Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  Glavine’s approach to pitch counts — as Leyland points out — is often different than the norm. He throws more balls than most good pitchers. In fact, he is almost at the top or near the top of the standings in the now closely tracked ball-to-strike ratio. In other words, he throws far more balls than most pitching coaches would like to see.

  “Ideally, you’d probably like a two-strikes-to-one-ball ratio, or something close to that or even better if possible,” Glavine said. “But sometimes I just can’t pitch that way. I’m just not going to give in to the hitter because the count is three and one or even three and oh and throw him a fastball he can hit.”

  “Not giving in” is a mantra among pitchers. It means you don’t give a hitter a fastball over the plate in order to try to throw a strike when you are behind in the count. Most pitchers talk about not giving in, but few are as stubborn about it as Glavine. In fact, when other players talk about him, that is almost invariably the first thing they bring up: “You know he’s never going to give in.” Glavine is as apt to throw a changeup on the outside corner on 3–0 as he is on 0–2.

  “The only time it creates a problem for me is if I’m having control problems on a given day and it drives my pitch count up,” he said. “I don’t want to get in a situation where I throw sixty pitches the first three innings because then I know it’s going to be a battle to go six. At times, it can be a delicate balance.”

  Glavine’s fifth start of the spring should have come on March 21 against the Dodgers in Vero Beach, which is about 30 miles north of Port St. Lucie on I-95, a fairly easy trip, especially midmorning, for a 1:05 game. But Willie Randolph and Rick Peterson asked him to stay home that day to pitch in a simulated game. Their reasoning had little to do with Glavine.

  “They were trying to make decisions on guys,” Glavine said. “Aaron Sele, Chan Ho Park, Jorge Sosa, Mike Pelfrey all needed some innings, and they wanted to see them pitch in game conditions a couple more times before they decided who to bring north and who they wanted in the rotation to start the season. I just needed work, so staying home and pitching in a simulated game was no problem for me.”

  Simulated games can take several forms. The kind Glavine pitched in involved his throwing about eighty pitches over six innings. No formal score was kept, and Glavine’s “team” didn’t come to bat. Instead, he simply sat in the dugout for about ten minutes after every three outs, the way he probably would in a real game.

  That left Glavine with one final start before the opener. It was at home against the Dodgers. Glavine pitched six innings and, in his last inning of the spring, finally got knocked around a little bit: five hits produced three runs. It was the only time other than the sloppy Sunday game against the Marlins that he gave up any runs at all. Even after giving up those runs, he finished the spring with a sparkling ERA of 2.25.

  “I think I probably got a little careless, let my mind wander a little that last inning against the Dodgers,” he said later. “Maybe the thought crossed my mind for a second that this might be my last inning ever in spring training. I didn’t do a lot of that during the spring, but on occasion those thoughts would cross my mind: ‘Is this the last time?’ Or maybe I’d just had enough of pretend baseball, which in the end is what spring training is. The wins and losses don’t matter; neither do the stats. You’re just trying to get ready for the real thing.”

  Glavine was ready. The real thing was six days away.

  12

  Real Baseball

  IF THE DAY PITCHERS AND CATCHERS report for spring training is the most romanticized in baseball, Opening Day is not far behind. There is, for example, no such thing as “opening day” — capital letters are required. Teams that will play in front of half-filled stadiums almost every day of the season will sell out on Opening Day. Fans who may not show up again for the rest of the season, unless perhaps their hometown team makes postseason, will show up on Opening Day.

  On Opening Day, everyone has hope. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  Of course, Opening Day, like everything else in sports, has changed considerably since the days when presidents threw out the first pitch in Washington, D.C., and no one played in the National League before the Cincinnati Reds.

  Once, it was unheard of for Opening Day to be Opening Night, but nowadays it happens on a regular basis. Four of the fifteen openers played during the first three days of the 2007 season were played at night, and three more were played in the late afternoon to accommodate television.

