Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “Nah, you can’t do it throwing underhanded,” Glavine said. (Smith is a side-armer who releases the ball from below the waist.)

  “But you,” he said, pointing at Pelfrey, “need to learn this. It’s part of being a pitcher.”

  Rivera didn’t need anyone to teach him about what to do with a scuffed ball. But watching him in the game in Cleveland and then the two games against the Orioles, Mussina was convinced he saw something different in his delivery. “When you’ve watched Mo as many times as I have, for as many years as I have, you’re bound to notice any change at all. At first I wasn’t sure what was different, just that something was different. I asked [Mike] Borzello if he thought he saw anything different when he was warming him up, and he said he didn’t. I told him to watch that day if Mo went in.

  “He saw it from the center-field window, and I saw it from the dugout. Mo always stands up very straight in the stretch [like most relievers, Rivera always pitches out of the stretch] and keeps his front [left] shoulder very high. It looked to me like he wasn’t standing up as straight and his shoulder was dropping just a little. That doesn’t sound like much, but it can change your balance.”

  Once Mussina and Borzello had agreed that they had seen the same thing, Mussina let Joe Torre and Ron Guidry know what he had observed. They both said the same thing: tell him.

  “I have no problem when someone like Mike thinks he sees something,” Torre said. “For one thing, he’s smart and he knows pitching. For another, with his experience it’s almost like having another pitching coach on the staff.”

  Mussina mentioned to Rivera before the Yankees began their series with the Tigers on August 16 that he and Borzello had noticed something in his stance. When he got to the bullpen that day, Rivera discussed it with Borzello.

  “We need to get back to our routine from April,” Rivera told Borzello. Early in the season when Rivera had struggled, he had thrown to the Yankees’ other bullpen catcher, Ramon Rodriguez (no relation to Alex), while Borzello stood in the left-hand batter’s box to give him a target. When Rivera made the suggested adjustments, he instantly felt a difference, and his cutter, the pitch that has made him a surefire Hall of Famer, had noticeably more bite, diving away from Borzello as he stood on the left side of the bullpen plate.

  So Rivera was fixed. He came in the next night against Detroit and pitched a one-two-three ninth. If nothing else, that quieted all the people screaming on sports radio that Chamberlain should replace Rivera as the closer.

  “I heard some of that,” Mussina said, shaking his head. “Are people completely out of their minds?”

  Having fixed Rivera, Mussina made the start that same night in the opener against the Tigers. He had every reason to feel good about himself as he took the mound against Detroit’s young ace Justin Verlander. In his four starts since the “no ball” session in the bullpen, Mussina had gone 4–0 with an ERA of 2.84. And yet, as he warmed up before the game, Mussina had a small sense of dread. Nothing felt quite as comfortable or as easy as it had in Cleveland.

  “This is something that happens to everyone during a season; in fact, I’d bet it’s something that happens to every athlete,” he said. “You reach a point where you’ve worked hard and everything is clicking. That’s when you have that mindless game like the one I had in Cleveland. But pitching isn’t a mindless exercise. For one game, maybe even two, it can be. But most of the time you need a certain focus on your mechanics, on your release, on how you’re locating the ball.

  “The problem is, when you go from mindless to needing to focus, it isn’t something you can just snap your fingers and make happen. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s almost as if you have to learn how to pitch all over again. You go from feeling like you can’t do anything wrong in one start to wondering if you have any idea how to pitch in the next start.”

  Mussina’s sense that this happens to athletes in all sports is accurate. Consider how often golfers, after a brilliant round in which they appear capable of hitting any shot, come back the next day and shoot ten or twelve strokes higher. Or the tennis player who can’t miss a serve one day and starts firing double-faults all over the place the next. Or basketball players who hit every shot they take one night and are ice cold the next. It happens in every sport.

  Mussina calls it “mindlessness.” A lot of people call it “being unconscious.” As in “He was so hot, he was unconscious.” The term is apt because an athlete in that kind of zone isn’t thinking about what he’s doing. That’s why when someone — even someone as articulate as Glavine or Mussina — is asked about a brilliant performance, he often can’t explain it because he isn’t thinking about what he’s doing, he’s just doing it.

