Living on the Black
Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember
John Feinstein
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This is for Chris Bauch, who deserves far more than this
Introduction
THE IDEA TO WRITE A BOOK about pitching first crossed my mind while driving down the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of a monsoon on a February morning in 1999. The rain was coming down in sheets, the visibility was about six feet, and the radio was tuned to New York’s WFAN, which had debuted as the very first all-sports radio station back in 1987.
The host that morning was Suzyn Waldman, then the station’s New York Yankees beat reporter and a sometimes weekend host. She was leaving for Tampa the next morning for the start of spring training, and most of her callers wanted to talk about the Yankees’ prospects for the coming season. New York and Boston are probably the last two cities on earth where the fortunes of the baseball teams are more important than those of the local NFL teams.
A caller wanted to know what kind of a year Waldman expected from David Cone. “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure. There isn’t a person who knows David Cone who doesn’t want to see him do well because we all love the guy…”
I really didn’t hear the rest of her answer. I was thinking about Cone, as likable and bright as any athlete I’d ever met. I’d gotten to know him during the 1992 season, when I was working on my first baseball book, and had kept in occasional touch with him since then. It was always fun to talk to him about almost anything, from the art of pitching to union issues to good restaurants.
An idea came into my mind: why not do a book on a year in the life of a major league pitcher? Pitching is one of those sports skills few of us really understand. We know how hard someone is throwing; we know their pitch count; and we think we know what pitches they are throwing. But so much about pitching is, for lack of a better term, truly “inside baseball.” What do pitchers really do during the off-season — especially as they get older — to prepare for spring training? What do they do while “throwing a bullpen,” which is what pitchers call the time they spend throwing in the bullpen on the day or days that they pitch to a catcher between starts. In fact, they will often refer to “having a good bullpen,” which is a lot different than a team having a good bullpen.
There’s more: How do pitchers and catchers relate to one another; what in the world do pitching coaches really say when they jog to the mound; and what does a pitcher, especially one who can’t just rear back and throw 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, do to get out of a slump? How do they interact with umpires? Opposing hitters? The manager? Their wives?
Cone, I thought, would be perfect for such a book. He was a very good pitcher who was getting near the end — he would be thirty-seven in 2000, which was when I was contemplating doing the book. He was smart, personable, and articulate. I already had a good relationship with him. I knew Joe Torre, his manager, well. More than anything, it would be fun to spend a year watching baseball and talking about pitching — and, no doubt, a lot of other things — with someone I genuinely liked.
And, perhaps most important at that particular moment, it meant I would spend most of February in Florida and not on the New Jersey Turnpike.
THREE WEEKS LATER, I made the trip down I-4 from Orlando to Tampa on a Saturday morning. There were no monsoons in sight. It was a glistening March day, and exhibition baseball had just begun. I knew that Cone would be finished with his workout by 10 a.m. That’s the way spring training is — if you aren’t playing in a game, most days your work is over long before noon.
I hadn’t called Cone in advance, because there’s never been a more approachable athlete than Cone, and I’ve always liked to spring ideas on people in person. I was actually talking to Roger Clemens, newly arrived as a Yankee, when Cone walked into the clubhouse, sweat-soaked from his workout. As usual, he was warm and friendly.
“What brings you to spring training in the middle of the [NCAA] basketball tournament?” he asked, shaking my hand.
“To be honest,” I said, “I came to see you. Have you got a few minutes?”
“Let me take a shower,” he said. “We’ll go get breakfast.”
Which we did, at a diner down the road that Cone said George Steinbrenner frequented. “Never been here myself,” he said as we walked in. “But I hear it’s pretty good.”
Inside it was apparent that Steinbrenner hung out in the place because there were pictures of him all over. There was also one of Cone. “Thanks for the great soup!” it said.
“I thought you’d never been in here.”
“I didn’t think I had been,” Cone said, laughing.
We sat down, and, over eggs and coffee, I laid out the idea.
“Boy, I think that would be a lot of fun,” Cone said. “There’s only one potential problem.”
He explained to me that he had been friends almost since the beginning of his career with Roger Angell, the nonpareil baseball writer of The New Yorker. “I always promised Roger that if I ever did a book, I’d give him first crack,” he said. “I really think I have to talk to him before I commit to you. I’d feel funny if I didn’t.”
Part of me couldn’t help thinking, Great, I get the one baseball player in America not only literate enough to read Angell but with a conscience too. Another part of me thought I’d be okay: Angell had never actually written a baseball book, only collections of his New Yorker pieces. He was seventy-nine at the time. I figured the chances that he’d want to take on such a project weren’t all that great.
“I understand completely,” I said. “But I think there’s a good chance he’ll pass.”
“In which case, I’m in,” Cone said. “I’ll call you sometime in the next week.”