  The Mets-Cardinals was a game set up strictly for television, specifically ESPN, which liked to take advantage of the fact that Sunday was a rest day during college basketball’s Final Four, and there was no serious competition for viewers. Generally speaking, players really don’t care where or when Opening Day or Opening Night falls. Their major concern is the weather. Having just come from the warmth of Florida or Arizona, they know their bodies will be in for a shock when they come north in early April. This is especially true for pitchers because the most difficult thing to do in cold weather is to keep your fingers moist, which is critical when pitchers try to feel the baseball and grip it to throw a specific pitch.

  “Being cold isn’t so bad,” Tom Glavine said. “Not being able to feel the baseball is very bad. It affects every pitch you throw.”

  On especially cold days, pitchers will keep a hot-water bottle with them in the dugout and wrap their pitching hand around it between innings. Often, they don’t remain in the dugout when their team is up, instead racing back to the clubhouse to keep warm. This is more difficult to do in the National League, where pitchers hit at least once every three innings and frequently more often than that. On especially cold days, pitchers are also allowed to back off the mound and lick their fingers to keep them moist — something not allowed when the weather is warmer.

  The Mets and Cardinals got lucky on Opening Night in St. Louis. The game-time temperature was a balmy seventy-two degrees, although there was a brisk seventeen-mile-an-hour wind blowing out to right field. For the Mets, the most difficult part of the evening was what came before the game: the Cardinals unveiling their World Championship banner while most of the 45,429 in the new Busch Stadium celebrated. The Mets couldn’t help feeling that they could easily have been unveiling that very banner when they got home the next week.

  The Mets had gone through the postseason without two of their top-three starting pitchers — Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez — and had still come within one victory of the World Series. They had lost Game Seven of the National League Championship Series to the Cardinals when their best hitter, Carlos Beltran, had taken a called strike three from rookie reliever Adam Wainwright, with two outs, the bases loaded, and the Mets trailing 3–1 in the bottom of the ninth.

  That’s why there was a strong sense of “this is our year” in the Mets clubhouse. The players believed they had lost to the Cardinals with one hand — or perhaps more accurately, two arms — tied behind their backs. Martinez still hadn’t returned, but Hernandez had, and with most of the 2006 team intact, there was no reason to believe that 2007 would not be their year.

  Opening Night certainly did nothing to dispel that feeling.

  Glavine was matched against Chris Carpenter, who had won twenty-one games and the National League Cy Young Award in 2005 and had come back from injuries to win fifteen more in 2006. Which was why the last thing Glavine expected was to walk to the mound in the bottom of the fourth inning with a 5–0 lead.

  “Of course I got the whole thing started,” he joked.

  In a sense, he had. He had led off the top of the third with a single, and, even though he had been forced out at second by Paul Lo Duca, his hit started a two-run inning for the Mets.

  On the mound, Glavine was pretty close to cruise control. Adam Kennedy tripled with one out in the bottom of the third, but Carpenter bunted into a fielder’s choice at the plate trying to get Kennedy home. It wasn’t until the sixth inning that the Cardinals began to get to Glavine even a littl
e bit. A pinch-hit single by Skip Schumaker was followed by an RBI double by David Eckstein that made it 5–1. Then Preston Wilson, the ex-Met, singled, but Beltran cut Eckstein — and the potential for a big inning — down at the plate with a perfect throw from center. That play loomed large when Glavine walked Albert Pujols — a classic example of an intentional though technically unintentional walk — and then very unintentionally hit Scott Rolen to load the bases.

  That brought up catcher Yadier Molina, whose two-run home run in the ninth inning of Game Seven of the NLCS had been the difference between the two teams a little more than five months earlier. He hit the ball hard but lined it right at Jose Reyes.

  End of inning, end of the night for Glavine. He had thrown eighty-nine pitches, twenty-three of them in the sixth, and he and Rick Peterson agreed that was plenty for Opening Night. The bullpen took over and produced three scoreless innings, and the Mets won 6–1.

