Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  But, as always seemed to be the case, Minnesota was like a health spa for the entire team. Carl Pavano became the first starter to win a game with seven solid innings on Monday, and Andy Pettitte pitched six shutout innings the next night, as the Yankees won 8–2 and 10–1. It was left to Mussina to complete the sweep.

  The night started out well enough. There was still snow on the ground outside, but it was seventy degrees inside the Metrodome as Mussina warmed up, and he felt comfortable, much more so than before the Baltimore game. He was going on his normal fifth day, and that felt good too.

  He gave up a walk in the first inning and a double to Torii Hunter in the second but easily pitched out of both innings. “I felt much better than in New York,” he said. “I had something on the ball, and my location was about a hundred percent better.”

  Luis Rodriguez led off the third inning for Minnesota. On the first pitch he threw to him, Mussina felt something grab inside his left leg. He knew he’d done something but hoped it was minor. Rodriguez singled to right. Then, Alexi Casilla, the weak-hitting shortstop who was batting ninth, also singled. Mussina was fairly certain at that point he had done something to his hamstring. Like any pitcher, he’d had hamstring injuries before. A hamstring injury can be fairly mild, a pull that can be fixed with some heat, or it can be very serious and keep a pitcher out for months.

  Mussina decided to try one more batter before he told anyone he was hurt. Maybe — not likely but maybe — it would somehow loosen up. On his third pitch to Luis Castillo, he knew better. He couldn’t land without feeling pain, and as a result he was pushing his pitches rather than following through the way he needed to.

  He walked off the mound and waved at Ron Guidry in the dugout. Guidry trotted out to meet him.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I hurt myself,” Mussina answered. “Hamstring.”

  “How bad?”

  “I can’t pitch.”

  By now, Torre and assistant trainer Steve Donahue had followed Guidry out of the dugout.

  “What’s up?” Torre asked Guidry.

  “Hamstring,” Guidry answered. “He can’t pitch.”

  Mussina walked off the field while Torre signaled for reliever Sean Henn to start warming up. Since Mussina had left with an injury, Henn had all the time he needed to get ready.

  As he eased onto the training table to let Donahue feel around the back of his leg, Mussina’s mind was racing. A hamstring, he knew, could be a bad injury. But it didn’t hurt, he thought, that much. He didn’t think he’d torn it, just pulled it enough that he couldn’t land on it.

  “On the one hand, it’s your second start of the season and you know you’re probably looking at the DL,” Mussina said. “On the other hand, it isn’t your shoulder and it isn’t your elbow. It’s a hamstring and it’s April. It isn’t exactly how you want to start your season, but it’s early. If you only miss two weeks, you’re back before April is over.”

  If you only miss two weeks.

  Sitting on the training table in Minneapolis, with snow falling outside and the DL looming, Mussina knew one thing for sure: he was not where he wanted to be.

  13

  A Cold Spring

  THE YANKEES WAITED A FEW DAYS before deciding whether to put Mike Mussina on the disabled list. They had this luxury because baseball rules allow a team to place someone on the DL retroactive to the date when he last played, regardless of when they actually decide to make him inactive.

  There are two disabled lists: one that requires a player to be out at least fifteen days, and another that requires him to be out at least sixty days. The sixty-day DL is generally used only for long-term injuries and for players who are out for the season.

  Mussina was fairly certain when he walked off the mound in Minnesota that he was looking at a stint on the DL but was certainly willing to wait a few days to see if the hamstring would loosen up more rapidly than he expected. “Nothing to lose by waiting,” he said. “They can wait until they need someone to pitch in my spot before making a decision. But a hamstring isn’t something you want to take a chance with and really hurt yourself. My goal, realistically, was to come back in as close to fifteen days as possible.”

