Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

In the first inning, working to all corners of the plate, Mussina got three ground-ball outs, the third coming after Alex Rios had singled with two out. The always-frightening Frank Thomas rolled over a slider and hit into a six-four force play.

  “It wasn’t as if I let out a big sigh of relief or anything,” Mussina said. “It was one inning. I might have gone out there in the second and gotten bombed. But I felt good, the ball felt good coming out of my hand. My foot didn’t hurt. I could really drive down the hill. It felt completely different than it had in the three starts before I got taken out.”

  He kept getting batters out. It was almost as if the Blue Jays were seeing a pitcher they weren’t familiar with, because they were: Mussina stayed ahead of most hitters, pitched carefully when behind — he walked three — and kept getting outs. The Yankees added two runs in the fourth to make it 4–0.

  Mussina rolled through the fifth, meaning he was eligible to get the win. In the sixth, he began to falter a little. After Russ Adams singled to lead off, Mussina threw another good slider and got Rios to bounce into a five-four-three double play. But Thomas walked and Matt Stairs singled. Mussina had thrown eighty-seven pitches, ordinarily a comfortable pitch count. But he hadn’t pushed himself this way for sixteen days — “It was almost like a first start coming off the DL,” he said later — and Torre wanted to be sure he came out of the game feeling good. A bad pitch now would leave a sour taste in his mouth.

  “The funny thing about Moose is that as good as he’s been for so many years, he’s really kind of fragile,” Torre said. “Not fragile in the way he pitches or competes but in terms of self-belief. Part of his problem was when he lost some velocity, he didn’t think he was good enough to pitch to contact — when in fact he was. He had pitched really well; he was a little tired. I wanted him smiling, feeling good about what he’d done the next few days, not moping around doubting himself again.”

  Torre waved in Edwar Ramirez, who promptly walked Aaron Hill to load the bases and bring the tying run to the plate. But he got Lyle Overbay to fly to Abreu in right, and Mussina’s line for the night was complete: five and two-thirds innings pitched, five hits, no runs, one strikeout, three walks. Obviously the stat that mattered most was the runs — or lack of them.

  When he came into the dugout, the entire team greeted him with handshakes and pats on the back. “After so many years, the handshakes run together a little bit,” Mussina said. “But that felt pretty good.”

  The Yankees went on to win the game 4–1, even though Joba Chamberlain had his first shaky outing since joining the team and had to be rescued by Mariano Rivera in the eighth.

  The victory put the Yankees at 83–62 and, remarkably, in complete control of the wild-card race. Both the Mariners and the Tigers had faded badly since Labor Day, and the Yankees now led Detroit by four games and Seattle by five and a half.

  “It was amazing how that happened,” Mussina said. “Obviously we played very well. [Brian] Cashman and Torre deserve a lot of credit for not panicking at the trade deadline and sticking with the young guys — who came through. But I don’t think people really appreciate Joe. If you look at some of the rotations we’ve run out there the last few years and still made the playoffs every year, I think it’s amazing.

  “This year we didn’t have Clemens until June, and then he was up and down and hurt most of September. Andy was good; Wang was good. I had the worst year of my career. We ran a bunch of untested kids out there the first half, and then in August and September we had Hughes and the Kennedy kid in the rotation and we still played really well.

  “It helped that Detroit and Seattle faded. That was a surprise. Usually teams going after the wild card play really well in September because they’re good teams that have gotten hot. We were the only ones that stayed hot. I don’t think any of us expected that.”

  The Yankees went from Toronto to Boston for what should have been a crucial series. Only it didn’t feel crucial. They won two of three to cut their deficit to four and a half games, but the real suspense was gone. Barring an unlikely collapse, the Yankees were going to make the playoffs for a thirteenth straight season. They left Boston with a three-and-a-half-game lead on the Tigers with thirteen games left to play.

  They went home to play the Orioles, who had won eight of twelve from them. With Kennedy and Clemens still hurting — Kennedy would not pitch again as it turned out — Mussina was told he was back in the rotation. He had never pitched all that well against his old team — he was 9–6 with a 4.45 ERA — but pitching the middle game of the series, he completely shut them down.