When I didn’t hear anything for ten days, I began to get nervous. “Don’t worry about it,” my friend Dave Kindred counseled. “Even really good guys like David Cone don’t always call back when they say they’re going to call back.”
I waited until after the Final Four before I finally got impatient enough to call Cone myself. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew the news wasn’t good.
“Roger wants to do the book,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I should have called you.”
The lack of a phone call didn’t bother me at that moment. The lack of a book did.
ANGELL WROTE THE BOOK (as I had planned) during the 2000 season. As it turned out, that was Cone’s last year with the Yankees. I enjoyed reading the book because if Angell wrote a book about paint drying it would be enjoyable to read. But the fact that Cone pitched hurt for most of the season made Angell’s task monumentally difficult, and the book, even though it got good reviews, sold only about twenty-two thousand copies in hardcover and far less than that — about six thousand copies — in paperback. Cone’s lost season clearly didn’t help sales.
I still thought my initial idea had a lot of merit. But it needed the right subject or, I was now convinced, subjects. You can’t chronicle an entire season in a pitcher’s career if he only pitches half the season or less. I decided I needed two pitchers, so that if one got hurt, I could compare and contrast what a pitcher on the disabled list went through with one who was healthy and pi
tching.
I came up with a short list of potential subjects: Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Mike Mussina, John Smoltz, Al Leiter, and Curt Schilling. Maddux and Glavine were, I believed, lock Hall of Famers. Smoltz was borderline, and Mussina and Schilling had a shot if they finished their careers on a high note. Only Leiter, I thought, was definitely not a Hall of Famer, merely a very good pitcher. All six were smart, the kind who would understand a project like this and not chafe (or at least not chafe that often) at the sort of detail and time I would need, and I knew Glavine, Mussina, and Smoltz well from past contact with them.
I decided to ask Glavine and Mussina because I liked the contrasts they brought to the table: Glavine was a lefty who hadn’t gone to college and had been (like Cone) a very vocal and visible part of the players union during the player-owner battles of the 1990s. He had pitched in the National League his entire career. Mussina was a righty who had gone to Stanford and graduated in three and a half years. He had also been a union rep but never an especially visible one. He had pitched in the American League, Eastern Division, his whole career.
One started in Atlanta, the other in Baltimore. Both landed in New York — one a Met, one a Yankee. The notion of comparing and contrasting the culture of the Mets with that of the Yankees as part of the story also appealed to me.
What’s more, I knew that both would be able to explain to me exactly what it is they do to be successful pitchers. Neither has ever won on pure power. Glavine never threw in the 90s. Mussina did, but what made him an All-Star was his ability to keep hitters off balance with a variety of off-speed pitches. Both pitchers have always relied on their ability to throw the ball almost exactly where they want to most of the time.
“They’re like scientists out there,” Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland said. “They don’t beat you with their arms so much as they beat you with their minds.”
Both understand the importance of not giving the batter a good pitch to hit. “What you don’t want,” Glavine explained once, “is white on white. You have to be around the black.”
“The black” is a reference to the outside edges of home plate. The plate is seventeen inches wide. The outside edges are framed in black, and a pitcher with great control is someone who can “hit the black.” In other words, he can throw pitches that just nick the corners of the plate, making it difficult for batters to hit but forcing umpires to call strikes if batters don’t swing. If you get the white baseball over the white part of the plate — Glavine’s “white on white” — you’re in trouble, especially if you’re not a power pitcher.
Thus, Glavine and Mussina, neither a power pitcher, have had to hit the black to be successful, and now, near the end of their careers, their margin for error would be tiny. I looked forward to watching them face that challenge over a season.
The two of them are also extremely different personalities. If there’s a baseball player as friendly and as approachable as David Cone, it is Tom Glavine. He has a knack for taking an unbelievably stupid question and making the questioner think he’s giving the answer great thought. He’s unfailingly polite, whether you’ve talked to him a hundred times or never talked to him at all. He has never ducked a postgame meeting with the media, no matter how poorly he may have pitched. If you can’t get along with Tom Glavine, something is wrong with you.
Here, in total, are the discussions we had about doing the book:
JF: I’d like to do a book on a year in the life of two aging, smart, and very good pitchers. I think you’d be ideal.
TG:Okay. When do you think you’d want to do it?
Mussina is completely different. In fact, when he first signed with the Yankees prior to the 2001 season, he was given the locker in the Yankee clubhouse that had belonged to Cone.
“Part of my problem that first year was that I had David Cone’s locker,” he said six years later. “The guys in the media wanted me to be David. I am not David Cone.”
Not by any stretch of the imagination. The New York writers — most of whom very much like and respect Mussina now — talk about “paying the Mussina toll.”
Rarely does a conversation with him begin with “Have you got a minute?” And rarely is the answer “Sure.”
More likely the answer is “What do you want to talk about? And I don’t believe for one minute that this will only take one minute.”
