Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  The only good news was off the field — his family loved New York. The Glavines had found a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that was a relatively easy commute to the ballpark. The kids loved the area and so did Chris, especially the fact that they were away from Atlanta’s brutal summer heat for almost three months.

  Still, it was a long year. Glavine wondered if perhaps his decision to leave Atlanta might end up costing him his chance to win three hundred games. He was now forty-nine wins away, meaning he would have to average a little more than sixteen victories per year if he was to reach that milestone by the end of his contract.

  The 2004 season started far better than that of 2003. The Mets had hired a new pitching coach, Rick Peterson, who had worked wonders with a young Oakland staff when Howe had been the manager there, helping make Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito into twenty-game winners. Peterson was the polar opposite of Mazzone in just about every way possible. He was a college-educated, literature-quoting, vegetable-eating, Zen master. Or, at the very least, a Zen pitching coach.

  “To say that Leo and Rick are different is one of the great understatements of all time,” Glavine said, laughing. “If you put the two of them in a room and they talked to each other for an hour, I’m not sure either one would understand a word the other was saying.”

  Peterson grew up in a baseball family — his dad was the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates when he was a kid — and was a pitcher with some promise until he blew out his arm in college when his coach left him in a game to throw 164 pitches. “I was never the same after that,” he says now, without rancor. “I’m not saying I would have been a big leaguer if that hadn’t happened, but after that there wasn’t any doubt.”

  He graduated from Jacksonville University in 1976 with a degree in psychology and was drafted in the twenty-first round by the Pirates. He spent the next four years pitching at the A-ball level in the Pirates’ system before deciding it was time — at age twenty-five — to move on. He had already decided what he was going to do when he was finished playing, so moving from playing to coaching seemed like a natural step at the time.

  “I always loved the game; I grew up with it,” he said. “After I got hurt in college, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it very far in pro ball, but I wanted to take the shot and see how far I got. I was into a lot of other things by then — art, reading. I loved to paint — still do.

  “Not long after I graduated, I was in San Diego visiting some friends, and I went on a seven-day fast. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a kid, and I just felt like this was something good to do — cleanse my body entirely for a little while.

  “I was walking on the beach during the fast — and I’m not really sure how to describe this — but I was looking up at the sky, and the sun came slanting down in a certain way, and something inside me said, ‘You’re supposed to teach.’ I know how that sounds, but that’s how it happened. The thing I knew best was baseball; the thing I know best in baseball is pitching. So, here I am.”

  Peterson almost never raises his voice to a pitcher. He is constantly looking for analogies they can relate to and always talks about the process of pitching — constantly telling his pitchers not to worry too much about results. If they focus on the process, the results will be there.

  After all those years with Mazzone, Glavine went through a little bit of culture shock working with Peterson. Even four years into their relationship, he would still occasionally roll his eyes when Peterson would point out a butterfly in the bullpen.

  “Do you realize what a miracle that is?” Peterson was likely to say. “Not that long ago that beautiful creature was a caterpillar. Think about that, Tom — a caterpillar! Now look at it. Seeing it has to be a good omen.”

  “That’s great, Rick,” Glavine would likely reply. “Now would you mind taking a look at my changeup?”

  Glavine and the other pitchers may occasionally mock what Glavine calls “all the Zen stuff,” but they respect Peterson.

  “He may go on for a while, but he’s smart, and he understands people as well as he understands baseball,” Glavine said. “When we first talked, he asked me a lot of questions about golf, which I wondered about. But after a while, he began using golf analogies that really made sense to me, especially when I was struggling.”

  Glavine was superb for the first half of the 2004 season. He was 3–1 with a 1.64 ERA in April, and he pitched a one-hitter against Colorado — taking a no-hitter into the eighth inning — in May. The Mets were bad again (71–91), but Glavine made his ninth All-Star team in July.

  Then disaster struck — again. The Mets had wrapped up an early-August road trip in St. Louis, and Glavine had flown home on Sunday night to spend an off-day with his family. Chris and the kids had just returned to Atlanta to get ready for the start of school. He caught a late-morning flight to New York on Tuesday, landed at LaGuardia Airport, and got into a cab to make the one-mile trip to Shea Stadium. The cab pulled out into traffic while Glavine called Chris to let her know he had landed safely.

  “I was getting ready to hang up with her, and I remember thinking, ‘Short trip, but I probably should put my seat belt on,” he said. “Just as I thought that, I heard the cabbie say something loudly — I think I was looking down at that moment for my seat belt — and the next thing I knew, I got slammed headfirst into the partition between the front seat and the backseat.”

  The cab had been cut off by a car trying to weave through traffic on the ramp leading onto the Grand Central Parkway. Glavine’s face went directly into the partition and shattered it.

  “I remember kind of going down and wondering if I was going to pass out,” he said. “I didn’t, and I thought, ‘Okay, that’s good,’ and then I felt this pain in my mouth. I looked down, and I saw blood all over my hands. Then I saw a tooth in my hands too.”