  As Mussina says, you go from autopilot to being on a plane with the autopilot turned off and no one in the cockpit. The result is predictable: crash.

  Mussina didn’t exactly nosedive against the Tigers. In fact, with a little help from his defense, he might have gotten through the game in reasonable shape. In the first inning, he gave up a one-out single to ex-Yankee Marcus Thames. That brought up a far more notorious ex-Yankee, Gary Sheffield. Earlier in the season, Sheffield, who was known for an extremely quick bat and an often wayward mouth, had said in a magazine story that he believed Joe Torre treated African American players differently than he treated white and Hispanic players. The comments were so upsetting to Torre, who had gone out of his way to keep Sheffield happy while he’d been in New York, that for one of the few times in his life, he simply refused to comment. Every time Sheffield came to the plate during the weekend series, he was greeted by very loud boos.

  Mussina made everyone happy when he got Sheffield to hit a ground ball to Alex Rodriguez for what should have been a five-four-three double play, especially given Sheffield’s lack of speed. But Rodriguez booted the ball, and all hands were safe. Instead of being in the dugout with a relatively easy first inning behind him, Mussina was on the mound with men on first and second and cleanup hitter Magglio Ordonez, who was having a monster year, at the plate. Pitching carefully, Mussina walked Ordonez. That loaded the bases for Carlos Guillen, who was no bargain either, especially hitting lefty in Yankee Stadium.

  “In that situation, you obviously don’t want to walk the guy,” Mussina said. “But you also don’t want to make a mistake because the guy hits mistakes.”

  Working carefully, Mussina got to 2–2. Not wanting to go to 3–2, he tried to make the 2–2 the decisive pitch of the at bat, a fastball on the outer half of the plate. But Guillen, looking for it, extended his arms across the plate and drove the ball high into the right-field seats for a grand slam. Instead of putting a zero on the board in the first inning, the Tigers had hung a four on Mussina.

  “Yeah, it’s true; if Alex makes that play, maybe I get out of the inning untouched,” Mussina said. “But if I’m being honest, I think that only would have meant my numbers for the night would have been better. I still wouldn’t have been good. Nothing was easy.”

  He gave up two more runs in the second, managed to work through the third and fourth untouched, and gave up another run in the fifth, before leaving, trailing 7–3. Obviously three earned runs in five innings would have been considerably better than six earned runs in five innings, but Mussina knew if he’d gone out for a sixth inning, it probably would not have gone well.

  “The home-run pitch to Guillen was kind of typical,” he said. “I knew what I wanted to throw and where I wanted to throw it, and I just let it drift in a little too much. The whole night was like that.”

  The Tigers went on to win 8–5, giving Justin Verlander his thirteenth win of the season. The Yankees bounced back on the strength of three good pitching performances — Pettitte, Clemens, and Wang — to win the last three games of the series. Heading to the West Coast, that gave them a three-game cushion on the Tigers in the wild-card race.

  They lost the opener in Anaheim 7–6 in ten innings thanks to some sloppy outfield play and some poor relief pitching. I
t was Mussina’s turn the next night. He had worked diligently in the bullpen on his mechanics between starts, knowing he wasn’t likely to capture the mindless feeling of Cleveland any time soon but that the semi-helpless feeling of the Detroit game wasn’t what he wanted to feel.

  He warmed up well on a beautiful night and felt good when he came to the mound for the bottom of the first inning. The feeling didn’t last very long. He walked Chone Figgins and Orlando Cabrera to start the game. In 497 major league starts, Mussina had never walked the first two batters he had faced in a game. Months later, discussing that night, he shook his head and said, “I honestly don’t remember walking those guys. The only thing I remember about that first inning is getting a bad call on Garret Anderson’s ground ball down the first-base line.”

