Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  Mussina decided his performance that day — six and one-third innings; six hits, all singles; one run (to that point); one walk; and six strikeouts — merited doffing his cap. When his family is in the stands, he will always wave his cap in their direction at that moment because if he doesn’t his sons get upset with him for waving to fifty-five thousand people but not to them. Jana and the kids were home that day, so he settled for the fifty-five thousand.

  “It felt good to go out and pitch well,” he said. “I wasn’t limping along; I had good stuff; I had good location; I didn’t pitch away from contact. I felt good about myself.”

  The icing for the day would have been to get a win. Scott Proctor, who had been the closest thing the Yankees had had to a decent setup man in 2006 and 2007, came in to take his place. The notion of getting a win didn’t last very long. Proctor instantly gave up a double to Howie Kendrick, which moved Kotchman to third. Then he completely lost the plate, walking Mike Napoli to load the bases and then Erick Aybar — after Aybar fouled off seven pitches on 2–2 — to tie the game at 2–2. Mussina, who had accepted congratulations from his teammates and then headed to the clubhouse to ice, saw the tying run trot in from third as he was wrapping the ice packs around his shoulder.

  “Well, at least there wasn’t any suspense,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Sometimes when you come out in the seventh or eighth, watching those last few outs can be torture, especially in a close game. When you pitch well, you would really like to get a win. Obviously there are times when you don’t pitch that well and you get a win, but when you’re in the clubhouse and you’re up two-one, you aren’t thinking about those days. I didn’t even have my ice pack on before I knew I wasn’t getting a win.”

  Not long after that, the team’s chances of winning were pretty much gone. Proctor walked Chone Figgins and left to loud boos, the Yankees now down 3–2. The Angels tacked on another run and completed the weekend sweep with a 4–3 win.

  The loss dropped the Yankees to 21–27, putting them twelve and a half games behind the Red Sox after climbing to within nine and a half by taking two of three in their series with the Sox earlier in the week. That brief moment of brightness seemed a long way off in the quiet postgame clubhouse. Even John Sterling, the longtime radio play-by-play man who could usually find hope in a leadoff single with the team down 5–0, sounded despondent. During a sponsored postgame bit, “the highlight of the week,” Sterling played the last out of the Wednesday-night victory over the Red Sox, which climaxed with his trademark, “the Yankees winnnnnn.” Coming out of that piece of tape, Sterling said quietly, “It seems like forever since I’ve had a chance to say those words.”

  He brightened a moment later though, adding, “At least today there was some hope for the future, and it came in the form of one Mike Mussina.”

  THINGS WEREN’T NEARLY as dreary in Met-ville. Even after losing the last game of the Yankees series, the Mets were a snappy 28–15 and had a two-game lead on the Braves as they headed to Atlanta for the third of the six three-game series they would play against the Braves during the season. The only real negative in the first quarter of the season had been the Braves taking four of the first six games against the Mets.

  “We handled them pretty well last year [winning eleven of eighteen],” Glavine said. “We need to show them we can do the same thing this year.”

  They didn’t exactly do that in the opener, going down 8–1. But they bounced back behind a superb pitching performance by Oliver Perez to win game two 3–0. That gave them a chance to tighten up the season series if they could win game three. It was a pretty good pitching matchup: Tom Glavine versus John Smoltz, act three for the 2007 season. In four years, Glavine and Smoltz had matched up once as starters. Now they were doing it for the third time in seven weeks.

  The game had a little more juice than usual, as if it needed it. Smoltz had turned forty nine days earlier: “I’m exactly a century away from my goal — to play on the Senior PGA Tour,” he said, referencing the golf tour that one has to be fifty to play on. Someone pointed out that he probably meant a decade away. “Hey, I’m forty,” Smoltz said. “My mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be.”

  His pitching certainly was. He was off to a great start, with a 6–2 record and an ERA of 2.58. In his last start in Washington, he had been hit on the hand by a line drive and had been frightened that he might be hurt. But it had turned out to be a broken pinky on his nonthrowing hand. “It hurts like hell,” he said. “But it doesn’t bother me when I pitch.”

