Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

If Mussina had any doubts at all about going through with free agency, they were washed away during the 2000 season. If 1996 was the year when his record was better than he was, 2000 was the year when he was much better than his record. Mussina pitched well all year — “In some ways, as well as I’ve ever pitched,” he said — and finished the season with the first and only losing record of his career: 11–15.

  The Orioles were a bad team on their way to getting worse. They were still clinging to Ripken like a lifeboat on the Titanic, even though Ripken was turning forty and was a shell of himself. For the year, he hit .256 and was able to play in only eighty-three games.

  “That was, without doubt, the longest season of my life,” Mussina said. “We were bad. I lost a lot of games I should have won, and the atmosphere was just awful. People in Baltimore were upset because they thought I was leaving, and they let me have it, which hurt because I didn’t think they understood what was going on. What we asked for in spring training was not at all unreasonable in the market we were in. By the end of the year, I knew it was time to go someplace else.

  Brycen, Mussina’s first son, had been born a year earlier, and Mussina wanted to be near his family. Teams like the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Phillies, and Pirates fit the geographic profile best. The Yankees were coming off their fourth World Series victory in five years, but everyone knew that David Cone wasn’t going to be back. He had been plagued by injuries all year, and the Yankees no longer believed they could count on him for thirty-plus starts. They were looking for a reliable starter on the free-agent market.

  Shortly after the Yankees had beaten the Mets in a five-game World Series, Mussina was relaxing at home when he heard the phone ring. Jana answered, then walked into the room and pointed at the phone. “It’s Joe Torre,” she said.

  Needless to say, Mussina was a little bit surprised that the manager of the Yankees was calling him out of the blue less than a week after winning the World Series.

  “I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow,” Torre told Mussina. “But before I go, I wanted to talk to you because I’ve been hearing some things, and whenever I hear things I wonder if they’re true.”

  “What have you heard?” Mussina asked.

  “That you’ve got concerns about living in New York during the season,” Torre answered. “I think you need to come in here and see where you and your family could live. New York isn’t just Manhattan. You can live in the suburbs, have a fairly easy commute, and be quite comfortable. I live in Westchester. Just take a look.”

  Mussina was touched and flattered that Torre had taken the time to call. He did have some concerns about living in New York, but beyond that, Torre’s reaching out to him told him that the Yankees — or at least the manager — really wanted him to pitch for them. Having grown up as a Yankee fan, knowing what kind of team and organization they had at the time, he was extremely intrigued by the idea of going to New York.

  “The fact that Joe took the time to call me was a big deal,” he said. “I certainly didn’t know him well at the time, although my sense had always been that he was someone who would be good to play for. What the phone call said was that I was a priority for him. That made me feel very good, especially since I didn’t really feel that the Orioles felt that way about me at that stage.”

  It took less than a month to nail down the deal. On November 30, the Yankees and Mussina agreed to a six-year deal worth $88.5 million — an average of $14.7 million a year. In the blink of an eye, Mussina went from being a very good pitcher on what had become a mediocre team (the Orioles had just finished their third straight losing season) to a key member of baseball’s best team and rotation.

  He joined a Yankee staff that included Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Orlando Hernandez, each very much a star in his own right.

  “I think that was a good thing for Moose,” Torre said. “In Baltimore he was the guy, and they felt they had to win every time he pitched because they didn’t have anybody nearly as good. A lot of times when we faced him, our strategy was just to wait him out, try to run deep counts on him and stay close, because we knew they would leave him out there for the extra inning, and that was going to be our chance to get him when he was a little tired and should probably be out of the game.

  “On our staff, he was one of the guys we counted on, but that was it: one of the guys, not the guy.”

  Mussina was fine with that aspect of his new team. And, as Torre had predicted, he was able to find a comfortable house in Westchester that was about a twenty-minute drive from Yankee Stadium on most days. Like many players who sign for big money in New York, especially with the Yankees, Mussina thought he knew what to expect when he arrived: increased media scrutiny, the pressure to perform up to the numbers on his contract, the expectations that the team would win every year.