  That would be on April 26. The Yankees waited three days to see how Mussina was feeling. He flew with the team from Minnesota to Oakland and tried to throw lightly in the bullpen on Saturday. It only took him a few pitches to know there was no way he could think about trying to throw hard. The next day he was placed on the DL. Chase Wright, a twenty-four-year-old lefty who had spent the 2006 season pitching in A-ball, was called up to take his spot in the rotation. It was the sixth time in seventeen big league seasons that Mussina had been forced to go on the DL.

  “Which, if you think about it, is pretty good,” he said.

  True. But not as good as Tom Glavine, who was truly a medical marvel, having never been on the DL. He had missed a few starts over twenty years but had never been out long enough to merit the DL.

  Glavine had come out of the start in Atlanta disappointed but feeling fine physically, even after throwing 113 pitches. The Mets came home from the first week on the road with a 4–2 record, a good start, although one sullied by the fact that the two losses had come in Atlanta to end the trip.

  “It would have been nice to reestablish our superiority on those guys right away,” Glavine said. “We had the chance to do it after Friday night but didn’t. Still, it’s a long season.”

  If someone could find a way to get every American to chip in a dollar each time a baseball person says “It’s a long season,” or “There’s still a lot of season left,” there would be no reason for the government to collect taxes. Baseball people talk about how long the season is in February, and they talk about it in September. When the New York media was getting impatient about Pedro Martinez’s return one evening, Mets general manager Omar Minaya shook his head and said, “Hey, fellas, it’s a long season. We’ve got a lot of baseball left to be played.” That was on September 2.

  The Mets’ first homestand — of the long 2007 season — was against the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies were off to a brutal beginning, having started 1–5. Already there was talk that Charlie Manuel might be the first manager to lose his job that spring.

  Glavine was scheduled to pitch the third game of the series, against Jamie Moyer. This was, to put it mildly, an intriguing matchup. To begin with, Glavine was the youngster of the two, since Moyer was forty-four. In fact, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, Glavine-Moyer represented the oldest combined age of two starting left-handers in a game in Major League Baseball history. Only Elias can come up with stats like that.

  Beyond that were the obvious similiarities between the two. When Moyer and Glavine watched each other, they might as well have been looking into a mirror. Glavine was a soft-tossing lefty; Moyer tossed even softer. His fastball almost never cracked 80 miles an hour, but, like Glavine, he had been keeping hitters off-balance for years with a great changeup and pinpoint control. Batters constantly walked to the plate knowing they could crush both pitchers, then walked away wondering why they had just rolled out to shortstop. They were masters of “the comfortable oh for four.” A hitter almost never saw a pitch he couldn’t hit and at the end of the night would be oh for four without ever feeling uncomfortable at the plate.

  Moyer is an unabashed fan of Glavine. For years he carried a tape of Glavine’s performance in Game Six of the 1995 World Series with him wherever he went. “To me that game represented as close to a perfect performance by a lefty who has a style like mine as I had ever seen,” he said. “It wasn’t so much the results, which were obviously great, but the way he pitched that game. The way he stood on the mound, his mechanics on every single pitch, his release point.

  “I always say that I can watch a pitcher release a ball and, without looking, tell you where the pitch went and how it broke or didn’t break. That night, every pitch he threw was a good pitch — regardless of what t
he hitter did or, in most cases, didn’t do with it. That game was what I was striving to achieve for years.”

  Moyer no longer carries the tape because several years ago, in a game in St. Louis, he finally pitched a game he thought was comparable. “When I look at that tape now, that’s what I want to be every single time I pitch,” he said. “But Glavine was the model for me. Even now, I love to watch him pitch. I think I learn something every time I watch him.”

  Moyer is a remarkable story. He had been drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1984 out of St. Joseph’s University — hardly a baseball power — and made it to the big leagues in 1986. But he hurt his arm in 1989 and was released by the Texas Rangers at the end of the 1990 season. That led to several years of wandering in the baseball hinterlands. He spent 1991 in St. Louis and was released again at the end of that season. The Cubs re-signed him, then released him before the 1992 season began. He finally signed a minor league contract with the Detroit Tigers in May and spent that year pitching in their minor league system, where he began to develop his changeup. At the end of that season, he signed with the Baltimore Orioles and made it back to the big leagues for good in 1993.

