When a rainout occurs and is rescheduled as a day-night, Joe Torre always gives the pitcher who was supposed to pitch the previous day the option of pitching day or night. Some prefer to get the start over with and pitch during the daytime. Mussina will usually opt for the night game.
“I don’t like pitching in an empty, quiet stadium,” he said. “I would rather have people cheering against me and making some kind of noise than pitch when no one is there. Those afternoon games of day-nights tend to be very quiet.”
Andy Pettitte pitched the afternoon game in front of a crowd that could have been counted on several hands. But, not long after the Yankees had won that game 4–3, it started to rain again. “I’m thinking, ‘You have to be kidding,’ ” Mussina said.
Fortunately the rain abated this time and the game started forty minutes late. The delay — twenty-four hours or forty minutes — didn’t seem to bother Mussina. He retired the Rangers one-two-three in the first inning, only his second one-two-three inning of the season. He started the second by striking out Sammy Sosa before Hank Blalock singled. That led nowhere and the Yankees then staked him to a 2–0 lead in the top of the third.
“I felt great,” Mussina said. “It was a good night to pitch, not too hot at all, especially for down there. I mean it can be in the eighties and humid in May, and it felt more like seventy. I was glad to get the first inning out of the way and do it quickly. My control was surprisingly good from the start. When you haven’t pitched for a while, the thing you worry most about is your control. I wasn’t throwing as hard as I normally would be in May, but that was to be expected. My location made up for it most of the time.”
Only in the fourth did the Rangers mount any kind of rally. Sosa, making a comeback after a year out of baseball, singled with one out. Blalock doubled and Sosa, who at age thirty-eight could be timed on a sundial when running the bases, stopped at third. Ian Kinsler scored him with a sacrifice fly to make it 2–1, but Mussina got Brad Wilkerson to pop out to end the inning. He then retired the Rangers one-two-three in the fifth.
“By then I was pretty gassed,” Mussina said. “You go twenty-two days without pitching, it’s hard to get your stamina back. I couldn’t run at all while I was out because it was a hamstring so my conditioning wasn’t what it should be. Plus, when you haven’t actually pitched, the act of getting on the mound in game conditions is completely different than throwing in the bullpen or a simulated game or even a minor league game. Your arm strength just isn’t there. I hadn’t thrown that many pitches, but I was tired.”
Ron Guidry and Torre had watched Mussina closely throughout the game. He wasn’t on a strict pitch count, but he was very much on a “don’t push him too hard” leash. When Mussina walked to the dugout after the fifth and sixty-four pitches, Guidry walked over to him.
“How you feeling?” he asked.
“Tired,” Mussina answered.
Guidry nodded. “That’s what I thought. We’re going to get you some help. Good job.”
If Mussina had said he felt fine, Guidry probably would have told him he was done for the night anyway.
“When you’re working with a guy like Moose, you expect him to be honest, because he’s too smart to try to be macho, especially the first game back,” Torre said later. “But if he had wanted to keep going, we weren’t going to let him. There was just no sense in it, even if he had said he was okay.”
Mussina was both happy and relieved: happy that he had pitched well; relieved that he had been pain free. He figured the odds that he would get a win leaving the game up 2–1 after five innings weren’t great, but that wasn’t what this start was about. “It wasn’t a struggle in any way, and it could have been after three weeks,” he said. “I walked up to the clubhouse thinking if I somehow got a win that would just be a bonus because when you come out up one run with four innings to go you certainly can’t count on a win.”
He got one though, even though it took five Yankee relievers — including closer Mariano Rivera — to get to the finish line. The only run the bullpen gave up was a home run to Mark Teixeira in the eighth by the ever-erratic Kyle Farnsworth. In the meantime, the Yankees had tacked on three more runs against the Texas bullpen, and the final was 5–2 — Mussina’s 240th career win.
“Number one for this year is a lot more important than that right now,” he said. “At some point, even though you tell yourself it’s early and there’s no need to panic, you do start to panic a little. Is this just a three-week injury, or is it the beginning of the end? It’s always there in the back of your mind when you get to this point in your career. It isn’t something you lie awake in bed and worry about at night, not often anyway, but when you aren’t throwing well or when you get hurt, you can’t help but wonder just a little. Getting to pitch and to pitch well felt very, very good.”