  The six wins had put Smoltz at 199 for his career. If you added the 154 saves he had accrued during his four seasons as the Braves’ closer, it seemed very likely that a 200th win would make Smoltz a Hall of Fame lock. Only Smoltz and Dennis Eckersley had won at least 150 games (Eckersley had won 197) and saved more than 150 (Eckersley had saved 390). Smoltz had missed all of the 2000 season after Tommy John surgery, and large chunks of both 1998 and 2001 with injuries. And yet he had come back to pitch well, first out of the bullpen and then as a starter again.

  “I think if Smoltzie gets to two hundred wins, when you factor in the saves and his postseason record, there’s no way they can keep him out,” Glavine said. “I’m rooting like hell for him to get to two hundred. Just not against me.”

  Smoltz was probably most proud of his postseason record because it was the one place where he had clearly outshone his old buddies Glavine and Greg Maddux. He had won more postseason games than anyone in history, going 15–4. By comparison, Glavine was 14–16 and Maddux 11–14.

  “I think that’s the thing that’s most special to me,” Smoltz said. “If you look closer, the four games I lost could have been wins. One was one to nothing to Andy Pettitte in Game Five of the ’96 World Series. Another was two to one. Postseason is a completely different kind of baseball than regular season. Tom and Greg are very good at getting guys to give up at bats because [hitters] aren’t mentally tough enough to deal with everything they bring to the table. In postseason, no one gives up an out. Everyone is focused on every at bat because it’s so important. There are no easy outs for a pitcher. I think because I’ve been more of a power pitcher than they are, I’ve been able to adapt to postseason a little bit better.”

  But Smoltz, for all his success, felt as if he had taken a backseat to Glavine and Maddux through the years. “I think they took turns at the steering wheel while I was in the backseat,” he said. “Part of it was they never got hurt and I did. They had multiple twenty-win seasons and multiple Cy Young seasons; I had one of each [1996]. It never bothered me; it’s just the way it was.”

  Glavine knew that Smoltz would savor getting win number two hundred against him in Atlanta, with the crowd rooting him to the finish line on every pitch. “I knew going in I’d have to pitch really well to have a chance,” Glavine said. “I would have been shocked if John was anything less than great that night.”

  Smoltz was just that. Glavine was almost as good. The two players who had been thorns in his side in April continued to be troublemakers in May. Leadoff hitter Kelly Johnson, who had opened the game at Shea with a first-pitch home run, singled to start the game and ended up scoring on a sacrifice fly by Jeff Francoeur. Glavine had to pitch clear of a two-men-on, two-out situation (typical Glavine first inning) but did so and trailed 1–0. Then Matt Diaz, who had led off the second inning the last time Glavine faced the Braves in Atlanta, again led off the second inning with a home run on a 2–0 pitch, and the Braves were up 2–0.

  “It occurred to me then that if I didn’t hold them right there, we had no chance at all,” Glavine said. “Smoltzie was dealing.”

  Glavine did hold them there. The Braves didn’t score again, but Smoltz didn’t need them to. He was in trouble only twice. In the third, Glavine singled with one out and Jose Reyes followed with another single. Then Carlos Beltran got an infield single with two outs to load the bases for David Wright. Smoltz reached back and threw a 96-mile-an-hour fastball past Wright to get out of th
e inning unscathed.

  The Mets had one more chance against Smoltz in the seventh when Shawn Green and Ruben Gotay both singled with one out. Glavine had already thrown 110 pitches to get through six innings (throwing thirty-one in the first hadn’t helped), so Willie Randolph went to his bench for David Newhan, sending him up to hit for Glavine. Newhan grounded into a force play. So did Reyes.

