When the game was over, Willie Stargell, the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer who was then a Braves coach, walked over to Glavine in the clubhouse and handed him the game ball, giving him a heartfelt handshake. “You should give this to your mom,” he said.
Glavine thought that was a cool idea until he looked at the inscription Stargell had written on the ball. “Hey, Mom,” it said. “This is the ball from my first fucking major league win.”
Glavine almost gagged.
Stargell reached into his pocket and produced the actual game ball, a huge smile on his face. Glavine could see a number of his teammates standing behind Stargell, cracking up.
“They got me,” he said. “It was the first time I saw what big league humor was like.”
The rest of the season was predictably up and down for a rookie on a bad team. Glavine was 2–4 with a 5.54 ERA. He wasn’t going to overpower hitters throwing a fastball that topped out at maybe 90 miles per hour. He was still looking for an effective changeup and hadn’t found it. Like most young pitchers, he had tried different grips and arm motions, but nothing had really worked.
“No matter how hard you throw, you have to have at least one good breaking pitch to go with your fastball,” Glavine said. “It sounds simplistic, but pitching is really about two things: changing speeds and location. The location part is obvious: if you throw the ball over the plate to major league hitters, they’re going to crush it unless they’re fooled by the speed of the pitch. If you can throw every pitch on the black or just off the black, then fooling a guy with pitch speed becomes a little less important. Most of us can’t do that all the time so we have to be able to change speeds.”
In Ball Four, Jim Bouton describes Sal Maglie, the pitching coach for the Seattle Pilots, going through a lineup in a pitcher’s meeting and saying of every hitter, “Keep the ball low and on the outside corner, and he won’t hit it.”
That was accurate, as Bouton pointed out, because no hitter can hit a pitch low and outside. The trouble is that no pitcher can throw every pitch — or even a majority of his pitches — in that spot.
So, assuming a pitcher can’t place every pitch exactly where he wants it — in today’s baseball vernacular it’s called locating — he has to keep hitters off balance by changing speeds. At twenty-one, Glavine was pretty good at locating, especially for a young lefty, but he was still working on changing speeds.
Even so, he was part of the Braves’ starting rotation when the 1988 season began. The Braves were even worse in 1988 than they had been the previous three-years. Manager Chuck Tanner was replaced thirty-nine games into the season by Russ Nixon, but it didn’t make much difference. By season’s end, the Braves were 54–106 (two games were mercifully rained out) and had drawn only 848,000 fans at home. Glavine’s season fit right in with all that: he was 7–17 and his ERA was 4.56. Not only was he going through on-the-job training, he was doing it with a very bad team behind him.
“Part of me understood that this was the deal,” he said. “I was still learning, and we were bad. Some days I was just bad; other days I was pretty good, and the team was bad. Either way, it made for a long year.”
One positive during that season was the arrival in Atlanta of another young pitcher: John Smoltz. Glavine and Smoltz became fast friends. They shared a love of golf, a love of giving people a hard time, and, most of all, a love of competing.
Both young pitchers — Glavine was a little more than a year older than Smoltz — were learning on the job and sharing the suffering that went with it. A year later, the Braves weren’t much better, 63–97, but Glavine believed he had turned a corner. His 14–8 record and ERA of 3.68 were a big part of that feeling. But believing he had finally found the changeup he needed to be a successful pitcher was even more significant.
Early in his minor league career, Glavine threw three pitches most of the time: fastball, curveball, forkball. The forkball is a pitch that starts out looking like a fastball but drops hard and fast as it gets near the plate, causing batters to swing over it. It isn’t all that different from the split-fingered fastball, or splitter, that many pitchers throw nowadays. The grip is different, and the split-finger tends to be thrown harder, but the principle — fooling the batter into thinking a fastball is on the way — is the same.
Glavine loved his forkball while he was in A-ball and Double-A ball. “I could throw it fifty-five feet, and guys would still swing at it,” he said. “I thought it was a great pitch.”
