Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “It happens to every pitcher at some point but that wasn’t a point where I expected it and certainly not one where it was easy to take,” Glavine said. “But you don’t really have a choice. I had to start thinking about how to get better for my next start.”

  Shortly after he arrived in the clubhouse, he received a text message from Chris, who was sitting in the stands with the boys. “Why couldn’t Willie have given you another couple of batters?” she wrote.

  Glavine smiled. “Because,” he wrote back, “there was absolutely no evidence I was going to get anyone out between now and midnight.”

  It wasn’t quite eight o’clock in Los Angeles. Glavine knew he probably wasn’t exaggerating by much.

  THE METS HELD ON THAT NIGHT to win 13–9 and took three of four in Los Angeles, including a satisfying come-from-behind 5–4 win in ten innings in the getaway game on Sunday. They flew home and had an off-day before the Pittsburgh series, meaning Glavine got to stew about his L.A. performance for an extra day since this was one of those times when Peterson had pushed him back a day in order to give him a breather.

  “The one thing I wasn’t after the L.A. game was tired,” he said, laughing, as he got ready to face the Pirates in the middle game of three at Shea.

  The Pirates were one of baseball’s sadder stories, a franchise with a great history that had not had a winning season since 1992, when they had won the last of three consecutive NL East titles under Jim Leyland. Barry Bonds, who weighed less than two hundred pounds at the time, had left for San Francisco after that season, and Leyland had left a couple of years after that. Little had gone right since then. The Pirates, even with a gorgeous new ballpark, had become the classic, poorly run small-market team. They kept changing general managers and managers with no noticeable effect. They arrived in New York with a record of 41–56 on their way to firing yet another GM and manager by season’s end.

  The one thing the Pirates did have going for them, at least for the long-term, were some good young pitchers: Ian Snell, Paul Maholm, and Tom Gorzelanny had all flashed potential early in their big league careers. All three of them were twenty-five, and Maholm and Gorzelanny were lefties who agreed that their role model — since neither threw very hard — was Tom Glavine.

  “I grew up in Massachusetts, so I was always aware of him, even when I was little,” said Maholm, who had been five years old when Glavine first reached the majors. “Just watching him pitch made me want to be a pitcher. He’s always so in control of things, handles himself so well. I’m not sure how you could have a better role model, especially if you’re a lefty, than that.”

  Gorzelanny hadn’t grown up in Massachusetts, but he felt pretty much the same way. It was a thrill for him to match up against Glavine on a comfortable July night. His numbers for 2007 were actually better than Glavine’s: playing on a bad team, he had a record of 9–5 and an excellent 3.20 ERA.

  Glavine didn’t like to think about major league pitchers who had been five years old when he got to Atlanta, but he was far more concerned with bouncing back from the debacle in L.A.

  Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was the presence of Tony Randazzo behind the plate (the Mets were beginning to feel as if this crew was permanently assigned to them), or maybe it was just the memories of all the shots he had given up in L.A., but Glavine started the night unable to find the plate.

  After leadoff hitter Nate McLouth struck out, Glavine promptly walked the next three hitters: Freddy Sanchez, Adam LaRoche, and Jason Bay. The little voice in Glavine’s head was getting louder and louder: Here we go again.

  But an ex-teammate bailed him out. Xavier Nady, who had been traded to Pittsburgh in the deal that had brought Oliver Perez to New York, hit a perfect double-play ground ball to shortstop. Jose Reyes flipped to Damion Easley, who threw on to Carlos Delgado, and just like that Glavine was out of the inning.

  As soon as the ball settled in Delgado’s glove, Glavine pumped his fist, both relieved and happy.

  “That might be the first time in my career I’ve pumped my fist after getting the side in the first inning,” he said. “It was just such a relief because it looked like I was about to get off to a really bad start and then — bang! — I’m out of it. When I pumped my fist, I kind of caught myself and said, ‘Whoa there, this is just the first inning.’ But I guess it shows how tightly wound I was right then.”

