Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  In all, there have been twenty-three complete-game one-hitters in Mets history. Technically, Glavine’s was the twenty-fourth, but a six-inning one-hitter hardly resonated with him. What did was the win, his seventh of the season. He was now three wins away with three starts left before the All-Star break.

  “Boy, would it be nice to go away for a few days with that part of the season behind me,” he said. “It probably isn’t realistic, but it would sure be nice.”

  What was most important was that he was pitching well again. Since the two bad games against the Yankees and Tigers and the slight adjustment on the rubber, he had pitched fourteen innings, given up one run — the home run by Shannon Stewart in the Oakland game — and had won twice.

  “It’s always a relief when you come out of a little slump,” he said. “Because you know then it was only a slump.”

  MUSSINA WAS IN A LITTLE SLUMP of his own. He had lost twice on the western road trip, and, even though he hadn’t pitched horribly in either game, he knew Borzello’s succinct analysis of the game in San Francisco — “You were bad” — was accurate.

  Well-rested, he went to the mound against the Oakland Athletics on Friday night, June 29. It was exactly a week since Glavine had gotten back on track against the A’s. The Athletics had come into Shea Stadium playing good baseball, but the trip to the East Coast had not gone well. After being swept by the Mets, they had gone to Cleveland and lost three of four. Tired at the end of a long trip, they were probably just what the doctor ordered for a pitcher trying to find himself again.

  Mussina was in control from the start. He had worked in the bullpen during the week on locating his pitches, on making sure he could hit his spots so as not to fall behind in too many counts. He knew he couldn’t afford to pitch behind and that he had to stop worrying about giving up home runs and pitch to contact more often.

  “The thing about Moose is, he’s smart,” Joe Torre said. “That sounds simplistic, but there are some guys who are book smart but not baseball smart. Moose is both. He knew what happened in San Francisco, and he couldn’t go out and pitch like that and expect to have any kind of real success. So, he adjusted. That’s what guys who don’t have overpowering stuff have to do: make adjustments all the time. He did that.”

  As is often the case, getting out of trouble in the first inning proved key. There’s no better example of how important it is to get to a good pitcher early than Glavine, who gives up almost half his runs in the first inning. But it is true of all good pitchers.

  “The first inning you often aren’t completely comfortable on the mound,” Mussina said. “It takes a while to get yourself to feel exactly the way you want to feel in the game. You throw thirty to forty pitches in the bullpen, then you only get eight warm-ups on the mound. That’s why a lot of times if you see a guy who is good get through a tough first inning, he settles down and pitches well. When you’re on the bench facing someone good and you get men on in the first, you automatically think, ‘Better get him now because there might not be another chance this good.’ ”

  That was certainly the case with Mussina against the A’s. With one out in the first, he walked Shannon Stewart, with Oakland’s two best power threats, Nick Swisher and Jack Cust, coming up. Stewart promptly stole second, which put him into scoring position. “The inning can go either way at that point,” Mussina said.

  It went his way. He struck out Swisher with a fastball that hit 90 and got Cust to fly out to Hideki Matsui in left. Threat averted. The Yankees then scored twice in the bottom of the inning, and Mussina felt a surge of confidence.

  “Remember in my last two outings, we’d scored a total of one run while I was pitching,” he said. “Going out to the mound with a two-oh lead after that felt more like ten-oh. I had to remind myself what it was like to pitch with the lead.”

  He relearned the art quickly. All night long he was around the plate, allowing the A’s to put the ball in play. He worked ahead of hitters and only walked one batter. Of the twenty-one outs he got, eighteen came on balls that were put in play; he struck out three. He completely shut down Oakland until the seventh inning, when Eric Chavez led off with a double, and Mark Ellis singled, Chavez stopping at third.

