Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “Stan [Kasten] told me that the team didn’t want to negotiate any new deals until we knew if there was going to be another work stoppage,” Glavine said. “I understood that.”

  But when the negotiations began, they were rancorous. Once again, Glavine and Kasten found themselves on opposite sides, and the two of them argued almost constantly with each other.

  “It got to the point,” Kasten remembered, “where most of our conversations would end with one of us saying to the other, ‘You must be the single stupidest person on the face of the earth!’ And the other one saying, ‘Right back at ya, pal.’ ”

  In July, the players set a strike date — August 30. Another blown-up postseason loomed. The players had actually agreed to some form of a luxury tax, meaning that any team that went over a certain figure in payroll would have to pay a “tax” to Major League Baseball. It was a “soft” salary cap — that is, an owner would have the option of going over it if he was willing to pay the tax — as opposed to a “hard” cap, which would have prohibited anyone from going over that number under any circumstances.

  The question was how high the tax threshold should be. The owners wanted it lower, naturally. And just as naturally, the players wanted it higher.

  As the deadline neared, tempers got short. Jim Bowden, then the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, went on a radio show and accused the players of “steering Major League Baseball right into the World Trade Center,” as if a threatened strike could somehow be akin to the events of September 11, 2001.

  Kasten’s phone rang that day. “Who is the stupidest person on the face of the earth?” he heard Glavine’s voice say.

  Kasten had to laugh. “Okay, Tommy, you win,” he said. “Today, you are no better than number two when it comes to stupidity.”

  Just prior to the strike date, Glavine flew to Pittsburgh to meet with other members of the players’ negotiating committee and union leaders Don Fehr and Gene Orza. The players and owners were now $10 million apart on the luxury tax threshold, but neither side seemed ready to budge another inch. The players had already lowered the number they had initially demanded by a considerable margin.

  Glavine knew that if the negotiating committee went back to the players and said the strike was on, it would be on. The votes had already been taken in all thirty clubhouses. He also remembered 1994 and how long it had taken baseball to recover from that strike. The owners had lost millions of dollars; the players had lost millions in salary, and their image had taken a pounding.

  “Fellas, I just don’t think we can do this,” he finally said late on the eve of the strike date. “I don’t think we can go back to our guys and say we’re walking because of a $10 million difference in a luxury tax level that probably isn’t going to affect very many teams, regardless of where it’s set. I think, even if it means we have to give in to the owners a little bit, we can’t afford to stop playing again.”

  The others in the room listened. They knew Glavine was as loyal to the union as anyone, that he had been one of the out-front guys the last time there had been a strike. Fehr and Orza never wanted to give in to the owners because history showed that the players were always proven right in the end, especially when arbitrators or the courts got involved. But Tom Glavine saying that a strike would be a bad thing — especially when they were so close to an agreement — was a voice worth listening to. Early the next morning, with several teams sitting in their clubhouses waiting for word on whether to leave on a team bus to the airport to a game that night or in a cab to the airport to go home, the players and owners reached an agreement. There would be no strike.

  “From what I’ve been told by others — not by Tom — no one played a more important role in averting a strike than he did,” Kasten said. “He deserves a lot of credit for standing up and saying what he said. I don’t think he’s really gotten it.” He smiled. “Of course I would never tell him that to his face.”

  The strike averted, teams began negotiating with their free agents to be. The Braves made an initial offer to Glavine: one year, $9 million.

  “Which was a joke,” Glavine said. “They weren’t offering me a raise of any kind, and if I wanted to sign for one year I could go to arbitration and get a good deal more than that based on my past performance.”

  Glavine had pitched well again in 2002, going 18–11, and he was still as durable as any pitcher in baseball. Since he didn’t rely on throwing hard, there was no reason to think he didn’t have several more good years left in his arm.

  But the Braves didn’t want to commit to three-years for a thirty-seven-year-old pitcher. Period. They had just signed Smoltz to a three-year, $30 million contract and didn’t want to make a similar commitment to a pitcher who was a year older — even if his medical history was far superior. That was where the parting of the ways began: To Glavine, asking for the same contract Smoltz had gotten was fair. To Kasten, it was fair but it wasn’t practical.