Two things changed his thinking while he was pitching in Greenville in 1986. The first was the arrival of Ned Yost as a minor league pitching instructor. One night after Glavine had struck out a number of hitters with his forkball, Yost walked over to him and asked how he felt about his forkball.
“I love it,” Glavine said. “Look at what it did for me tonight.”
“Yeah, well, the pitch sucks,” Yost said. “You can get Double-A hitters out with it, but major league hitters will laugh at it. They’ll just wait until you leave one up and hit it a million miles.”
Glavine was skeptical. After all, he was twenty years old and knew everything there was to know about baseball. Yost was just a washed-up old catcher. What could he possibly know about pitching?
A few weeks later, Glavine found himself pitching to Bo Jackson, the famous two-sport athlete who was trying to make his way to the big leagues and had recently started his minor league career.
“I had faced him about a month earlier, and he was completely clueless about how to hit a breaking ball,” Glavine said. “I think I struck him out three times with the forkball. So, first time up, I threw him one and waited for him to flail at it. He just waited on it; it was up just a little, and he hit it, honestly, about six hundred feet. The ball may still be going.”
Glavine was impressed by how much Jackson had improved in a month and by the fact that someone not yet in the big leagues had hit the pitch so hard. He remembered what Yost had said. “From that moment on, I was searching for a way to throw a good straight changeup.”
Fast-forward to March of 1989. Glavine was shagging balls in the outfield during spring training when a ball rolled up to him. He picked it up, and, as he went to throw it back toward the infield, it slipped in his hand, causing him to grip it between his middle finger and his ring finger rather than the more natural way between the middle finger and the index finger. When he released the ball, he noticed that it dropped more rapidly than his other breaking pitches did and, at least it appeared to him, darted to his left as opposed to his right, the way most breaking pitches do when thrown by a lefty.
Intrigued, Glavine attempted to throw some pitches like that from the mound when he next threw a bullpen, and, sure enough, the pitch dropped quickly and to his left, meaning he was throwing a breaking pitch that broke away from a right-handed batter. He asked Bruce Dal Canton, the pitching coach, and Bruce Benedict, the catcher, what they thought.
“If it feels good, give it a shot” was the response from both of them.
“Until then I had two problems with my changeup,” Glavine said. “If I tried to throw it with enough sink and enough change of speed from my fastball, I was slowing my arm motion down. The batters at the big league level are good enough to read that, and they would know I was throwing a change as a result. When I didn’t slow my arm motion down, the pitch might go seventy-eight [Glavine’s fastball was in the 86- to 88-mile-per-hour range at that point], or it might go eighty two or eighty three — which isn’t nearly enough change of speed — and batters would rip it. I just never knew what was coming out of my hand. With the new grip, I had both break and change of speed without slowing my arm motion down. I couldn’t throw it faster than seventy eight even if I wanted to.”
Glavine began using the new grip and pitch in exhibition games and carried it over to the regular season. Bobby Cox, who was still the general manager, was impressed. “It’s one thing for a young pitcher to mess around with a new pitch,” he said. “Tommy was throwing it in t
ough spots right from the beginning. He was never afraid of it.”
By the end of 1989, Glavine was convinced he was now ready to be a big time major league pitcher. He had won fourteen games with a bad Braves team, and he had found the changeup he needed. Then, in 1990, he went backward again. He started the season feeling pain in his shoulder — it turned out to be tendinitis — and the confidence he had gained the previous year rapidly disappeared. It hurt to pitch, and it hurt just as much to watch his fielders kick the ball around.
Sixty-five games into another lost season, with the Braves 25–40 and sitting in their usual spot — last place — Cox fired Nixon and came down to the dugout to become the manager. Cox brought an entirely new coaching staff with him. Dal Canton was fired and replaced by Leo Mazzone.
Glavine knew Mazzone a little bit from Instructional League baseball. He knew Mazzone was a disciple of Johnny Sain. Even so, he was shocked when Mazzone told the pitchers that they were going to throw almost every day and would always throw not one but two bullpens between starts.