  The case can be made that the Orioles, heading for another ninety-plus-loss season, were playing out the string, but they had played well against the Yankees all year and always came to play when Mussina was pitching. Mussina walked Brian Roberts leading off the game but got Tike Redman to hit the ball right back to him, starting a one-six-three double play. The Orioles got a single from Ramon Hernandez in the third and another single from Hernandez in the sixth. In the seventh, Miguel Tejada hit a dribbler down the third-base line and beat it out for an infield hit.

  That was it. Three scratch singles, one walk. The Yankees exploded for six runs in the fourth, added a single run in the fifth, and then scored five more in the seventh against the pathetic Orioles bullpen. That made it 12–0, and Torre saw no reason to leave Mussina or any of his other starters in the game, allowing a group of September call-ups to finish it. (Major league rosters can expand to forty players on September 1. Contending teams don’t often play their call-ups, but teams like the Orioles do to take a look at some of their younger players.)

  Mussina had only thrown ninety-eight pitches — sixty-four of them strikes, he had been so precise — and might have been able to finish the game. Neither he nor Torre were worried about that. The time to start looking ahead to the playoffs had come, and Torre, now figuring Mussina as his number four starter in the postseason, saw no reason to leave him in a 12–0 game.

  For Mussina, the win had more significance than might meet the eye. It was his tenth victory of the season, meaning he had won at least ten games in sixteen straight seasons. He had never failed to win ten games in a complete big league season. No American League pitcher had a streak as long. The only pitchers in major league history who had won at least ten games in sixteen or more seasons were Greg Maddux (twenty years), Cy Young (nineteen), Steve Carlton (eighteen), Don Sutton (seventeen), Warren Spahn (seventeen), and Nolan Ryan (sixteen). The only one of those six pitchers not in the Hall of Fame was Maddux, and the only reason he wasn’t there was that he hadn’t gotten around to retiring yet.

  It was also the 249th win of Mussina’s career.

  Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon in Yankee Stadium, Mussina went for number 250 against the Blue Jays. His wife and kids were in the stands, but the game wasn’t on national TV, and there was absolutely no fanfare surrounding the attempt.

  “Two fifty isn’t three hundred,” he said. “I understand that.”

  Two fifty isn’t three hundred, but it is still an impressive number. Among the nearly eight thousand men lucky enough to have pitched in the major leagues, Mussina was trying to become the forty-fifth to win 250 games. That would put him in pretty elite company.

  Mussina hadn’t allowed a run in his two starts since returning to the rotation. But he allowed three runs in the second inning, and the Yankees trailed 3–0. They answered with three in the bottom of the inning and scored three more in the fifth to give Mussina a 6–3 lead. He had settled down after the second. In fact, the Blue Jays only got three hits over the next five innings.

  Mussina was now pitching with the confidence of the Mussina of old. He wasn’t afraid to come inside, and he wasn’t afraid to throw strikes, especially since he now felt he could hit or just miss corners whenever he wanted to. He had found the black again.

  “Once I got out of Darrell Royal mode, I was a pitcher again,” he said. “Unless you throw ninety-eight [miles an hour],
you have to worry about how you locate your pitches. But you can’t be afraid to let batters hit the ball, and you can’t be predictable. I’d become predictable, and I was afraid to throw anything near the plate. Once I stopped doing that I could pitch again.”

  The Blue Jays made it interesting for Mussina, who waited in the clubhouse after Torre took him out following the seventh inning. Luis Vizcaino, who had pitched well for a long stretch during the summer, took over in the top of the eighth, allowed two quick runs, and Torre had to bring in Joba Chamberlain with two on and two out. Mussina was icing his arm by then. The rest of him was sweating.

  “It wasn’t as if not getting two fifty that day meant I wasn’t going to get it,” he said later. “I had another start, and I knew I was coming back next year. But I was close enough to it that I figured it would be nice to get it done then.”

  Chamberlain got it done for him. He struck out Adam Lind to get out of the eighth-inning jam, then pitched a one-two-three ninth, striking out Reed Johnson for the final out. The Yankees had won the game 7–5. Mussina stayed in the clubhouse in the ninth.

