Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “But when it’s mental, you can’t escape it. You can be playing with your kids, and you think about it. You can be in a restaurant with friends or lying in bed, and you think about it. It’s just not any fun.”

  The Yankees and Devil Rays had one of those delightful day-night doubleheaders on Saturday, the second game making up the rained-out game from the first week of the season that had pushed Mussina’s first start back a day, getting the season off on the wrong foot — a place where it had stayed for most of four months.

  Mussina walked into the clubhouse the next morning looking as if a dark cloud was right behind him. A local reporter, someone he liked, who was working on a Cal Ripken story for the following weekend to coincide with Ripken’s induction into the Hall of Fame, asked Mussina if he could ask him a couple of questions about his old teammate.

  Mussina sighed. “You know what, I’m really sorry; I just can’t do it today,” he said. “I’m so pissed off now, I don’t even want to talk about Cal. Maybe tomorrow; I just can’t do it today. I’m really sorry. I just have to figure out a way to pitch better.”

  That was really what was on his mind: how to pitch better. He knew it would be a long day for the rest of the staff and that, with two games to play, both Guidry and Borzello would be tied up all day. In fact, the schedule was so busy that Chien-Ming Wang, whose day it was to throw in the bullpen, would do his throwing during the first game because there was no other free time.

  “He might even have to pitch an inning,” Guidry told Borzello. Both knew why: Kei Igawa was the starter. If all went well, it would be his last start, since Philip Hughes was supposed to come off the DL the following week.

  While Mussina was moping around the clubhouse, Torre and general manager Brian Cashman were having one of their periodic meetings in Torre’s office. One of the topics for the day was Mussina. Cashman wanted Torre to know that if he thought moving Mussina out of the starting rotation was the right thing to do, he shouldn’t let seniority or salary affect that decision.

  “Don’t be afraid to put payroll in the bullpen if you feel that’s the right thing to do,” Cashman said to Torre, referring to Mussina’s $11.5 million salary.

  Torre understood. At that moment, though, unless Igawa suddenly became a different pitcher, there were no alternatives to Mussina. The Yankees had Wang, Clemens, Pettitte, Mussina, and — they hoped — Hughes. Joba Chamberlain was tearing up the minor leagues, but the plan was to bring him to New York to set up Mariano Rivera, since no one else had been able to fill that role. Ian Kennedy was another possibility but probably wasn’t ready.

  “It wasn’t as if we had reached the point of ‘one more bad start and we’re going to yank Mike,’ ” Cashman said later. “He was clearly struggling, though, so I wanted to let Joe know if he thought he had to make a move it should be based only on performance.”

  Mussina knew none of this. All he knew was that he needed to pitch better. The thought that he might be taken out of the rotation hadn’t crossed his mind. He had made 491 major league starts without ever missing a turn for anything, except an injury.

  As luck would have it, Saturday was the day the Yankee bats exploded. They scored seven runs in the first game and seventeen in the second, en route to a doubleheader sweep.

  Wil Nieves caught the second game that night. Jorge Posada had caught Mussina on Friday night, in part because Torre didn’t want Posada to catch both games on Saturday; in part because he knew the Yankees were trying to trade to upgrade the second-string catching spot offensively; and in part because Torre knew (as did Mussina) that in key games in September and in October (if the Yankees got there), Posada was going to be the starting catcher.

  “It’s no big deal to me at all,” Mussina said. “I’ve thrown to Georgey for seven years. We’re fine together.” He did not blame his poor performance on Posada. “I did a good job of pitching poorly all on my own,” he joked.

  Nieves got two hits and drove in two runs in the nightcap of the doubleheader. When he walked into the clubhouse, Torre asked if he could see him in his office. It is never good, especially for a marginal player, when the manager asks to see you.

