Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  He is a fastball/slider pitcher who, at twenty-eight, wanted very much to be a starter again. Glavine had often encouraged him not to worry about that and to simply try to control that which he could control. Now, he had control of the ball and the game.

  Theriot was clearly thinking about tying the game with one swing. He reached for a Heilman slider and popped it up to medium-center field. Milledge settled under it, and everyone in the dugout — most notably Glavine — breathed a sigh of relief.

  Six outs to go.

  With the lead down to two runs, the Mets wanted to get some insurance in the eighth against the Cubs bullpen. Will Ohman was now on the mound. Castillo and Wright started the inning with singles. Delgado doubled Castillo home, Wright stopping at third. Alou was walked intentionally, and Green struck out. But Lo Duca, in pain but happy to be playing, singled to left to score Wright, and the lead was 7–3. Milledge flied out, and then Randolph decided to go for the jugular with runners on second and third and two out. He sent up Marlon Anderson, his best pinch hitter, for Heilman, hoping to break open the game. A base hit would make the lead six. But Anderson flied to center, and it was still 7–3.

  Now, with Heilman out of the game, someone had to pitch the eighth to get the ball to Wagner. Randolph chose Jorge Sosa, who had been a starter at the beginning of the season but had been moved into the bullpen in recent weeks. Sosa had live stuff and when on could be almost unhittable for an inning or two.

  With everyone on the Mets bench wondering if Randolph would bring in Wagner if Sosa found trouble (he would have), Sosa got Lee and Ramirez on ground balls, walked Floyd, but then got DeRosa to fly to Milledge for the third out.

  Three outs to go. And now Wagner would have the ball. The Mets added one more run in the ninth. In the clubhouse, Glavine wondered if he should go back to the dugout or stay put. His normal routine was to stay in the clubhouse, but this wasn’t a normal night.

  “Everyone said I should go back to the dugout,” he said. “I figured they were right, especially because no one was in the clubhouse.” (Almost always during a game there are players in the clubhouse for various reasons; now everyone was in the dugout.)

  He walked back to the packed dugout. ESPN’s camera was on Glavine more than on the field as Wagner came in to pitch. “I was glad to have a five-run lead,” Wagner said. “When I had fantasized about it, I thought it would be a one-run lead, and I’d come in and blow them away. But the reality of it was I was glad to have some cushion.”

  Pagan lined out to right. But then Kendall doubled. Matt Murton came up to pinch-hit and foul-tipped a pitch right off of plate umpire Marty Foster’s mask. Foster was knocked a little bit dizzy by the impact. He took off the mask while the Cubs’ training staff ran out to check on him.

  Tim McLelland, the crew chief, came in from third base to talk to Foster. As luck would have it, ESPN had miked McLelland, so people watching on TV got to hear him pleading with Foster to go back inside and let someone else finish the game in his place.

  “I can’t let you go on,” McLelland said. “There’s only two outs left. We’ll finish for you.”

  Foster wanted to finish the game. He and McLelland and the trainers continued to talk while everyone waited.

  In the stands, Glavine’s sister Debbie, not knowing Tom was in the dugout and not near his BlackBerry, couldn’t resist sending him a text message: “This could only happen to you.”

  Glavine was thinking roughly the same thing. “The game had been going on forever already,” he said. “I was thinking we were heading for midnight.”

  On the East Coast, it was well past eleven o’clock when the trainers finally decided Foster could try to finish the game. Wagner, annoyed at himself for giving up the double to Kendall, struck out Murton looking.

  One out to go.

  Sitting in his house in Atlanta, Bobby Cox broke an old baseball rule — counting the last out before the last out. “I was just so excited, I couldn’t wait any longer,” he said. He dialed Glavine’s cell phone and left a message: “I couldn’t be happier for you. No one has ever deserved it more.” He paused a second before adding the last sentence. “I just wish you could have done it in a Braves uniform.”

  Everyone was standing now, knowing they were about to witness baseball history. In spite of the length of the game, the lateness of the hour, and the home team trailing by five, almost no one had left the ballpark. Mike Fontenot was the Cubs’ last hope.

