Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  The Mets actually rallied to lead, scoring six runs in the sixth but — sound familiar? — lost in ten after another bullpen meltdown. Even so, the loss hardly appeared to be a big deal. The Mets took two of three from the Dodgers over the weekend and headed to Philadelphia for a four-game series, with a six-game lead on the Phillies and a seven-game lead on the Braves, who were fading badly, even after pulling a major trade to get slugger Mark Teixeira from Texas at the trade deadline.

  “They just don’t have what they always used to have,” Glavine said. “Enough starting pitching.”

  The Mets pulled into Philadelphia thinking they had a chance to just about finish off the pennant race. After struggling to create some space all summer, they now had some. They had doubled their lead, from three games to six, since the embarrassing loss in Pittsburgh, winning six of nine while their pursuers continued to slide backward.

  But the opener in Philadelphia was a disaster. Brian Lawrence had been filling the fifth starter spot while the Mets continued to wait for Pedro Martinez to have enough rehab starts to be ready to pitch. The Mets, and the media, were so obsessed with Martinez’s return that if there wasn’t a daily update on his status, everyone wondered if something had gone wrong.

  Lawrence’s results had been mixed at best, and he got bombed by the Phillies, the Mets losing 9–2. Glavine pitched the second game and could not have pitched better. Citizens Bank Park is as good a hitter’s venue as there is in baseball, and keeping hitters in the park for an entire game is a major challenge for any pitcher. Glavine made it look easy. The Phillies appeared to be out front of everything they swung at as Glavine kept them off-balance.

  Joe Kerrigan, the Yankees bullpen coach who had watched Glavine for years, laughed later when he remembered watching Glavine pitch that night. “He’s made a living for twenty years out of the fact that his baseball IQ is so much higher than that of the batters he faces,” he said. “He always makes them hit his pitch, and when they do, they roll over it [hitting the ball with the bottom of the bat] and hit easy ground balls. Maybe in another twenty years, they’ll figure him out.”

  They didn’t that night in Philadelphia. Glavine pitched seven shutout innnings, walking no one and scattering eight hits. Unfortunately for the Mets, Adam Eaton, who had been having a terrible year, was almost as good as Glavine, giving up just two runs in five and two-thirds innings. Even so, Glavine left with a 2–0 lead after Peterson told him 102 pitches was enough for the night.

  What happened next was, as Yogi Berra liked to say, déjà vu all over again. Glavine was icing his arm when Pedro Feliciano came in to start the eighth. Jimmy Rollins hit Feliciano’s fourth pitch over the left-field fence to make it 2–1. Pat Burrell walked with one out, and Shane Victorino ran for him. Feliciano managed to get Ryan Howard out, and Aaron Heilman came in needing one out to get the ball to Wagner.

  He didn’t get it. Victorino stole second and went to third when Paul Lo Duca, just off the DL, threw the ball into center field. Victorino scored a moment later when Aaron Rowand hit a dribbler down the third-base line and beat Heilman’s throw. It was 2–2 — another chance for a Glavine win by the boards. Worse than that, the Philllies won the game 4–2 when Howard hit a mammoth two-run homer off Guillermo Mota in the tenth.

  The loss was a damaging one. The Mets had wasted an excellent performance by Glavine and had allowed the Phillies to pull within four games instead of knocking them back to a six-game deficit. The next two days were even more frustrating. The Phillies won 3–2 on Wednesday, the game ending when Marlon Anderson was called for interference trying to break up a double play, while what would have been the tying run was scoring. Umpire C.B. Bucknor said that Anderson had thrown his arms into the air in an attempt to interfere with the relay throw to first base. Instead of a tie game, the Mets were in the clubhouse, literally screaming with frustration.

  “That was the first time all season everyone was really mad,” Glavine said. “Willie came in screaming, and a lot of guys were genuinely pissed off. I wasn’t happy we lost, but I thought the anger was a good thing.”