  Just before the free-agency period began, the Braves offered Glavine $18 million for two years.

  “By then I was going to file anyway,” Glavine said. “I had told Stan I wanted three-years and $30 million. I thought that was reasonable. He told me he didn’t think I could get that from anyone. I thought he was wrong.”

  Glavine and Kasten ran into each other at a hockey game in early November. By then, Kasten was also running Atlanta’s hockey team, the Thrashers. As part of Glavine’s previous contract, Kasten had sold the old hockey player a suite to use at Thrashers games.

  “You go do your ‘Tommy over America Tour’ and call when you get back,” Kasten said.

  Glavine said fine. Except in the crowded room they were in, he thought Kasten had said, “We’ll call you when you get back.”

  Glavine was still convinced he was going to end up with the Braves, even after he filed for free agency. Smoltz, who had signed his new contract a year earlier, told him this was all part of the game, that he had to go “on tour” to other cities to find out what people would pay him, and then sit down with the Braves and hammer out a deal.

  Within days of filing for free agency, Glavine had visited with the Mets and the Phillies. There had also been a phone call from the Yankees. The Mets’ first offer was three-years for $28 million. The Phillies’ offer was almost identical, three-years and $29 million. “Which meant I could now go back to Stan and say, ‘You see, there are teams who will give me three-years, and you know they’ll go to at least $30 million if I pursue a deal. So now can we please get serious and talk?’ ”

  Glavine came home and waited for the Braves to call. The Braves were waiting for him to call. Finally, a reporter called Glavine. Frustrated, Glavine said, “The Braves were supposed to call me and didn’t. I think it’s unprofessional.”

  The next day Kasten called. There was some shouting about who was supposed to call whom, but a meeting was set up. The phone conversation was not filled with pleasantries. “It was,” Glavine said, “typical Stan.”

  “I guess it was,” Kasten said. “I called him and said, ‘Congratulations! I read in the papers that you have now officially discovered that New York and Philadelphia both have nice restaurants. Who would have thought it? Now, are you ready to talk?’ ”

  Glavine was ready. He figured this was playing out just as Smoltz had told him it would. He and Gregg Clifton went to Kasten’s office and met with Kasten and general manager John Schuerholz. The meeting lasted well into the night.

  “Their first offer was exactly the same as before,” he said. “Two years, $18 million. I think I said something like, ‘Are you guys fucking kidding me?’ ”

  Round and round they went. Kasten screamed. Glavine screamed. This wasn’t a philosophical union argument; this was genuine anger, on both sides. Kasten’s description of the meeting is simple and direct: “Gregg and John didn’t say very much. Tom and I just sat there and motherfucked each other for most of six hours.”

  After those six hours, with the building completely empty excep
t for the four men in Kasten’s office, Kasten and Schuerholz made their best offer: three-years at $30 million, with $9 million from the last year deferred.

  “You guys already owe me $4 million in deferred money from the last contract,” Glavine said. “I don’t want you to owe me $13 million interest free.”

  “That’s the last, best offer,” Kasten said. “It’s the best we can do.”

  It wasn’t good enough. Stunned and saddened, Glavine went home. He told Clifton to tell the Mets and Phillies that the Braves were out of the picture. The Mets immediately responded by upping their offer and raising the possibility of adding a fourth year to the contract.

  The fourth year was important to Glavine for reasons that had nothing to do with money. He had finished 2002 with 242 career victories. He had won a total of sixty-nine games over the previous four seasons and believed if he stayed healthy — he had never been on the disabled list — there was a good chance he could win fifty-eight during the next four and get to three hundred wins.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it until that point,” he said. “When I was younger, I never thought I’d pitch past thirty-five, just because guys didn’t do that. But the game had changed a lot in the time that I had gone from a twenty-one-year-old rookie to a thirty-six-year-old veteran. I was thirty-six, and I felt great, and I was still pitching well. There was no reason for me to think I couldn’t pitch another four years and get to three hundred.”