  Wagner went to 1–1 on Fontenot. He threw one more 97-mile-an-hour fastball, and Fontenot rolled it to Castillo. Wagner was running in the direction of first base thinking, Throw it, throw it, please throw it, as Castillo, a Gold Glove second baseman in his American League days, smoothly fielded the ball and tossed it to Delgado, who squeezed it in his glove just to be absolutely sure.

  First-base umpire Fieldin Culbreth gave the out signal, and it was official: the Number Could Finally Be Named — three hundred.

  In the radio booth, play-by-play man Howie Rose adjusted his usual final-out call from “Put it in the books!” to “Put it in the history books!”

  Wagner demanded the ball from Delgado as the Mets poured onto the field. The crowd was up again, applauding Glavine’s feat. A feeling of complete and utter satisfaction swept over Glavine as he headed out from the dugout.

  Wagner was waiting for him with the ball: he held it up, handed it to Glavine, and the car-pool buddies hugged.

  The Cubs’ security people had made sure to get the Glavine family onto the field. They were standing next to the dugout when Glavine, ball in hand, came back from the celebration with his teammates. He hugged Chris, and he hugged his mother. He started to shake hands with his father because that’s what he and his dad always did — they shook hands.

  “I think I’ll take a hug for this one,” Fred Glavine said.

  He turned to the kids, going youngest to oldest. He didn’t lose it until he got to Amber, who was crying. Like her dad, Amber Glavine doesn’t show emotion all that often, even at twelve. Now, she was crying tears of joy and pride, and it got to her father.

  “She’s been through a lot for a kid who is only twelve,” he said. “She saw her parents go through a divorce and get remarried. Then her stepdad got killed in an accident, and, through it all, she’s never been anything but a great kid. When I saw the tears in her eyes, it got to me. I had to get the lump out of my throat before I talked to the guys in the clubhouse.”

  When he had finished the family hugs, Glavine told them all, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  There was still work to do: postgame with ESPN, postgame radio, postgame in the interview room with everyone else. The visitors’ clubhouse in Wrigley was much too small for all the media that would want to talk to him. Before all that, though, he had a moment alone with his teammates. Charlie Samuels, who had worked for the Mets since 1976 and been the clubhouse manager almost as long, had made arrangements for a celebration.

  As the players walked into the clubhouse, they were each handed a T-shirt that said simply “Glavine 300” over a silhouetted photo of Glavine in his pitching motion. The number was out in the open now for all to see. Samuels had also set up champagne for everyone in the middle of the clubhouse.

  The man of the hour picked up a glass as everyone else did and offered a toast: “I just want to thank all of you guys for putting up with all the stuff that’s gone on surrounding this,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. Now let’s take care of winning the pennant.”

  They all drank, toasted, cheered, and hugged. Heilman felt himself tingling. “I figured this was the closest I’d ever get to three hundred wins,” he said later.

  It was a rare pro sports moment of pure joy. The Mets were 63–48, with a four-and-a-half-game lead and eight weeks left in the season. There was a lot of work still to do. But for this one night, they could all share in Glavine’s special moment.

  All of baseball felt the same way. There were many who wished Bonds hadn’t reac
hed Aaron and quite a few who felt very little emotion about A-Rod reaching five hundred. Most didn’t have much of an opinion on Bridget Moynahan.

  But everyone liked and respected Tom Glavine. He had always been a great teammate. He had stood up for his fellow players for years in his union role. He had always done things the right way.

  And now, he had won three hundred games.

  “It meant I didn’t have to ever speculate again,” he said. “It didn’t have to be ‘If I can get there.’ I was actually there.”

  Now, about that pennant race…

  25

  Autopilot

  LIKE A LOT OF BASEBALL PEOPLE, Mike Mussina was watching as Glavine went for number three hundred in Chicago. He was sitting in a hotel room in Toronto, having flown there earlier in the evening with the rest of the Yankees after he had won his third straight start, beating the Kansas City Royals 8–5 in New York.

  Once again, the Yankees had produced a lot of early offense, and Mussina had made it stand up — then watched the bullpen wobble before Mariano Rivera came in to wrap up the victory.