  Anger is all well and good, but there’s a reason for the old baseball saying that momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher. For the Mets the next day, it was Orlando Hernandez, and he got shelled early, putting the Mets in a 5–0 hole. Still, they came back to lead 10–8 in the eighth, and Randolph, not trusting anyone in the bullpen but Billy Wagner, sent him out to get a two-inning save for the first time all season. It seemed like a good idea at the time, given that Wagner was rested and the rest of the bullpen had been shaky. But the Phillies got one back on a home run in the eighth by Pat Burrell and then scored two in the ninth to win 11–10.

  Suddenly, the Mets’ comfortable six-game lead was a two-game lead, and the Phillies were flying, the town gripped by pennant fever, not having hosted a playoff game since 1993. Jimmy Rollins, who had so angered the Mets with his “We are the team to beat” declaration in spring training, was backing up his words with his play. After going three for five in the finale, Rollins was hitting .293 with twenty-four home runs, seventy-five RBIs, and twenty-seven stolen bases. If nothing else, he was certainly the player to beat.

  The Mets limped into Atlanta for their final road series with the Braves, knowing they needed to find something to turn them back around.

  They found it: John Maine, who had appeared to be hitting the wall since the All-Star break, won the first game 7–1, outpitching Tim Hudson. The Mets then got a huge boost when Mike Pelfrey, who had pitched so poorly the first half of the season that he had been sent to the minors, pitched his best game of the season and got his first win, 5–1, in the middle game of the set. The Phillies had split their first two games in Miami, which meant the Mets had a three-game lead again (six and a half over the Braves) going into the final game of the series. With a win, they would finish the season 5–4 in Atlanta.

  The pitching matchup: Tom Glavine versus John Smoltz, naturally.

  In the back of his mind, Glavine couldn’t help but consider the fact that this might be his last start in Atlanta. “If it was going to be my last start there, I wanted it to be a good one,” he said. “I wanted to beat the Braves, and I wanted to beat Smoltzie.”

  He was 0–2 on the year in three starts against Smoltz, even though he had pitched pretty well all three times.

  It took two batters for Glavine to find trouble in the first inning. Rookie shortstop Yunel Escobar singled, and Glavine nemesis Matt Diaz singled up the middle, bringing up Chipper Jones. Glavine managed to get him to fly to deep center field, with Escobar moving to third.

  Pitching carefully, Glavine walked Teixeira, loading the bases. Great. His last game, maybe, in Atlanta, and the bases were loaded with one out in the first. Glavine gave himself his usual talking to: “Don’t try to do too much. Get a ground ball. Get out of this down no worse than one-nothing.”

  Jeff Francoeur, another headache for Glavine in ’07, hit a ground ball to David Wright that wasn’t hit hard enough to go for a double play. Wright threw Francoeur out as Escobar scored to make it 1–0. Still pitching carefully, Glavine walked his old pal Andruw Jones to again load the bases. That brought up catcher Brian McCann. One bad pitch — or one good pitch turned into a bad one — and the Mets might be in a hole they couldn’t climb out of for the rest of the afternoon.

  “You have to figure when you’re facing Smoltzie that if you get down three-nothing or anything beyond that, you’re in serious trouble,” Glavine said. “I really wanted to hold them right there at one-nothing.”

  He did, reverting to his old ways — staying away from McCann the entire at bat. On 2–2, he threw a changeup down and away, and McCann reached for it and hit a harmless ground ball to Delgado at first. Disaster averted.

  Even so, Glavine was angry when he came into the dugout. “Why does this always happen with these guys?” he said, ostensibly to Peterson but really talking to himself out loud. “Sometimes I just feel as if they’ve got some kin
d of hex on me.”

  He felt less frustrated after the top of the second when he produced a run with a fly ball to center field that scored Moises Alou from third. The Mets could have scored more, but Jose Reyes struck out looking with two on and two out. Coincidence or not, Reyes hadn’t been the same player since the All-Star break when Rickey Henderson and Lastings Milledge had arrived. His batting average was now under .300 — .295 — and at times he and Milledge had upset opponents with their post-home-run celebration dances and some of their showboating. The Mets desperately needed him to be their catalyst for the stretch drive.

