Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  During the 2006 season, when the Mets had come to play in Washington, Kasten wanted to introduce Mark Lerner, one of the Nationals’ new owners, to Glavine. He spotted him signing autographs down the left-field line and walked up behind him.

  “You know, Mark,” he said as they approached, “the last time I tried to get this guy to sign an autograph, he wanted me to give him $40 million for it.”

  “Thirty million,” Glavine answered, not even pausing as he signed.

  Glavine was also still close with Braves manager Bobby Cox, whom he had never had an issue with. This was not the case, however, with general manager John Schuerholz.

  “Some of it is just personality,” Glavine said. “My relationship with Stan was that we could curse each other out for hours, and when it was over, it was over. John’s not like that. Things tended to linger — on both sides — with him.”

  There was also the issue of Schuerholz’s autobiography. It had been published early in the 2006 season, and, among other things, it detailed the Glavine negotiations of 2002, including the Saturday when Glavine had thought he wanted to back out of the New York deal and return to Atlanta. That had never been publicized before, and Glavine was upset that Schuerholz went public about his last-minute doubts.

  “There were two issues to me,” he said. “The first was I considered what happened that day private, which may be naive because, ultimately, in sports nothing is private. Beyond that was the timing. I had just gotten to the point where people had accepted me in New York, and now John comes along saying I didn’t want to go there. This was three-years later; my doubts about New York were long gone.”

  Fortunately, Glavine pitched so well through most of 2006 that few people in New York were concerned about any doubts he’d had in 2002. He and Schuerholz sat down together in August during a Mets-Braves series to hash out their differences and did… sort of.

  “He explained what he was trying to do, and I told him how I felt,” Glavine said. “It cleared the air — at least to some extent.”

  Was the air clear enough for Glavine to return to Atlanta? The Mets had told Glavine they wanted him back, and Glavine knew he would probably be paid about $11 million for 2007 if he went back to the Mets. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about going back to the Braves.

  “In some ways it would have been perfect,” he said. “Obviously, for the family it would be much easier — no more airplanes, no more packing and unpacking all the time. It would have been nice in a lot of ways to come back and try to get my three hundredth with the Braves. Full circle. It was certainly something worth checking into.”

  The Braves appeared to have some interest when the free-agent signing period began in November. They could certainly use some help on their pitching staff. John Smoltz was back in the starting rotation, and Tim Hudson was certainly solid, but there were lots of question marks after that. Cox made it clear he would love to have Glavine back.

  While Glavine waited to see what the Braves would offer, the Mets were asking for an answer — one way or the other. If Glavine wasn’t coming back, they needed to make a move to fill his spot in the rotation. Baseball’s annual winter meetings, where a lot of trading is done, were in early December. Glavine finally told Jeff Wilpon he would give him an answer in time for the winter meetings.

  And then he waited. And waited. The Braves never made an offer.

  Schuerholz had a problem: new owners were about to take over the team, and he didn’t know exactly what kind of budget he was going to have for player payroll. He needed to make some moves — several at the winter meetings — to gain some payroll flexibility. If Glavine could have waited a little longer, Schuerholz might have been able to make an offer.

  Glavine understood, but he couldn’t wait. He had given Wilpon his word. On December 9, several days after telling the Mets he was coming back, he re-signed with the Mets: one year, $11 million. More money than Carl Pavano was making, and more than Glavine would have been willing to take to play for the Braves.

  “I’m honestly not sure what went on with the Braves,” Glavine said when it was over. “I know they had payroll issues; I get that. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure they wanted me back. Maybe they weren’t either. I understood that.

  “Going back to the Mets is absolutely fine with me,” he said. “We had a good team last year; we should have a good team this year. We’ve done the travel thing for four years; no reason we can’t do it for five. I’m ready to go.”

  HOW ATHLETES PREPARE FOR THE NEXT SEASON changes as they get older, especially for pitchers. As pitchers age, their off-seasons get shorter. After the season ends, neither Glavine nor Mussina will go more than a week or two without at least working out.

  “I might put on a little bit of weight through Thanksgiving,” Glavine said. “But the cookies and the desserts start to go away in December, and once New Year’s comes around, I’m done with them.”

  In today’s world, most professional athletes never really get out of shape. The days when baseball players reported to spring training twenty-five pounds overweight and spent February and March getting into playing shape are long gone.

  Both Glavine and Mussina have workout facilities in their homes. Glavine has lived at the Country Club of the South, a posh, gated community, since the early 1990s. He and Chris spent the 2007 season building a new home a few doors down from their old one. The new house, at fifteen thousand square feet, will be slightly smaller than the old one. In the basement of his old house, Glavine had all the workout equipment he needed. He begins a daily workout regimen within a week of the season ending and starts to throw shortly after New Year’s.

  “When I was younger I would take a longer break after the season ended,” he said. “But as I got older, I found that even taking a few weeks off made it hard to start working out again. I was just so sore and it hurt so much I figured I’d be better off not taking that break and not being as sore.”