  In Baltimore he became friends with a veteran pitcher named Jimmy Key and a young pitcher named Mike Mussina.

  “We spent hours talking about pitching,” Moyer said. “We would talk about it in the clubhouse, in the bullpen, in the outfield during batting practice. We talked about how you set up hitters, about improving your mechanics, about how to have a good bullpen. I mean everything. I never got tired of listening to those two guys. What’s really too bad is you don’t see young pitchers do that anymore. Everyone’s got an iPod or a cell phone going all the time. There’s very little talking in baseball anymore.”

  Sitting in a comfortable chair, Moyer gestured around the Phillies clubhouse. Sure enough, several players were sitting in their lockers talking on cell phones; several others stared into space with headphones on. The only person who appeared to be having a conversation at that moment was Moyer — with a reporter.

  “Talking to Key was great back then because he’d been at it for so long,” he continued. “Mussina hadn’t been, but it didn’t matter. Even then when he was very young, he really understood the art of pitching. In a way, I think I learned how to pitch from those two guys, not just how to throw but how to think on the mound and off the mound. In those days, Moose could throw hard, but that wasn’t how he won. He won because he was always a step ahead of the hitter. Sort of like Glavine, only from the right-hand side.”

  Sort of like Moyer. After three-years in Baltimore, Moyer signed with the Red Sox for the 1996 season. At that point he was in the midst of a very ordinary career: he was thirty-three-years old and had a big league record of 59–76. He had started to see improvement in Baltimore but was still learning to throw his changeup where he wanted with consistency. He pitched well in Boston, going 7–1 through the first half of the season, but was sent to Seattle in what appeared to be an unremarkable trade deadline deal for Darren Bragg.

  In Seattle, Moyer became a star. Over the next ten years he was 145–81 for the Mariners, including twenty-win seasons in 2001 at the age of thirty-eight and in 2003 at the age of forty, when he was 21–7 with a 3.27 ERA. He and his wife, Karen, the daughter of former Notre Dame basketball coach and ESPN commentator Digger Phelps, established the Moyer Foundation to raise money for kids at risk. The foundation has raised almost $10 million, and Seattle is still home during the off-season for the Moyers and their six children.

  With the Phillies trying to make a late run in 2006, they traded for Moyer, bringing him to the team he had rooted for as a little boy. He had pitched well, going 5–2, but the Phillies — as always seemed to be the case — had come up short of making the playoffs, their thirteenth straight year without a postseason appearance. Moyer knew the end was near but still felt he could get batters out enough to contribute.

  “I won’t have to ask anyone to tell me when I’m done,” he said. “The hitters will tell me. That’s how baseball works.”

  The night of Thursday, April 12, was hardly one for two senior citizens of baseball to be out trying to pitch. It would be forty-four degrees when Glavine walked to the mound, with the wind whipping through Shea Stadium so hard that it brought back memories of the New York Jets and Joe Namath playing on this same field on cold, windy, late-fall afternoons.

  Only this wasn’t an afternoon. “This will be worse than Atlanta,” Glavine said, pulling on the requisite extra T-shirt and sipping hot coffee in the clubhouse. “Because it’s night, it will only get colder as the game goes on. It will be almost impossible to feel the ball.”

  Glavine hadn’t pitched much better against the Phillies in his Mets career than he had against the Braves. He had been 24–10 against the Phillies while in Atlanta but was 2–7 against them as a Met, with an ERA of 5.27. Beyond that, his ring finger had started to feel cold while playing against the Phillies the previous August. What’s more, even though the Phillies were off to a terrible start, the Mets had reason to want to hammer them early and often. During spring training, Jimmy Rollins, the Phils’ talented shortstop had said, “I think we are the team to beat in the National League East.”

