Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

“Very early in my career [1990], I’d had a problem with my index finger and my middle finger where they got cold that way,” he said. “I had it checked out, and the doctors decided it was something called Raynaud’s disease, which means, basically, that when your hand gets cold, the blood doesn’t flow properly through your fingers sometimes. They put me on some Procardia — a pill I took once a day — and I never had a real problem with it again.

  “This was a little different because it was my ring finger, but my first thought was that maybe the Raynaud’s was flaring up a little. I decided I probably shouldn’t take any chances and should tell someone about it.”

  The first person he found was assistant trainer Mike Herbst, who agreed the finger was abnormally cold and suggested he pack it in heat that night and see how it felt the next day. When the finger was still cold and the knuckle on it was sore (something that hadn’t happened with the Raynaud’s in the past), the Mets decided to send Glavine to see a hand specialist in New York.

  He showed up at the hospital on the east side of Manhattan the next day, thinking he would be at the ballpark at four o’clock, just a little later than he normally arrived for a seven o’clock home game. He left the hospital nine hours later.

  First, the specialist looked at his hand and performed an MRI. Nothing unusual showed up. Then he asked Glavine to stick his hand into a bucket of ice and hold it there for two minutes. “I remembered doing that in ’90 and how much it hurt,” he said. “It hurt just as much this time.”

  And the results were similar: his thumb and pinky returned to normal circulation in less than five minutes. The three middle fingers were still cold. “They said, ‘Probably the Raynaud’s, but, since you’re here, let’s do an ultrasound.’ I was sitting there while they were doing the ultrasound when I heard the doctor say, ‘Uh-oh.’ When a doctor says ‘uh-oh,’ that gets your attention.”

  The doctor showed him what he had seen. On the screen there was clearly something that was darker in his blood flow in one area than in the others. “Not sure what it is,” the doctor said. “But I think we better get a full MRI-” — An MRI from Glavine’s shoulder down to the hand would show what was causing the darker color on the screen, what might be cutting off the circulation to his hand. Since an MRI can only be done for small portions of a person’s body, Glavine had to spend four hours going in and out of the MRI machine. “They would set it on my shoulder, leave me in there for forty-five minutes, and then move it down my arm a little,” he said. “A couple of places they couldn’t get the camera positioned exactly right, so I had to go in and out like four times. It was absolutely brutal.”

  When the MRI was finally over, the doctors told him they still couldn’t be sure what was wrong with him. “Could be something minor,” they said. “We want to do an angiogram on you on Monday.”

  Great, Glavine thought. I have to wait until Monday, and the closest thing I have to a diagnosis is a doctor saying “uh-oh.” He drove home exhausted and a little bit frightened.

  “I went from thinking it was no big deal and I probably wouldn’t miss a turn to thinking maybe my season was over. I didn’t even want to think my career was over. But the thought sneaked into my head briefly.”

  As luck would have it, his parents and his sister and brother-in-law were in for the weekend, so it was a full house. Glavine told them and Chris what was going on. “No one panicked or anything,” he said. “But the uncertainty was kind of tough.”

  He went to the ballpark briefly the next day, avoiding the media only because there was nothing he could tell them. When his teammates asked what was going on, his answer was honest: “I don’t know. Could be nothing. Or my season could be over.”

  Not surprisingly, when he arrived at the ballpark on Sunday, several writers were waiting for him. They had heard his season might be over. True? Glavine talked to everyone that day, saying he would know more after the angiogram, and, yes, he was nervous about what was going on.

  The next day he and Chris drove back to the hospital. The angiogram took close to two hours. When he came out of the fog from the light anesthesia he’d been given, he found Dr. Anne Winchester, who had performed the angiogram, looking at him, concern on her face. The angiogram showed a small blood clot, not one that was life-threatening, but one that might make it risky to pitch again.

