Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  Glavine worked Utley to 3–2. He had first base open and another good hitter, Aaron Rowand, on deck. A walk wouldn’t be disastrous, except that Utley was a left-handed hitter and Rowand hit righty. Glavine decided to throw a changeup, figuring if Utley took it for ball four he would focus on Rowand.

  “I wanted to throw it inside and I didn’t,” he said. “I got too much of the plate with it, and he made me pay. Good hitters do that.”

  Utley, knowing that Glavine was one of the few pitchers in baseball who would even think of throwing a changeup on 3–2, was looking for the breaking pitch, and he got it. He hit it into the Mets bullpen, and the score was tied at 2–2.

  Neither Glavine nor Moyer gave up anything more after that, and the game fell into the hands of the two bullpens. That rarely worked out well for the Mets in 2007. The Phillies won the game in the tenth when they scratched together a run aided by an error by Mike Difelice, who dropped a Jayson Werth foul pop leading off the inning. Werth ended up singling and scoring the winning run. What made the whole thing even more galling was that the only reason Difelice was in the game was that Paul Lo Duca had been ejected by plate umpire Paul Emmel (Mussina’s old friend from the Anaheim game in August) for arguing a called strike three.

  The loss was disappointing. Still, the lead was five and a half, and a split of the last two games of the series would leave the Mets comfortably in front, especially given their opposition the final two weeks of the season.

  Only they didn’t split. The Phillies won both games for a sweep, meaning they had won the last eight games the teams had played and eleven of the last fourteen dating back to June. The manner of the losses was almost as disturbing as the losses themselves. In the Saturday game, Martinez pitched six superb innings and left with a 3–1 lead, which the bullpen blew in a 5–3 loss. The next day, the Mets rallied from a 5–2 deficit to tie the game 5–5 after five. But Mota and Sosa combined to give up five runs in the sixth, and the Phillies won 10–6.

  The Mets could have won any of the three games. They won none. Their lead was down to three and a half games, and the Phillies felt as if they had life. The Mets headed to Washington to begin their final road trip of the season. The Nationals were starting the final homestand in the history of RFK Stadium since they would move into their new stadium for the start of the 2008 season.

  The Mets jumped to a 4–0 lead in the opener but couldn’t hold it. Brian Lawrence came out with the score tied at 4–4, and the bullpen was again miserable. The Nats — one of the weakest hitting teams in the league — won the game 12–4. In the meantime, the Phillies won in St. Louis, and the seven-game lead on September 12 was now a two-and-a-half-game lead six days later.

  The Yankees were still comfortably in control of the wild-card race in the American League. That made the Mets the story in New York. “I had a seat on the columnists’ charter,” Mike Vaccaro, a columnist for the New York Post, joked in the clubhouse in Washington the next day. He was referring to the fact that most of the newspaper columnists in New York were now following the Mets in case a monumental collapse was about to happen.

  The players noticed, as did Willie Randolph, whose pregame sessions with the media were becoming a bit more tense with each passing day. It was Marlon Anderson, the veteran utility player who had been brought back to the team in mid-July, who went to Randolph prior to the second game of the series in Washington and suggested that a team meeting was in order. Randolph agreed, and the clubhouse was cleared at 4:30 in the afternoon.

  “It’s a ‘we suck’ meeting,” Glavine said. “The point of it really is to remind each other that we’re a lot better than we’ve played the last few days. A lot of us have been talking about it, but calling a meeting when you play in New York isn’t like calling a meeting someplace else. People are going to make a big deal out of it; they’re going to wonder if we’re panicking. We’re not panicking, but we need to remind one another that we’re still a good team. We all know it, but sometimes it can’t hurt to hear it.”

  Randolph spoke first. He reminded the players they were still in first place and that he knew they were still the best team. All they had to do was play the way they were capable of playing, and everything would be fine. Nothing special was needed, just bearing down and playing hard.

