Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  He did work during that off-season, wanting to prove that Mussina ’92 — not Mussina ’93 — was the real Mussina. Sure enough, the work paid off. Right from the start, Mussina was the dominant pitcher he had been in 1992. He was 13–4 at the All-Star break and was cruising along with sixteen wins and an ERA of 3.06 on August 7, clearly on his way to a twenty-win season, when baseball came to a screeching halt.

  The players and the owners had been parrying with one another for most of two years, headed in the direction of another work stoppage. The owners had sent a clear message in 1992 when they had fired commissioner Fay Vincent, who had counseled against going to war with the players, both publicly and privately, and installed one of their own, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, as his replacement. They had also hired Richard Ravitch, who had established a reputation as a union buster, as their new negotiator.

  Ravitch’s negotiating stance was simple and direct: nothing that had been negotiated in the past mattered. The owners wanted a new financial system. Don Fehr, the head of the union, wasn’t about to allow that, and it became apparent by midsummer in 1994 that the two sides were headed for a collision.

  It came on August 12 when the players carried out their threat to go on strike. Mussina was 16–5 when the strike hit. Only one pitcher in baseball, the Yankees Jimmy Key, had more wins (17) than Mussina did at that moment.

  The strike would be the ugliest in the history of baseball. There was no postseason in 1994; Major League Baseball shut down for good with one-third of the regular season unplayed. Congress held hearings, and President Bill Clinton called both sides to the White House, all without a resolution. The owners, with the exception of Orioles owner Peter Angelos, decided to start spring training in 1995 with “replacement players” — scabs — and threatened to begin the season with scab teams, mimicking the tactics used by the football owners in 1987, when three regular-season games were played with scab teams.

  That decision had worked out for the football owners. Many players crossed their union’s picket line to play, and to this day the NFL is the only major professional sport in which the players’ contracts are not guaranteed. This was not the football union, though. This was a powerful union with smart leadership. It was not about to back down, and the players weren’t going to cross any picket lines.

  Major League Baseball decided to hand out awards at the end of 1994, even though the season had been shut down. David Cone of the Kansas City Royals, who had a 16–5 record, identical to Mussina’s, won the Cy Young Award. Key was second, Randy Johnson was third, and Mussina was fourth.

  Glavine was 13–9 when the strike ended the season, not having a banner year. But he had a fairly good excuse for not pitching quite as well as he had the previous three seasons: No one was more involved in the player-owner battle than he was. In fact, to fans in Atlanta, he would become the symbol of the strike. It would make 1995 the most difficult season of his career.

  4

  Crossroads

  GLAVINE WAS FIRST ELECTED as the Braves’ player rep in 1990, replacing Dale Murphy, when he was only twenty-four. Mussina was twenty-five when he became the Orioles’ rep. Each was in his third full season in the big leagues when elected.

  The job is not exactly coveted in major league clubhouses. It is a no-fun, no-win job. It can be time consuming, which is why pitchers, especially starting pitchers, are frequently elected to the job; they have more free time than most players. A lot of the work is just plain dull: conference calls to discuss insurance plans, setting up meetings for players to listen to union lawyers, negotiating whether a team will give up a required off-day in order to make up a rainout.

  And when it isn’t boring, it’s because the players and the owners are doing battle — again. Baseball’s recent history is littered with work stoppages, dating back to 1972, when the start of the season was delayed by a player strike. During the next thirty years players and owners negotiated eight collective-bargaining agreements. Each and every time, there was some kind of work stoppage. But nothing like the strike of 1994–1995.

  Mussina was probably fortunate because he was a new player rep in 1994. His job was to report back to his teammates on the work being done by the negotiating committee and, when the time came, to take the strike vote.

  It wasn’t nearly as simple for Glavine. He was on the negotiating committee. What’s more, the union’s leadership — Don Fehr and Gene Orza — decided early on that the two players they wanted to put out front were Glavine and David Cone. Both were smart and articulate and didn’t get nervous in front of microphones. Both also had absolutely no chance of being viewed by the public as anything but villains.

  Anytime there is a strike or a lockout, most people assume it is all about the players, already rich and famous, demanding more money. That was certainly not the case in 1994. The crux of the issue was the owners’ demand for some form of a salary cap and the players’ insistence that a salary cap was not necessary. The owners claimed many franchises were in financial trouble. The players asked to see their books. The owners said no.

  The owners never really intended to negotiate with the players. Their plan was to wait until the contract expired, declare an impasse with the union, and then simply announce that, in the absence of a contract, they were going to change the rules — which would include a salary cap, although they were euphemistically calling it a “luxury tax.”

  The players believed their only chance to get the owners to negotiate was to strike. “Our thinking was if we went out early enough, there would be owners who wouldn’t want to give up the postseason TV money, and they might seriously negotiate with us,” Glavine said. “We were wrong.”

  Ravitch had convinced the owners that if they stuck it out and imposed new rules, they would get what they wanted, and that a long-term victory was more important than the short-term losses they would suffer by wiping out a postseason.