  “I was sort of freaking out at that point,” Glavine said. “Then Dr. [David] Altchek and the other doctors who work with the Mets came in. I was still a little groggy, but at one point I heard someone say something about when I started pitching again. I kind of sat up and said, ‘Pitching again? You guys think I can pitch?’ Dr. Altchek kind of nodded and said, ‘Sure, in a little while; why not?’ ”

  Glavine was less groggy but more confused. Chris was concerned. Why, she wanted to know, did the baseball doctors think it was okay to pitch but the nonbaseball doctor didn’t? Glavine was wondering the same thing when, as if on cue, Dr. Winchester came into the room.

  She told him that she had been discussing the angiogram results with Altchek and the other doctors. She was in agreement that there was no reason why he shouldn’t pitch. The clot had probably been developing for years and years — in fact, it might have been the cause of his problems in 1990, not Raynaud’s — as a result of the way he twisted his body when he released the ball. It had probably started in his chest, traveled to his hand, and was creating a circulation blockage there.

  “The only way you would really be at risk by pitching is if you have a bunch of symptoms that you choose to ignore,” she said. “If the finger feels cold again, you tell someone right away.”

  Glavine was relieved. He and Chris both asked if there was any chance he could have a heart attack or a stroke. Dr. Winchester said almost none, unless he ignored symptoms. And over the next several days, his finger began to feel normal again.

  Eleven days later, he was back on the mound in Houston, feeling nervous, wondering what would happen. “It was almost like the first game in spring training,” he said. “I’d done my work, gotten back on the mound, but I had no idea where the ball would go when I got out there. Would the finger get cold again? I didn’t know.”

  He pitched three good innings, a bad fourth inning, and left after five. He was almost as happy as he would have been if he had pitched a shutout. “The finger was fine; I felt fine,” he said. “The problems I had in the fourth were normal pitching problems — I put a couple guys on and tried to make perfect pitches instead of good ones. That had nothing to do with the finger. I was fine.”

  He pitched well throughout September and October and had no further issues with the finger. His only complaint during the last nine weeks of the season was that the Mets came up one victory short of reaching the World Series.

  “After it was over, I realized how lucky I was,” he said. “If I had needed surgery, the rehab would have been six to eight months. At my age, that could have been the end. To get back on the mound so quickly and to do it pain free and be pretty effective was a blessing. I felt very lucky.”

  And, when he beat the Washington Nationals 13–0 in his final regular season start, he had won his 290th game.

  8

  One More Contract

  TOM GLAVINE AND MIKE MUSSINA both became free agents not long after the 2006 season ended.

  Mussina’s six-year, $88.5 million contract with the Yankees had a $17 million team option for 2007, but he knew they were not going to execute it. “Given the market, there was no way they were going to pay me that kind of money,” he said. “But I knew they wanted me back.”

  Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had made that clear to Mussina before the season ended. In 2006 Mussina had had his best year since 2002. He had been completely healthy — making thirty-two starts — and had pitched to a 15–7 record with a 3.51 ERA, his lowest since the 3.15 he’d put up his first year in New York.

  There were other reasons why the Yankees would want Mussina back. For one thing, their starting pitching was
as shaky as it had been in years. Although Chien-Ming Wang had emerged as a star, winning nineteen games, the rest of the staff — behind Mussina — was full of question marks.

  On the orders of owner George Steinbrenner, the Yankees had traded for forty-two-year-old Randy Johnson and given him a two-year, $32 million contract prior to the 2005 season. Johnson’s stay in New York had been disastrous. It had taken him about fifteen minutes to get into a scuffle with a local cameraman when he first arrived in town, and his pitching had been consistently mediocre. Even though he had won seventeen games in ’06, he had pitched to a horrific 5.00 ERA, and then, for the second year in a row, had pitched poorly in the critical third game of a Division Series.

  The fourth starter had been Jaret Wright, who had won eleven games and managed to stay healthy for the first time in years but was a free agent, a question mark for ’07, and a six-inning pitcher at best.

