Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “Again, nothing you can do,” Glavine said. “If Hosey makes the catch, it’s a great play. I threw a good pitch, Cabrera’s strong enough that he got it over the infield, and they get a run. It was just one of those innings that we all have. I was just glad it was happening in March.”

  Even in March, no pitcher wants to see an inning unravel. Glavine was able to get the next two hitters, Josh Willingham and Miguel Olivo, to fly out to right field. But the runners moved up both times, extending the Marlins lead to 4–0. As if to punctuate the futility of the inning, David Wright kicked an easy ground ball by Hermida before Glavine finally got Jason Wood to ground to second for the final out. When Valentin fielded the ball cleanly and threw it to Carlos Delgado without incident, the normally gentle spring crowd let out a derisive cheer.

  Glavine understood. “Bad baseball is bad baseball,” he said. “People paid to see the game. We weren’t very good in that inning.”

  Of course that’s what spring training is for — getting the kinks out. Glavine sailed through a one-two-three fourth and then headed to the bullpen to finish his day since, even with the troubles in the third, he had only thrown forty-nine pitches — eleven under par. Only two of the Marlins’ runs had been earned, and the key play of the third inning had been Valentin’s inability to corral Cabrera’s pop-up.

  One person who wasn’t the least bit unhappy was Rick Peterson. “If you look at it from my point of view, that was vintage Tom Glavine,” he said. “Think about it: his defense lets him down on three plays; he throws the one bad pitch that hits Boone; and yet, we’re still in the game, and he comes back the next inning and gives us a one-two-three. You can’t just look at numbers in pitching. You have to look at how the numbers came about. He’s pitching really well. I feel great about him right now.”

  ACROSS THE STATE, Mike Mussina wasn’t quite as sanguine about how his own spring was going. His first two outings had been okay — not especially sharp but not nearly bad enough to warrant concern.

  His third start was at home against the Cincinnati Reds. The first batter of the game, Brandon Phillips, hit Mussina’s first pitch deep into the left-field bleachers. Three games, three home runs, this one to the first batter — someone Mussina had never seen before in his life. “I couldn’t even tell you his last name,” he said a month later, recalling that evening.

  The time for making jokes about having his home-run pitch in midseason form was now past. As Glavine had pointed out, the third start of the spring is when things start to get serious because when you’re finished, half your spring training starts are over. To begin the third start of the spring by giving up a home run, “on a belt-high fastball, right down the middle,” Mussina said, was not good.

  The rest of the night — the Yankees were now starting to sprinkle some night games into their schedule — didn’t go much better. Mussina gave up another run in the first — aided by an error by second baseman Robinson Cano — and a third run in the third. He was done after that, having thrown fifty-seven difficult pitches. Joe Torre and Ron Guidry decided there was no point putting anyone through a fourth inning of what they were all seeing.

  “At that point, I wasn’t at all happy with myself,” Mussina said. “There comes a point where you need to start seeing improvement and progress as the spring moves along. I wasn’t seeing it at all. I couldn’t locate my breaking pitches, and my fastballs were up a lot — the home run was a perfect example. My velocity still wasn’t where it needed to be either.

  “What made it tougher was that it took me by surprise. I’d felt good coming into spring — I was healthy; there was just no apparent reason for it. After a while you start to question yourself a little bit: ‘Maybe I’m not throwing it as well as I thought I was.’ But you really can’t do that. You have to convince yourself that today is going to be better than yesterday, even if you can’t put a finger on why. You have to go back to your side sessions and really work. Maybe you weren’t concentrating as hard as you thought because everything seemed easy. You look for something, and you tell yourself it’s there; you just have to find it.”

  After the third outing Mussina worked hard in the bullpen trying to get his breaking pitches to go where he wanted them to. He slowed down, just a tiny bit, between pitches to make sure he was completely focused before he threw the ball. One of the biggest differences between veteran pitchers and young pitchers is that the veteran often sees his bullpens as an opportunity rather than as a chore. It isn’t just something you do between starts because the pitching coach says you should do it; it’s something you look forward to, especially when you aren’t pitching well, because it represents a chance to find something that will make your next start better.