  One of the clubhouse kids brought Mussina a ball that he had pitched with in the game. Most teams keep a bucket of game-used balls in the dugout so that players who want a game ball can have one and others can be signed by players as souvenirs. Balls are marked so that a player knows if it was in play when he was in the game. Mussina wanted Chamberlain to keep the ball Chamberlain had ended the game with because it was the kid’s first major league save.

  A number of players stopped by Mussina’s locker to congratulate him, as did Torre and Guidry — “He was talking to me again, now that I was back in the rotation,” Mussina said. He answered questions about the milestone win and talked about how good it felt to be pitching well again.

  Then he got in the car and drove back to Westchester. Jana and the kids had gone directly from the game to the airport because the kids had school the next morning. He made dinner and relaxed by himself in front of the TV before going to bed.

  “That was my celebration,” he said. “A night at home by myself. I was happy I was pitching well again. Actually, I was happy I was pitching again. I didn’t need a party. I was perfectly satisfied.”

  28

  We Suck

  SIX DAYS AFTER HIS EMOTIONAL VICTORY in Atlanta, Tom Glavine pitched at home against the Houston Astros. Pedro Martinez had made his long-awaited season debut in Cincinnati on Labor Day, pitching five solid innings. The Mets’ lead was up to six games, and the big question at Shea Stadium seemed to be who would pitch the playoff opener, Glavine or Martinez.

  “I’m just glad to know we’ve got that option,” Glavine said. “Having Petey back in the rotation should make us a lot deeper and a lot more dangerous, not to mention all his experience.”

  Saturday, September 8, was an uncomfortably hot, humid day in New York, and Glavine didn’t feel all that good riding into the ballpark that morning with Billy Wagner. “I didn’t know if it was something I ate or what it was,” he said. “I just didn’t feel right.”

  Warming up in the bullpen didn’t make him feel any better. “I’m not sure I threw one pitch exactly where I wanted to throw it,” he said. “I was all over the place.”

  Glavine knew from his years of experience that a bad warm-up doesn’t necessarily lead to a bad performance, just as a good one doesn’t always lead to a good day once the game begins. Nevertheless, as he left the bullpen, he turned to Aaron Sele, who was the long man in the bullpen, and said, “You might want to be ready early today; you could get a call.”

  Sele laughed, but Glavine wasn’t joking.

  As it turned out, Sele could have walked across the boardwalk from Shea Stadium to the National Tennis Center to watch the U.S. Open men’s semifinals that afternoon, and he wouldn’t have been missed.

  Glavine was — at least for five innings — unhittable. He retired the first fifteen Astros he faced. Once he had gotten through a one-two-three first inning, he began to feel comfortable. His changeup was darting away from batters; his fastball was as precise as it had been all year. By the end of the fifth, there were “no hit” murmurs going around the stadium.

  Glavine wasn’t really thinking about that. He had once gotten within four outs of a no-hitter but didn’t think of himself as a no-hit pitcher, especially at this stage of his career. “I just don’t strike that many guys out,” he said. “The more balls that are put into play, the more likely it is that someone is going to hit one in a hole or drop one in somewhere. I knew no one had gotten on base. I could hear the crowd getting into it a little in the fifth inning, but that is so early.”

  No-hitters inspire more baseball superstition than anything else in the game. For years, announcers wouldn’t mention that a pitcher had a no-hitter going for fear of being a jinx. If you listen to old tapes of no-hitters, you will hear announcers saying things like “He has a chance to finish a very special game if he can get one more out.” But no mention of what’s so special.

  Players on the bench still adhere to no-hit superstitions. No one dares mention it or says anything to a pitcher when he begins to get close to one. By the seventh or eighth inning if you look into a dugout, you are likely to see a pitcher who has a no-hitter going sitting all by himself because no one will sit close to him.

  Glavine never got to that point. Cody Ransom led off the sixth inning for the Astros with a soft single to left field. The game stopped briefly while the crowd stood to give Glavine an ovation for the effort. He appreciated it. He was far more appreciative, though, when Eric Munson hit into a six-four-three double play, wiping Ransom out. He then got the side one-two-three in the seventh, meaning he had pitched to the minimum twenty-one batters.