  It was Mussina’s first jam of the night. He got out of it immediately, getting Dan Johnson to hit the ball right back to him. Quickly, he turned it into a one-four-three double play, allowing Chavez to score to make it 2–1. Bobby Crosby flied to center, and the inning was over. Torre and Guidry decided right then, even though Mussina had only thrown eighty-four pitches — his most efficient performance of the season — that they wanted to let the bullpen get the last six outs.

  “When a guy’s been struggling, and he goes out and pitches that well for that long, you want to make sure he walks away with a good feeling,” Torre said. “He had started to look a little bit tired in the seventh, even though he did a good job pitching out of trouble. I thought getting him out was not only the best way to win the game but the best way to make sure he went into his next start with some confidence.”

  Torre was proven correct, although it wasn’t easy. He brought in the always-flammable Kyle Farnsworth. There was no enigma on the Yankees quite like Farnsworth. He could throw harder than anyone on the team, often reaching 98 on the radar gun. But he was maddeningly inconsistent, frequently walking batters at crucial moments, then giving up a key hit — often a home run — to give up a lead.

  Plus, it was never his fault. When the media would try to ask him about a poor outing, he would snarl and say it was somehow their fault (shades of Carl Pavano?) and that he really didn’t care what anyone other than his family and friends thought of him. He didn’t include his teammates in that speech or the team that was paying him $7 million a year to pitch considerably better than he had pitched.

  Farnsworth coming into a 2–1 game in the eighth was about as sure a bet as Wall Street in November of 1929. He started the inning by getting Jason Kendall on a ground ball back to the box, but then promptly gave up back-to-back singles to Shannon Stewart and Mark Kotsay. Icing his arm in the clubhouse, Mussina couldn’t help thinking another chance to get a win was about to go by the boards. Torre got Mariano Rivera up but had to let Farnsworth pitch to one more batter while Rivera got warm.

  Most of the time in key situations, Farnsworth would do one of two things: give up a home run (and blame it on the media) or get a strikeout. This time, he struck out Nick Swisher. Torre wasn’t going to push his luck. He strolled to the mound as slowly as possible and waved Rivera into the game.

  If Rivera is not the greatest closer in the history of baseball, he is certainly part of the conversation. He has probably pitched in more crucial situations than any relief pitcher in history, becoming a critical part of the Yankee bullpen in 1996 when Torre moved him from the starting rotation to being a two-inning setup man for then-closer John Wetteland. Torre called that decision “the Formula” — Rivera in the seventh and eighth and Wetteland in the ninth — and saw it as the key to the Yankees taking control of the American League East en route to their first World Series title in eighteen years.

  Wetteland was allowed to leave as a free agent after that season, and Rivera has been the closer ever since. He entered the 2007 season with 413 saves, which put him fourth on the all-time saves list. Beyond that, he had a staggering thirty-four saves in postseason play, a number put in better perspective by the fact that Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley had fifteen.

  Of course Rivera had been given more postseason opportunities than any other closer in history, having been on a team that had been in the playoffs all ten years that he had been closing games. Still, he had proven himself in the clutch so many times that when he failed — in the 1997 Division Series against Cleveland, the 2001 World Series against Arizona, and the 2004 American League Championship Series against Boston — it was man-bites-dog news.

  Rivera was now thirty-seven, and the first half of the season had been a struggle for him. On the rare occasio
ns when he’d had a chance to close a game in April, he had pitched poorly. He had started to pitch better as his chances to pitch increased, but he still had only nine saves as he jogged in from the bullpen to try to bail out Farnsworth.

  Seeing him come in, Mussina breathed a sigh of relief. Rivera might not be the sure thing he had once seemingly been, but he was still about as good as it got. And Mussina would rather have him in the game than Farnsworth. So, clearly, would Torre, who had more or less reinvented the closer’s role as Rivera’s manager. In the 1980s, Tony LaRussa had changed the game by making Eckersley strictly a three-out closer. Eckersley never came into the game before the ninth, and he almost always came in to start the ninth, regardless of how well the starter — or whoever pitched the eighth — was pitching.