  Torre told Nieves that the Yankees had traded a minor league pitcher to the Los Angeles Angels for backup catcher Jose Molina — one of three Molina brothers catching in the big leagues. The Giants’ starter was Bengie Molina, and Yadier, the youngest of the three, was the starter in St. Louis. Molina would be flying to New York the next day. Nieves would be designated for assignment, which meant he could be released or sent to the minor leagues. Since the Yankees didn’t know when Molina would arrive the next day, they needed Nieves to stick around in case Molina’s plane was late so they would have a catcher available if something happened to Posada. Only when Molina arrived would Nieves officially be designated.

  Mussina had left the clubhouse by the time Nieves finished with Torre. He’d been told about the trade and felt bad, very bad. “It’s part of the game,” he said. “You see guys come and go all the time. That’s one of the reasons I don’t get very close to other players that often. Just look at our team. I’m in my seventh year, and there are only four guys [Jeter, Rivera, Posada, Pettitte] who have been here longer — and Andy was gone for three-years and came back.

  “Still, when I heard about this, I felt for Wil. We’d spent a lot of time together. We were on the same schedule. He only caught the days I pitched, so we talked a good deal in between our starts. Plus, he’s just a good guy.”

  When Mussina arrived in the clubhouse the next day, Nieves was saying his good-byes to people, still waiting for word on when Molina would arrive. This was the baseball equivalent of being strapped into an electric chair and then being told to hang on for a few hours until the executioner arrived from out of town.

  Mussina walked across the clubhouse to talk to Nieves. He thanked him for all the work they had done together and wished him luck. Mussina is not an emotional person most of the time, but he felt emotional saying good-bye to Nieves. “We didn’t hug,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have minded if we had.”

  It wasn’t until 1:30 — shortly after the game that day had started — that Molina reached Yankee Stadium. Wil Nieves took off his uniform, picked up his things, and left the clubhouse. His nameplate was gone by the time his former teammates came back inside following their win over the Devil Rays.

  Soon after saying good-bye to Nieves, Mussina went to the bullpen with Guidry and Borzello for his normal between-starts bullpen session. He threw his usual battery of pitches to Borzello, and then the three men sat down on a bench in the bullpen and talked.

  Both Borzello and Guidry thought they had noticed something watching Mussina throw out of the stretch. They thought he was leaning forward just a little bit as he came set, not standing up as tall or as straight as he normally did.

  The three of them stood up, and Mussina walked back onto the bullpen mound without a ball. “Pick your leg up the way you do when you’re going to deliver out of the stretch, and just hold it up in the air,” Guidry instructed.

  Mussina went into his set position, picked his leg up, and held it in the air. After a few seconds, he could feel himself starting to fall forward — not hard, not fast, but just a little. Guidry had him do it again. Same result.

  “If you’re in the correct position, if you’re balanced the way you need to be, you should be able to stand on one leg until you get tired,” Guidry said. Guidry’s a left-hander and he’s fifty-six, but he can still pick his right leg up off the ground from the set position and stand there and hold a conversation for as long as he feels like talking.

  Mussina, at that moment, could not. Guidry and Borzello told him to set up again in the stretch and simply stand on the mound the way he did before lifting his leg. “Stand taller,” Guidry said. “Try to feel like you’re standing up as straight as you possibly can.”

  Mussina did as he was told. They worked on getting him to stand up straight and to focus on remaining as
vertical as possible once he had gone through his stretch — still dipping down low the way he always did to peek between his legs — but then remembering to stand back up straight when he came set. Only after he had gone through that ritual several times, focusing on standing straight, much the way kids at a Catholic school are taught to sit up straight, did Guidry allow him to continue his motion to the point where he lifted his leg.

  “Okay, now hold it,” Guidry said when Mussina’s leg was up in the air again. This time Mussina was able to hold his leg up — in his case the left leg since he throws right-handed — for as long as he wanted to hold it there.

  “Do it again,” Guidry said.

  Mussina went through the entire stretch motion, pretending to look in for a sign, dipping in, then standing up again as straight as he possibly could. Each time, he was able to stay balanced on one leg. After thirty minutes, Guidry had him throw a few pitches to Borzello. He felt better delivering the ball from the stretch than he had in a long time.