  In the fifth inning, with the game still locked at 1–1, Reyes did just that, leading off with a single. Two batters later, Smoltz grooved a first-pitch fastball to David Wright, and Wright hit it into orbit, giving the Mets a 3–1 lead.

  Glavine kept the score right there into the seventh. When Kelly Johnson led off the inning with a single, Randolph decided one hundred pitches on a hot day was enough and went to get him. As Glavine handed the ball to Randolph and started toward the dugout, a remarkable thing happened.

  For the first time since he had left Atlanta five years earlier, he heard cheers. Section after section, the fans in the sold-out stadium began standing. By the time Glavine crossed the third-base line, they were all on their feet. Of all the ovations Glavine had received before and after three hundred, this one might have meant the most. This was the place he had started as a player, the place where he had become a star, won two Cy Young Awards and a World Series. It was also the park where he had been booed more than any other place.

  And now, realizing this might be the last time they saw him in a baseball uniform, Atlanta’s fans were cheering him. “It meant a lot,” he said. “After all that had gone on, if that was the last time I walked off a field in Atlanta, I really couldn’t think of a much better ending.”

  Of course there was the little matter of winning the game. This time the bullpen hung on. Barely. Billy Wagner, who had been so good the first four months of the season before having a tough August, gave up a run in the ninth and allowed the tying run to reach second. But he got Diaz to ground out to second for the final out. The Mets had won 3–2. Glavine had beaten Smoltz. The Braves were seven and a half back, and the Phillies, having lost in Miami that day, were four back.

  Glavine was 12–6, and his ERA was barely over 4.00 after being 4.63 following the disaster in Los Angeles. All was well. There were twenty-six games left.

  THE DAY AFTER GLAVINE’S VICTORY in Atlanta, Mike Mussina got to pitch again. Called from the bullpen to replace Roger Clemens — who was officially removed from the game because he was injured but just as clearly taken out because he had given up five runs in four innings — in the top of the fifth inning against the Seattle Mariners.

  Relief or not, Mussina was happy to be in a game. He had decided that whenever he was allowed to pitch again, he wasn’t going to worry so much about giving up home runs, something that both Mike Borzello and Mark Mussina had counseled him on.

  “I had gotten to be like Darrell Royal [the old University of Texas football coach],” he said. “I figured if I let guys hit the ball, three things could happen and two of them were bad.”

  Royal, who was famous for not wanting to throw the football, had once said: “If you throw the ball, three things can happen, and two of them [interception, incompletion] are bad.” For Mussina the two bad things were home runs and base hits. Royal had been retired from coaching for almost thirty years, and it was time for Mussina to retire his approach from baseball.

  Mussina wasn’t great against the Mariners, but he was considerably better than he had been against the Angels and Tigers. The Mariners got to him for seven hits in three and two-thirds innings (Torre took him out with two down in the eighth inning so a lefty could pitch to Ichiro Suzuki), but there were far fewer ringing line drives, and there were quite a few more outs. Mussina retired eleven batters while giving up two runs. In the two starts before his benching, he had gotten fourteen batters out while giving up thirteen runs.

  “It was hardly the kind of performance you write home about, but it was better,” he said. “I felt like I had figured some things out about how to pitch. I was getting outs. I didn’t feel like every time I threw a pitch it was going in a gap someplace.”

  Once Mussina had stopped brooding — “about three days, I’d say” — he had gone to strength coach Dana Cavalea and asked him to come up with a new regimen. “I needed to be doing stuff that involved more energy,” he said. “I tend to get on cruise control in the weight room once the season starts. I needed to be working harder to strengthen myself so I wouldn’t hurt so much anymore.”

  Even while he was working on some parts of his body he was resting others. All the nagging injuries were nagging a little bit less. Following a bullpen session two days after pitching against the Mariners, in which he felt as good as he had felt since July, he told Borzello, “I think I’m really close to being a good pitcher again.”

  Borzello agreed. “This is the best I’ve seen you throw in three months,” he said. Mussina knew Borzello wouldn’t say that if he didn’t believe it.

