“You don’t need a radar gun to see he’s throwing a little harder than I did,” Glavine said, laughing. “Fortunately for me, there’s more to this game than throwing hard.”
He was clearly relieved to have both his BP sessions behind him. He would throw in the bullpen once, perhaps twice, before starting against the St. Louis Cardinals in five days.
As he went through the spring rituals, it occurred to Glavine every so often that he might be doing things he had been doing all his adult life for the last time.
“I thought about it this morning, getting dressed,” he said. “If that was my last BP session, all I can say is good riddance.”
He went off to do his running. Chris and the boys were down for the weekend, and the rest of the day was his. It was 10:30 in the morning.
“THAT’S THE IRONY OF SPRING TRAINING,” Mike Mussina said, sitting in his house shortly after noon on the day he threw his second BP session. “It’s forty-five days long, basically to accommodate five guys — maybe six or seven if you aren’t certain about your rotation — and we spend less time at the ballpark than anyone.”
Pitchers do three things on a typical spring-training day: stretch, throw — either catch, in the bullpen, or BP — and run. Then they’re done for the day. Occasionally on a day when they aren’t scheduled to throw, they will take PFP, something that Glavine and Mussina take very seriously. They are both good athletes and two of the best fielding pitchers in the game. Mussina has won six Gold Glove Awards as the best fielding pitcher in the American League during his career. Glavine has won none, but that’s only because he’s pitched in the National League at the same time as Greg Maddux, who many consider the best fielding pitcher of all time. In 2007, Maddux would win his seventeenth Gold Glove.
“To be honest, I think I deserved to win it at least once,” Glavine says, when the subject of Gold Gloves comes up. “Don’t get me wrong, Greg’s a great fielder, and he always has more assists than I do because he’s more of a ground-ball pitcher than I am. But I think what happens with that award is that once a guy wins it more than once, it’s almost automatic that he keeps winning it. It’s a little bit frustrating to me that I never did win one.”
Glavine has won the Silver Slugger Award as the best hitting pitcher in the National League four times, something he is almost as proud of as his two Cy Young’s. He has never been an automatic out at the plate and works hard on both his hitting and his bunting. When he was in Atlanta he, Smoltz, and Maddux were always extremely competitive about their hitting.
“Especially Smoltzie,” he remembered. “That was always the nature of the relationship. That’s not to say Doggy [Maddux] wasn’t competitive. Among the three of us, he was the one most likely to take a bat up the tunnel and bash it all over the place if he thought he’d screwed up on the mound.”
Glavine believes that being proficient at the plate can be worth a minimum of two wins a year to a National League pitcher. What’s more, he enjoys hitting. He always hit third when he was in high school and has hit as high as .274 for an entire season in the majors. Four times in his career he has been used as a pinch hitter. In 1995 he hit his first and only career home run off of Pittsburgh’s John Smiley, who at the time was one of the better pitchers in baseball.
“I remember that I hit to the opposite field, which is pretty amazing in itself,” he said. “And I remember running around the bases pretty fast. The last thing I wanted to do was show Smiley up by cruising because I know just how I would have felt if I had been him in that situation.”
Beyond that, Glavine has more sacrifice bunts — 216 — than any other pitcher in major league history. In an era when bunting has become a lost art, when some pitchers look as if they don’t know which end of the bat to hold when asked to bunt, he almost never fails to get a bunt down when asked.
“It amazes me during spring to watch young guys in bunting drills clearly not trying and not paying attention,” he said. “Every once in a while I’ll say something to one of them because it’s pretty clear to me they don’t understand how helpful it can be to you to be a good bunter.
“If we’re late in a game and I have to come out for a pinch hitter, fine, I can live with that. But if we were ever in a situation where I’m coming up and a bunt was called for and they didn’t think I could get it down, I would be furious with myself. I still get angry with myself if I don’t get one down. Through my career, being able to bunt has probably been worth at least one extra win a year to me.”
That’s why, unlike a lot of young pitchers, he takes PFP and pitchers’ BP seriously. When the subject of young pitchers and hitting comes up, Glavine sighs and shakes his head before saying anything.
“My guess is if you go back a hundred years in baseball and ask any veteran then about younger players, he’ll shake his head and say, ‘These young guys just don’t get it.’ That’s the nature of the game; it’s the nature of life. But the game has changed a lot since I first came up, and a lot of it has not been for the good.
“Some of it is money — that’s always changing things. When I first got called up to the Braves in 1987, I got a huge raise because I was making a [prorated] salary of $62,000. Back then, that was a lot of money, especially for a twenty-one-year-old. The next year, my first full year, I got bumped to $65,000. Still good money. But now, even if you put aside the huge bonuses kids sign for — well into the millions — the minimum salary they make in the big leagues is $320,000. I’m all for that; I fought for it all those years with the union. But having that kind of money does change your attitude, especially when you’re young, and, in a lot of cases, immature.