  The Mets soon got him another early lead. After Lastings Milledge had doubled, both David Wright and Delgado walked. Gorzelanny was visibly unhappy with Randazzo’s strike zone and got flustered. He gave up a two-run double down the left-field line to Lo Duca. Two more singles scored him, and the Mets were up 3–0.

  This time having a lead seemed to relax Glavine. “For whatever reason, it does make a difference having an inning under your belt,” he said. “You’re into the rhythm of the game; you’ve set up the way you want to pitch. You don’t walk out there thinking, ‘Oh God, don’t blow this lead.’ You just pitch.”

  He pitched well, and the Mets extended the lead to 6–0 in the third, Lo Duca keying the inning with another two-run double. Before the inning was over, manager Jim Tracy had been ejected, arguing about a play in the outfield but clearly far more upset about balls and strikes than about Larry Vanover calling a ball Shawn Green had hit a trap (the Pirates still got an out on a force play) instead of a catch.

  All Glavine knew was that he was up six runs and cruising. Until the fifth, when McLouth singled with one out, and Sanchez — the National League batting champion in 2006 — reached out and pushed a double down the right-field line. Glavine stood on the mound cursing after that one. “I threw such a good pitch,” he said. “I still don’t know how he managed to turn it into a hit.” LaRoche drove in a run with a ground ball out, and then Glavine got careless, leaving a fastball up to Jason Bay, who drove it into the left-field bullpen. Suddenly, 6–0 on cruise control had become 6–3, still one out short of the five innings needed by a starter to qualify for a win.

  Nady promptly doubled to right — better then than in the first inning — and Glavine was wondering if he was ever going to get the third out. “It wasn’t as if I panicked or I thought Willie was going to come get me,” he said. “The only ball hit really hard was the home run. But still, I was standing there thinking that this had gone from easy to hard very quickly.” He smiled. “I was picturing Chris in the stands staring at the dugout, ready to tackle Willie if he happened to come out of there.”

  It never got to that. Glavine got Ryan Doumit to tap back to the mound to end the inning. He hung in for one more inning and left, having thrown 112 pitches, pretty close to the maximum Peterson would allow him to throw. He hadn’t walked anyone after the first, but he had still thrown only sixty-six strikes. Most pitchers would prefer a ball-strike ratio of at least two to one. Glavine was comfortable with that number being lower, but when it backed toward fifty-fifty he got nervous, if only because it pushed his pitch count so high he couldn’t get past the sixth inning. This had been one of those nights, meaning he had to depend on the bullpen to get the last nine outs.

  Aaron Heilman and Billy Wagner made it look easy. Heilman, who thought of himself as a starting pitcher doing time as a setup man, was superb, retiring all six Pirates he faced. Wagner was almost as good, hitting McLouth with a pitch with two outs in the ninth, before ending the game by getting Sanchez to fly to Milledge. The final was 6–3.

  It hadn’t been pretty, but it was good enough. Glavine was 9–6 on the season, and 299–197 for his career. “Well,” he said afterward. “Now it’s here. At least I know I’ll get a chance to walk out there and try to get this done.”

  No one had to ask him what it was he was trying to get done. At that moment, all of baseball was fully aware of it.

  THE FIRST TRY — the only try, Glavine hoped — would come in Milwaukee. As Glavine had suspected, logistics were a bigger headache than anything else. In all, thirty people would be coming to the game as part of Team Glavine, including his pa
rents; his sister and brother-in-law (and their three kids); his two brothers; Chris and all four of the kids; neighbors from Billerica and Atlanta; and a couple of old friends from the Braves. They would fly in from various locations around the country and be seated behind the Mets dugout on the third-base side of Miller Park.

  “Had to pay for all the tickets myself,” Glavine said. “Goddamn IRS.”

  The Internal Revenue Service had changed the law several years ago on the number of comp tickets teams were allowed to give to their players, apparently because comped tickets couldn’t be taxed. Glavine could afford the tickets, but he couldn’t resist the half-joking swipe at the government.

