Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  Girardi became his mentor. “He would tell me, ‘Don’t ever lose a job because someone works harder than you.’ He taught me how to work out and how to be tougher. He showed me how to use video and showed me things about the game I wasn’t seeing. He studied lineups; he would look at every at bat of a team’s previous game against a particular pitcher. He taught me about how to learn things from watching a guy’s feet.

  “For example, if Jim Thome comes up and spreads his feet extra wide, he’s trying to go up the middle. If he closes his stance, he’s trying to pull. That affects the pitches I’m going to call. Joe was the one who taught me to look for things like that. I still talk to him [Girardi, who will manage the Yankees in 2008, was a Yankee broadcaster in 2007] whenever I get the chance.”

  Since 1997, Posada has been the Yankees’ starting catcher. He has been an All-Star five times and has won the Silver Slugger Award as the best hitter at his position five times. He was thrilled when the Yankees signed Mussina because he knew firsthand how tough he was to hit. But learning to work with him was a major adjustment.

  “At first I had no clue,” he said. “It seemed as if whatever I was thinking, he was thinking the exact opposite. I think he must have shook me off on every pitch for the first two months. As a catcher, you don’t want a guy shaking you off all the time because you worry that they might be a little bit tentative if they don’t think you’re in agreement. We talked about it a lot — at first it did no good. By June, we started to know how the other guy was thinking, and things went much better after that. I began to get a better feel for him and that helped us both. Since then, I think we’ve worked well together.”

  Posada was too much of a pro to throw a fit over a pitcher preferring another catcher. He also knew this situation was different than it had been two years earlier when Randy Johnson had gone to Torre and all but demanded that John Flaherty be his personal catcher after he’d broken out of a slump and pitched well on a day Flaherty was catching. “That was tough, especially in the playoffs,” Posada said. “I want to catch every game in postseason.”

  That was a long way from happening here, and Posada knew that Mussina hadn’t gone to Torre because both Mussina and Torre had told him that. “I told Mike that he had turned on me, but I knew it wouldn’t last, that he’s just having a fling,” he said. “Wil and I talk all the time about how to call the game. Sometimes he’ll look into the dugout, and I’ll try to help him out. I know Mike is comfortable with him. In some ways, it’s easier for him because he can control the game more easily. Wil is less likely to disagree with him than I am, and maybe, right now, that’s what Mike needs.”

  The real issue was Nieves’s bat. Everyone agreed he caught a good game and he had a reasonably good arm. But, the two hits in the Angels game aside, the days he caught, it was almost as if the Yankees were putting a National League lineup on the field with Nieves in the role of pitcher.

  “For now it’s fine,” Torre said. “We’ll just ride with it. If we get to postseason, then we might have to make some decisions. Right now, we’re a long way from anything like that.”

  THE HOT STREAK that put the Yankees over .500 coincided with the Mets’ first real slump of the season. After their 3–6 home-stand, the Mets headed for Detroit to face the defending American League champion Tigers in their first non-Yankees interleague series of the season. The Tigers had added Gary Sheffield to an already potent lineup in the off-season and were battling the Cleveland Indians for first place in the American League’s Central Division.

  The teams split the first two games of the series, the Mets breaking their four-game losing streak on Friday, before losing on Saturday. The rubber game featured the old man, Glavine, against the kid, the Tigers’ twenty-two-year-old rookie, Andrew Miller.

  Things could not have started much better for the Mets. David Wright hit a three-run homer off Miller in the first. The three runs were one more than the team had scored for Glavine in his three previous starts combined.

  “Maybe I just couldn’t stand prosperity,” he joked later.

  The Tigers got one run back on a Sheffield shot to left field in the first inning, the good news being that no other runs scored because Glavine had retired the first two Tigers. They got a second run back in the second when Ivan Rodriguez walked and Brandon Inge singled him home. It was the Rodriguez at bat that really began the trouble for Glavine. Twice, he threw changeups he thought were strikes. Twice, Tim McClelland, the home-plate umpire, called balls. McClelland is considered one of the best ball-and-strike umpires in the game by most.