“Sometimes when pitchers take BP, there’s a lot of joking around and giving each other a hard time. I’m all for that; I enjoy it as much as anyone. But it’s like with anything else — there comes a time when you have to go to work. When I get in the cage, that’s work time. It isn’t as if you’re being asked to carry cement around; you’re being asked to swing a bat or put down a few bunts for five or ten minutes. That’s not exactly heavy lifting. But there are guys who just won’t concentrate. They think their job is to just throw the ball. It’s not, especially in our league.”
It is different in the American League. Because of the designated-hitter rule, American League pitchers hit only during interleague play — fifteen games — and during the World Series. In spring training, those games are so far away that there is no pitchers’ BP, even though a pitcher might get up once or twice when playing in a National League park.
Early in spring training 2007, the Yankees made the trip down I-4 to play the Braves in Orlando. Mussina, making his second start of the spring, came up in the third inning against the Braves’ Tim Hudson and hit a fly ball fairly deep to right field. As he trotted off the field, he went past Hudson and said thanks. Hudson had thrown him an 85-mile-an-hour fastball right down the middle to make sure he didn’t make Mussina look bad. An inning later, Mussina returned the favor.
“We’ll take some BP a week or so before we play interleague,” Mussina said. “Tom’s right. A lot of guys don’t take it seriously. Obviously, it isn’t nearly as big a deal for us. I mean for me, I might get to hit ten or twelve times during a season, maximum. But if two of those times are crucial — if I need to get a bunt down or if I come up with two outs and the bases loaded — I like to feel I have a chance to be competitive at the plate.”
Mussina bats lefty and was a decent hitter in high school, though not as good as Glavine. He learned to hit lefty at the age of eleven because he thought it gave him an edge since most pitchers are right-handed. “Just gives me a better shot to hit someone’s breaking ball,” he said. “In a real game, a guy isn’t likely to just throw you a batting-practice fastball. They need to get you out.”
Both men take spring training seriously. “One of the things you don’t want to fall into during spring is the idea that you’re down here on vacation,” Mussina continued. “It can happen. It isn’t like football wher
e guys are pounding on each other in practice every day during preseason. It is more relaxed than that. But you are here to work. There are certain things you need to get done every day so that when April comes, you’re ready to go. It isn’t like we have to be at the ballpark all that long every day. You’re up early, and you’re done early.”
Before exhibition games begin, spring training is very much a rite of morning. Mussina is usually out of his house by no later than 7:45, and on weekdays he will take back roads to get from his house to Legends Field. “If I go straight down Dale Mabry [the main road near his house] with lights and traffic on a weekday, it will take me at least forty-five minutes and some days more than that. So I go back roads, and it’s twenty-five minutes. On a weekend, I can go straight down Dale Mabry, and it’s about twenty minutes.”
Both the Yankees and the Mets have chefs who will prepare just about anything the players want to eat. Mussina is a Froot Loops and juice guy most mornings — he’s not a coffee drinker — and then will spend some time in the weight room before going into the clubhouse to deal with any media types who want to talk to him before workouts begin.
Glavine is a coffee drinker. He will usually have a cup at home and may make a Starbucks stop en route to Tradition Field, the new name of the Mets’ ballpark in Port St. Lucie. His commute from the house he rents is a little shorter than Mussina’s, although he is just as apt to hit traffic on weekdays. He also eats when he arrives, sometimes cereal, sometimes — “when I’m in a mood to try to be healthy” — egg whites.
Until the games start, a pitcher’s day is always over before noon, even with a leisurely shower, getting another bite to eat, and dealing with postworkout media. Glavine, the avid golfer, will often have a tee time to get to when his day is done at the ballpark. Mussina rarely plays golf, and when his family isn’t down he is often content to go back to the cool air-conditioning of his house to read or watch TV.
The longest hours during spring training are put in by the manager and the coaches. They arrive earlier in the morning than the players in order to be sure they have their assignments straight for the day and to go over points of emphasis and review how they think players are progressing. The managers also have to deal with the media, which for New York teams is no small task.
For all intents and purposes, Joe Torre wrote the book on how to handle the media. During the spring he actually does two sessions each day because his office simply isn’t big enough to accommodate all the print and radio and TV people who want to talk to him at the same time. As a result, he will do one session with print and radio and then a separate one with TV.
Additionally, there are always people who need extra time once the formal session is over — a question here, five minutes there, do you have any time early tomorrow? Torre almost never says no. If he does say no on a given day, it is always with the promise that he will do it the next day or the day after. If someone insists they are fighting a deadline, he’ll figure out a way to answer a question or two. No question seems to bother him, even when he’s asked about his job security, which during 2007 was an almost-constant topic.
“I guess at this point in my life [Torre turned sixty-seven in July of ’07], the good news is I can stop mid-anecdote and pick up again where I left off without any trouble,” he said one morning, sitting in the empty dugout while his players stretched. “Everyone talks about pressure here. Pressure to me is having a team you don’t think can compete. We always have a team that can compete. I get paid very well [$7 million a year] to do something I really enjoy doing. I really don’t have a lot to complain about.”