  Randolph and his coaches left the players alone after that. They spent a solid thirty minutes together, one veteran after another talking. “Everyone basically said the same thing,” said Glavine, who spoke right after Anderson had opened the meeting. “If we went back to Opening Day and said, ‘Okay, you’re going to have a two-and-a-half-game lead with thirteen to play, would you take it?’ The answer was of course, we would. We’d been in first place almost the entire season, and every time someone got close to us we’d turned it up a little and pulled away. We just had to do it one more time.

  “It wasn’t as if we weren’t trying. If anything we were trying too hard. Our defense had gone south the past few games. We were a good defensive team. Errors on easy plays are a sure sign of nerves. We just needed to relax. That was what I said: ‘Everyone, relax. We’re the team in first place. We’re the team that controls our own fate.’ ”

  Most of the veterans on the team got up and delivered the same message. There was no need to worry about what anyone was saying or writing; all that mattered was that the guys in this room believed in one another.

  Okay? Okay.

  Thus inspired, the Mets promptly scored four runs in the first inning. They led 7–3 after four and a half, with John Maine on the mound. At least half of those in the tiny crowd of 19,966 appeared to be Mets fans. The tide, it seemed, had been stemmed.

  But Maine couldn’t get out of the fifth inning, allowing five runs. The Mets trailed 8–7 and never caught up. Another loss — this one 9–8 — and another Phillies win. The Mets’ lead was down to one and a half.

  “So much for team meetings,” Glavine said. “If we had won, everyone would have said it was the meeting. Now we just have to go out and play. I mean now, not soon. Now.”

  The unlikely streak stopper the next night was Mike Pelfrey, the talented rookie who had been sent back to Triple-A after an 0–7 start. Pelfrey won his third straight start since returning to the rotation to end the five-game losing streak, and the Cardinals beat the Phillies in St. Louis. For the first time in eight days, the Mets gained ground. The lead was two and a half with eleven to play. The magic number was nine.

  Best of all, from the Mets’ point of view, Glavine and Martinez would be pitching the first two games in Florida.

  Glavine has never liked pitching in what is now known as — after going through several corporate names — Dolphin Stadium. To begin with, it is, as you might guess from the name, a football-first ballpark that doesn’t quite feel like a place to play baseball. The weather is almost always hot and humid and frequently rainy.

  Even though the Marlins have won two World Series titles in the past ten years, they have also twice broken up championship teams so that team owner Wayne Huizenga could invest more money in his football team and other businesses. As a result, the Marlins — much like the other ill-conceived Florida expansion team in Tampa — simply don’t draw. In a stadium that can seat up to sixty-five thousand when seats are opened up during the postseason, crowds of under ten thousand are not uncommon.

  The opener with the Marlins was no different than the norm for September baseball in Fort Lauderdale. The announced crowd of 15,132 looked like considerably less, and, as always in Florida, quite a few were transplanted New Yorkers who came out to root for the visiting team.

  Right from the start, Glavine sensed trouble. “I always have a problem there because of the bullpen mounds,” he said. “I know that sounds weird, but of all the parks we play in, the difference between the bullpen mound and the actual mound is the greatest there. When you stand on the bullpen mounds, at least to my eye, the plate is off-center; it’s a little bit closer to the left-hand batter’s box. They’ve checked it in t
he past, and they say it isn’t so and maybe it’s not, but it absolutely feels that way to me.

  “Plus, the mounds are virtually flat. You almost feel as if you’re playing catch rather than throwing off a mound. You get to the mound on the field, and you feel as if you’re standing on a mountain. I remember that night saying to Rick [Peterson] after the first inning that I feel as if I’m falling straight down when I drive forward. He suggested trying to stay back a little longer, which is fine, but when you do that you’re thinking way too much. I’m not trying to make excuses; it’s just the way it is.”

  Even feeling awkward, Glavine was able to work in and out of trouble through the first four innings. He got Miguel Cabrera to pop out with two down and Dan Uggla on second in the first. He gave up a leadoff single to Josh Willingham in the second but induced Mike Jacobs into hitting into a double play before giving a single to Cody Ross that proved harmless, thanks to the double play. He struck Willingham out with men on second and third and two outs in the third.