  He is very tall, which may help him see the plate better since he looks almost straight down as the ball crosses the plate. The only complaint players have with him is that he is maddeningly slow when making his strike calls, seeming to move in slow motion to get his right arm up.

  On this day, he and Glavine were not seeing the strike zone the same way. It got worse in the third inning when Placido Polanco led off with a double. Glavine retired the next two hitters and then faced Omar Infante. Twice, he thought Infante had been struck out. Twice, McClelland said he hadn’t been. Infante walked, and Glavine stalked off the mound, took the return throw from Lo Duca, and snapped the ball angrily into his glove. He didn’t say anything, but his body language made it clear he thought he was being squeezed.

  “That would be an accurate reading,” Glavine said later. “Tim is a good umpire. I just thought he had a real small strike zone for me that day. I’m not sure why.”

  Instead of being in the dugout still leading 3–2, Glavine had to face Rodriguez, a very solid hitter even at thirty-five. He promptly tripled in both runners to put the Tigers ahead 4–3, and now Glavine was really upset. He got the last out of the inning and stalked to the dugout, frustrated. His pitch count had skyrocketed, in large part, he believed, because of McClelland’s strike zone, and he knew that getting through six innings would be very difficult.

  As it turned out, he didn’t make it through five. The next inning was his worst of the year: a Placido Polanco single, a Sheffield RBI triple, an Infante bunt single to drive in Sheffield, a double by Rodriguez, and a two-run single by Sean Casey made it 8–3 Tigers and sent Glavine to his earliest shower of the season. It was the first time all year he had allowed more than four earned runs. Aaron Sele came in and gave up a home run to Inge to make it 10–3 and closed the books on Glavine’s day: eleven hits and nine earned runs in four and one-third innings.

  “It certainly wasn’t pretty,” he said. “The balls and strikes didn’t help, but I wasn’t good either. You have to pitch through things like that, and I didn’t. It was my first really bad day of the season.”

  No one felt worse about it than Rick Peterson. He was just as convinced that Glavine was getting squeezed as Glavine. “I should have gone out and said something, even if I got thrown out for doing it,” he said. “Tim’s a good umpire; maybe he would have adjusted if I’d gotten into it — I don’t know. Tommy deserved a better fate.”

  Peterson has only been ejected three times as a pitching coach. “The first time was in Oakland when I told Bob Davidson he was calling the game as if he’d just fallen off a turnip truck,” he said. “I’ve actually said worse to umpires and not been ejected. My only regret is that I didn’t send him a bag full of turnips the next day. I wish I’d said something to Tim. As it turned out, whatever I did wouldn’t have made things worse.”

  Glavine was now 5–4. He would next pitch the following Saturday against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. He had not won a game since beating them at Shea in May. It would be exactly four weeks since that game when he faced them again.

  19

  F—— the Process

  THINGS HAD CHANGED considerably during the four weeks that had passed since the first Subway Series. The Mets had gone 8–13 since the Yankees had departed Shea Stadium and arrived in the Bronx, having lost five straight games — including being swept by the Dodgers in Los Angeles — and nine of their last ten. Th
e Yankees had used their win in the final game at Shea as a springboard to a 15–8 run and were coming off sweeps of the Pirates and Diamondbacks in interleague series and had won nine in a row.

  “What’s not to love about interleague play?” Mussina joked.

  The Mets still led the Braves by two games and the Phillies by five — largely because neither had played very well of late either — and the Yankees still trailed the sizzling Red Sox by eight and a half, but the moods in the two clubhouses had shifted dramatically.

  “I think we’re all just a little bit frustrated right now,” Glavine said in the visitors’ clubhouse in Yankee Stadium on Friday afternoon. “We know what kind of team we have here, and we’ve been waiting to get on that big hot streak we know we’re capable of having. It just hasn’t come yet.”