  Even as he got older, Glavine had never given any thought to steroids. For one thing, his style of pitching wasn’t built on strength. Like any pitcher, his legs were an important part of his delivery, but he wasn’t a power pitcher by any stretch of the imagination. “Soft-tossing lefty” he likes to call himself.

  Several years before Major League Baseball finally got around to drug testing (2003), Glavine did take creatine, a vitamin supplement that allows people to recover more quickly after a rigorous workout. “It really worked,” he said. “I felt great. It made my work between starts a lot easier for me.”

  Creatine is not a banned substance, but as soon as MLB started drug testing, Glavine stopped using it. “It just wasn’t worth the risk,” he said. “What if, somehow, there was something in what I took that was banned, even a tiny bit. I just didn’t think it was worth the risk. I know anytime someone tests positive and says ‘I was using a legal supplement; there must have been something wrong with it,’ no one believes him. I didn’t want to somehow be the guy who was using a legal supplement and tested positive for some crazy reason.”

  Glavine was still a very good pitcher at the end of 2002, and the Mets certainly thought he could help them. They were coming off an awful season, and adding someone like Glavine to their pitching rotation would give the team an immediate credibility boost.

  The deal was finalized on the first Thursday in December: four years, $42.5 million. If nothing else, Glavine had proven Kasten wrong. But from the moment Clifton told Glavine the deal had been made, Glavine began to have buyer’s remorse.

  “It had nothing to do with the Mets or with New York, and certainly it had nothing to do with the deal,” he said. “My family lived in Atlanta. I had a daughter I shared custody on whose mother lived in Atlanta, and Chris had a son in the same situation. We had two boys who, at that point, were four and two. It just hit me that they were going to be on airplanes all the time between New York and Atlanta during the season. I wasn’t sure I could go through with everything that was going to be involved for them. Chris was the one who would be doing most of the work, and she said she was fine with it. I wasn’t so sure if I was fine with it.”

  After the announcement that he was coming to New York, Glavine spoke to the New York media. He said he was disappointed with the way the Braves had handled the negotiations. They had failed to call when they said they were going to call. He didn’t think they had negotiated in good faith. He didn’t really believe they had wanted him back.

  Kasten picked up the Friday papers and went ballistic. He called a press conference of his own and blasted Glavine. It was Glavine, he said, who had failed to call (both men now agree they had an honest misunderstanding about who was to call whom). The Braves had negotiated in good faith; they had wanted Glavine back, but he wanted every last dollar he could make.

  Glavine woke up on Saturday morning, read Kasten’s comments, and went into a state of anger and semipanic. Since his contract would not be formally filed with the union until Monday morning (at 12:01 a.m.), he was not yet officially a Met. He called Bobby Cox. He wasn’t sure he could leave the Braves. Was the door still open? Cox called Kasten and Schuerholz. They agreed that Schuerholz should be Glavine’s contact at that point.

  Schuerholz called Glavine. Did he still want to talk? Yes. Schuerholz drove to the house, and Chris went down to the wine cellar and opened a good bottle of wine.

  “Right now the best we can do for you is two years, $10 million,” Schuerholz said.

  “Is that per year or total?” Glavine asked, in such a daze he honestly wasn’t sure what Schuerholz was offering.

  “Per year,” Schuerholz said.

  “I think I want to do it,” Glavine said. “I don’t want to leave Atlanta.”

  Schuerholz told Glavine he needed to call Clifton and Jeff Wilpon immediately. He left to call Kasten and Cox. They decided to call a 1:30 p.m. press conference for the next day.

  “If Tommy had ended up staying, he would have been the fair-haired boy in Atlanta all over again,” Kasten said. “But I wasn’t convinced the deal would hold once he talked to Clifton.”

  It didn’t. Clifton told Glavine he understood why he felt the way he did, but he had given his word to the Mets. Even if the contract wasn’t signed, it would be wrong for him to back out for numerous reasons. Glavine knew Clifton was right. He also knew he wanted to stay in Atlanta. He spent the next day in a complete fog, talking to no one.