  Glavine tried to lie as low as he could in the days between starts, but it was close to impossible. On Friday, before the Mets began a series at home with the Washington Nationals, he had a press conference, the point being to get as many of the “three hundred” questions out of the way as possible in one fell swoop. Of course, that didn’t keep reporters from stopping by his locker for “one question,” and Glavine, being Glavine, wasn’t about to pull the “I already talked about that in the press conference” line on them. The Mets split four games with the Nationals and flew to Milwaukee, still leading the division by three and a half games over the red-hot Phillies and by four and a half over the not-so-hot Braves. The Brewers were also in first place, clinging to a one-game lead over the Cubs, after it had looked early in the season as if they might run away with the National League Central. They were now 57–49 and not running away with anything.

  Milwaukee is a town with a decidedly mixed baseball history. When the Braves first moved there from Boston in 1953, the place went baseball mad, aided by the presence of superstars Henry Aaron and Eddie Matthews. The Braves won the World Series in 1957 and lost it in seven games to the Yankees a year later. Seven years later, they were gone, spirited off to Atlanta after attendance had fallen as the team dropped in the standings. Four years later, the expansion Seattle Pilots, having spent one year in what had been a minor league ballpark, were bought by a group led by car salesman Alan (Bud) Selig and moved to Milwaukee just prior to the start of the 1970 season.

  The Brewers had been bad a lot more than they had been good in their thirty-eight seasons in Milwaukee. They had won the American League pennant in 1982 but had not been in the playoffs since. They had been moved to the National League in order to accommodate the addition of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Colorado Rockies as expansion teams in 1998.

  But now, after years of wandering in the depths of the NL Central, the Brewers were legitimate contenders. Doug Melvin, who had scouted Mike Mussina years ago for the Baltimore Orioles, was the general manager. Ned Yost, who had first told Tom Glavine he needed another breaking pitch when he was in Double-A ball, was the manager. The star of the team was young slugger Prince Fielder, the son of former American League MVP Cecil Fielder.

  The Brewers were not all that concerned about Glavine’s quest for three hundred. When Ned Yost was leaving for the ballpark on Tuesday, his wife, who had known Glavine well during the days when Yost had been a coach in Atlanta, said to him, “Gee, I really hope Tom can get three hundred tonight.”

  “What?” Yost answered. “We’re in a pennant race. We need to win every game. You can’t root for him.”

  “Not even for one night?” she replied, sending her husband off to the park in a semihuff.

  In both clubhouses there was considerably more media than would be normal for a Tuesday-night game at the end of July, even with both teams in pennant contention. It could have been far worse, but many in the national baseball media were trailing Barry Bonds, who was one home run short of Henry Aaron’s record. What’s more, a lot of the New York media had stayed back in the Bronx because Alex Rodriguez was one home run shy of five hundred.

  “If Bridget Moynahan has her baby tonight, I might win three hundred and only make the agate,” Glavine said, relaxing with his feet up in his locker.

  Moynahan was the actress who was due to give birth to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s child at any minute. Glavine didn’t really mind the idea that he wasn’t getting as much attention as he might have if not for Bonds, A-Rod, and, well, Moynahan. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “I’m glad right now there aren’t more people here. But if I get it, I’ll probably be saying ‘Where is everybody?’ ”

  There were a number of people in the clubhouse — notably the other pitchers — who didn’t think Glavine was getting the attention he deserved. Some of that stemmed from a comment Willie Randolph had made after Glavine had won number 299 the previous week.

  “It’s not as big a deal in the clubhouse as it is to you guys,” Randolph had said to the media. “I really don’t think any of our guys are talking about it very much.”

  Randolph has a tendency to try to low-key things. If the media thinks something is really big, he will go out of his way to tell them that it’s not. This time, though, he had said something that shocked — and annoyed — some of his players.

  “What is he thinking?” asked Billy Wagner. “Not talking about it? We have been talking about it all year. This is something we all want for Tom, and we all want to feel we’re a part of it when he gets it. How can you say this number isn’t a big deal? How many guys have done it in history — twenty-two? Plus, he might be the last three hundred–game winner for a very long time.”