  Even before the strike began, Glavine was being pilloried in Atlanta for his role as a union negotiator and spokesman. To a large degree, he had no chance. He was seen as the spokesman for a group of young, greedy athletes who were making millions of dollars — Glavine’s salary that year was $5 million — and were still about to go on strike. He also made a mistake that haunted him for a long time. He said that fans didn’t understand that players loved the game and didn’t play just for the money: “I would gladly play for $1 million a year,” he announced at one point, not realizing how that would sound to people who weren’t making 10 percent of that.

  “It certainly didn’t come out the way I meant it to,” he said, years later. “The problem is, when you’re asked so many questions on so many different occasions, sometimes you say something you don’t really mean. I was trying to make a point about the fact that we weren’t all about money, that we did love the game, and it just came out wrong.”

  Even if Glavine hadn’t made that mistake, the public was going to be against the players. The notion of young men — many of whom flaunted their money — being wealthy or, so it seemed, wanting more wealth didn’t sit well. Most polls taken during the strike ran two to one in the owners’ favor.

  The owners began spring training in 1995 with scab teams in place and prepared to play the season with the “replacement teams” if necessary.

  Fortunately for everyone, the courts stepped in. On March 31, a federal court judge in New York granted an injunction requested by the National Labor Relations Board, finding that the owners’ attempt to unilaterally invoke a contract was against federal labor laws. Even though they were without a new contract, the owners had no choice but to open spring-training camps.

  And even though both the NLRB and a federal court had found that the owners were the bad guys in the dispute, it was still the players — and Glavine — who had to deal with angry fans.

  “I actually had people throw money at me warming up in the bullpen,” Glavine said. “Pitching in Atlanta was actually worse than pitching on the road for most of the ’9
5 season. It really hurt because I thought I had done the right thing and that what we had fought for was right. Certainly the NLRB and the courts thought we were right.”

  Glavine also got in trouble because he said on a number of occasions that he understood that it was “tough for fans to understand all the issues.” He was trying to give those who were critical of the players a pass; instead it came off as if he were saying that fans weren’t smart enough to understand the issues.

  GLAVINE HAD MOVED to Atlanta five years earlier, following the 1990 season. It was during that year that he had met Carri Dobbins, who worked for a friend of his at a tanning salon. He had liked the fact that she wasn’t a big baseball fan and didn’t seem all that impressed with the notion that he had just won the Cy Young Award. In fact, she really didn’t know what the Cy Young Award was or who Cy Young had been. She just liked Glavine.

  For Glavine, meeting Carri could not have come at a better time. He was young and single and wealthy and obviously well known around Atlanta. “It isn’t as if my lifestyle was wild or crazy or I got into any serious trouble,” he said. “But I did go out, and at times I stayed out late. When I started dating Carri and settled down, it was a good thing. If nothing else, it was good for my pitching because I was better rested.”

  Glavine asked Carri to marry him on Christmas Day in 1991, and they planned their wedding for the following November — right after the World Series. The scheduling had worked out fine — the Braves made the World Series for a second straight season — although the result was the same as 1991, except that this time the Braves lost in six games instead of seven.

  Glavine pitched very poorly in Game Six of the National League Championship Series against the Pirates, giving up eight runs in one inning-plus, but he pitched superbly in the first game of the World Series, beating the Toronto Blue Jays and Jack Morris 3–1.

  The victory was gratifying for several reasons. To begin with, Glavine had outpitched Morris, who had been the Braves’ nemesis in Game Seven the previous year when he had still been with the Twins. Beyond that, Cox had been pilloried for deciding to bring Glavine back to pitch Game One after his awful performance in Game Six against the Pirates.

  Glavine heard it all, and it angered him, which was good. “It kind of focused me,” he said. “I might have been a little bit nervous pitching Game One of the World Series [he had pitched Game Two the previous year], but hearing what people were saying really got me into just the right mood to pitch.”

  Glavine pitched so well that Cox opted to bring him back on three days’ rest in Game Four, with the Braves down two games to one. He pitched well again, but Jimmy Key was a little bit better. Two nights later, the Blue Jays won Game Six in eleven innings to win their first World Championship.

  That off-season Glavine and his agent Gregg Clifton negotiated his first big-money, long-term contract. The Braves had guaranteed him $18 million for four years — pretty good money for a newlywed. That 1992 contract had made Glavine an easy target for fans during and after the strike. In 1994, he was young, rich, and walking off the job. It was all about perception. Intellectually, Glavine understood that, but the boos still hurt.

  Even so, Glavine pitched well in 1995. The season was shortened to 144 games because of the strike, and Glavine went 16–7 with a 3.08 ERA. The Braves made it into a fourth consecutive postseason, and, for the first time, under the new wild-card system that would have started in 1994 if not for the strike, the team had to get through two rounds of playoffs to reach the World Series. Glavine pitched well, and the Braves easily beat both the Colorado Rockies and the Cincinnati Reds to reach their third World Series in four seasons.

  He then won Game Two of the Series and watched his team take a 3–1 lead over the Cleveland Indians. This was as close as the Braves had been to finally winning a World Series. But the Indians came back to beat Greg Maddux in Game Five, sending the Series back to Atlanta for Game Six. Glavine was scheduled to pitch against Dennis Martinez, and he knew — and everyone in Atlanta knew — that the last thing the Braves wanted was to face a Game Seven after blowing a 3–1 lead.