“It was a little bit like that first year in Bradenton,” Glavine said. “My arm is killing me, and here’s a guy saying I should throw more. It had worked with Johnny, but I was very skeptical because I wasn’t working my way back starting with long tossing and then eventually getting on a mound. I was pitching in the majors every fifth day. It was kind of scary.”
Glavine didn’t complain though — partly because it’s not his way, partly because he was still a little nervous he might be yanked from the rotation because he wasn’t pitching well. He went along with the program, and, sure enough, his arm started to feel better. For most of the second half of the season, he pitched without pain and pitched much better. Even so, life with Leo was an adjustment.
Dal Canton had been an upbeat, friendly guy, someone who soothed when things weren’t going well and always tried to find something good to say. That wasn’t Mazzone’s style.
“If you were throwing a bullpen and not hitting your spots, he’d let you have it,” Glavine said, smiling at the memory. “Sometimes he’d come to the mound to calm you down; other times he’d just blast you.
“I remember one night in San Diego, I was really struggling in the first inning — not unusual for me. Leo comes to the mound and he says, ‘Tommy, are you okay? Are you hurt?’ I said no, I felt fine. He says, ‘Well, then, do me a favor and get some people out! Otherwise, I’m gonna yank you and get someone in here who will get some people out!’ I pitched out of it, settled down, and we won the game.”
Glavine finished 10–12 that year but pitched much better down the stretch. In fact, the entire team played better down the stretch, even though their record (65–97) wasn’t much better than it had been in the past.
“You just got the sense that we had some guys by then,” Glavine said. “Smoltzy was clearly going to be a star; we’d picked up Charlie Leibrandt the previous winter and he could really pitch. We had gotten Terry Pendleton and Sid Bream; [Jeff] Blauser was up too. You looked around and said, ‘You know what? There’s a chance to get better.’ I’m not saying we knew it was going to happen as fast as it did, but by the end of ’90, we were starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel.”
In 1991 the Braves pulled one of the all-time turnarounds in baseball history. With Glavine, Smoltz, Leibrandt, and a young lefty named Steve Avery leading the way, they emerged as one of the best starting-pitching staffs in baseball. Glavine was the star, his arm healthy. The Mazzone method was working for him, and with the changeup now a true weapon, he dominated throughout most of the season, finishing 20–11 with a 2.55 ERA.
The Braves became a worst-to-first story, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers down the stretch for the National League West title. Atlanta suddenly became a baseball city, with attendance jumping from 980,000 in 1990 to more than 2.1 million in 1991. Fulton County Stadium was full and frenzied every night as the Braves made their run.
The Braves upset the Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games in the National League Championship Series, with Smoltz pitching a shutout in the seventh game. They led the Minnesota Twins (who had also gone from worst-to-first that year) 3–2 in the World Series, before losing two remarkable games in Minnesota: the first on an eleventh inning home run by Kirby Puckett off Leibrandt; the second 1–0 in ten innings. Smoltz was brilliant that night; Jack Morris was a little more brilliant.
Glavine lost Game Two of that series, pitching a complete game but losing 3–2 before coming back to win Game Five. As disappointing as the loss in the World Series was, the exhilaration of the remarkable season lingered in Atlanta all winter. Glavine was named the Cy Young Award winner, which vaulted him into stardom at the age of twenty-five.
WHILE GLAVINE WAS BECOMING A STAR, Mussina was trying to become a major leaguer. Like Glavine, he believed that wearing a major league uniform alone didn’t cut it.
“It isn’t really something you can define,” Mussina said. “There’s no set time when you look in the mirror and say, ‘Okay, now I’m a real big leaguer.’ I can tell you for sure that when I first came up in ’91, I in no way felt as if I was a big leaguer. I was happy to have the uniform and the chance to pitch, but when I looked across the clubhouse and saw Cal Ripken, I knew there was a substantial difference between what he was and what I was.”
Ripken was one of the game’s true superstars. Even then, four years before he would break Lou Gehrig’s record, his consecutive-games streak was the stuff of lore. He was having a great season on a bad team in 1991, en route to winning the MVP Award for the second time in his career. Smart and savvy as he was, Mussina was in awe of Ripken and a little bit overwhelmed by the other veterans on the team.