  That was it for Smoltz: seven shutout innings, a 2–0 lead, and a standing ovation as he came off; the crowd knew that after 101 pitches he wouldn’t be back to pitch the eighth. His bullpen finished for him, but not before closer Bob Wickman made it interesting in the ninth. A single by Carlos Delgado, an error by Johnson on Green’s ground ball, and a sacrifice bunt by Gotay put the tying runs in scoring position with one out. But Wickman got pinch hitter Julio Franco to tap back to him (Delgado scoring), and Reyes popped the first pitch he saw to Edgar Renteria. Game over: Braves 2, Mets 1.

  Smoltz and Atlanta rejoiced. Glavine was, to use his word, pissed. “I was proud of John and happy for him to get two hundred,” he said. “But I really didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hearing from him how he beat me to get to two hundred. I was pretty steamed going through the postgame interviews and getting dressed. Once I got out of the ballpark, I was okay. I called him on the way home and left him a message telling him I was proud of him. He called back a while later and we had a good talk.”

  Glavine smiled. “It didn’t make me feel any less pissed off to talk to him.”

  Someone suggested that perhaps he could get even by winning his three hundredth against Smoltz. “Oh God, I hope not,” he said. “We don’t see them again until mid-August. If I haven’t gotten it by then, I’ll be a wreck.”

  He was 5–2 and pitching well. There was no reason to believe the Number would not be reached before August.

  Even so, Glavine’s next outing was discouraging. It followed a pattern that was becoming familiar: an early struggle, followed by several innings of strong pitching with little run support. In this case there was no run support.

  The San Francisco Giants were in town and that meant the Barry Bonds Circus would draw a lot more media attention than anything Glavine or the Mets were trying to accomplish. The Mets had gone to Florida after the Atlanta series and swept the Marlins, meaning they came home with a 32–17 record and a four-and-a-half-game lead that was widening, it seemed, on a daily basis.

  The Giants were awful. Barry Zito, their big free-agent acquisition of the winter, was pitching to an ERA of just under 5.00. The team was old and cranky and overwhelmed by the Bonds Circus. Bonds had gotten into the habit of doing one press conference at each road stop. Exactly why anyone wanted to talk to him was a reasonable question to ask, but no one seemed able to resist. He was like the scene of an accident.

  The Giants had announced that Bonds would speak to the New York media on the first day of the series. But Bonds changed his mind, deciding to push it back until Wednesday, leaving a lot of camera crews and columnists looking at one another before game one on Tuesday. The Mets won that night 5–4 in twelve innings. The losing pitcher for the Giants was ex-Met Armando Benitez, who among fans had set some kind of unofficial record for blown key games during his time in New York. Beating Benitez to start a homestand put everyone in a good mood.

  It didn’t last. Glavine began the next night by getting two quick outs in the first inning. It looked as if, for once, he might have a low pitch count in the first. Wrong. Rich Aurilia beat out an infield single in the shortstop hole, and Bonds, who had deigned to speak to the media and play in the game that day, singled to center. Glavine then walked catcher Bengie Molina after thinking he had struck him out on a changeup. Now it looked like a familiar Glavine first inning: bases loaded, two out. Pedro Feliz singled to center, driving in both Aurilia and Bonds. The Giants led 2–0, and Glavine had spent thirty-one pitches by the end of the inning.

  Still, that didn’t seem like a disaster given how poorly Zito had been pitching. But it was apparent from the first that the Zito who had been the most highly sought free-agent pitcher of the off-season had decided to show up for at least one night. His curveball, the classic twelve-to-six that starts at a batter’s shoulder and ends up at his feet, was as good as it had ever been, and he was throwing it for strikes. He had the Mets flailing right from the start.

  The Giants widened their lead in the third, although the inning was not without an amusing moment: After Aurilia led off with a single, Bonds hit a ground ball to first base. Once, Bonds was a great base runner, an excellent base stealer. Now, he would lose to a fast racewalker. Seeing Carlos Delgado field the ball cleanly, Bonds flipped his bat away and walked about twenty feet down the first-base line, as the Mets easily turned a three-six-three double play. They probably could have completed the play twice more, and Bonds still wouldn’t have been at first base.