  That came after Vladimir Guerrero had hit a long fly ball to center field for the first out. Anderson, one of many Yankee killers in the Angels lineup, hit a hard ground ball down the first-base line that was either just fair or just foul. Mussina thought it was foul and so did first baseman Andy Phillips. Paul Emmel, the first-base umpire, thought it was fair. The ball went down the right-field line while both Figgins and Cabrera scored. Anderson ended up on second.

  Mussina, Phillips, and catcher Jose Molina argued the call vehemently, but Emmel wouldn’t budge, and he wouldn’t ask home-plate umpire Ron Kulpa for help. “He’s actually a good umpire,” Mussina said. “I’d never had a problem with him in the past. I just thought he missed that call.”

  Perhaps Mussina argued as much as he did because he knew he was skating on thin ice already. He managed to get out of the inning without further damage, and Alex Rodriguez homered in the second to make it 2–1. Then came the bottom of the second inning.

  Crash.

  The inning began with a Maicer Izturis single followed by ringing no-doubt doubles by Howie Kendrick and Jeff Mathis, the second making the score 4–1. Mussina managed to get two outs, but then the bottom dropped out completely: a Guerrero double in the gap made it 5–1; another double by Anderson made it 6–1; and then Gary Matthews Jr. singled up the middle to make it 7–1.

  The only reason Mussina faced Matthews was that Torre couldn’t get Ron Villone warmed up in time to prevent it. Ready or not, Villone was in after the Matthews hit. Mussina’s line read like this: one and two-thirds innings pitched; seven runs, all earned; seven hits; two walks; one strikeout. He had thrown forty-eight pitches in less than two innings, and nine of the fourteen batters he faced reached base. Every one of the seven hits was hit hard. The only surprise was that no one had homered. By the time he walked off the mound, his ERA for the season had soared to 5.22.

  “I simply couldn’t keep the ball off the barrel of the bat,” he said. “It was embarrassing. They hit everything hard.”

  The bullpen wasn’t any better than Mussina, and the game turned into a nightmare, the Angels finally winning 18–9. Mussina was so bad that several Angels asked Mike Borzello if he was hurt.

  The answer, as it turned out, was yes.

  Mussina had been nursing a number of minor injuries for most of the season. When he had come back from the hamstring injury, he had been healthy enough to pitch but not 100 percent. “If you want to be a hundred percent after an injury like that, you probably have to do nothing for two or three months,” he said. “You can’t do that. You’re paid to pitch. When it felt good enough to pitch, I pitched.”

  In mid-May, he had hurt his right foot when he misstepped going down into the dugout after batting practice one afternoon. “The dugout steps at Yankee Stadium are rounded off a little, and my foot just caught a little,” he said. “I didn’t think that much of it at the time, but it kept hurting to the point where I’d get out of bed in the morning and I could barely walk.”

  Several doctors examined him but none could find anything broken or torn. The feeling was that he had stretched one of his arches. He could have shut down for a while but — as with the hamstring — didn’t want to stop pitching. “I could still pitch, and at times I pitched well,” he said. “But there were times I felt like I couldn’t drive down off the mound the way that I wanted to.”

  Other aches followed: His right knee hurt, probably connected to adjusting his delivery because of the foot. Then his left hip began to bother him, probably the result of old age.

  “You know you’re going to have aches and pains during the season,” he said. “Especially when you’re older, you have to learn to put up with them. You don’t want to spend your life in the training room or on the DL or sitting out because of something minor. The funny thing is my arm never felt better. And, even with all this stuff going on, I had that four-game stretch where I pitched really well. But in August, particularly in that Anaheim game, I just seemed to feel everything. Was that the reason I pitched so poorly? I don’t know. But after that game, I felt like I needed to let Joe know what was going on.”

  Torre already knew about the foot and the hamstring but didn’t know that Mussina’s knee and hip were also bothering him. When Mussina walked into his office in Anaheim the day after the debacle there and told him what was going on, Torre’s first notion was to have him skip a start.

  “Moose has never been a whiner or an excuse maker,” Torre said. “If he comes to me and says he’s hurt, I know he’s hurt. I asked him if skipping a start might help him heal up a little.”