“Mostly I just sat at my locker very quietly and watched the other guys,” he said. “I didn’t say much to them; they didn’t say much to me.” He smiled. “I’m pretty sure the first time Ripken spoke to me was when he came over to the mound to ask me something during a game.”
The first veteran to speak to him was Dwight “Dewey” Evans — Glavine’s boyhood hero. The Orioles had flown home from Chicago after Mussina’s debut, and Mussina arrived at the ballpark early to get out and stretch and go through his day-after-pitching routine.
“In Memorial Stadium, the player’s parking lot was outside the left-field fence,” he said. “You’d park, then walk in from there to our clubhouse on the third-base side. I was out stretching when Dewey came walking in. He looked at me and said, “You were good yesterday, kid. I’m glad you aren’t taking it for granted, though, and you’re out here working.”
Mussina wasn’t likely to take anything for granted. That just wasn’t his way. He pitched solidly the rest of that season, going 4–5 but with a 2.87 ERA — exactly the same as his ERA in Rochester. He pitched two complete games and had the thrill of matching up against Nolan Ryan on a steamy night in Texas. “I pitched well but lost,” he said. “But, heck, how badly can you feel losing to Nolan Ryan when you’re twenty-two-years old and fifteen months out of college?”
The Orioles finished that season 67–95, not all that different from the Braves team that Glavine was called up to in 1987. Mussina was fairly certain he had won a spot in the starting rotation for the next season. The Orioles moved into their sparkling new ballpark in April of 1992 and became the surprise of the American League, contending right from the start and chasing the Toronto Blue Jays deep into September.
No one played a bigger role in their renaissance than Mussina. He began the season as the number four starter in the rotation, but by the All-Star break it was apparent that he was the team’s best pitcher. He opened the season 5–0 and was selected for the All Star team, a rare honor for a pitcher in his first full year. In July, he pitched a one-hitter against the Rangers in Texas, giving up a single to Kevin Reimer in the fifth inning. He didn’t beat Ryan, but he did beat Kevin Brown, a twenty-game winner. The Orioles ended up 89–73 that season, and Mussina was 18–5 with an ERA of 2.54. He finished fourth in the Cy Yo
ung voting.
Then did he think of himself as a major leaguer?
“Maybe,” he said with a smile. “Seriously, I did have a great year in ’92. But if you look back through history, there have been a lot of one-year wonders in this game. Mark Fidrych? Joe Charboneau? They were Rookies of the Year, weren’t they? There are lots of other examples. I was very happy to pitch that well, believe me, but I felt as if I had to come back and do it again to really prove myself.”
In many ways 1992 became symbolic of Mussina’s career. By any definition, he was outstanding. But it was a season of almosts: The Orioles almost won the American League East (they ended up seven games behind the Blue Jays). Mussina almost won twenty games. He almost pitched a no-hitter, and he was almost a serious contender for the Cy Young Award.
At that moment though, neither he nor anyone else in the organization was thinking in those terms. Ripken was still the number one star in Baltimore and would always be that, until the day he retired in 2001. But Mussina was clearly established as the number one pitcher, as an All-Star, as someone the team would count on to lead its pitching staff for years to come.
He was solid again in 1993, but the year did not go as well for him or for the team as 1992 had. The league had now seen Mussina and his array of pitches and had settled in against him a little bit. What’s more, Mussina missed six weeks of the season and was on the disabled list shortly after the All-Star break, with a strain in his right shoulder brought on by neck and back pain. He still won fourteen games that season — proving that he wasn’t a one-year wonder — but his ERA (4.46) was considerably higher than it had been the year before.
“There were factors involved,” Mussina said. “My shoulder, the team not being as good, the fact that I was still learning about life in the big leagues — but it was still a learning experience for me. I was only twenty-four, but after going to the All-Star game the year before I was kind of surprised when I wasn’t an All-Star. When you’re young and things are going well, there’s a tendency to figure they’ll keep going well as long as you keep working at getting better.”
Living on the Black Page 5