  “Even when his parents called, I told them he just couldn’t talk,” Chris Glavine said. “He was really tormented.”

  So tormented that at one point he sat down and wrote a letter announcing that he was retiring. At that moment, it seemed like the only way out. “I was a mess,” he said. “I didn’t want to renege on the Mets deal, and I didn’t want to leave Atlanta. For a few hours, I thought if I just retired that would be the best thing to do.”

  That was when Chris made the decision to call Jeff Wilpon. “You’ve got to get us out of here,” she said. “If Tom sits around and thinks and rethinks, I don’t know how it will come out.”

  Jeff Wilpon sent a plane to pick up Tom and Chris. They went through all the details of the deal the next day: where the family would live; the private airport Chris and the kids would fly into; Tom being able to fly home to Atlanta while the kids were in school when the team had an off-day. Glavine calmed down. He decided he could go through with it. The next day — finally — he was formally introduced as a Met.

  “Hardest four or five days of my life,” he said, looking back. “I felt guilty about my family, guilty about the Mets, guilty about the fans in Atlanta — just guilty. I remember going downstairs in an elevator at Shea Stadium to meet the media, and it hit me, ‘I’m not a Brave anymore; I’m a Met. We’re really doing this.’ Chris said to me on the way home, ‘You just went through a divorce after eighteen years of being married to the Braves. Don’t feel bad about feeling bad.’ She was right. I felt hurt and confused about it all. In the end, though, I felt like I’d made the right decision.”

  There would be times over the next two years — many times — when he wouldn’t be so sure.

  GLAVINE MADE HIS DEBUT as a Met on Opening Day 2003, March 31 — a cold, blustery day in New York — pitching against the Chicago Cubs.

  He wasn’t out in the cold for long. He lasted only three and two-thirds innings and was pummeled for eight runs en route to a 15–2 loss. Less than an hour into his Mets career, he heard boos from the hometown fans. That game turned out to be a harbinger. Fo
r the first time, he had to deal with injuries: he left a game in Milwaukee in early June with inflammation in his elbow and missed his next start. It was the first time in his big league career that he had missed a start. Later in the month, a Derek Jeter line drive smacked him in the chest, and he was forced to leave the game.

  Even healthy, he didn’t pitch terribly well — especially against the Braves, who looked like they were taking batting practice whenever they faced him. “We just told our guys to look for the ball outside and take it to the opposite field,” Bobby Cox said. “We had an advantage because we knew how he had been pitching for sixteen years. If there was one guy in baseball who could think along with Tommy it was Leo [Mazzone].”

  Glavine missed Mazzone. The Mets’ pitching coach, Vern Ruhle, let him continue his regimen of throwing twice between starts (most pitchers throw only once), but it wasn’t the same for Glavine without Mazzone. The team was bad again. The Mets had hired Art Howe as their manager. Howe had been very successful in Oakland, but his quiet see-no-evil approach just wasn’t going to work in New York. Mike Piazza was aging and balking at moving from catcher to first base. The team was a wreck, finishing 66–95.

  Glavine was no better. He went 9–14 — the first time since his rookie year he hadn’t won at least ten games. His ERA was 4.52, and he was 0–4 against the Braves, which really stung.

  That was also the year that Major League Baseball first began using Questech, a videotaping system that judged umpires on balls and strikes in ten major league parks. As luck would have it, Shea Stadium was a Questech park. Glavine, who had spent most of his career getting pitches on or just off the outside corner called in his favor, found that he wasn’t getting those pitches anymore. Umpires didn’t want Questech showing that a Glavine pitch just outside was a strike while someone else’s pitch in the same spot was a ball.

  “Whether that was actually happening or not doesn’t matter,” Glavine said. “I believed it was happening, and it affected my confidence and the way I pitched. I think I could go back and show you pitches that had been strikes that weren’t strikes anymore. But even if I couldn’t, I thought that was what was happening.”