  “It can be mechanical,” Mussina said. “Maybe it’s just a tiny little change you make in your motion or the way you stand on the mound before you pitch. Sometimes you make a change so small, it really doesn’t change the way you’re throwing but you think it does. And if you think it does, that can be as helpful as something that does actually change the way you’re throwing.

  “I never change my routine. I throw five fastballs, five sinkers, five curves, five changeups, five sliders. Then I throw three of each out of the stretch and finish with one of each from the windup and three fastballs — four-seamers away — to finish up. I don’t keep throwing one pitch until I get it right. I know there are guys who do that, but that can get too frustrating. I keep throwing, and I hope if I don’t start out well that I’ll get better. Maybe Ron or [bullpen catcher Mike] Borzello will say something to me while I’m throwing, or maybe they’ll say something afterward to give me something to think about or to work on the next time I throw.”

  When he’s struggling, Mussina will talk to a lot of different people, looking for answers. He respects Guidry, not only as someone who was a successful pitcher but as someone who was a successful Yankees pitcher. “There is a difference,” he said. “Mel [Stottlemyre] was the same way. They know what it’s like to pitch in Yankee Stadium and in New York. That helps.”

  He will also talk to Torre as an old catcher who knows a lot about pitching. But the person he talks to most often is Mike Borzello.

  Borzello was never a successful pitcher for the Yankees or for any other team. He grew up in Los Angeles, going to Dodger games with his dad, who had played baseball as a kid and as an adult, though never professionally. He also saw a lot of Lakers games because his mother’s sister was married to Rudy LaRusso, a standout player for the team in the 1960s.

  He was a good infielder who went to college thinking he might have a chance to get drafted, and did, in the thirty-first round, by the Cardinals. Two years into his professional career, he began to understand the realities of the minor leagues. He was playing A-ball, and the pitching coach was Hub Kittle, who had pitched in the major leagues for many years.

  “One day we’re sitting around talking before a game, and Hub says to me and a couple of the other guys, ‘Look around here; how many guys on this team do you think have a chance to play in the big leagues? One, two, three maybe? So why are the rest of you here? So that those guys can have games to play.’ ”

  Borzello thought there might be a ray of hope when the Cardinals decided to make him a catcher. He wasn’t keen on it at first but came to enjoy the position. “I found that I liked having the game in front of me and being in on every pitch,” he said. “I was lucky because Dave Ricketts was the Cardinals’ minor league catching instructor, and he was the absolute best. Everything I know about catching, I learned from him.

  “But even after the switch, I realized I was never going to be more than an organization player, and I started thinking I wanted to do something else.”

  An organization player is the kind of player Kittle was talking about — someone who bounced around the minor leagues making sure that the organization’s prospects had teammates to play their games with. Borzello, a bright guy with a college degree, found himself tiring of the long bus rides and the
pay, which had gotten to $1,100 a month at the start of 1995, his fifth year as a pro.

  He got to Double-A ball briefly — in Little Rock, Arkansas — and started to hear people telling him he would make a good manager or coach at the minor league level. “They wanted me to go to the South Atlantic League,” He said. “I’d been there. Some of the bus trips are fifteen hours. I decided to go home, even though I knew I’d miss the game.”

  Back in Los Angeles, a friend of his from the local CBS TV affiliate got him an interview at CBS for a job reading potential scripts. He was hired and liked the job, even though a lot of what he read was awful. “It was fun,” he said. “Interesting. And I wasn’t riding any buses.”

  He was happily ensconsed reading scripts in February 1996 when he got a surprise phone call from Bob Watson, whom he had met during spring trainings with the Cardinals. Watson had just become the Yankees’ general manager. Joe Torre was the new manager.