  In the meantime the Mets were putting together a 3–0 lead against the wildly inconsistent, and often wild, Dontrelle Willis. In 2005, Willis had won twenty-two games at the age of twenty-three and appeared on the verge of superstardom. He was left-handed, he had a hard-to-follow motion, he could throw hard, and he was probably the best-hitting pitcher in the game.

  But he had been up and down in every possible way for two seasons, and 2007 had been more of the same, with his ERA hovering around 5.00 all year. This night was no different. In the first he hit Lastings Milledge and David Wright back to back, leading to a two-run double by Moises Alou. He gave up a third run in the third on doubles by Reyes and Wright.

  “My goal was to get through six,” Glavine said. “I was throwing a lot of pitches and allowing a lot of base runners. But as long as I could pitch out of trouble, I thought we’d be okay. It was one of those nights where I didn’t feel all that good but had a chance to do what I needed to do for the team anyway.

  “Basically, I blew it all with one pitch.”

  That came in the fifth. Although Glavine remembered one pitch above all others, the Marlins took him all over the park before and after, getting six hits in the inning. Willis, who was hitting .271 for the season, led off with a double, and Hanley Ramirez doubled him home to make it 3–1. Ramirez then did Glavine a favor by trying to steal third base and was thrown out by Paul Lo Duca.

  Even that break wasn’t enough to get Glavine out of the inning. Uggla and Jeremy Hermida singled, bringing Cabrera up. “There are certain batters that are make or break in a game,” Glavine said. “Most of the time you know it when they come up. With Cabrera, the temptation is always to pitch around him, and I wasn’t trying to give him anything too good to hit. Unfortunately, I did.”

  It was a 3–2 changeup, just as the home-run pitch six days earlier had been a 3–2 changeup to Chase Utley. The problem, again, was location. The ball drifted too close to the plate, and Cabrera crushed it. That was the first time Glavine began to wonder if his changeup wasn’t behaving the way he wanted it to behave.

  “Part of it was location,” he said. “You put a changeup in the wrong place, and, unless you fool a guy completely because he’s looking fastball, you’re going to be in trouble. The pitch to Cabrera wasn’t a horrible pitch. I tried to throw it in and probably didn’t get it quite far enough in, but he still did a good job keeping it fair. Most hitters on a pitch like that, even though it was up, will hit it hard but get out front and hit it foul. He kept it fair. Sometimes you just have to say a guy beat you. On that pitch, he beat me.”

  The Mets’ three-run lead had quickly became a 4–3 deficit. Glavine was disgusted with himself. “If I have a lead and I give the game to the bullpen and we still have the lead, then I’ve done my job,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter if it’s a one-nothing lead or a five-nothing lead; I expect to leave the game with a lead. Two games in a row I had a lead [two-nothing versus the Phillies], and I gave the lead up before I came out. That doesn’t make me happy.”

  He left after the fifth inning, having thrown 107 pitches, which is barely reasonable for seven innings, a lot for six innings, and way too many for five. But the Mets rallied in the ninth, scoring four runs to take a 7–4 lead. It was the kind of rally that a team will often look back on as a season-turner: trailing in the ninth, coming up with big hits and key at bats, and pulling the game out.

  There was just one problem: Jorge Sosa couldn’t hold the lead. Wagner had pitched the night before, and Randolph decided with a three-run lead to gamble that Sosa, who had been both good and bad out of the bullpen (as opposed to Mota, who had only been bad), could get three outs.

  Sosa blew the lead in the ninth, then gave up a game-ending double to Uggla after Ramirez led off the tenth with a single. Instead of an exhilarating victory, the Mets walked away with a disastrous loss. The Phillies had won in Washington, so the lead was down to a game and a half.

  “That was one that hurt, but I really don’t think we were panicked by it,” Glavine said. “The way we came back in the ninth was encouraging. Plus, I think in the back of our minds, we knew we had Petey going the next day, and that was comforting.”

  Martinez was showing no ill effects from the season-ending surgery of the previous October. The Mets were keeping him on a pitch count, basically trying to build his arm strength so that he would be 100 percent in time for the playoffs. Now they needed him to help make sure they made the playoffs.