Torre has the luxury of having won four World Series and six pennants as the manager of the Yankees. He knows that whenever he stops managing, his place in the Hall of Fame is now assured. As a player he was a borderline Hall of Famer. In eighteen big league seasons, he hit .297, with 2,342 hits, 252 home runs, and 1,185 RBI — numbers that aren’t quite worthy of the Hall of Fame but aren’t that far off. If you add his managerial record, there’s no doubt he belongs in the Hall.
Willie Randolph, Torre’s Mets counterpart, has a total of six World Series rings — two he won as a player with the Yankees in 1977 and 1978, and four he won as one of Torre’s coaches between 1994 and 2004. Randolph was also an excellent player — he had 2,210 career hits in his eighteen big league seasons and was a very good second baseman. It took him a while to get a shot to manage. For a number of years he was interviewed frequently, never hired. Often he felt as if he were being interviewed so that a team could claim it had at least considered an African American for the job.
“It did get frustrating after a while,” he said. “I thought I was ready to manage and that I would do well, given a chance. It took a long time for me to get a chance.”
His chance finally came when the Mets fired Art Howe in October 2004 after two disastrous seasons in New York. Randolph, the kid who had grown up in Brooklyn, had played most of his career with the Yankees but had played for the Mets in 1992, his last big league season. The Mets couldn’t help thinking that Randolph’s New York background, combined with his experience in the Yankee organization, would be a good thing.
They were right. Like Torre, Randolph doesn’t often show a lot of emotion during games — one of the complaints about him among fans during his first season was that he hadn’t been thrown out of a game — but he is extremely intense. He was also well organized and ran a training camp that had little wasted motion and produced a team that played much more fundamentally sound baseball than Howe’s teams had. The Mets were 83–79 in 2005 and then ran away with the National League East title in 2006, with ninety-seven victories.
Although Randolph, who was fifty-two at the start of the 2007 season, still referred to himself as a “young manager,” he was also an established manager, having put his imprint on what was now a winning team that began the season with high expectations.
“I think after last year, it’s not unreasonable for us to say that our goal is to be in the World Series this year,” Glavine said one afternoon in early March. “A lot of things can happen, especially with injuries, but we know we’re good enough to do big things if we stay healthy and play up to our potential.”
The biggest question mark in the Mets’ camp was the starting pitching. Pedro Martinez had undergone shoulder surgery in the fall and was not expected to be back before August. Orlando Hernandez (“El Duque”) listed October 11, 1969, as his birth date, but there wasn’t a soul in the clubhouse who believed he was under forty. Oliver Perez and John Maine had both shown potential down the stretch the previous season, but whether they could be consistent, every-fifth-day starters was a question mark. The fifth starter? It could be Mike Pelfrey, who had pitched a total of twenty-one innings in the major leagues; it could be Humber, who was probably a year away; or it could be any one of several reclamation projects in camp, including Jorge Sosa, Aaron Sele, and Chan Ho Park, who had once signed a five-year $65 million contract with the Texas Rangers. He had won a total of twenty-two games during the duration of that contract, which might explain why teams are reluctant to give pitchers five-year contracts for big money.
The only sure thing was Glavine. He would turn forty-one a week before the season began, but no one doubted that he would take the ball every fifth day and start at least thirty times and pitch at least two hundred innings before the season was over. In eighteen full seasons in the majors, he had started fewer than thirty times just twice — and in those two years he started twenty-nine times — and he had never pitched fewer than 183 innings, pitching more than two hundred innings thirteen times.
Glavine was Mr. Reliable. “If there’s one thing that Tom and I have done well through the years, it’s take the ball every fifth day,” said Greg Maddux, who in twenty-two years has been on the disabled list once — one more time than Glavine. “You can shrug at that, but it’s a bigger deal than people think, especially when pitchers get older. Look at the staff Tom’s on now: who can th
ey absolutely count on every fifth day — one guy. That tells you it isn’t as easy as it looks.”
Mussina has had a few more physical problems than Glavine, but his record for consistency and reliability is close to Glavine’s. Through 2006 he had made five trips to the disabled list — two of them in 1998 — and had started at least thirty times in eleven of forteen complete seasons. In nine consecutive seasons, he pitched at least 200 innings — including years of 243 and 238 innings — and pitched 197 innings in 2006, even though he had a stint on the DL because of a groin injury. He had also won at least eleven games in every year of his fifteen-year big league career, an all-time record.
“You’re talking about two guys who figured out how to pitch at an early age,” said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland. “As they’ve gotten older, they’ve adjusted with time, learned what works and what doesn’t work, and adapted. The great ones are always a step ahead.”
Or, as Ron Darling, who pitched for the Mets, Expos, and Athletics during an eleven-year big league career put it: “When they were young, you knew they’d have long careers because even when they had great stuff, they pitched as if they didn’t. They always used their minds. When you get older, the mind stays even if the stuff doesn’t.”
And so, as the full squads reported and the calendar turned to March and the first exhibition games, the Mets and the Yankees were full of questions about their pitching staffs. But both knew they could rely on Glavine and Mussina to take the ball whenever asked. Because, as Maddux put it, that was what they had always done.
Living on the Black Page 15