  He was mistaken.

  “You can read about it; you can talk to other players who have been through it; you can tell yourself a thousand times that you can handle it. There’s just no way to walk into that atmosphere on a daily basis and be prepared for it. You have to learn it, adapt to it, adjust to it, and, most important, accept it. You can’t fight it. Every guy who has tried to fight it has ended up failing.”

  Mussina had gotten along with most of the media in Baltimore, especially once he became comfortable and established. “There were times when I felt like he enjoyed talking to us more than the other players,” said Mark Maske, who covered the Orioles for the Washington Post in the ’90s. “He would talk to us about things that had nothing to do with baseball, knowing, I guess, that we were more likely to be interested in that stuff.”

  But the Yankees clubhouse is a far cry from the Orioles clubhouse. It is packed every day with a minimum of fifty media members — frequently more. The clubhouse is open to the media three and a half hours before the first pitch and closes one hour before the game starts. Because of that, there are plenty of areas that are off-limits to the media: the hallway that leads to the manager and coaches’ offices, the players’ dining area, and the training area. Many players spend a good deal of time in the off-limits areas so they don’t have to deal with the media. Those who venture to their lockers are frequently pounced on.

  “The toughest part was that there was never a day off,” Mussina said. “Every day there were guys who wanted to talk to you. Sometimes they wanted to talk about you, but just as often they wanted to talk about whatever was going on with the team or something else. Some of the guys I knew; a lot of the guys I didn’t know. I really didn’t deal with it very well the first year.”

  There were days when Mussina just didn’t feel like talking because he had talked the previous four days. Sometimes he didn’t think the subject was worth his time, or, on occasion, he got snappish. As a result, his early relationship with the New York media was rocky.

  What saved him was the way he pitched. Unlike many players who allow adapting to New York to affect their performance, Mussina had a very good first season as a Yankee in 2001. He was 17–11 with an ERA of 3.15 and pitched, arguably, the two best games of his career.

  The first came in early September in Boston, a place where Mussina had never pitched especially well. On this night he was perfect for twenty-six hitters, coming within one out and one strike of a perfect game. It was broken up by pinch hitter Carl Everett, who punched a 1–2 pitch to left field, the only hit and only base runner of the game for the Red Sox.

  Yet another almost. Actually, Mussina set a record of sorts that night. It was the fourth time in his career that he had taken a no-hitter into at least the eighth inning, en route to pitching a one-hitter. That was the most times anyone had ever gone into the eighth with a no-hitter without recording one.

  A month later, Mussina found himself back in postseason for the first time since 1997. The Yankees quickly found themselves down 2–0 to the Oakland Athletics and flew to the West Coast facing elimination in Game Three of the Division Series. Mussina pitched seven superb shutout innings, and the Yankees
won the game 1–0. What most people remember about that game is not how well Mussina pitched but the extraordinary play that Derek Jeter made in the seventh inning to preserve the Yankee lead.

  With Jeremy Giambi steaming toward home plate with the tying run, Jeter somehow got from his shortstop position to the first-base line to grab a wayward throw to the plate, and, in one motion, backhanded the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who managed to pick the ball out of midair and tag Giambi, who was so certain he was going to score that he failed to slide. That play ranks with Willie Mays’s catch on Vic Wertz in Game One of the 1954 World Series and Ron Swoboda’s diving catch on Brooks Robinson in the 1969 World Series as among the most spectacular in postseason history.

  Mussina had a great view of the play since he was backing up home plate. “The funny part of it is, Derek was exactly where he was supposed to be when he made the play, which people don’t understand,” he said. “His job on the play is to be in the middle of the infield and read the throw from the outfield — in this case from the right-field corner. The throw (from rightfielder Shane Spencer) missed two cut-off men. Derek saw that, got over to the line, and made the play.