  Baseball people copy success, so other managers began using their closers to get three outs and three outs only. Torre changed that with Rivera. If he felt he needed a win badly enough, he would bring Rivera in during the eighth, sometimes even to start the eighth, especially in postseason. Frequently the Yankees set up postseason games to use whoever they had to in order to get through the seventh and try to get the ball to Rivera with the lead because they were almost certain he would get the final six outs.

  Now, needing four outs, Rivera struck out Jack Cust. He got two quick outs in the ninth, before one of his cutters got away and he hit Dan Johnson with a pitch. But he made up for that by striking out Bobby Crosby to end the game, giving Mussina his fourth win of the season.

  “If you had told me before the season that on June 29 I’d get my fourth win and Mo would get his tenth save, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. “But right now it feels like a big deal. It’s been a long three months for all of us. I just hope this is the start of a good run for all of us. We could certainly use it.”

  The Yankees were 38–39 after the win and in third place, eleven games behind the Red Sox. That same day the Mets went into Philadelphia and swept both ends of a day-night doubleheader to up their record to 45–33. They had a four-game lead on the Braves and a five-game lead on the Phillies, who dropped back into third place at 41–39 after being swept.

  Driving into the stadium the next morning, Mussina switched on the radio, which he will do on occasion just to hear what people are saying. “I like to know what they think about what I know,” he said with a smile.

  The discussion centered that morning on the Mets. Would Pedro Martinez be part of the postseason rotation? If so, would he pitch Game One or would Tom Glavine pitch Game One? Could John Maine and Oliver Perez be relied on in October?

  Mussina laughed. “We’re not even at the All-Star break yet, and people are setting up postseason rotations for the Mets,” he said. “And us? We don’t exist anymore. All I could think was ‘Wow, these guys really don’t get baseball.’ ”

  And since neither the Mets nor the Yankees had quite reached the halfway point of their seasons, there was still a lot of baseball yet to play.

  21

  Limping to the Break

  THE FOURTH OF JULY is a line of demarcation in Major League Baseball. It always falls almost exactly halfway through the season, and, history shows, teams that are in first place on the Fourth of July very often are in first place when the season ends.

  The six division leaders on July 4, 2007, were the Red Sox, Indians, and Angels in the American League, and the Mets, Brewers, and Padres in the National League. If the season had ended that day, the wild cards would have been the Tigers in the American League and the Dodgers in the National League.

  The Yankees certainly hoped their first half wasn’t an indication of how their season was going to turn out. They reached the halfway point of their schedule at 40–41 after Chien-Ming Wang beat the Minnesota Twins 8–0 on July 3 at Yankee Stadium. Their second half began at home on July 4 with two-time Cy Young Award–winner Johan Santana pitching for the Twins against Mike Mussina.

  Mussina had traditionally pitched very well when facing an opponent’s top pitcher. Even though pitchers will point out that they are facing the other team’s lineup, not the other pitcher, they are fully aware of who the other starting pitcher is every time they take the ball.

  “You have to be aware of it,” he said. “If you’re pitching against a guy like Santana, you know going in that if you give up more than a couple of runs you probably aren’t going to win the game. It can affect the way you pitch in a certain situation. If you’re down one-nothing, and they have men on first and third, you might try to get a pop-up or a strikeout rather than a double-play ball because you don’t want to concede that run. I think it actually makes me pitch better because I know I have less margin for error. It isn’t as if you’re trying any harder; it’s just that you’re a little more focused.”

  Glavine agrees and adds one other factor: “Certain games, you just have more adrenaline going to the mound,” he said. “It can be for a variety of reasons, but knowing you’re facing a top pitcher is certainly one of them.”