  In fact, the Mets had yet to piece together a five-game winning streak all season. They managed to end their losing streak in the opener thanks to Oliver Perez, who had become a major Rick Peterson reclamation success story. Perez had come to the Mets the previous July as a throw in to a trade-deadline deal general manager Omar Minaya had made in order to acquire relief pitcher Roberto Hernandez. Perez had been a rising star in 2004 at the age of twenty-two, when he went 12–10 on a bad Pittsburgh team and pitched to an ERA of 2.98.

  He had completely fallen apart after that. His ERA had doubled the next year, and he had been sent back to the minors. The Pirates were more than happy to part with him as part of the Hernandez–Xavier Nady trade. He had actually been the Mets’ game-seven starter in the NLCS in October and had pitched well, allowing just one run in six innings, even though the Mets lost the game.

  “If you were a stock, I’d buy you now,” Peterson had told Perez during spring training. “Because you have the ability to be worth a lot — especially to yourself — by the end of this season.”

  Peterson’s prediction was turning out to be true. Perez pitched seven and a third shutout innings against the Yankees, lowering his ERA to 2.93 in a 2–0 Mets win. The victory stopped the Mets’ bleeding and the Yankees’ winning streak and set up a matchup the next afternoon between Glavine and twenty-two-year-old Tyler Clippard.

  For the first time in anyone’s memory, a Mets-Yankees Saturday game was not broadcast on Fox. Even so, Bill O’Reilly, the right-wing talk-show host, was at the game. He turned up in the Mets clubhouse, glad-handing players until a security guard asked him if he had a credential for the clubhouse. O’Reilly’s response was something along the lines of “Don’t you know who I am?” Whether the guard did or did not know who O’Reilly was and whether that would have caused him to remove O’Reilly more quickly or more slowly, no one knows. O’Reilly was asked to leave, which galled him.

  What apparently galled him even more was the sight of his archenemy, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, walking around the clubhouse unimpeded. There was a reason for that: Olbermann, who had begun his career in sports and still cohosted an hour-long segment of The Dan Patrick Show, then on ESPN radio, actually covered sports, so he had a credential. That didn’t much matter to O’Reilly, who complained loud and long to Yankee officials, demanding that Olbermann’s credentials be removed. They weren’t.

  Glavine probably would have been happier if he had just left with O’Reilly. His day was at least as miserable. As in Detroit, the Mets scored early for him, staking him to a 2–0 lead on a David Wright RBI single in the first and a home run by Ruben Gotay in the second. Once again, Glavine couldn’t stand the prosperity, even though he breezed through the first. The Yankees tied it in the bottom of the second, and the Mets went back ahead 3–2 in the third. Glavine immediately gave up a two-run home run to Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the inning to make it 4–3. Then Ramon Castro answered with a two-run home run in the fourth to make it 5–4, until Derek Jeter hit a two-run home run to make it 6–5.

  It was now the Mets’ turn to hit a two-run homer in the fifth. At the rate things were going, the game was going to end up finishing on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.

  But the Mets missed their turn, failing to score. The Yankees did not. Posada led off with a double that knocked Glavine out — his shortest outing of the season — and the Yankees ended up scoring two more runs in the inning, making it four consecutive innings in which they had scored two runs.

  Glavine was disgusted with himself, frustrated with the results, and angry at home-plate umpire Bruce Froemming.

  Froemming was in his thirty-seventh and last year as a major league umpire. He had umpired more games than any man in history and had survived as long as he had because he had a self-deprecating sense of humor and most of the time managed to take his job seriously without taking himself seriously. He’d even survived a controversy several years earlier, when he had asked some players to autograph items for him — an absolute no-no if you are an umpire, for obvious reasons.

  Froemming had once been one of the better ball-and-strike umpires in the game. That was no longer the case. Players had noticed that Froemming had developed a flinch when working the plate, moving backward just a tiny bit as the ball was delivered. “If you’re moving, even just a little bit, it’s hard to see the ball as it crosses the plate,” said Mussina, who watched closely from the dugout that day. “I felt for Tom because I know how important it is to have your good pitches called strikes. He wasn’t getting it, and it forced him to change the way he pitched. I guess there’s a reason why this is Bruce’s last year.”