  Glavine actually managed to call Chris back while he was spitting up blood and teeth (two were knocked out) to tell her he’d been in an accident but he was okay. Then he called Mets public relations director Jay Horwitz to tell him what had happened and that he suspected he wouldn’t make it to the ballpark as planned. Horwitz immediately called Jeff Wilpon, who made arrangements to have Glavine taken to the Manhattan hospital where the Mets send their players.

  When the police arrived, they put Glavine in a squad car and waited for the ambulance.

  “How do I look?” Glavine asked the first cop on the scene.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the cop said. “But not a lot worse.”

  Once he got to the hospital, they began giving him one novocaine shot after another because of all the work they needed to do on his gums and his teeth. “After about the tenth one, I said, ‘Enough; do what you have to do. I’ll deal with the pain.’ ”

  Before they dug in to do the major work, Glavine asked if he could go to the bathroom. “When I finished, I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror,” he said. “That was it. I went down.”

  He was in the hospital until late that night and ended up having to go through several rounds of dental surgery — the final one done in January of 2007. He missed a total of thirteen days — just two starts — and came back on August 21 to pitch against the Giants.

  “It was probably a mistake,” he said. “I couldn’t throw at all while I was out because they were afraid I might rip open the stitches in my mouth on my follow-through. I came back too quickly, and I was probably a little bit afraid of hurting myself when I went back. I was pretty bad the rest of the season.”

  He finished 11–14 with a respectable 3.60 ERA, but nine of the wins came before the accident. He could easily have had a dozen wins before the All-Star break if the Mets had been better, but he didn’t. He was now at 262 victories, and it was clear that he wasn’t getting to three hundred by the end of 2006 when his contract was up. People in New York were calling his signing yet another Mets mistake in a parade of them during that period.

  The 2005 season began much the way th
e 2004 season had ended. Glavine was still struggling. He had almost grown accustomed to not getting the outside pitches called in his favor anymore, but he hadn’t come up with a way to consistently get hitters out without his bread-and-butter pitch — the one just off the outside corner — working for him.

  He opened the season by getting bombed in Cincinnati — five runs in three and two-thirds innings, and it just kept getting worse. The bottom came in June when the Mets made an interleague road trip to Oakland and Seattle. Glavine was merely mediocre in Oakland — four runs and ten hits in six innings. But then he was awful in Seattle, giving up six runs while getting just seven outs before new manager Willie Randolph mercifully came to get him.

  Glavine was just about at the end of his rope. He was 4–7 for the season, and his ERA was 5.06. The notion that he might stick around long enough to win thirty-four more games was laughable. He was, as you might expect, getting hammered in New York. One radio talk show host wondered on the air if the driver who had slammed into Glavine’s cab the previous August could be found for a reprise.

  On the long flight home from Seattle, Rick Peterson sat in the front of the plane trying to decide what to do next. He had tried just about everything he could think of to get Glavine out of his funk. Because Peterson had so much respect for Glavine as a pitcher and liked him so much as a person, Glavine’s pitching was tearing him up almost as much as it was tearing up Glavine. Finally, he made a decision. Peterson got out of his seat, walked back to where Glavine was, and slid into the empty spot next to him. He knew Glavine wasn’t in the mood for any Zen soothing, and he had none to give. He asked the flight attendant if they could have a couple of beers.

  “I was really nervous going back there,” he said. “I’m very aware of who Tom Glavine is and how much he’s accomplished in baseball. I never got close to the major leagues as a pitcher. But I had decided I had to tell him that he had to blow up the way he had pitched for eighteen years and try something completely new.”

  Once the beers arrived, Peterson started out with a golf question.

  “How many clubs are you allowed to have in your bag?” he asked Glavine.

  Glavine wasn’t really in the mood for a golf analogy at that moment, but he isn’t the kind of guy to tell someone to leave him alone, and he liked Peterson enough to play along.

  “Fourteen,” he answered.

  “Well, as a pitcher right now, you’re using about seven clubs. Does it make any sense to use only half the clubs you’re allowed to use?”

  Glavine looked at him quizzically.

  “You have to start pitching inside,” Peterson said. “Not once in a while to get a guy off the plate — all the time.”

  Glavine had never pitched inside because his game had always been to get batters to chase pitches outside. When his changeup is working and his location is good, he likes to say he has batters “playing the chase game.” Pitching inside for a nonpower pitcher was high risk because if a batter is ready for an inside pitch and it isn’t located perfectly, he is apt to crush it.

  “Pitch inside?” Glavine said. “Me?”

  Peterson nodded. “Every team in the league has the same scouting report on you: lay off on the pitch off the plate; wait for him to come over the plate, and then take the ball to the opposite field or up the middle. They’re sitting on your pitches, Tom. Your game is keeping guys off balance. No one is off balance right now.”

  Glavine couldn’t argue with that. It had been a while since he had felt as if he had hitters off balance. They talked for a while longer about when to throw inside and what pitches to throw inside and when to go back outside. Glavine’s thinking was simple: I can’t pitch any worse. Why not try it?

  He unveiled his new self in Yankee Stadium a few nights later. He was inside, and he was outside. The Yankee hitters were surprised. “He was a different guy completely,” Joe Torre remembered. “A couple of times, I was tempted to check his uniform number to make sure it was Tom.”