  The Mets had a 3–0 lead, having pieced together single runs in the third, fourth, and fifth. Because of the heat and because the game was close, Glavine came out after the Astros began the eighth, with Carlos Lee and Mark Loretta producing back-to-back singles.

  “If I’d had the no-hitter, I would have stayed in, obviously,” he said. “I hadn’t thrown that many pitches [eighty-six], but the heat and the humidity were really wearing on me. It seemed to get hotter as the afternoon went on.”

  Aaron Heilman came on and gave up an RBI single to Ty Wigginton but then struck out the side. Billy Wagner finished it in the ninth without incident. Glavine was 13–6, the Mets were 80–61, and the lead was still a comfortable six games, with twenty-one to play.

  Glavine was clearly now on the roll he had talked about throughout the first half of the season. Since the two-inning horror show in Los Angeles, he had started nine games. In eight of them he had given up three runs or less, two runs or less in seven of those eight. He’d had one bad game, against San Diego, in two months. His ERA in the other eight games during that stretch was 2.18. Even with the San Diego game included it was 3.00.

  That was big-time pitching in any league. It would be hard, very hard, for someone who could still pitch that effectively to just walk away at season’s end. Glavine knew that. So did his wife.

  “The first thing Chris is going to say to me is ‘I know you’re pitching next year,’ ” Glavine told Wagner, as they walked out of the clubhouse.

  “She’ll be right, won’t she?” Wagner answered.

  Glavine smiled. He knew she would be right. Wagner was right too. “You’re pitching next year, aren’t you?” was Chris’s greeting.

  “The fact is, unless my arm falls off, it doesn’t make sense for me not to pitch after a year like this,” he said. “With some luck, I could actually have had a shot at winning twenty games. I had two bad starts in June, one in July, and one in August. All the others [26 starts at that moment] have been either pretty good, good, or very good. I’m really happy about that.”

  The next question was the obvious one: if he was going to pitch, where would he pitch? He smiled. “I don’t need to worry about that right now. I’m really in a good position. If the Braves made me an offer and gav
e me the chance to stay home and pitch, I would have to seriously consider it. But if they don’t, assuming the Mets want me back, I’m very comfortable with that too. We’ve done this for five years now. We can certainly do it for one more.”

  At that moment, the Mets very much wanted Glavine back. What had started as a rocky marriage had become a very solid one. Even a happy one.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER GLAVINE’S GEM against the Astros, the Mets’ lead over the Phillies stood at seven games with seventeen to play. They had won two of three in their final series of the season with the Braves and had ended up splitting the season series 9–9 after the Braves had won eight of the first twelve. The Braves crawled out of town, their once promising season just about finished, and were followed into Shea by the Phillies.

  The Mets were in countdown mode and with good reason. Since the Phillies had closed to within two games with their four-game sweep at the end of August, the Mets had gone 10–2. The Phillies had gone 6–7 during that stretch. With seventeen games left, the Mets’ magic number to clinch the division was eleven: any combination of Met victories and Phillie losses totaling eleven and the Mets would win their second straight title. To put those numbers in perspective, if the Mets played mediocre baseball and went 8–9, the Phillies would have to go 15–2 to tie them.

  Throw in the fact that thirteen of the Mets’ final fourteen games of the season were against the Washington Nationals and the Florida Marlins, the two bottom-dwelling teams in the East, and it seemed almost impossible for the Mets not to win the title. “Of course, we can really take the suspense out of it if we take care of business this weekend,” Glavine said on the eve of the Philadelphia series.

  The Mets wanted nothing more than to blow up the Phillies’ season once and for all at Shea Stadium. All the Jimmy Rollins talk and all the celebrating the Phillies had done after their late-August sweep had not been forgotten.

  Glavine pitched the opener against — who else? — Jamie Moyer. Both pitchers were superb. The Mets got off to a 1–0 lead on a first-inning home run by David Wright — who was having a monster second half of the season — and scored again in the fourth on an RBI single by Moises Alou. Glavine sailed along with that lead until the sixth, when he walked Abraham Nunez to start the inning. Moyer sacrificed, but Glavine got Rollins to fly out to Alou in left. That brought up Chase Utley, one of the more dangerous left-handed hitters in the league.