  And then there was the fifth starter. Cashman had signed Carl Pavano as a free agent prior to the 2005 season, giving him a four-year contract worth just under $40 million. Pavano was about to turn twenty-nine and was coming off a superb season in which he had gone 18–8 with a 3.00 ERA pitching for the Florida Marlins. He had been a part of the staff that had beaten the Yankees in the 2003 World Series and had given up just one run in eight innings in the game he started against the Yankees.

  Given Pavano’s age and his 2004 season, signing him seemed to make sense. But he had really had only one outstanding season in the major leagues, and, as Mussina often says, a lot of guys have had one good year. By the end of 2006, Pavano still had just one good year.

  He pitched poorly during the first half of 2005 — 4–6 record, 4.77 ERA — and had gone on the disabled list at the end of June with tendinitis in his right shoulder. He hadn’t pitched in a major league game since then because of various injuries. Three times Pavano had begun rehab stints in the minor leagues, and each time he had returned to the DL without making it back to New York.

  The last time had been most galling to the Yankees. Pavano had started the season on the DL because of tendinitis, had undergone arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone chip from his elbow, and had started to pitch rehab games in Tampa in August. On August 25, he had come out of a game complaining about soreness under his right armpit. Only then did Pavano tell the trainers that he had been in a car accident ten days earlier and had experienced pain since then. For Mussina and other Yankees, that was about the last straw.

  “You’re being paid a lot of money, and you haven’t pitched for more than a year, and you don’t tell people about an accident for ten days?” he asked rhetorically, incredulous at the thought. “That’s just irresponsible. I think a lot of us decided after that happened that, for whatever reason, he really didn’t want to pitch. I mean, every time he’d start back and it would look like he might get back to New York, something would happen. The car accident was the topper.”

  Mussina had been skeptical about Pavano even prior to the accident. Shortly before going to Tampa to begin rehab, Pavano had come to New York to throw a bullpen session with pitching coach Ron Guidry and bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan (an ex-pitcher and pitching coach). Mussina was standing by his locker when Kerrigan walked by on the afternoon Pavano was going to throw.

  “Pav’s going to throw,” Kerrigan said to Mussina. “You want to come watch?”

  “Not really,” Mussina said.

  When Kerrigan walked away, Mussina shook his head and said, “Why watch? There’s no way the guy is pitching for us this season.”

  He had been proven correct.

  All of which meant the Yankees had exactly one starter — Wang — under contract for 2007 they felt they could absolutely count on. Wright was going to be allowed to sign elswhere; the team was hoping to trade Johnson; and Pavano was, at best, a major question mark.

  “We wanted Mike back; we needed Mike back,” Cashman said. “He had earned every single dollar we had paid him for six years. He was a great investment, and, given the way he pitched in ’06, there wasn’t any reason not to want him back. Plus, he’d become an important guy in our clubhouse.”

  That last point was a development few people would have foreseen. As well as he had pitched in 2001, Mussina had, by his own admission, gone through a rocky time adapting to the Yankeee clubhouse. Unlike a lot of players who struggle early in New York and throw their arms up and say “This is impossible,” Mussina had taken the opposite tack. “I had to learn how to deal with it,” he said. “I had a six-year contract. I wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was the New York media.”

  He learned to accept the fact that a day off from pitching was not necessarily a day off from talking to the media. He began to make a point of not keeping people waiting after he had pitched poorly, although he still might make them wait a few extra minutes after he had pitched well. Writers figured out that Mussina would give smart, thoughtful answers as long as he was approached correctly.

  What’s more, Mussina had become the leader of the pitching staff. When Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and David Wells had all departed after the 2003 season, Mussina had been the one remaining veteran with New York experience. He began to go out of his way to talk to younger pitchers and to newcomers. In fact, Torre had called him in early in the 2006 season to ask him to counsel the struggling Johnson.

  “Moose had been through the New York wringer when he first got here,” Torre said. “He had figured out how to deal with it all. Not everyone does that. Randy was really struggling with it. I thought maybe he could help.”

  Mussina tried. He sat Johnson down and talked to him about his early struggles in 2001.

  “Does it ever stop?” Johnson asked.