  Four mornings a week, after taking the kids to school, Glavine works out with Frank Fultz, the Braves’ longtime strength coach. They work for about an hour each day, doing different exercises to work on different parts of the body. The first two months of the off-season are devoted mostly to exercises that build strength — heavier weights, fewer reps. After New Year’s, the weights are lighter, and the exercises are designed to stretch out muscles and get them loose and ready for pitching. The one part of Glavine’s workout routine that has changed radically in the past few years is the amount of work he does on his rotator cuff. Once, he did exercises to strengthen that part of his shoulder on a daily basis, even during the season. Now, he does it just two days a week.

  “Basically, it was something [Mets assistant trainer] Mike Herbst suggested,” Glavine said. “He said there’s a point where you do so much in that area — especially when you’re a little older — that you’re tearing down muscle rather than building it up. I tried cutting back to a couple days a week, and I’ve felt much stronger ever since.”

  Glavine’s winter preparation is almost scientific and goes according to the calendar. Just as he gives up eating sweets and fast foods after Christmas, he begins throwing a baseball.

  “Obviously you start out throwing very lightly,” he said. “You’re just playing catch, and the first few days you don’t throw for very long; you don’t throw for much distance; and you certainly don’t throw hard. How quickly you build up really depends on how the arm and the shoulder feel.”

  A pitcher protects his throwing arm and shoulder the way the Secret Service protects the president. “If I pull open a refrigerator that’s stuck a little during the off-season, I’m apt to feel something in my shoulder,” Glavine said. “I understand that’s from not using it for a while. But if I feel any pain at all, I’ll ice it.”

  One of the more remarkable aspects of Glavine’s career is how resilient his arm has always been. He has never been on the disabled list and has only missed one start in his career because of anything arm related:
he had a bone spur in his elbow that forced him to miss a start in June 2003.

  “One reason I didn’t get panicked about getting to three hundred when I struggled my first couple of years with the Mets was that people have always told me, ‘Hey, you can pitch until you’re forty-five,’ because of the way I pitch — not throwing that hard and not putting that much pressure on my arm with my motion,” he said. “Sometimes, early in the season, I actually feel too strong. When I’m a little tired, like a lot of pitchers, I tend to pitch better because there’s more natural sink on the ball when I throw.”

  As healthy as he had been throughout his career, Glavine was amazed by how good he felt during the 2006–07 off-season. Even the normal misery of building up his early workouts wasn’t as pronounced as it usually was. When he began to throw, there was little of the soreness he had come to expect.

  “I can’t really explain it,” he said, sitting in his kitchen one morning sipping coffee after a workout. “It’s always a little different every winter, but this year has just been easier than the past few years. Maybe my arm is a little looser because I pitched into October. I’m certainly not going to complain, but I’m also going to be careful not to push too hard too soon just because I feel good.”

  Glavine spends most of January working his way backward in his game of long toss. He starts out at thirty or forty feet the first few days and works back to no more than eighty feet, tossing the ball rather than throwing it. Before he actually steps onto a mound, he and Fultz stand about 120 feet apart when they throw. “I like to get to a point where I’m throwing at maybe sixty or seventy percent before I get on a mound,” he said. “I’m not trying to hum the ball from a hundred twenty feet by any means or put it on a string, but I’m not just lobbing it either.”

  By the end of January, Glavine is on a mound. There is an indoor baseball training facility with both batting cages and mounds, run by Mussina’s old minor league roommate Jim Poole, a few miles from Glavine’s house, and he and Fultz drive there and Glavine gets on the mound at least five times before he heads to Florida in mid-February. Those sessions are very much like the bullpen sessions he throws between starts during the season: about forty pitches at first — one day from the windup, the next from the stretch. He starts out building up his fastball but throws all his pitches and might get up to 90 percent the last few times on the mound. The final session or two can go as long as sixty pitches, depending on how his arm feels.

  “It’s funny, though; no matter how well your throwing sessions go at home, it all changes when you get to Florida,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s being in the heat and the humidity or throwing with other guys around, but you still feel kind of sore the first couple of times you throw in Florida. I’ve had years where I feel great throwing in January and terrible in March. As scientific as you might try to make it, as much as you try to regiment it and point toward being ready to really pitch seriously that first week in April, there’s no way of knowing for sure that what you’re doing is going to work.”

  Glavine would turn forty-one a week before Opening Day, but he felt great physically. In his mind he was probably preparing for his last spring training.

  Probably.

  “If Chris had her way, I’d be retired already,” he said before heading to Florida. “But she knows what I’m trying to do, and she’s been great about it. I think in her mind the plan is for me to get this done and then be home next year. That’s the way I’m thinking too. But if I have a great year and I can still pitch and someone wants to pay me well to keep pitching, I think I have to at least consider it.”

  He wasn’t going to close the door on pitching for another year if he didn’t have to. “One thing I don’t want is some kind of farewell tour,” he said. “If I say I’m definitely quitting, then I’ll be getting rocking chairs everywhere I pitch on the road. That’s really not for me. Plus, I don’t want to be one of those guys [does the name Roger Clemens ring a bell?] who says he’s retiring and then turns around and says, ‘Never mind.’ ”

  Still, he went through all his preseason rituals as if it might have been the last time.