  “What was unbelievable was that he was able to backhand and, in one motion, get it to Posada and that Posada was able to grab it and make the tag in one motion.”

  That play allowed Mussina to hand the ball to Mariano Rivera in the eighth inning with a 1–0 lead, and that was the final score. The Yankees ended up winning the series in five games and then beat the 116-win Seattle Mariners in five games. Mussina pitched Game Two of that series as well and gave up two runs in six innings as the winning pitcher. That set up what turned out to be a classic seven-game World Series that the Yankees lost when Rivera couldn’t hold a 2–1 lead in the ninth inning of the seventh game.

  Mussina pitched twice in his first World Series. He pitched poorly in Game One but pitched very well in Game Five, leaving in the eighth inning, trailing 2–0. The Yankees rallied to win that game in twelve innings. In Game Seven, the Yankees had a 2–1 lead in the eighth, only to lose 3–2 after two Arizona runs in the bottom of the ninth.

  “I think of all the almosts in my career, that one was the toughest to take,” he said. “We were three outs away from winning a championship, and we had Mo [Rivera] out there. You can talk about blowing the Boston series [in 2004], but even if we win that series, we still have to win the World Series. In Arizona, it was right there.”

  The Yankees have not been that close to winning a World Series since that night. In fact, they have only reached one World Series in the last six seasons, and, if you were to ask Joe Torre, the person most responsible for that one appearance was Mussina.

  It was the seventh game of the 2003 American League Championship Series: Yankees-Red Sox in Yankee Stadium. Mussina had started and lost two games in the series, not pitching horribly but not pitching especially well. The seventh-game pitchers that night were Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez.

  “You would have thought it would be a low-scoring game,” Mussina said. “But you never know. Since it was Game Seven, it was all hands on deck. Joe and [pitching coach] Mel [Stottlemyre] told me to be ready to come out of the bullpen just in case.”

  Mussina had never pitched a game in relief in thirteen seasons in the major leagues. In fact, he had never pitched in relief at any level of pro ball or at Stanford or in high school. “I don’t think I’d ever relieved in my life,” he said. “There had been times when I’d been in the bullpen in a ‘just in case’ situation, but it had never happened.”

  By the time Mussina made his way out to the bullpen in the third inning, the Yankees were down 3–0.

  “You better be ready to pitch,” Mike Borzello, the bullpen coach and his best friend on the team, told him when he arrived.

  “You really think so?” Mussina answered.

  Borzello nodded. “Roger’s struggling. How far can you go?”

  Mussina shrugged. “Probably not more than an inning.”

  “An inning?” Borzello said. “What are you doing here, then? You go in, you better be ready to go longer than that.”

  The call came in the top of the fourth inning. The score by then was 4–0, and the Red Sox had men on first and third, with no one out. Torre and Stottlemyre had told Mussina they wouldn’t bring him in except to start an inning. This wasn’t exactly starting an inning.

  “It was four-nothing,” Mussina said, “and I’m thinking that, best-case scenario, maybe I get us out of it with only one run scoring. That means we’re down five-nothing, and Pedro Martinez is pitching for them. I really didn’t think we stood much chance.”

  Mussina gave the Yankees a chance. He got a strikeout and a double-play ground ball and kept the Yankees within four runs. When he got to the dugout, he said to Torre and Stottlemyre, “I thought you were only going to bring me in to start an inning.”

  “We lied,” Torre answered.

  Two Jason Giambi home runs cut the lead to 4–2, and Mussina pitched two more shutout innings. Still, when David Wells gave up a home run to David Ortiz in the eighth to make it 5–2, it looked as if Mussina’s effort had been for naught.

  But Martinez ran out of gas in the eighth inning. Manager Grady Little famously left him in the game too long (and was fired as a result), and the Yankees tied the score 5–5. Mariano Rivera pitched three shutout innings, and then Aaron Boone led off the eleventh inning by hitting a Tim Wakefield knuckleball into the left-field seats to win the game and the pennant for the Yankees. Not surprisingly, Boone still has vivid memories of that night — one of them being Mussina after the game.