  That was very possible. Roger Clemens was first in wins among active pitchers, and Greg Maddux was next, followed by Glavine. After Glavine came Randy Johnson, who was stuck on 284 and was about to undergo back surgery at the age of forty-four. Whether he would ever pitch again, much less be capable of winning sixteen more games, was a serious question mark. Next in line after Johnson? Michael Cole Mussina, who that night was going after win 245. All the other pitchers with more than two hundred wins were a long way from three hundred, and most were late in their careers: pitchers like Jamie Moyer, Kenny Rogers, and Pedro Martinez.

  In fact, the argument can be made that a pitcher winning three hundred games is a far more significant achievement in this day and age than a hitter reaching five hundred home runs. Once, those were two of the numbers — along with three thousand hits — that guaranteed entry to the Hall of Fame. Now, with smaller ballparks, juiced baseballs, and juiced players, five hundred home runs isn’t the iconic number it once was.

  “I’m not even sure I would vote for someone with six hundred [homers],” Glavine said. “It doesn’t have the same meaning.”

  At the same time, getting to three hundred wins has become more difficult. Pitchers aren’t allowed to pitch as deep into games as they once did because they are kept on such strict pitch counts. On the day that Tom Seaver won his three hundredth game, he was forty years old and threw 146 pitches.

  Because home runs have gone up — although not so much since steroid testing came to baseball — and the number of innings starters pitch has gone down, getting wins is tougher. “You’re certainly far more dependent on your bullpen,” Glavine said. “I would like to think whenever I get there, I’ll pitch a complete game that night. But I know the chances are I won’t. Billy [Wagner] will probably throw the last pitch. But that’s the way it is nowadays.”

  The last two pitchers to reach three hundred wins were Clemens and Maddux. Clemens had pitched six innings in reaching the number; Maddux five.

  The fact that A-Rod was about to reach five hundred home runs at age thirty-two was more proof of how the numbers had changed in terms of degree of difficulty. Even before he hit the home run — which, as it turned out, took him quite a while — Rodriguez was already being anointed by baseball people as the man to someday overtake Ruth and Bonds.

  Clearly, no pitcher will ever challenge Cy Young’s 511 wins or 749 complete games. Those numbers were achieved in a completely different era of baseball. Even so, of all the unchallengeable records in baseball, many of them dating to that period, Young’s was by far the most unimaginable.
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br />   “Let’s see,” Glavine said. “If you win twenty games for twenty years, you’re still more than one hundred wins away. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no one quite gets there.”

  Later, when Randolph was asked what he meant when he said that three hundred wasn’t “that big a deal,” he more or less recanted.

  “I certainly wasn’t trying to put Tommy down or what he was trying to do,” he said. “I guess I’m still a hitter at heart. To me, five hundred home runs is a number I can identify with and understand. Three hundred wins is almost something in another sport because I never pitched. But if I think about it, I know what a big deal it is. All you have to do is look at how few guys have it and how few guys are close to it.”

  On a steamy night in Milwaukee, Glavine really wasn’t focused on who might or might not get to three hundred after him or how many home runs Bonds or Rodriguez might ultimately hit. He was focused on the Brewers’ lineup. Peterson had decided it would relax Glavine to get the pregame meeting out of the way early, so he had come into the training room with catcher Ramon Castro when Glavine first arrived, rather than waiting until an hour before game time.

  That it was Castro who was catching and not Paul Lo Duca was the subject of considerable conversation in the Mets clubhouse. Lo Duca had been saying half-jokingly all season that he would catch Glavine’s three hundredth win if he had to do so on a broken leg. That bit of hyperbole had ceased being a joke when Lo Duca pulled a hamstring running to first base the previous Saturday against the Nationals. Hamstrings are tricky injuries. Come back too fast, and you are likely to hurt yourself again. Lo Duca insisted he was okay to catch in Milwaukee. That wasn’t what the Mets’ medical people thought, and they told Randolph just that.

  Lo Duca was in the clubhouse early that day to get treatment when Randolph called him into his office.