  It was about as good a start to the season as Glavine or the Mets could have hoped for: Glavine had been effective and so had the bullpen. As a bonus, Glavine had been on base twice with a single and a walk, and the Mets had taken a little of the joy out of the Cardinals’ celebration of their 2006 title. The win made Glavine 5–3 in season openers, and, most important, it made him 291–191 for his career — nine wins away from pitching Nirvana.

  Glavine’s victory got the Mets off to a rolling start. They went on to sweep all three games in St. Louis, which sent them to Atlanta in as good a frame of mind as possible. Which was important. Because there was no place in baseball more difficult for the Mets or for Glavine.

  OPENING DAY FOR THE NEW YORK YANKEES was far more traditional than the Mets’ Opening Night in St. Louis. To begin with, it was at Yankee Stadium, generally considered the most historic venue in sports. In 1999 when Sports Illustrated had, as part of its end of the millenium compilation, selected the twenty most historic venues in sports, Yankee Stadium had been ranked number one.

  It was so historic that it was going to be torn down. For years, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had insisted the Yankees needed a new ballpark. He had talked about moving to New Jersey and to downtown Manhattan. He had insisted at one point that people were afraid to go to games in the Bronx at night. Then the team got good again, and attendance in the Bronx shot up to about fifty thousand people per game — day or night.

  Still, Steinbrenner, like a lot of owners in sports, wanted a monument to himself. Yankee Stadium, which had opened in 1923 and been refurbished in 1974 and 1975 (the Yankees played those two seasons in Shea Stadium), was still a wonderful place to watch a baseball game. But it didn’t have nearly as many luxury boxes as Steinbrenner wanted, and luxury boxes are the yin and yang of most owners’ existence today. Attendance is nice; hundreds of luxury boxes is much nicer. What’s more, Yankee Stadium would always be “The House That Ruth Built.” The New Yankee Stadium would be, as the first ten pages of the Yankees 2007 media guide reminded everyone, “The House That George Built.”

  “It’s just hard to believe that in two years this place won’t be here anymore,” Joe Torre said. “I know why the new place is needed, but there’s just so much history here.”

  Monday, April 2, 2007, would be the eighty-third — and second-to-last — Opening Day in Yankee Stadium. The Yankees’ Opening Day pitcher would not be Chien-Ming Wang as had been planned. He had torn a hamstring in what should have been his second-to-last spring training start and would be out for a month. Andy Pettitte was nursing a sore back, so Torre didn’t want to move him up a day. Mike Mussina’s schedule had been set up for him to pitch on Thursday, so it was impossible to move him up three days. The same was true for Kei Igawa. That left just one man who could take the ball on Opening Day for the Yankees: Carl Pavano.

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Mussina laughed. “Actually, after Wanger got hurt, I thought to myself, ‘It makes sense for Pavano to pitch. He’s healthy. He wasn’t supposed to go until Saturday, so it falls right for him in terms of rest, so why not?’ I even brought it up to Ron [Guidry]. Maybe it will be the start of something good for him.”

  Pavano was sharp for four innings, while the Yankees built a 3–1 lead, but the season did not start auspiciously for the Yankees’ two biggest stars: Alex Rodriguez dropped a foul pop in the first inning, and Derek Jeter booted a ground ball in the second. A-Rod’s first at bat produced a strikeout and the first boos of the season.

  Pavano sailed into the fifth before things began to come apart for him. The Devil Rays scored four times in the fifth, and Torre had to go and get him, with one man out and three runs in. The Yankees got him off the hook when Rodriguez singled, stole a base, and scored in the seventh to take the lead at 6–5 and then hit a two-run home run in the eighth to silence the boos. The Yankees went on to win 9–5, and, at least for one day, all was well in “The House That Ruth Built and George Was About to Tear Down.”

  Things did not stay that way for long. Wednesday’s game — most teams have a day off after Opening Day — was rained out. That meant Mussina would be pushed back to pitching on Friday against the Orioles instead of the final game against the Devil Rays on Thursday.

  “I know people talk about me being a creature of habit, and it’s true,” he said. “I like to pitch on the fifth day, and at times I’ve had trouble adapting when I have to wait a day. In this case, the plan was for me to pitch on my sixth day, which at the start of the season, especially going from hot weather to cold, isn’t a bad thing. It’s also easier if it’s planned. I can plan my off-day schedule knowing I’ve got an extra day.”