  Mussina shook his head. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “You have to accept the fact that it isn’t going to stop. A lot of it is your attitude when you talk. If you pitch six innings, give up three runs, and we lose 4–3, they don’t want to hear you say, ‘Well, I pitched pretty well; I gave the team a chance to win.’ Because we didn’t win. What you should say is, ‘Hey, my job was to hold the other guys to one or two if we’re only scoring three today, and I didn’t get it done. That’s on me.’ No one in this town wants to hear excuses because in the end, that’s what they are, excuses.”

  Johnson listened, and Mussina sensed at times that he was trying. But Johnson just couldn’t do it. Often, Mussina would look at Johnson, who lockered a few yards away from him, and see him just staring into space, looking completely alone in a packed room.

  “I felt for him,” Mussina said. “He was just never happy here.”

  Mussina was happy in New York and was pleased that the Yankees wanted him back. He would be thirty-eight when the 2007 season began, and, in the back of his mind, he thought it possible, though not likely, that he could get to three hundred wins.

  “The odds are against it at this point,” he said. “I’ve won two hundred thirty-nine games, which means I would have to average fifteen wins a year [plus one] for four years to get to three hundred. I pitched well this year [2006], and I was healthy all year, and I won fifteen games. The chances are I won’t do that for the next four years, the last year coming when I’ll be forty-one. But we’ll just have to see. Two years from now, I’ll see where I am and reevaluate.”

  He could wait two years because Cashman offered him a new two-year deal shortly after the team had formally let Mussina and his agent, Arn Tellem, know they wouldn’t exercise the 2007 option. Although Tellem closes Mussina’s deals, Mussina will often talk to Cashman during the negotiations.

  Not long after the season had ended — the Yankees had been eliminated by the Detroit Tigers in the Division Series, with Mussina pitching a mediocre Game Two in a 4–3 loss — Cashman called Mussina to talk about a new contract. His first offer was for two years at $18 million. Mussina’s response was swift and to the point: “Brian, you’re not paying me less than you’re paying Carl Pavano,” he said. “Don’t insult me.”

  Point taken. Mo
nths later, Cashman laughed when that conversation came up. “I don’t remember a lot of details,” he said. “But I do remember that.”

  It didn’t take long for Cashman to come up to a respectable above-Pavano level. On November 27, the Yankees announced that Mussina had signed a two-year contract worth $23 million.

  With Mussina and Wang under contract, the team then went on to bring Andy Pettitte back as a free agent, and, after losing out to the Boston Red Sox in the Daisuke Matsuzaka sweepstakes, they signed their own Japanese free agent, Kei Igawa, for a lot more money (five years at a cost of $46 million) than most baseball people thought he was worth.

  In January, Johnson was traded to Arizona for four prospects. Wright signed with Baltimore. And so, the Yankees headed into spring training with a starting rotation of Wang, Mussina, Pettitte, Igawa, and… Carl Pavano.

  LIKE MUSSINA, Glavine had been outstanding in 2006, also finishing 15–7, and then pitching superbly in the postseason, allowing just three runs in seventeen innings over three starts against the Dodgers and Cardinals. His strong season had put him at 290 career wins, and, given the way he had pitched, there was no reason to think he would not be able to get the ten wins he needed to reach three hundred the following season.

  The question was, where would he be pitching?

  Both Glavine and the Mets had options for 2007 that each knew would not be exercised: the Mets could have signed Glavine for $16 million. Once the Mets did not exercise that option, Glavine could have exercised his own for $7.5 million. Team and player were in agreement: Glavine should be paid more than $7.5 million and less than $16 million.

  “Money was never really an issue with the Mets,” Glavine said. “I knew that Jeff [Wilpon] and Omar [Minaya] would make me a fair offer if and when the time came.”

  The if, as in 2002, was the Braves.

  Things had changed in Atlanta since Glavine’s rancorous departure four years earlier. Stan Kasten was now CEO of the Washington Nationals. The two had long since made up, having sat down over lunch during the 2003 season. They were now back to their friendly bickering.