  He pitched six innings that night and gave up two earned runs and got the win. Each time out, he got a little more confident with his new style, and even after word got around the league that he was pitching differently it didn’t seem to matter.

  “They knew I was willing to come inside,” he said. “But they didn’t know when I was going to come inside. It was like the old days; I had them chasing again.”

  The turnaround was remarkable. In his first 15 starts through Seattle, Glavine had given up 48 earned runs in 85 innings. In his last 19 starts of the season, he gave up 35 earned runs in 126 innings, pitching to an ERA of 2.50. He finished with a flourish, winning his last three starts, including a masterful two-hit, eleven-strikeout shutout of the Colorado Rockies in his final start of the season. He was 9–6 after the late-night talk on the plane with Peterson and could have been considerably better if the bullpen hadn’t blown several leads for him.

  “I felt like a new man, a new pitcher,” he said. “Rick deserves a lot of credit because he convinced me I had to change the way I was pitching. It isn’t easy to get someone who has been pitching as long as I have to start all over again, but he did it.”

  The new Glavine was just about as good in 2006 as he had been late in 2005. He went 15–7, and except for a stretch in July where he struggled with his control, he was outstanding all year. The Mets had finally turned around after Randolph had been hired as the manager, Omar Minaya had taken over as general manager, and Pedro Martinez had joined Glavine in the rotation, with Billy Wagner as the closer. After going 83–79 in 2005, the Mets dominated the National League East throughout 2006, taking complete control of the pennant race by the All-Star break. They cruised home with a 97–65 record and won the division by twelve games, finally ending the Braves’ run of fourteen consecutive division titles.

  There were really only two down moments for Glavine all season, although one of them was potentially serious.

  The first came in July, when he was struggling. On June 23, he had raised his record for the season to 11–2 with a victory over Toronto. Over his next six starts, nothing went right. He gave up twenty-one runs in thirty-four innings and was fortunate to lose only twice, getting off the hook with no decisions in the other four games.

  “Every year you go through a period where you just can’t get anyone out,” he said. “This lasted a little longer and was a little more worrisome, if only because I was forty years old. I mean, I wasn’t panicking or anything, but I was definitely frustrated.”

  On a hot Sunday in Atlanta, Glavine went out for his sixth start of July. The Mets promptly staked him to a 3–0 lead. Still struggling against his old team, Glavine let the Braves close to 7–3 by the end of the second, but then the Mets scored again to make it 8–3 in the third.

  “At that point, given the heat and my pitch count, I’m just thinking about getting through five so I can get the bullpen to finish it off for me and get a win,” he said.

  He almost didn’t make it through the fourth. The Braves scored three runs, with two out, the score now 8–6. Glavine steadied and got the final hitter out to maintain the lead. He walked into the dugout, put a towel on his neck, and saw Randolph approaching.

  “You’re done, Tommy,” Randolph said. “The bullpen will take it from here.”

  Glavine was stunned. He knew he wasn’t pitching well, but he thought at worst either Randolph or Peterson would ask him if he thought he had another inning in him. “I’ve never been a guy who always says I’m okay no matter what,” he said. “After the eighth inning in Game Six [of the ’95 World Series], I told Bobby [Cox] and Leo [Mazzone] that I thought I was done, and I was pitching a one-hitter.

  “If Willie had come and gotten me during the fourth, I would have understood. But I got out of the inning. At the very least, especially given how I was scuffling and needing a win to get some confidence back, I thought he’d let me start the fifth. If I put someone on, fine, come get me. But at least give me a shot.”

  If Randolph
had it to do all over again, he probably would do just that. But he was thinking he had an older pitcher who was struggling in the heat. Peterson was worried about Glavine’s pitch count. The Mets had a comfortable lead in the pennant race — eleven games — but it was still Atlanta and it was still the Braves. So, Randolph made the move.

  “When Tommy and I sat down and talked about it, I understood why he was upset,” Randolph said later. “I respected his point of view, and I think he respected mine. I think it’s fair to say that was a learning experience for me as a manager.”

  Once he knew he was out of the game, Glavine went back to the clubhouse and, by his own description, proceeded to go ballistic. “I was hot,” he said. “About as angry as I can ever remember being. I don’t throw things around very much, but that day I did.”

  When Randolph heard what had happened in the clubhouse, he asked Glavine to come to his office the next day to talk. Both men explained their thinking. There was an agreement to disagree. “And then it was over,” Glavine said. “I was still a little upset, but you get over it. I think Willie knew where I was coming from and that was all I could ask.”

  It helped that Glavine ended his seven-game no-victory skein with seven solid innings against the Phillies six days later. Eleven days later, Glavine pitched against the Phillies, this time in Philadelphia. He pitched seven innings and left for a pinch hitter in the eighth, with the Mets trailing 3–0.

  Sitting in the dugout in the top of the eighth — Glavine always waits until the end of an inning to go to the clubhouse after he comes out of a game — he felt some coldness in the ring finger on his pitching hand. It was a comfortable night, so the coldness wasn’t caused by the weather. After he had gone back to the clubhouse and gone through his twenty-minute postgame routine with an ice pack on his shoulder, the finger still felt cold.