  There was one problem: two hours before game time, no one was sure if Glavine would be able to pitch. He had somehow gotten an infection in his thumb — he thought because of the way the thumb rubbed against his ring finger when he released his changeup. It had never become serious enough to create a problem in the past, but now it was creating a very serious problem.

  While his teammates got ready to play, Glavine was in the training room with doctors looking at his thumb to see if he would be able to pitch. He couldn’t tape it because a pitcher can’t have anything on his hands while on the mound since it might be used to scuff the baseball. While Glavine was being worked on, the training staff put towels on the windows so no one could see what was going on.

  “It was scary,” said Milwaukee Brewers manager Ned Yost, who was a Braves coach at the time. “Everything was so secretive with the towels and all. We all knew something was wrong, but we had no idea what was wrong. Finally, Glav came out and said he was ready to go as if nothing was wrong.”

  Glavine’s injury was so secret that when he wrote his autobiography that winter, he never mentioned it. It wasn’t until 2007 that Stan Kasten, who was the team president in 1995, heard about the thumb issue. “Typical Tommy,” he said. “My God, if he had been healthy that night, imagine what he might have done.”

  Kasten insists that Glavine’s performance that night, thumb or no thumb, was the greatest game he has ever seen pitched in a World Series. Against a loaded lineup — Albert Belle, Jim Thome, Kenny Lofton, Carlos Baerga, among others — Glavine was almost flawless. Over eight innings, he allowed one hit — a bloop single in the sixth inning to Tony Pena. In the bottom of the sixth, David Justice homered off relief pitcher Jim Poole, Mussina’s old minor league roommate, to give the Braves a 1–0 lead.

  Mazzone was absolutely convinced at that moment that the Braves had just won the World Series. “Tom came in after the fifth, sat down, and said, ‘I hope we score a run soon because I know they’re not scoring.’ That was so unlike him. I was completely convinced there was no way he would give up a run.”

  He didn’t. After he had retired the Indians in the eighth, he surprised Mazzone and Bobby Cox by telling them he’d had enough. That wasn’t like him either, but he was tired, his thumb was feeling sore, and he had not felt as if his pitches had much snap left in them in the eighth. Cox and Mazzone brought Mark Wohlers in to pitch the ninth, and he closed out the Indians one-two-three.

  Most Atlanta fans forgave Glavine for his union sins after his Series-clinching masterpiece. It was the first championship in any sport for the city of Atlanta, and the town went nuts. Glavine’s first child, Amber, had been born during the strike, in January, so he was now a husband, a father, and a hero.

  All was right with the world. As is almost always the case in real life, it would not stay that way.

  THE STRIKE OF 1994 could not have come at a worse time for Mike Mussina. He completely supported the decision to strike, not just because he was a player rep but because he didn’t think the players should give things up they had won at the negotiating table simply because the owners were crying poverty.

  The Orioles were different from any other team in baseball during the strike for two reasons: Peter Angelos, their owner, was the only team owner in baseball who refused to field a replacement team. Angelos had made millions of dollars as a lawyer representing unions, and he wasn’t going to damage his relationship with the leaders of other unions by hiring scabs, even if the union in question was made up of, for the most part, millionaires.

  There was also the Cal Ripken question. When the strike hit in 1994, Ripken was 118 games away from breaking one of baseball’s most cherished records: Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played. Had the season not been canceled, he would have broken the record prior to the 1995 All-Star break. If the Orioles didn’t field a team, would Major League Baseball
declare their games forfeits and claim that Ripken’s streak had been broken? What if the other owners forced Angelos to field a team. What then? Some players said publicly that they would understand if Ripken crossed the picket line to keep the streak alive. Mussina, the Orioles’ player rep, was caught squarely in the middle of the issue.

  Ripken himself stayed quiet, hoping it would all go away. Fortunately for him and for everyone else, replacement baseball never made it beyond spring training, and the record wasn’t jeopardized.

  Ripken broke the record on September 6, 1995, in Baltimore. President Bill Clinton not only attended the game but was sitting in the Orioles radio booth with play-by-play man Jon Miller when Ripken homered in the third inning. As the ball came off Ripken’s bat, Clinton’s voice could clearly be heard: “Go baby, get out!” The ball listened to the leader of the free world.

  Two innings later, after the Angels had been retired in the fifth inning, and the game became official, Ripken had the record. The pitcher who got the last out of the fifth and who went on to be the winning pitcher was Mike Mussina, who still has a copy of the lineup card from that night.

  “Obviously I was happy to have a small part in that night,” he said. “But it was a small part. We weren’t in contention. If not for Cal, it would have been a meaningless early-September game with a lot of no-shows. Because of Cal, it was a celebration, not just for the Orioles, but for the game of baseball. I felt proud that night to be his teammate. I think we all did.”

  Perhaps the most touching sight during the twenty-two minutes that the game stopped so Ripken could circle the park and shake almost every hand in the place was the Angels on the top step of their dugout, clapping and cheering and reaching for Ripken’s hand, just like everyone else who was there.