  “They were looking for a bullpen catcher,” Borzello said. “Joe remembered me from spring training and so did Bob. Watson said to me, ‘Why don’t you come on down here?’ I was skeptical. Was this for a week? Was it a tryout? I figured it was the Yankees and guys that I liked. I decided to go down and see what it was about.

  “I got there and they said, ‘Can you throw BP?’ I said I could. Then they asked me to catch [John] Wetteland who had that nasty sinker. I must have done okay because the next thing I know they’re offering me a job.”

  Bullpen catcher may not sound like a glamorous job, but when you are part of any major league team, much less the Yankees, the life is a lot different than riding buses in the minor leagues. Borzello enjoyed what he was doing right away. Mel Stottlemyre was the pitching coach, and he kept giving Borzello more and more responsibility.

  “I learned a lot working with guys like David Cone and Jimmy Key,” he said. “They were such pros. They knew exactly what they needed to do to get ready or to fix things. They liked input — honest input. In that way, they were a lot like Mussina.”

  When Mussina came to the Yankees in 2001, he was assigned to play catch early in the season with Brian Boehringer. But Boehringer was released, leaving Mussina without a catch partner. Borzello was assigned to take Boehringer’s place, and he and Mussina quickly became friends.

  “What I learned early with Mike, as with most good pitchers, is that if they ask you if something’s good and you say yes and it’s not, they know,” Borzello said. “You tell them yes when the answer is really no, and they won’t ask you again. So, my tendency is to tell them exactly what I really think right from the start. Mike liked that. He always asks me what I think because he knows I’ll give him an honest answer.”

  Borzello isn’t just Mussina’s bullpen catcher, he is his best friend on the team. They are the same age and have similar interests: ’80s music and TV shows, old cars, and pitching. What’s more, Mussina feels comfortable that Borzello isn’t likely to leave the team while he is still there.

  “You have to be careful about how close you get to guys on a team,” he said. “It’s the nature of the game. This is my seventh year here, and how many guys are left from when I got here? [Derek] Jeter, [Jorge] Posada, Mo [Rivera], and that’s it. I’m the only starting pitcher from that year who is still around. Borzy’s not going anywhere — certainly not as long as Joe is in charge and probably even after that. So, there’s an extra level of comfort that the guy isn’t going to get traded, leave as a free agent, or get cut. He’s here.”

  Because Borzello had worked with Mussina for considerably longer than Guidry, who became the pitching coach in 2006 after Stottlemyre left, he would often see things or tell Mussina things that Guidry might not. After the Cincinnati start in March, Borzello didn’t think there was any reason to panic.

  “Sometimes you do need to kick him in the butt,” he said. “But a lot of times you have to remind him how good he is. For a guy who has done as much as he’s done for as long as he’s done it, he can lose confidence quickly.”

  Mussina and Borzello will often talk at length after an off-day bullpen session. Their conversation can be about anything from the quality of Mussina’s breaking pitches to his location to his game plan. Often Borzello will question him about how he pitched to specific hitters and why he threw certain pitches.

  After working hard with Guidry and Borzello between starts, Mussina pitched against the Pirates for the second time that spring. Since the Pirates train in Bradenton, a relatively short drive from Tampa, they play the Yankees frequently during March.

  Right from the beginning, Mussina felt better on the mound than he had since he first arrived in Florida. He was throwing “strike one,” which most pitchers understand is a key to success. There are all sorts of statistics that prove a pitcher is far more successful when a count begins 0–1 to a batter than when it begins 1–0. Batters know this too, so they are often looking for a fastball over the plate on the first pitch. The best pitchers can throw strike one without grooving it.

  One of the notable exceptions to the strike-one rule is Glavine. “He may be the only pitcher, certainly one of the few, who is better when he’s down one and oh,” Tigers manager Jim Leyland said. “Most pitchers down one and oh, you think you’re getting a fastball; if they get you oh and one you tend to think breaking pitch. Glavine’s got that great changeup that he’ll throw on any count, so you never know with him if he’s going to throw that or a fastball. I think he almost prefers one and oh because then he’s got the hitter trying to outthink him, and most guys aren’t smart enough to do that.”