Mussina had to wait the extra day again before his next start. Since he and Pettitte had pitched on the same day, Torre opted to start Pettitte a day before Mussina, partly because Pettitte was pitching well but also because Mussina was still rebuilding arm strength. The opponent was the same: Texas, this time in Yankee Stadium.
Mussina went six innings and got up to eighty-five pitches. The Yankees made life a little bit easier for him by scoring four runs in the first. As in Texas, Mussina only had one difficult inning. This time it was the third. Wilkerson led off with a home run to make it 4–1. Nelson Cruz doubled and Chris Stewart walked. For some strange reason Kenny Lofton then bunted. Exactly why Lofton would choose to bunt or why manager Ron Washington might order him to bunt with two men on, no one out, and the team three runs behind with a chance for a big inning, no one knew for sure. But Mussina wasn’t complaining.
The runners moved to second and third, but the potential momentum of the inning was lost. Mussina got the dangerous Michael Young to ground to second — Cruz scoring — and then got Teixeira to fly to left. Inning over, lead intact at 4–2. The Yankees added two in the fourth and cruised from there.
Mussina still felt strong when he came out. “I thought I could go another inning,” he said. “Gator [Guidry] came over to me after the sixth and said, ‘Good job. You’re done.’ For a second I thought about trying to talk him into another inning. There are times when I’ll do that. But I knew he was probably right — there was no sense pushing it past eighty-five pitches the second time out.
“As an older pitcher, you have to be aware of your limits. There are times now where I really think I can go one more inning or get one more batter, and by doing so I’ll blow up a good game. That’s the thing about pitching — you can be good for an entire game, and one or two hitters can ruin the whole thing for you. It’s not like hitting where you can be terrible the entire night and then be a hero with one swing. In pitching, if you’re terrible, you’re terrible, and you usually get knocked out early. But there are other times where you’re actually pretty good, and you end up looking terrible because of a mistake or two. The way our starters had been going, there was no point in taking a chance on turning a good outing into a bad outing.”
Mussina’s return to the rotation could not have come at a more critical time for the Yankees. His April provided a pretty good summation of the starting staff’s April. A lot of it had to do with injuries: Mussina and Chien-Ming Wang had started a total of four times and had combined to be 0–3 in April. Carl Pavano had started twice and was now gone, as far as everyone was concerned, for good. Kei Igawa, the $46 million man, had simply been awful, throwing home-run pitch after home-run pitch. His performance was best described by longtime radio play-by-play man John Sterling, who, searching for something — anything — positive to say about Igawa, came up with: “Well, if he would stop giving up home runs all the time, he might be a pretty good pitcher.”
Only Andy Pettitte among the five projected spring starters had pitched well in April, and, naturally, he had been the pitcher the Yankees hadn’t scored any runs for. He was 1–1 at the end of the month, even though his ERA was under
3.00.
The injuries had forced the Yankees to parade an array of rookies and inexperienced pitchers to the mound: Darrell Rasner, Chris Britton, Tyler Clippard, Matt DeSalvo, Chase Wright, and Colter Bean had all been called up and been used as starters and middle relievers. The decision to call Philip Hughes up before the end of the first month of the season made it pretty clear how desperate the situation had become.
Mussina’s first start in Texas had come in a series that had given the Yankees both hope and a bit of despair. Hughes, in his second start, had been brilliant in the opener, pitching no-hit ball into the seventh inning. But he had strained a hamstring in the seventh, far more seriously than Mussina had strained his in Minnesota, and was placed on the sixty-day disabled list two days later. After the rainout, Pettitte and Mussina had both pitched well in the doubleheader. That made three straight good starts — a 2007 team record — but with Hughes on the DL, the Yankees were forced to start Igawa again when they came home to play the Seattle Mariners.