  “I’d been around for half the season and I certainly respected him,” Boone said. “He’s kind of the consummate pro — all business, always prepared. He had a dry sense of humor, but you didn’t see him get excited. We all know that I never get the chance to hit that home run if not for him.

  “My memories of what happened right after the game ended are a little hazy. I remember being mobbed and how great it felt. I came back out of the clubhouse, and I was doing a TV interview on the field when someone poured champagne on my head. I looked behind me, and it was Moose. He had this look of absolute, pure joy on his face. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. It was just neat to see.”

  Borzello remembers the same thing. “That’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” he said. “I’ve seen him satisfied after pitching well or after a milestone victory. But never quite like that. He was just absolutely happy, thrilled. I don’t think Mike gets thrilled a lot. That night, he was thrilled. He knew he had done something special, and it meant a lot to him. Everyone in the clubhouse knew that Boone’s home run was going to be replayed a million times, but Mike’s fourth inning and the two after that saved the game.”

  Mussina doesn’t argue. “Maybe it was because I did something I’d never done before. When I start a game, I know I have a job to do. If I do my job, that’s great, but I go out there expecting to do it. If I don’t do my job, I’m angry with myself. That night I had no expectations, especially when I walked to the mound. To have it turn out the way it did was just an amazing thing and an amazing feeling.”

  The last two people out of the clubhouse that night were Mussina and Borzello. They sat in the corner of the room, next to Borzello’s locker, until close to 2 a.m., going over the events of the evening.

  “I just couldn’t believe we had actually won,” Mussina said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a feeling like that in all the years I’ve played the game.”

  It looked as if Mussina was finally going to get his World Series ring when the Yankees went up 2–1 on the Florida Marlins after Mussina won Game Three in Florida, giving up one run over seven innings, striking out nine. But the Yankees lost Game Four in extra innings, then David Wells could only pitch one inning in Game Five and they lost that one too, to trail 3–2. Josh Beckett shut them out in Game Six to wrap up the Series. Thus, Mussina is currently the answer to a trivia question he wishes di
dn’t exist: name the last Yankee pitcher to win a World Series game.

  7

  A Bitter Divorce

  TOM GLAVINE WATCHED Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series on television. He had nothing better to do that night or that month because for the first time since 1990 (other than the strike year) he was not playing postseason baseball.

  The Braves were in postseason, playing the Chicago Cubs in the National League Division Series. But Glavine, the man who had coauthored a book titled None but the Braves, was no longer a Brave. He was a New York Met.

  The story of how Glavine came to be a Met is a convoluted one that still sparks controversy and anger in Atlanta to this day. The general assumption as the 2002 season wore down was that Glavine would sign a contract with the Braves that would allow him to finish his career in Atlanta. Glavine thought that’s what would happen. Everyone in Braves management thought that was what would happen. Everyone in an Atlanta uniform thought the same thing.

  “I don’t think it ever seriously occurred to anyone that Tom would leave Atlanta,” said John Smoltz. “I mean Tom, not a Brave? There was no way. Or at least that’s what we all thought.”

  Glavine had continued to be one of the best pitchers in baseball after signing the contract that kicked in beginning in 1998. During that season, he was 20–6 with a 2.47 ERA and won his second Cy Young Award. Over the four guaranteed seasons of the contract, he was 71–33 and never missed a start as the Braves continued to win Division titles every year — although they never could win a second World Series. The Braves were more than happy to exercise the $10 million fifth year in the contract at the start of 2002. It was then that the trouble began.

  Once again, the collective-bargaining agreement was up at the end of the season. Once again, the owners were demanding changes. Specifically, they were insisting that they must have some kind of luxury tax, which the players again saw correctly as being a euphemism for a salary cap.