  Glavine liked Froemming but at that moment could only wish he had retired a year earlier. When Peterson came to the mound to talk to Glavine in the fourth inning, he let some of his frustrations tumble out. Peterson understood. “Tom wasn’t great by any means,” Peterson said the next day. “But Bruce was the worst possible umpire for him to have behind the plate right now.”

  Glavine was upset because he felt two umpires he had liked through the years — Tim McClelland in Detroit and now Froemming — had forced him to throw strikes he didn’t want to throw. “Look, if they’d given me every single pitch I thought I deserved, I might still have gotten bombed in those games,” he said. “I wasn’t good. But it isn’t like I can afford to throw the ball over the plate. I can’t. They weren’t giving me pitches I thought should have been strikes. Pitchers and hitters are in a nonstop battle for a few inches one way or the other. If a guy throws ninety-five, he may not need those few inches. If you throw eighty-five, you need them. When I didn’t get those few inches those two days and I had to throw pitches where I didn’t want to throw them, I got hurt.”

  Two games had yielded eight and one-third innings of pitching and sixteen earned runs. That jacked Glavine’s ERA from a more than respectable 3.36 to 4.67.

  All of that didn’t make for the happiest of Father’s Days, although being with his family was a good distraction. His parents and Chris’s parents were down for the weekend, and they all went to a good Italian restaurant for dinner on Saturday night and took the kids to brunch on Sunday. “Father’s Day may be the only day of the season when it’s a break to play at night,” he said. “I had most of the day with the family.”

  The one present Glavine would have liked to get for Father’s Day was an answer to why he had pitched so poorly in back-to-back outings. Part of it, he knew, was the rhythm of the season. “No one goes through an entire year without a bad stretch of some kind,” he said. “I’ve had them every year of my career. It’s like the old baseball saying about bad teams having winning streaks and good ones having losing streaks.

  “When you’re going through a streak like this it’s certainly no fun. You’re frustrated, and you do wonder on occasion if you’ll ever get another out or feel good on the mound again. You know that’s not the case, but there are times when it feels that way.”

  Pitching poorly in the Subway Series didn’t make things any easier for Glavine. When the Yankees are playing the Mets, even the U.S. Open golf championship, which is the big story of the weekend everyplace else in the sports world, takes a backsea
t. Sunday’s stories on the game were quick to point out that Glavine hadn’t won a game in a month. No one knew that better than he did.

  “The thing is, I haven’t pitched poorly for a month,” he said. “I’ve pitched poorly twice. Before that I pitched well but didn’t get any wins. People are acting like it’s been a month since I pitched well.”

  When Glavine walked into the clubhouse on Sunday afternoon it was, naturally, packed. The clubhouses at Yankee Stadium are bigger than the ones at Shea, but not much. The visitors’ clubhouse is narrow, and there aren’t a lot of places for players to hide from the media. The dining area in the back of the room is off-limits, but anyone can walk to the door and stick his head in to talk to someone. No one on the Mets was taking the Miguel Cairo approach and putting tape down to mark the off-limits area, so Glavine dressed quickly and found a spot as far from the door to the dining area as he could so he could watch the golf tournament in semipeace.

  After a while he got up to walk to the training room. He was in the hallway leading there when he ran into Peterson. “How are you feeling?” Peterson asked.

  “Been better,” Glavine answered.

  Peterson had been trying to decide whether to talk to Glavine that day or wait until the team got back to Shea the next day to begin a series against the Minnesota Twins. It would be easier at Shea; they could just go into the coaches’ room in the back of the clubhouse and talk, but if Glavine was stewing, he preferred to do it sooner rather than later. Seeing the look on Glavine’s face, Peterson decided sooner — even in a hallway — was better.

  As he always did with a struggling pitcher, Peterson reminded Glavine about “the process.” He wasn’t that far off, he told him. The umpires certainly hadn’t helped matters the last two games, and he’d been facing good lineups where there really wasn’t any margin for error. There were things they could work on when he threw his bullpen the next day, and it probably wasn’t a bad thing that there was an off-day Thursday, which meant he would get an extra day of rest before pitching against Oakland on Friday.