  MUSSINA, WHO TURNED THIRTY-EIGHT ON DECEMBER 8, had no such musings, although retirement was something he thought about more and more often. “I really don’t want to be one of those dads who is gone until his kids are already teenagers. My kids are still young now [Brycen had turned eight in September and Peyton was five in January], but if I pitched four more years, Brycen would be just about a teenager by the time I got home. From everything I’ve heard, kids are done with you by twelve or thirteen until they’re twenty. Right now, they both want to be with me. I don’t want to miss out on that.”

  Mussina was sitting on a comfortable couch on a Saturday morning in January in the workout room of his gym as he spoke. Outside, snow was falling steadily, the norm in Montoursville on most winter days. “You can pretty much expect to have snow on the ground from Thanksgiving on around here,” he said. “If it’s what you’re used to, it’s no big deal.”

  Mussina starts his off-season throwing sooner than Glavine does. After Thanksgiving, he begins throwing lightly in his gym — which has a moose head at the center-court jump circle and room to seat at least a couple thousand people if needed — with his younger brother, Mark, who lives a few miles away. Like Glavine, Mussina starts throwing easily without very much on the ball and gradually builds up to the point where he is throwing at something approaching 100 percent before he heads south.

  “It really is amazing how it comes and goes,” he said. “It’s actually like pitching itself. You’ll have nights during the season where you warm up and have nothing and go to the mound and you’re lights out. Then on other nights, it will be just the opposite. When I start throwing at this time of year, I really have no idea how good my arm will feel. I expect it to get stronger as I throw more, but it isn’t necessarily a steady improvement.”

  The brothers usually begin their workouts by playing basketball, not because it helps Mussina’s pitching but because they enjoy it. More often than not, they play shooting games — horse, pig — rather than all-out ball. Mussina loves basketball enough that he spent several winters coaching the junior varsity team at Montoursville High School. He is always keenly aware of how good Stanford’s basketball team is each winter. Once the shooting contests are over, Mussina will loosen up, gradually moving backward and picking up the pace of his throwing.

  Until you have stood very close to a major league pitcher throwing a baseball, it is difficult to comprehend exactly how hard they throw. When a scoreboard shows that a fastball has been thrown to a hitter at 90 miles per hour and you are watching from the stands, it hardly seems like a big deal. But when you stand a few feet away from someone who is throwing at 80 miles per hour — and not trying all that hard to do it — and hear the whoosh of the ball as it goes past, you have a clearer understanding of why the very best hitters are fortunate to get a hit three times out of ten.

  On this winter morning, Mussina stood at one end of the basketball court while Mark crouched at the other end. They were about eighty feet apart, and Mussina was uncoiling from his tight, compact windup and effortlessly throwing the ball, as if on a string, to his brother time after time.

  “This is about as good as I’ve felt all winter,” he said at one point. “I could pitch in a game today.”

  He threw about forty-five pitches to Mark, then sat down to relax, breathing only a little bit harder than usual. A few minutes later his father arrived, bringing with him a friend whose son was a high school senior — and a pitcher. Mussina had agreed to spend some time with the father and son.

  He spent several minutes throwing with the young pitcher — acting as his catcher. “Is your arm okay to throw a breaking pitch?” he asked. Eagerly, the youngster threw several breaking pitches. Then, Mussina spent forty-five minutes talking pitching — what to do, what not to do, how to protect his arm. He asked the young pitcher what his plans were for th
e next fall.

  Mussina was completely unhurried, answering questions, showing father and son the kind of weight work he did. When they had left he said, “The kid is doing the right thing” going to a Division 2 college.

  He could tell that from fifteen pitches?

  “I could tell from five. He’s got a decent arm; I like his attitude.”

  He smiled. “I’m a month away from my seventeenth major league training camp. I should know something about pitching by now.”

  Outside, the snow fell harder. Mussina was in no rush to get to that seventeenth training camp. Clearly, though, he was ready for it.

  9

  The Rites of Spring

  “PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT.” It is one of those sports phrases that true baseball fans understand has magical qualities. That is the day each year that baseball fans look forward to because it is so full of symbolic meaning. It signals the return of baseball and the approaching end of winter. Exhibition games will soon be played in Florida and in Arizona, and later real games will begin. There will be standings to peruse, box scores to examine, and that day’s probable pitchers to speculate about.

  But why exactly do pitchers and catchers report before the rest of the team?

  “It’s simple,” Mike Mussina explains. “Spring training is forty-five days long because of five guys — the starting pitchers on every team. We need the full forty-five days to get our arms to the point where we can pitch five, six, seven innings once the season starts. Everyone else needs three weeks, four weeks max. But we need that extra time.”

  The pitchers need someone to throw to when they arrive. That’s why the catchers are also asked to show up early.

  The first few days of spring training before — as the pitchers call them — “the players” arrive is little more than a bunch of guys playing catch. Fans will turn up to watch, partly because it is spring training, but also because, traditionally, they can get closer to the players during spring than during the regular season.