Our discussions about doing this book took almost as much time as our discussions for the book did. Mussina worried about how much time I would need and when I would need the time. What if he pitched lousy — would that ruin the book? He also asked a question he later forgot he had asked: “What if I get so frustrated at some point in the season that I just don’t feel like talking for a while?”
My answer was honest: “That’s the luxury of a book. If you need a break, we can take a break, as long as I keep tracking what you’re doing and talking to the people around you.” That would turn out to be very important late in the season.
After about four different discussions and a number of e-mail exchanges, Mussina also said yes. And he was more than true to his word about giving me the time I needed once he pledged it.
And, true to his reputation, he did point out stupid questions.
On a cold, wet, rainy afternoon at Shea Stadium in May, with the Yankees well under .500 and Mussina’s record 2–3, we sat in the visitors’ dugout talking. Rumors were swirling that Joe Torre was about to get fired. Mussina’s answers, normally thoughtful and lengthy, were short and biting. Finally I said, “You’re not in a good mood today, are you?”
He gave me a look I had by then become familiar with.
“No, I’m in a great mood,” he said. “I’ve already been on the DL once this season, and I’m pitching right now like a solid, Triple-A pitcher. My team sucks, and there’s no sign it is going to stop sucking anytime soon. Everyone wants my manager fired, the temperature is about forty degrees, it’s raining, and there are about five hundred people in the clubhouse right now wanting to ask me questions like, ‘So, what do you think is wrong with you guys?’ Why the hell shouldn’t I be in a bad mood?”
THE SEASON I CHRONICLED was filled with twists and turns. Glavine began the year ten wins shy of three hundred, and Mussina started eleven away from 250. Both reached their milestones but took routes to them none of us would have imagined when spring training began.
The Mets, who looked like a lock for the playoffs all season, ended up blowing a seven-game lead in the last seventeen games, their collapse climaxed on the season’s last day by what was arguably the worst performance of Glavine’s storied career.
The Yankees, 22–29 in May and 42–43 at the All-Star break, made the playoffs for a thirteenth consecutive season. In August, for the first time in seventeen years, Mussina found himself yanked from the rotation. And yet, most Yankee fans headed into winter wishing he had had been the starter in Game Four of the American League Division Series against the Cleveland Indians rather than Chien-Ming Wang.
What I got to see and hear and learn up close had little to do with wins and losses, even though they were obviously very important to both pitchers.
The results produced by Tom Glavine (13–8 record, ERA 4.45) and Mike Mussina (11–10 record, ERA 5.15) in 2007 are there in black-and-white for all to see. What I set out to do was give people a sense of what went into those numbers, what the process is for a pitcher who isn’t ready to walk off into the sunset just yet.
“The physical part of doing this is pretty easy,” Mussina said at one point last summer. “You know what you have to do to prepare, to try to stay healthy or get healthy, to take care of your arm so you can take the ball every fifth day.
“The hard part is mental — especially when you aren’t pitching well. You can’t escape it. The physical part you can leave at the ballpark — you do your work and you’re done. Not the mental part. You can be playing with your kids, reading a book, talking to your wife, eating a meal, and it’s there. What can I do to get better?
What am I doing wrong? What am I missing? Is this the end or just a slump? It never goes away.”
He smiled. “I guess the day it does go away is the day you’re done. So, I guess I’m not done just yet.”
Neither man felt done during 2007, even when doing his job was really, really hard. This is the story of that season.
1
The Gifted Lefty
IF YOU HAVE ATTENDED A BASEBALL GAME at Yankee Stadium at any time during the past fifty-five years, you have heard the voice of Bob Sheppard, who has been the public address announcer there since 1951. No one introduces a starting lineup quite like Sheppard, who for years taught diction at St. John’s University.
In deep, sonorous tones, Sheppard, who turned ninety-seven during the 2007 season, introduces each player in a booming, deliberate voice: “And pitching for the Yankees… Number thirty-five… Mike Mussina… Number thirty-five.”
There are none of the theatrics that many of today’s PA announcers make a part of their act. Sheppard isn’t acting. He’s just informing, in remarkably clear, perfectly pronounced English.
It is different at Shea Stadium, where the Mets PA announcer Alex Anthony has only been on the job for a few years. Sheppard had been on the job in the Bronx for eleven years by the time the Mets played their first game as a team, and Anthony doesn’t even introduce the players. He simply says, “Batting ninth, the pitcher…” and at that point the player in question will appear on the Diamond Vision screen behind the left-field fence, smile, and tell the fans his name and his hometown.
When Tom Glavine is introduced, he smiles for the camera and says, “Tom Glavine, Billerica, Massachusetts.”
What he actually says is “Bill-uh-rica,” which is different from the way most people say it. They say “Bill-rica,” leaving out the uh. “That’s the short way,” Glavine says with a laugh. “If you’re a true Billerican, you say it with the uh.”
Living on the Black Page 1