  Mussina is more typical — strike one is key for him. Against the Pirates, he threw strike one to four of the first six hitters and got all six of them out, three of them on one or two pitches. “I had better velocity and location,” he said. “I got some first-pitch outs, and I got my breaking pitches over. It wasn’t as if it was spectacular, but it was better. That’s what I needed to see — improvement. I had to stop running in place.”

  The only inning in which he was in any trouble was the third, when he gave up two one-out singles but pitched clear. He left after five innings, having allowed three singles and no runs. He pitched ahead of the Pittsburgh hitters almost the entire night.

  “At this point in his career, it’s really all about location,” Joe Torre said. “He’s got all these different pitches he can throw; the question is where is he going to throw them? When a pitcher gets older, especially one who was once consistently in the nineties but isn’t anymore, there’s a tendency to be afraid to pitch to contact. You do that, you end up pitching behind a lot, and that’s no good. Mike sometimes forgets that it’s okay to let the hitters hit the ball. That’s why there are eight guys on the field behind him — to catch balls that are hit. I’d rather see him give up a home run with nobody on and then get three fly-ball outs than see him walking guys or pitching three and one all the time. That will catch up with anyone sooner or later.”

  Intellectually, Mussina understands all this. But sometimes, standing on the mound, knowing his fastball might top out at 90 but is more likely to be in the 87- to 89-mile-an-hour range, he gets a little bit bat shy.

  “You know you can’t pitch from behind,” he said. “No one can on a consistent basis. But if you see a couple of balls go four hundred feet or you’re giving up line drive after line drive, you do get a little bit nervous about throwing white on white too often. If you’re throwing ninety-five or more, maybe you can get away with it. The rest of us can’t.”

  The Pittsburgh game relaxed Mussina a good deal. “It was important to see improvement, and I did,” he said. “I didn’t have to worry that I was just spinning my wheels. I was getting closer to where I needed to be the first week in April.”

  April was now two weeks away. Mussina would have two more starts before the season began. The first would be against the Toronto Blue Jays, and the second would be against the Blue Jays’ Triple-A team, for the simple reason that no one saw any need for him to mak
e the drive to Lakeland, where the Yankees were playing on March 30, the day Mussina was scheduled to make his last spring start.

  Mussina stayed behind and pitched for the Trenton Thunder, the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team. His opponent was longtime major league journeyman Tomo Ohka, best known for getting himself traded by the Washington Nationals for yelling at manager Frank Robinson, when Robinson, one of the game’s all-time great players, came to the mound to take him out of a game.

  Ohka hardly looked ready for prime time, giving the Thunder seven runs in less than five innings. Mussina was just the opposite. He pitched seven shutout innings, gave up four hits, nudged his pitch count up over eighty for the first time all spring, and pronounced himself ready to start the season.

  “I better be ready,” he said. “I seriously doubt if I ask them to push the start of the year back a week or two that they’ll do it.”

  He smiled and, without being prompted, added: “Am I where I want to be? I sure hope so, because I really don’t have any choice in the matter.”

  AFTER THE SLOPPY GAME AGAINST THE MARLINS, Tom Glavine came back five days later to face them again. This time both he and his fielders were far more efficient. Glavine pitched five innings — that spring, he had gone two innings, three innings, four innings, and five innings, which is pretty much a perfect start for a pitcher — and this time the only inning he was in trouble was the fourth when he got wild for a moment, walking two and hitting a batter. But he pitched out of the jam and ended up with five shutout innings.

  “Sometimes I’ll walk a guy, even if it means putting someone in scoring position, rather than give in and throw him a pitch he might hit for extra bases or out of the park,” Glavine said. “Walks really don’t scare me. Throwing a pitch that’s over the plate on three and one does.”