  The win raised Mussina’s record for the season to 7–7 and put him at 246 for his career. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like three hundred, does it?” he joked.

  Someone pointed out that while 246 wasn’t 300, it did make Mussina the winningest pitcher in major league history without a twenty-win season, surpassing Dennis Martinez, who had 245. “I’m not exactly sure what that means,” Mussina said. “I guess it means people have kept running me out there for a lot of years; I’m grateful for that.”

  The Yankees were now officially a hot team: they were 19–7 since the All-Star break and had wiped out almost their entire wild-card deficit. They were a half game behind the Tigers (who were a half game behind the Indians in the Central Division) and percentage points behind the surprising Seattle Mariners. They had even sliced the Red Sox lead to seven games.

  Mussina’s resurgence had coincided with the team getting hot. He had been terrible against Tampa Bay, better in Kansas City, solid in a laugher against the White Sox, and even better in his return engagement against the Royals.

  “Worth noting who we’re playing,” he said. “Things will start to get tougher here very soon — for all of us.”

  After the Yankees wrapped their series against the Royals, their road trip would take them to Toronto (where the Blue Jays were playing respectably) and Cleveland. After that would come a homestand that would start with the Orioles — against whom they were 3–6 on the season — and then the toughest two weeks of the season to date: four games at home against the Tigers, three in Anaheim against the Angels, four more against the Tigers in Detroit, and then, finally, three back at Yankee Stadium against the Red Sox.

  The consensus was that everyone would know a lot more about where this Yankees season was headed once the Red Sox pulled out of New York following an afternoon game on August 30.

  Like everyone else in the clubhouse, Mussina was aware of the schedule but wasn’t yet ready to worry about it. He had been matched against Gil Meche in the finale of the Royals series, and even though Meche had become a kind of punch line when the subject of overpaid pitchers came up — “Hey, if Gil Meche can get $55 million for five years, anyone can get rich in this game” — he had been a good pitcher all season. His record was only 7–8 coming into the game, but his ERA was a very respectable 3.70 on a team that was 48–61 and trying to avoid yet another last-place finish.

  Meche had always pitched well against the Yankees, especially during his time in Seattle. Fortunately, this was one day when the Yankees got to him early. They scored four runs in the second inning after two were out, Bobby Abreu driving in the final pair with a single up the middle. The cushion grew to 6–0 over the next two innings, while Mussina sailed along.

  “You start to feel like you’re really in a groove after a while, which is one of the amazing things about the game,” Mussina said. “Two weeks earlier I wondered if I would ever get anyone out again. Now, I felt comfortable on the mound, the ball felt good coming out of my hand, and I just felt like I was going to get outs.”

  He faltered only in the sixth inning when he hit Emil Brown with a pitch and Ross Gload hit a two-run homer on the next pitch. “Sometimes trying to get that first-pitch strike with a fastball is a mistake,” he said.

  The Yankees answered quickly with two more runs in the sixth. Torre let Mussina start the seventh, even though he’d thrown ninety-seven pitches and there wasn’t much reason to stretch him a lot further than that. When Joey Gathright led off with a single, Torre quickly went to the bullpen, which almost turned into a disaster. Brian Bruney and Mike Myers managed to turn the 8–2 lead into an 8–5 lead with two on and two out in the eighth. Taking no chances, Torre brought in Rivera for a four-out save, and Rivera blew the Royals away — four batters, eleven pitches — to wrap up the game.

  That made three straight wins in three starts for Mussina. The wins had all been over weak teams — the Royals twice and the White Sox once — but that didn’t really matter. He knew he felt better on the mound, and he knew those teams probably would have pounded him a few weeks earlier.

  “The next few weeks will be interesting, given the schedule,” he said, as someone picked up his equipment to put it on the bus for the trip to Toronto. “We’re playing well now, but there’s no doubt who we have been playing has helped.”

  He was looking forward to getting to Toronto and relaxing in front of the television that night. “I really hope Tom gets it this time,” he said. “My guess is, he’ll do fine.”