  “The key was we all believed we had found something,” Mussina said. “The best work I did as a pitcher that day was when I never threw a pitch or even had a ball in my hands. When you’re a pitcher at this level, the tiniest thing can make a difference. [See Glavine moving a few inches over on the rubber in June.] It’s often the kind of thing that no one watching the game can see. If the average person watched me pitch my next time out, I seriously doubt they noticed any difference in my delivery. But there was a difference, just a small one, and it helped me feel more balanced. I can’t even swear to you that I was more balanced. I think I was. But the most important thing is I believed I was, and if I got results that was all that mattered.

  “The important thing that day was when we walked in from the bullpen, I felt we had found something. I believed I was going to pitch better. When you’re pitching badly, you need to find something — anything — that gets you thinking the next start will be better. Because you always have to believe that. If you don’t, then you’re in serious trouble.”

  His next start would be in Kansas City on Wednesday. He would know then if the nonthrowing session in the bullpen had been worth the time and effort.

  23

  Hardball

  AS POORLY AS MIKE MUSSINA had pitched against the Devil Rays, he looked like Cy Young that night compared to what he had witnessed the night before on television.

  He had decided to stay up to see a few innings of Tom Glavine’s start against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Even though Glavine and Mussina didn’t know each other well — and in spite of whatever Glavine may or may not have said about Mussina’s contract in 1997 — there was a great deal of mutual respect between the two of them. Mussina was very much rooting for Glavine to get to three hundred wins as quickly as possible.

  “I still remember when Roger [Clemens] was going through it,” he said. “Every outing was a big deal, a media circus, especially after he got to two ninety-nine. I think it took him four tries before he got it, and he had this entire troop of friends and family following him around the country. I remember thinking he was going for one of the great milestones you can reach in baseball, and it was torture for him. I hope it isn’t that way for Tom.”

  Most baseball players are night owls because of the hours they keep during the season. Since most games are played at night — the Yankees had fifty-two scheduled day games on their 162-game schedule — most don’t get to bed until after midnight, whether at home or on the road, and many stay up considerably later than that since they typically aren’t due at their job — the ballpark — until three o’clock the next day.

  Mussina was single when he first got to the big leagues and would go out after games fairly often. Marriage, kids, and age have changed that. “For one thing, you get to a point where you don’t want to wake up in the morning feeling lousy,” he said. “Then, when you have kids at home, you want to get to bed so you can see them in the morning. I don’t really go out on the road at all anymore.”

  In fact, according to Mike Borzello, there’s nothing Mussina likes more than going straight to his hotel room, shutting the door, and either going to sleep or reading himself to sleep. “He never even turns on the TV,” Borzello said.

  “Sometimes I turn on the TV,” Mussina said. “But not all that often.”

  On Thursday night, July 19, Mussina was home preparing for his start the next night against Tampa Bay. With the Mets not playing until ten, his kids were in bed by the time the game started.

  “I didn’t watch for long,” he said the next day.

  The pitching matchup certainly appeared to be a good one: Glavine versus Derek Lowe, the Dodgers’ veteran righty, who still had one of the better sinkers in the game. The Mets had started their weeklong West Coast swing by losing two of three in San Diego. They still led the division by two and a half games when they arrived in Los Angeles to play four games against the Dodgers.

  Glavine, coming off his great performance in New York against the Reds, was brimming with confidence, thinking he was about to get on the run he had been waiting for all year. If he could win in L.A., he would get his first shot at the Number the following Wednesday, at home against the always-awful Pittsburgh Pirates. It was, potentially, an ideal setup: the chance to, as he would say, “do what I’m trying to do” in front of a home crowd. It would also be a lot easier logistically to go for the win at home since the plan was for about thirty family members and close friends to be on hand.

  Going for 299 in L.A., the only family members in the ballpark were Chris and their two youngest sons, Peyton and Mason. The boys enjoyed Los Angeles and had come out for the long weekend to see some shows and to watch their dad pitch.