  The question was when he would get a chance to prove it. He was still the long man in the bullpen. The Yankees won the last two games of the Mariner series to move into first place in the wild-card race. Then they went to Kansas City and swept the Royals to push their record to 81–62 — 39–19 since the All-Star break. At that stage, Mussina was just along for the ride.

  “When guys go on the disabled list, they talk about feeling invisible in the clubhouse because there is no way they can help the team,” Mussina said. “They’re there, but they’re not there. I was in that kind of place, except I wasn’t on the DL. I was there but not there. It was pretty much a certainty every day that I wasn’t going to help the team because I wasn’t going to pitch. Having my pitching coach look right through me whenever he saw me just made it that much worse.”

  After a while, Mussina was able to adapt a gallows sense of humor about the whole thing. “Why should I complain about anything?” he said one day, standing at his locker. “I told my wife, ‘Think about it, I get to travel the country and do absolutely nothing — for free. I get to go to Kansas City and Toronto this week — for free. I get to eat — for free. I get to stay in a nice hotel — for free.’ I mean, what more could you ask?”

  One of the clubhouse kids arrived at that moment with a fax Mussina had been trying to send. “You see,” Mussina said, gesturing to the fax. “I get fax service — for free.”

  “Mike, there’s something wrong with the number you gave me,” the clubhouse kid said. “It didn’t go through.”

  Mussina shrugged. “So maybe not so much the free fax service.”

  He was smiling. A week earlier that would have been impossible.

  The first hint that he might escape from purgatory had come not long after Clemens had come out of the Seattle game. Clemens had claimed the injury was minor, and he didn’t see any reason to miss a start. But as often happens with older players — especially really old players — the injury proved more nagging than he had expected or hoped.

  Clemens’s next turn was scheduled for Sunday, September 9, in Kansas City. But the team had an off-day after the Seattle series, which gave Torre some flexibility. Rather than push Chien-Ming Wang back to start the first game in Toronto, as they would have done if Clemens had been healthy, Torre and Guidry decided to pitch him on his regular fifth day in what would have been Clemens’s spot. Wang had pitched arguably his worst game of the season in the Yankees’ last trip to Toronto, and the thinking was he would do better in Kansas City.

  On the day before the Yankees left on the road trip, Torre told Mussina that Wang was going to pitch on Sunday in Kansas City and that Mussina might pitch the middle game in Toronto. Kennedy, who had continued to pitch well, was also experiencing some soreness, and the last thing the Yankees wanted to do was push him too hard.

 
; “You might pitch on Wednesday in Toronto,” Torre told Mussina.

  “Might?”

  “Can’t be sure. I’ll let you know as soon as I possibly can.”

  There wasn’t much Mussina could say. “Might, maybe, could be, might not be,” he said. He smiled. “Hey, just remember, I’m getting to go to Canada — for free.”

  “MIGHT, MAYBE, COULD BE” became “definitely” the following Monday. Clemens wasn’t ready to pitch, and the Yankees had decided to let Kennedy skip at least one start. Torre told Mussina he would pitch on Wednesday against the Blue Jays “and then we’ll see.”

  Mussina was fine with that. He had pitched once in sixteen days, throwing sixty-two pitches on Labor Day. If nothing else, he figured he was rested.

  “Actually I did feel a lot better physically,” he said. “Sometimes when Joe does things, you wonder what he’s thinking. More often than not, though, he’s proven right. There’s no doubt after pitching once in sixteen days I felt better and stronger. The aches and pains were more or less gone, and I felt fresh, or maybe more accurately, I felt refreshed.”

  He didn’t feel especially nervous warming up in Toronto. He knew he could pitch a shutout and might not get another start, or he could give up five runs in four and two-thirds and perhaps start again in five days. His future depended more on the health of Clemens and Kennedy than it did on him. Maybe that relaxed him just a little bit. So did the Yankees’ scoring two quick runs in the top of the first.

  Mussina had decided to make one tactical change, one that both his brother and Borzello had been pushing him to try all season: pitch inside more often. It wasn’t all that different than what Glavine had gone through two years earlier. Mussina had become predictable and batters were diving across the plate, anticipating pitches on the outside corner.