The Yankees did everything they could to back up Igawa. They scored five runs in the first inning and three more through the fourth. It wasn’t enough. Igawa was knocked out after giving up back-to-back hits to start the fifth. Colter Bean came in and got out none of the four hitters he faced. The Mariners ended up scoring eight runs in the inning and won 15–11. Igawa had given up eight runs in four innings plus two batters, and his ERA went to 7.63. His next stop would be Tampa to work with the Yankees’ minor league instructors on his “mechanics.” The loss dropped the Yankees to 12–15, six and a half games behind the Red Sox.
The next day, Pettitte called a meeting of the pitchers. This was not the kind of pitchers’ meeting that is always held on the first day of a series to go over the opposition’s hitters. This was to talk about what was going on with the pitching staff. Everyone crowded into the video room in a corner of the clubhouse to talk.
Player meetings in baseball are rarely emotional, and it isn’t often that anything especially brilliant or revealing is said. This meeting was no different. Pettitte was the right person to call the meeting and start it because he was the one pitcher on the staff who had pitched well. His point was simple: What we’re doing isn’t good enough. Yes, we’ve been injured, and yes it’s early (it is, of course, a long season), but this was unacceptable.
He was talking, for the most part, to the starters. The bullpen hadn’t been great, but it had the excuse of being overused because of the starters’ incompetence.
Mussina, the other veteran in the room, also spoke. He pointed out that he hadn’t been much use to the team in April but went on to talk about what was expected when you pitched for the Yankees. “I’ve been on teams that began circling days on the calendar trying to get the season over with from the All-Star break on,” he said. “Believe me, it’s not fun. And it really wouldn’t be fun around here. We’re expected to win here. That can be tough, but it’s what’s expected. We have to pitch better — all of us. It’s that simple. The guns in the lineup can hit a million home runs, but we still have to pitch well for us to win.”
Near the end of the meeting, Torre and Guidry came into the room. They told the pitchers they had confidence in their ability to get the job done. Wang and Mussina were finally healthy, and Pettitte had pitched well. With Igawa gone, the fourth and fifth starters were now Darrell Rasner and Matt DeSalvo, another call-up from Triple-A. Unsaid was the fact that help might be on the way in the form of Roger Clemens, who the team was trying to sign for his annual June unretirement.
“On the face of it, a meeting like that isn’t going to do that much,” Mussina said. “But I think Andy was right to call it. We were wallowing a little bit. Look, realistically, it was easy to see why we’d been so bad. We were running guys out there who had been sent to the minor league camp in mid-March. There was a reason they were sent down: they weren’t in our top five as starters. Some weren’t even close to that. Now, we put them in Yankee uniforms and say ‘Go out and win.’ It’s a lot easier said than done.
“But we all needed a little kick in the butt — from ourselves — because it’s too easy to use injuries as an excuse. Or bad weather, which we’d had plenty of. It doesn’t matter. In the end, you have to perform. That was what I tried to say and what Andy said: we have to be better than this, regardless of the circumstances. We all knew that, but it wasn’t a bad thing to get together in a room and just say it.”
Coincidence or not, the starting pitching began to improve after the meeting. Wang was superb that night, getting his first win of the season, and Rasner and three relievers pitched a combined 5–0 shutout the next night. There were still rocky days: Wang got bombed in the finale of the Texas series after Pettitte and Mussina had both pitched well.
A week later, the team went into Chicago with a 17–19 record and Mussina scheduled to pitch the opener. Naturally, the game was rained out, creating another day-night doubleheader. This time, Mussina opted for the afternoon game because the weather report for the night game wasn’t good, with temperatures expected to be in the forties. As it was, the temperature for the afternoon game was fifty-six degrees. The announced attendance was 30,953, but it looked like about twenty-five thousand of those were season-ticket holders who didn’t come to the game.
“I felt like I was throwing batting practice in the first inning,” Mussina said. “There just wasn’t anyone there. No noise, nothing. I almost asked some of the guys in our dugout to get on me so I’d be hearing something.”
Mussina didn’t pitch badly in the empty stadium formerly known as New Comiskey Park before a phone company paid to have its name plastered all over the building, but he didn’t feel comfortable the whole day.
