the New York Mets. Fittingly, he entered Game 2 of the Wild Card Series as a pinch runner.
The Mets were the final stop for Gore on a baseball journey that began in Gray, Ga., a little town about 90 miles south of Atlanta. Gore was a star running back at Jones County High, but eschewed playing college football because he feared contact. Even as a man, he stood 5-foot-7 and weighed about 160 pounds. He could dunk a basketball, but only with a women’s ball, because his hands could not palm the larger sphere.
His body was best suited for baseball. At Gulf Coast State in Panama, Fla., he made enough contact to let his legs wreak havoc. He once scored from first base after a wayward pickoff throw. His coach estimated that one of the three times he was caught stealing in 54 attempts occurred because Gore tripped.
Heading into the 2011 draft, Gore intrigued the Royals, who several years earlier had struck gold with a 50th-round pick on fleet-footed outfielder Jarrod Dyson. Kansas City chose Gore in the 20th round that summer. He never became as complete a player as Dyson, who played in 12 big-league seasons and coined the phrase, “That’s what speed do.” But Gore might have been faster.
The two men first shared a roster in 2014, when the Royals called up Gore in a postseason chase. When he debuted, he was 23 but could have passed for 13. His teammates called him “G. Baby.” He loved Skittles. He drove a 1980 Chevy El Camino that his mother had purchased for $500. He was irrepressibly confident about his skills. To catch him stealing, he liked to say, it would take a perfect throw.
Gore swiped three bases for the Royals that postseason as the team reached its first World Series since 1985. The next autumn, he stole another when the team won it all. In between, he spent most of the regular season in the minor leagues. He was not a strong enough hitter to crack a roster during the 162-game grind, but his speed was a weapon in October.
That speed kept his career going after he left the Royals. Gore stole six bases for the 2018 Chicago Cubs. He spent time in the New York Yankees’ minor-league system. He appeared in two games for the 2020 Dodgers. After signing with the Braves, he played all year with Triple-A Gwinnett before cracking the postseason roster. Gore did not play in that World Series against the Houston Astros. But he still earned the right to celebrate the championship.
For Royals fans, a diehard group that endured decades of hideous baseball before the renaissance in 2014 and 2015, Gore represents a connection to a time period that will be hard to recreate. Whenever he exited the dugout, I would type a three-word message on Twitter: “Terrance Gore alert!” His arrival into the game usually meant just one thing. And there was nary the catcher who could stop him.
The play I’ll remember the most from Gore came in the 2014 Wild Card Game, a pivotal night in Royals history. The team trailed by two runs against the Oakland Athletics, but had turned the game into a track meet in the final innings. Gore entered the fray in the eighth inning as a pinch runner for designated hitter Billy Butler. He took off on the first movement of Athletics pitcher Luke Gregerson. He was already rising out of his slide when catcher Derek Norris’ throw reached second.
Gore did not clap his hands or celebrate. He had done the thing he was supposed to do, the thing he knew he could better than almost anyone else, the thing that would make him, time and again, a champion.