  Another extra day was not part of the plan. “I know how it sounds when you say it, but when you go a week between starts, it feels like forever. Sometimes you wonder if you’ll even remember how to pitch when you get out there.”

  Pettitte pitched the second game against the Rays and wasn’t much better than Pavano, although once again the Yankee defense was awful. After three errors on Monday, the team made three more on Thursday, on a cold night, and Pettitte was gone with no one out in the fifth, having given up four runs — only two of them earned. The Rays went on to win 7–6.

  Two games into the season, the Yankee bullpen had already pitched nine and two-thirds innings. That was not what Torre or Guidry had in mind. Since the team was scheduled to play three days in a row against the Orioles, they were counting on Mussina to pitch deep into the game and give the bullpen a chance to catch its breath.

  It didn’t come close to happening that way. Mussina’s season began like this: a lead-off double in the gap by Brian Roberts, a bunt single by Melvin Mora, and a two-run double by Nick Markakis. Orioles 2, Yankees 0. The game was not yet four minutes old.

  It was, to be fair, a miserable April night. The temperature at game time was forty-one degrees, and with the windchill the temperature was closer to freezing. It was overcast and dank, and Mussina had trouble getting loose in the bullpen and clearly didn’t feel comfortable when he got to the mound.

  “It’s always been tough to pitch in cold weather, but it’s tougher now than when I first came up,” he said. “After the strike [in ’94], they changed the baseballs. You could feel it when you put them in your hands. They’re slicker now, tougher to grip, and they’re wound tighter. Much tighter.”

  How does he know that?

  “A year or so after the strike, we were sitting around during a rain delay, talking about how different the baseball felt in your hands,” he said. “For some reason, I had kept a couple of balls in my locker from before the strike. We went and got one and cut it open. The inside of the ball just lay there; I mean literally just laid down on the table. Then we opened up a poststrike ball — it was as if the thing was alive. It literally stood up on the table next to the other one that was just lying there.”

  Other pitchers confirm Mussina’s suspicions. “During the strike I worked out at home with a bunch of balls I’d brought home with me,” said Ron Darling. “When we came back, the ball felt different in
my hands. I took a couple home and compared the stitching. It’s much tighter on the new balls — and the balls are slicker. It makes a big difference, especially when the weather’s cold.”

  Mussina, who describes himself as a “paranoid, conspiracy theorist,” believes that Major League Baseball thought home runs were an important part of bringing the game back after the strike. That’s one reason many believe baseball turned a blind eye toward steroid use. It also explains, Mussina believes, the slicker, more tightly wound baseballs; the much smaller strike zones of recent years; and, clearly, the smaller ballparks being built all around baseball.

  “Consider this stat,” Mussina said, reeling off numbers as he often does. “In 1992 my ERA was 2.54, and I finished third in the league. In 2000 my ERA was 3.79, and I finished third again. What does that tell you?”

  Warming up on a frigid night, Mussina knew he was going to struggle to control his breaking pitches. He went through his bullpen routine and walked to the mound. Like Glavine, he never varies the eight warm-up pitches he throws when he is on the mound: two fastballs, a sinker, a curve, a changeup, a slider, another sinker, and, finally, just like Glavine, a fastball to the outside corner for a right-handed hitter. “That’s the pitch I want to feel coming out of my hand before I start to pitch for real,” he says.

  The ball never felt good coming out of his hand that night.

  “It doesn’t matter what the conditions are,” he said later. “There are no excuses. You have to pitch in the conditions that exist. The other guy is pitching in the same conditions. Hitting isn’t easy when it’s that cold either. I just wasn’t very good.”

  One of the reasons the New York media had come to respect Mussina was that he didn’t make excuses. If it had been Randy Johnson pitching that night, he probably would have talked about how tough it was to feel the baseball in the cold and how unfair it was to play baseball in such lousy weather.