“It was one of those days you have as a pitcher where nothing feels quite right,” he said. “It’s hard to explain. You don’t feel quite right in the bullpen, and you walk onto the mound and your first thought is, ‘Have I ever done this before?’ The ball doesn’t feel quite right in your hands, and you just aren’t confident throwing your pitches. You can get by on a day like that, and I almost did it — but not quite.”
Being pushed back an extra day didn’t help. Mussina was already scheduled to pitch on his sixth day because the Yankees had a day off on Monday between their series in Seattle and the one in Chicago. That meant that once again it had been a week since he had started. Even worse, he had warmed up on Tuesday before the rainout and had gone through all his game-day routines.
“The bottom line is we’re paid a lot of money to pitch well, not to make excuses,” Mussina said. “But it does throw you off when you go through all your game-day routines and then have to go through them the very next day. It doesn’t mean you can’t pitch well; it just makes it a little bit harder — at least for me.”
Mussina got through the first three innings without giving up a run and with only two scratch singles. But with one out in the fourth, he got behind Paul Konerko 3–1 and threw a white-on-white fastball that Konerko crushed for a home run and a 1–0 White Sox lead. In the meantime, the Yankees were struggling to score against the immortal John Danks, who had come into the game with an ERA of 5.63. They finally scored a run in the fifth to make it 1–1. Mussina gave up a run in the fifth and was saved from a big inning when Melky Cabrera went over the fence to keep Juan Uribe’s two-out, one-on drive in the ballpark. Instead of trailing by at least three runs, the Yankees were down just 2–1.
They tied it again in the sixth, but the tie lasted five pitches. Mussina got into another bad count — 3–1 again — to A.J. Pierzynski, and the catcher launched another long home run to put the White Sox up 3–2. A double by Jermaine Dye, a hit batsman, and an RBI single by Joe Crede, and Torre was on his way to the mound.
“That was one of those days where I turned what looked like a bad day into a pretty good one and then let it all get away in the sixth,” Mussina said. “The Pierzynski home run was really what did me in because he hit a pretty good pitch. It was a sinker on the outside corn
er, and he took it to the opposite field. Sometimes you have to give the other guy credit. On the other hand, I kept pitching in bad counts, especially in that inning. I simply couldn’t locate my fastball, and bad counts and bad location usually add up to bad things.”
Mussina relies heavily — more so than Glavine, because Glavine loves to throw his changeup even on bad counts — on getting ahead of hitters. “There’s a reason why oh-and-one and one-and-two are called pitchers counts,” he said. “It isn’t coincidence. If I’m pitching two-and-oh and three-and-one a lot, you can be pretty sure that isn’t going to be a good day. There are exceptions of course, but on a percentage basis it’s pretty consistent. I never got comfortable in Chicago. I was happy with myself for giving them five pretty good innings — thanks to Melky. But the sixth was awful. Depressing. I felt like I had taken a step backwards.”
The Yankees split the last two games in Chicago, dropping their record to 18–21. On the day they lost the final game in Chicago 4–1 with Matt DeSalvo starting the game, the Red Sox swept a doubleheader in Boston from the Tigers. It gave them a nine-and-a-half game lead.
“If we were playing well, we’d be three or four games back,” Mussina said. “As it is, we have a long way to go — either to get to them or to get to the wild card.”
The season was only seven weeks old, and already the dreaded “wild card” phrase was being heard in the Yankees clubhouse.
The team flew to New York after the final game in Chicago. But they were not heading to Yankee Stadium to play. Instead, they would cross the Triboro Bridge into Queens and spend the weekend at Shea Stadium.
The timing, for the Yankees, could not have been worse.
16
Subway Series I
TOM GLAVINE AND MIKE MUSSINA arrived at Shea Stadium on Friday afternoon, May 18, within minutes of each other. Glavine walked through the old ballpark’s players’ entrance, turned right, and walked down the curving hallway to the home clubhouse. Mussina went the opposite way, turning left to walk to the visitors’ clubhouse.
Living on the Black Page 25