  The evening started wonderfully. Glavine felt good warming up, and he had always pitched well in Los Angeles. Most people in the National League thought the Dodger Stadium mound was a tad higher than the standard ten inches, perhaps because the Dodgers were always a pitching-oriented team. True or untrue, Glavine usually felt very comfortable on the mound there.

  As if they understood how important it would be to Glavine to get a win, the Mets bombed L.A. starter Derek Lowe for six runs in the first inning. When Glavine came up to bat in the inning, Ron Darling commented on the Mets broadcast that “there aren’t a lot of feelings better for a pitcher than coming up to bat before you’ve thrown a pitch.”

  Glavine was certainly happy to have the runs. But he actually felt a bit queasy going to the mound in the bottom of the first, up 6–0. “There’s a tendency to overthink,” he said. “If it’s nothing-nothing or if you’re at home, you have this plan on how you want to pitch, and you aren’t thinking score at all. You get that big a lead, you have to say to yourself, ‘Don’t change the plan; pitch like you would normally pitch.’ Of course the minute you do that, you aren’t thinking the way you normally think.”

  Glavine quickly gave two runs back, and it might have been more if Jeff Kent hadn’t been thrown out at third on Luis Gonzales’s two-RBI single, which made the score 6–2. After Matt Kemp homered for the Dodgers with one on in the bottom of the second inning, it was 6–4.

  What’s more, Glavine had already thrown fifty-two pitches, a good pitch count for four innings, an okay pitch count for three innings, a horrific pitch count for two innings. “At that point, my thought process was all messed up,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Just get through five with the lead, and maybe I can get the win.’ Not exactly a positive attitude.”

  He felt better after the top of the third when the Mets tacked on three more runs. Glavine was in the middle of the rally, drawing a walk against Lowe — who looked shell-shocked by that point — and scoring the Mets’ eighth run. He had a comfortable 9–4 lead going out to pitch the third and reminded himself that he just needed to throw strikes and let his fielders do the rest.

  “On paper,” he said later, “it was a good thought.”

  It lasted one pitch: Kent, leading off, hit Glavine’s first pitch (a strike, no doubt) i
nto the pavilion in left-center field to make it 9–5. While Kent was trotting around the bases, Rick Peterson was on the bullpen phone getting Aaron Sele up. No one wanted to see Glavine come out of a game with nine runs already on the board, but, unlike a year ago in Atlanta, the Mets were in a serious pennant race, and Willie Randolph had to think first and foremost about winning the game.

  “I saw Aaron get up,” Glavine said. “I understood. I knew I was on thin ice if I didn’t start getting outs.”

  He didn’t. Gonzales singled. Then Nomar Garciaparra, once the hero of Boston but a forgotten man there since 2004, also singled. Paul Lo Duca came out to the mound to give Glavine a pep talk that both men knew was nothing more than a stalling tactic to give Sele more time to get warm. “At that point, I figured I was no more than two hitters away from getting yanked,” he said. “Maybe less.”

  It was less. James Loney singled to load the bases, and Randolph had no choice. The tying run was coming to the plate; Glavine had now thrown sixty-eight pitches and retired six batters out of sixteen.

  Glavine felt slightly sick to his stomach. Watching at home on TV, Mussina felt his pain. “As a pitcher, that’s just about your worst nightmare,” he said. “Your team puts up a lot of runs for you, and you just can’t get anybody out. You feel helpless. You find yourself thinking, ‘Exactly when did I forget how to pitch?’ ”

  As embarrassed as he felt, Glavine stayed in the dugout for the rest of the inning, the way he always did when taken out of a game, even though he wanted to run into the clubhouse and hide. Sele did a good job holding the Dodgers to one run after taking over in a bases-loaded, no-out jam. When the inning ended, Glavine sat in the dugout as if unable to move because he was still stunned by what had happened: two innings plus three batters; six runs (all earned); ten hits, two of them home runs; and one walk. His ERA for the season jumped from 4.15 to 4.51.