  Martinez wasn’t great the next night, but he was good enough, leaving after five innings with an 8–4 lead. This time, the bullpen got the job done — notably Mota, who pitched two shutout innings — and the Mets hung on for a 9–6 victory. Buoyed by that win, the Mets won the final two games of the series. Oliver Perez, who had looked tired for much of September, pitched well on Saturday, and on Sunday the Mets finally pulled out an extra-inning win (they had lost five extra-inning games in a row) with a 7–6 victory in eleven. The Nationals, playing their final game in RFK Stadium, managed to beat the Phillies 5–3 to give the old ballpark a rousing send-off in front of a rare sellout crowd.

  The Mets didn’t much care about the last game at RFK or the attendance in Washington, but they were delighted when they got word the Phillies had lost. The lead was back up to two and a half games, exactly where it had been on the night of the “we suck” meeting. Only now, there were just seven games left, and the Mets were going home for those last seven games: three with the Nationals, a makeup game with the Cardinals on Thursday, and, finally, three with the team they had just beaten three straight times, the Marlins, to close out the regular season.

  The message was no different than it had been during the meeting: relax; we’re the best team; we’re the ones in first place.

  Their fate was in their own hands.

  29

  The Final Days

  THE LAST WEEK OF THE REGULAR SEASON began in New York with a rare doubleheader: both the Mets and the Yankees playing in town on the same day. The two teams are almost always scheduled to avoid playing at home at the same time, but the Yankees had a makeup game against the Blue Jays to close out their home schedule, while the Mets were beginning their final home-stand against the Nationals.

  The Yankees played at 1:05 and the Mets at 7:10, meaning that a real fan could see both games by either changing subways or enduring traffic on the Triboro Bridge.

  The Yankees were loving life. They had all but wrapped up the wild card and were actually making a late charge at the Red Sox. Mussina’s victory on Sunday against the Blue Jays had been the Yankees’ ninetieth win of the season (they were 90–65) and left them only a game and a half behind the Red Sox. Their magic number to clinch the wild card was two, even after the Blue Jays won the Yankees’ home finale 4–1.

  The Mets were riding a little bit of a high themselves, having won the last three games in Florida. Their lead was bigger than that of the Red Sox — two and a half — and their magic number was down to
five. If they went 5–2 in the final week against three sub-.500 teams at home, there was nothing the Phillies could do to catch them. If they went 3–4, the Phillies would have to go 5–1 just to tie them.

  The problem was you can’t win a pennant on paper; you have to do it on the field. With the Phillies taking the day off on Monday, the Mets had a chance to extend their lead to three games. Instead, playing in front of a crowd of just under fifty thousand, they stumbled around as if it were March and lost for the third time in four games to the Nats, 13–4.

  So the lead was two the next night when Glavine took the mound to face the immortal Jason Bergmann. He was convinced that the mediocre performance in Florida meant he was destined to pitch well the final week. “I’d only had two bad performances back to back all season, back in June against the Tigers and Yankees,” Glavine said. “Those teams have pretty good lineups. I was a little concerned about my changeup, but I really thought I had it in pretty good shape going into the game.”

  The first inning was like one of those surprise cold showers Glavine talks about. He had been pitching much better in first innings throughout most of his hot streak. In fact, he had only given up a run in the first inning once in his previous eleven starts — the single run against the Braves in Atlanta — which was one of the reasons he had been so good.

  Now the bad old days kicked in quickly. Felipe Lopez led off with a single and stole second. Pitching carefully, Glavine walked Ryan Zimmerman, the one real home-run threat in the Nationals’ lineup. Then he hung a 3–2 changeup to Austin Kearns, hardly a home-run hitter, and Kearns hit it over the left-center-field fence for his fifteenth home run of the season. Two batters later, Tony Batista, who had once been a home-run hitter but was now a little-used utility player, hit another changeup to almost the same spot. It was 4–0 Washington, and the boo-birds were starting to make an appearance at Shea Stadium.