  Mussina rejected that idea. Because of an off-day between the series in Anaheim and the four-game series in Detroit, he would have an extra day before he pitched next. He thought that would help. He and Torre agreed he would start the final game in Detroit and see how he felt after that game.

  “Looking back, maybe I was being a little stubborn about it,” Mussina said. “I didn’t want to go on the DL or miss a start when we were right in the middle of this wild-card race and not completely out of the division race. Whatever it was, I just knew I wanted to pitch.”

  In July, when he had struggled, the Yankees really didn’t have an alternative for Mussina in the starting rotation. Hughes was still on the DL then, and the feeling was that Ian Kennedy, the organization’s other touted young starter, was better off staying in the minor leagues at least until September call-ups. But now Hughes was healthy and Kennedy was pitching well enough that the team might consider moving him up sooner if necessary. Mussina wasn’t thinking in those terms. He was thinking only that he’d had two bad starts — one bad, one horrific — and he wanted to turn that around.

  He was better in Detroit than he had been in Anaheim but not by much. The Tigers scored one in the first, two in the second, and three in the third. Mussina was consistently finding bat barrels again, and line drives were going in all directions around Comerica Park. His fastball was too close to the plate, and his breaking pitches lacked any bite at all.

  “In those two games, there were times when it looked like he was throwing batting practice,” Borzello said. “It seemed as if everything he was throwing, regardless of the pitch, was just flat. You can’t get guys out that way.”

  This time, Mussina got nine guys out, getting through three innings. But the numbers were ugly again: nine hits, six runs, seventy-two pitches thrown to get through three innings. The bullpen was even worse than it had been in Anaheim, and the final was 16–0.

  Mussina wasn’t at wit’s end, but he was close. He’d had bad streaks before in his career, but his ERA had never been 5.53 at the end of August. “What you have to do in those situations, what I’ve always done, is take a day to be pissed off about it and pout and then start thinking about your next start,” he said. “You have to do that or you lose your mind. You have to think, ‘How do I get better before my next start?’ We’d been able to do it after the Tampa game. There had to be a way to do it this time too. I had to get in the bullpen with Borzy and Gator [Guidry] and figure something out.”

  The Yankees flew home from Detroit late on Monday night to start a three-game series with the Red Sox the next night. Their 2–5 road trip had allowed
Boston to widen its lead in the division race to eight games. Clearly, the wild card was what the Yankees had to shoot for now, with less than five weeks left in the season. They had dropped two games behind the Mariners and were tied with the Tigers in that race.

  Mussina wasn’t scheduled to pitch in the Boston series. His next start was to come on Saturday against his old friends the Devil Rays. He arrived at the ballpark on Tuesday a little bit tired — he had gotten home at about three in the morning after the flight — and a good deal frustrated. He went through his normal day-after-pitching routine and was sitting in the office of equipment manager Rob Cucuzza about twenty minutes before the game started, looking through a sporting goods catalog for things his boys might want in the spring.

  Mussina often hangs out in Cucuzza’s office. It is almost directly across from Torre’s office in the narrow hallway many of the players use to enter and exit the clubhouse. As he was paging through the catalog, Mussina saw Torre come out of his office and head in the direction of the field. When Torre saw Mussina, he stopped short and walked back into Cucuzza’s office, sitting in a chair opposite Mussina.

  “I just wanted you to know, so you don’t hear it from someone else later, that we’ve decided we’re going to let the Kennedy kid take your start on Saturday,” he said.

  Mussina wasn’t completely shocked — he’d heard talk that Kennedy might be called up — but he was stunned, partly by the news, but also by the way Torre had more or less dropped it in his lap, as if he were letting him know that batting practice might start early the next day.

  “So that’s it then?” he asked Torre. “No discussion? It’s just done?”

  Torre nodded his head. “It’s done,” he said. “We talked about it a good deal, and we’re going to see how he does and then decide what to do going forward after that.”

  “So you’re saying this may not just be a one-start deal.”

  Torre sighed. “Yeah, I guess that is what I’m saying. I don’t really know what we’re going to do beyond Saturday. I can’t promise you anything.”