  The double play prevented a big inning. Molina singled right afterward, and Feliz tripled to score him. That was it for the Giants, but it was more than enough. Glavine and Zito each pitched seven innings, each threw 122 pitches, and each threw seventy-seven strikes. The difference was that Glavine gave up the three runs. That was the final: 3–0.

  Once again, Glavine was not unhappy with the way he had pitched but with the result — for him and for the team. He had been 3–1 on April 17 after his first four starts. Since then he had started eight games and gone 2–2, even though his ERA during that stretch was a very respectable 3.55. He had pitched at least six innings in every one of those starts and had given up three or fewer runs in six of them; four runs in the other two. It was not hard to make the case that he could have easily won six of those games rather than two if he’d had some run support.

  If you left out the Yankees game in which the Mets had scored eight runs with Glavine on the mound, the team had scored eighteen runs in seven games behind him, an average of 2.7 runs a game, which wasn’t going to be enough to win very often.

  Every season, almost every baseball team has one pitcher it always seems to score a lot of runs for and one pitcher for whom it never seems to score runs. Glavine was very aware of that fact. “I just hope this is a blip and not a trend,” he said. “I gotta believe that it is.”

  18

  Bumps in the Road

  THE BLIP CONTINUED FOR GLAVINE in his next start. The Phillies were back in town, but they looked like a very different team than the one the Mets had faced in April. Since their dreadful 4–11 start, they had gone 24–18 and were within a game of .500, although they still trailed the Mets by eight games. Manager Charlie Manuel had not been fired, although it still appeared that he was just one more losing streak from being out of work.

  “We knew in April they were a better team than what we saw,” Mets manager Willie Randolph said. “Getting them at home now, this is a good chance for us to make a statement within the division.”

  They hadn’t made that statement to the Braves, who were three and a half games back and 6–3 against the Mets. There didn’t seem to be any reason, though, not to make it to the Phillies.

  Game one was a familiar matchup: Glavine versus Moyer. Old versus older. Slow versus slower.

  Both were superb. Glavine actually set the Phillies down one-two-three in the first, the first time in five starts that the opposition hadn’t scored in its first at bat. “I felt like someone should present me with a game ball or something,” he joked.

  The Mets scored two off of Moyer in the second and might have had a bigger inning than that. After Paul Lo Duca had singled in two runs, Glavine extended the inning with two outs by singling to right, moving Lo Duca to third. But Jose Reyes, who had been so hot early in the season, grounded into a force play, and the Mets settled for two. Then Glavine quickly gave the two back in the third — on another two-out rally.

  “That’s bothersome,” he said later. “You have to finish innings. In the San Francisco game, all three runs I gave up were with two outs, then I did it again in that inning against the Philli
es.”

  What made it more frustrating was that it would be many innings and hours before either team would score again. Glavine and Moyer each left after seven innings, with the score tied at 2–2. The Phillies won the game 4–2 in eleven innings. The blip appeared to be turning into a trend.

  It was now June, and, in theory at least, Glavine could have already had the ten wins he needed to get to the Number. Instead, he was still halfway there and wondering when he might win again. To make matters worse, the Phillies swept the series and crept to within five games of the Mets. The only good news was that the Braves were swept by the Marlins so they gained no ground.

  The Phillies series closed out a disappointing homestand. The Mets had gone 3–6, and Glavine had pitched twice, gone 0–1, and given up five runs in fourteen innings. The next road trip would be difficult: three games in Detroit against the Tigers, three in Los Angeles against the Dodgers, and three in Yankee Stadium against the Yankees. Since Glavine would pitch on Sunday in Detroit and the following Saturday in New York, he would be facing lineups — both good ones — with a designated hitter rather than a pitcher. That wouldn’t make things any easier.

  “We’ll get to use a DH in those games too,” he said. “Maybe that will help.”

  Maybe. Except that Glavine had gotten two of the eight hits the Mets had managed against Moyer and was hitting .292. Only Jose Reyes had a higher batting average at that moment. Not having Glavine batting might not be such a good thing.

  WHILE GLAVINE WAS PITCHING WELL and not winning games, Mike Mussina was pitching better — and not winning games.