  In many ways, the Twins were the anti-Yankees. They were a small-market team that had actually been targeted for extinction by MLB in 2001 when the owners had decided that contraction was one way to make up for their expansion mistakes (see Tampa Bay and Miami). The Twins, owned by Carl Pohlad, who was more than willing to be contracted, and the Montreal Expos, who had no owners, were the targets.

  Both clubs survived in large part because the players union fought for the jobs that would have been lost, and the Twins blossomed into a good team thanks to the shrewd leadership of general manager Terry Ryan and manager Ron Gardenhire. They had reached the playoffs four times in six years, although they were having a tough time in a strong division in 2007, trailing both the Tigers and the Indians, with a record of 42–40 on the Fourth of July.

  Mussina’s concerns about not falling behind Santana quickly became reality in the first, when the normally reliable Derek Jeter opened the game by kicking Jason Bartlett’s routine leadoff grounder. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, Bartlett ended up scoring when 2006 AL MVP Justin Morneau sliced a ball softly down the left-field line that landed about two inches fair before bouncing into the stands for a ground rule double.

  The only reason Bartlett was on second, at least in Mussina’s mind, was that plate umpire Adrian Johnson (an umpire brought up from the minor leagues to replace a regular ump who was on vacation) had called a 2–2 fastball he had thrown to Joe Mauer a ball when Mussina was convinced it was a strike. Mauer had won the American League batting title in 2006 and had a reputation for having a good eye. Umpires are frequently influenced by who is at the plate, just as they are often influenced by who is pitching. When Ted Williams, who probably had the best batting eye of any hitter in history, was playing, it was often said that umpires never called a borderline pitch to him a strike because they figured if Ted Williams thought the pitch was a ball, it must be a ball.

  Mauer took the 2–2 pitch, and Johnson figured it must be a ball. On 3–2, Bartlett was running and reached second base on Mauer’s ground ball to Jeter. If Mauer had struck out, Bartlett would have been on first when Morneau doubled and would not have been able to score because the ball bounced into the stands. Mussina might have escaped the inning without giving up a run. Instead it was 1–0.

  “When you have an inning like that, when you’re throwing pretty well and you know you’re up against Santana, you do think, ‘Oh God, is it going to be one of those days?’ ” Mussina said later. “You have to pitch through it, but you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t notice it.”

  Mussina didn’t let it affect him. He was almost flawless over the next few innings, and Santana, while good, was human. Hideki Matsui hit a long home run off him in the second inning to tie the score at 1–1. Then in the fourth, the Yankees had a real chance to take control of the game. Jeter led off with a double, and, after Alex Rodriguez grounded out and Matsui walked, Andy Phillips singled to score Jeter and give the Yankees a 2–1 lead. After Robinson Cano popped out
, Kevin Thompson walked to load the bases with two out.

  Which left Joe Torre with a decision to make. Wil Nieves, who was now locked in as Mussina’s personal catcher, was due up next. Nieves was hitting .120, and his chances of getting a hit off Santana, realistically, were close to zero. Managers rarely pinch-hit in the fourth inning of a game, especially for their catcher, because most teams only carry two catchers these days. If something happens to the second catcher, you are forced to go to someone who only catches in emergencies — for the Yankees it would have been utility man Miguel Cairo — and that can be a disaster.

  That said, as Mussina had noted, you sometimes have to approach a game differently with a Santana on the mound. You only get so many chances most days against a first-class pitcher, and this could be the Yankees’ last best chance to really get to Santana. The bold play would have been to hit Jorge Posada for Nieves and go for broke. Torre played it conservative. Nieves flied to right. As it turned out, they never threatened Santana again, even in the seventh, when Torre did pinch-hit Posada for Nieves.

  By then, the game had unraveled. The Twins had scratched another run in the sixth when Bartlett had singled, stolen second, and then scored on back-to-back ground-ball outs. That tied it at 2–2. “At that point I’m not thinking in terms of getting a win,” Mussina said. “Realistically, I just want to hold on long enough so we can get into their bullpen and maybe get the win that way.”