  His guess turned out to be right. The Mets returned home for a three game series against the Braves, meaning that Glavine’s wish to reach three hundred before the Mets and Braves met again had just barely been granted. It might have been a bit more dramatic if Glavine had gotten the milestone win against his old team, but he was just as glad to have it over with and to accept congratulations from old friends like Bobby Cox and Andruw and Chipper Jones.

  Celebrations were being planned. On Wednesday, Glavine and family would make a trip to downtown Manhattan to accept the key to the city from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The following Sunday, the Mets planned a ceremony to honor him. The timing had turned out perfectly: Peyton and Mason started school on August 14, and Chris was flying home with them Sunday night to get them ready.

  “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have this done before they start school,” he said. “I didn’t want them flying all over the place and missing school so they could see me go after it. This way, they can go home and get the school year going and feel happy that they got to see me do it and got to be part of the ceremony.”

  Glavine was excited about going to City Hall to get the key. “It’s an actual key,” he said. “Apparently there was a big key that opened the back door to the building, and this is a replica. “It’s kind of cool.”

  Alex Rodriguez would receive a similar key during the Yankees’ next homestand. He didn’t go to City Hall, though — Bloomberg and the key came to Yankee Stadium, and the key was presented to him behind home plate. There was, no doubt, some kind of symbolism in that. Or it just might have been that Glavine has always been able to enjoy getting to do things most people don’t get to do — like being given the key to New York City.

  Glavine left City Hall after the key ceremony and headed straight to the ballpark for the second game of the Braves series. He had been awash in congratulatory calls and e-mails and letters. The one that had really hit home was from another left-hander: Sandy Koufax. “That was cool,” he said. “I mean, growing up, when you thought about great pitchers, you thought about Koufax. He was just terrific about it.”

  Koufax had only won 165 games in his career but was in the Hall of Fame largely on the strength of what were probably the four most dominant years (1963–66) any modern-day pitcher has ever had. Unlike most retired players, he didn’t spend a lot of time in the public eye. He didn’t do card shows,
and he had given up his job as a Dodgers spring-training instructor several years ago. He might occasionally be spotted in a golf gallery, following his friend Billy Andrade, from the PGA Tour, around, and he almost always went to the Final Four since he was a basketball nut. But that was about it.

  With all the calls and notes and interviews and the key to the city, Glavine hadn’t given much thought to baseball. “As I was driving to the park, it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Hey, I have to pitch again in a few days,’ ” he said. “The last time I’d been through anything that was as big a deal was when we won the World Series [in 1995]. That was different because the season was over. Our season was very much still going on. I had to pause and think for a moment about who we were playing on the weekend.”

  That would be the Marlins. The Mets (again) lost two of three to the Braves, leaving their record for the season against them at a dreadful 4–8. The Braves and Phillies were playing leapfrog for second place, with the Braves jumping back up after winning the final game of the series. The Braves trailed by three and a half, the Phillies by four.

  The Yankees, in the meantime, were in a three-way wild-card chase coming out of Toronto. After winning two of three against the Blue Jays — with Chien-Ming Wang getting bombed in the last game of the set — they were a half game behind the Mariners and in a flat-footed tie with the Tigers.

  From Toronto, they headed to Cleveland to begin a three-game series with the Indians, who had moved into first place in the Central Division, a game and a half ahead of the Tigers. Philip Hughes, finally off the disabled list, made his return in the opener and pitched well in a 6–1 win. That sent Mussina to the mound on Saturday night against soft-tossing Paul Byrd, who was kind of a poor man’s Glavine. His fastball almost never touched more than 86 miles per hour but he had ninety-seven career wins and was 10–4 for the season going into the game.

  For the first time in four starts, Mussina gave up a first-inning run, the kind of soft run a pitcher hates to give up: a Grady Sizemore single, a sacrifice by Kenny Lofton, a wild pitch, and a sacrifice fly by Victor Martinez. The 1–0 lead didn’t last long — the Yankees bombed Byrd in the second inning for seven runs. Mussina went back to the mound in the second inning feeling very comfortable. For the next six innings, he was virtually untouchable.