  That comment rankled the Mets since they had finished twelve games ahead of the Phillies the previous season and saw no evidence that they weren’t at least twelve games better than the Phillies again. “It would be nice to make him eat those words,” Glavine said. “And there’s no reason why we can’t do it.”

  At that moment, Rollins was hitting .250 and the Phillies were 2–6. So far, so good, as far as the Mets were concerned.

  As always, Rollins led off for the Phillies. On 2–1, Glavine threw what he thought was a perfect changeup. Rollins laid off, and plate umpire Ed Montague — one of Glavine’s favorite umpires — called the pitch a ball.

  “Perfect example of why it’s important, especially at this point in my career to get the close pitch,” he said. “If it’s two and two, I can throw any pitch I want to throw. At three and one, I really don’t want to start the game by walking Rollins because there’s a decent chance he’s going to steal second and then you feel like you’re in trouble right away. So, I threw him a fastball and got a little more of the plate than I wanted to get.”

  The pitch also didn’t have much on it — the radar gun clocking it at 79 miles per hour, as Glavine tried to get his velocity up in the cold. Rollins jumped on the pitch and hit it into the left-field bullpen. “Nice start,” Glavine joked later.

  Before the inning was over, Glavine had walked the bases loaded. Fortunately, he got Wes Helms to strike out on a 3–2 changeup, and walked to the dugout relieved but not exactly thrilled after another thirty-pitch first inning. “Right away the chances of going deep into the game are pretty much gone after an inning like that,” he said. “But at least it was only one-nothing.”

  The weather wasn’t any better for Moyer, and he was quickly in trouble too, giving up singles to Jose Reyes and Paul Lo Duca and an RBI single to Carlos Beltran, to tie the game at 1–1, with no one out and runners on first and third. But, as veteran pitchers will do, Moyer took a deep breath and found a way out. He struck out Carlos Delgado and got David Wright to ground into a double play.

  Rollins hit another home run in the second, this time on a 3–2 changeup that left Glavine kicking at the mound. The Mets got one back in the second and then took a 4–3 lead in the fourth when Reyes singled two runners home with two men out. The reason the runners were both in scoring position? Glavine had sacrificed with one out, laying down a perfect bunt.

  “Perfect example,” he said, “of why every pitcher should know how to bunt.”

  Glavine managed to get Rollins to ground to shortstop the third time he came up, and fought his way through six innings without giving up any more runs. Moyer also made it through six before both old men headed for well-deserved ice packs for their arms and hot showers for their aching bodies.

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p; “You see in a game like that why Tommy is Tommy,” Rick Peterson said. “Five outs into the game he’s given up three runs and two home runs. And then he puts his head down and that’s it for the night. A lot of guys under those conditions, with the start he had, throwing fifty pitches [actually forty-nine] the first two innings, don’t make it to the fourth. He hangs in there through six and gets a win.”

  The final was 5–3, the Mets bullpen again pitching well behind Glavine, giving him his 292nd win. Moyer took the loss and remained at 217 wins. In all, not too bad for a couple of pitchers who were more likely to hit a dozen home runs apiece than throw a single pitch at 90 miles per hour before season’s end. Glavine hit 86 a couple of times over the course of the evening; Moyer hit 80 — once.

  “Slow, slower, slowest,” Mets’ closer Billy Wagner joked. “But they get people out.”

  Twenty years after arriving in the major leagues, they both still got people out.

  BY THE TIME THE METS AND PHILLIES MET for two more games a week later at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, it appeared likely that Charlie Manuel wouldn’t make it out of the month of April as Phillies manager.

  Both teams had only played twice since they had met in New York as the awful April weather continued in the East. The Mets had been rained out of the last game of their series against the Washington Nationals, and then both teams had watched it rain all day in Philadelphia the next day. That made the two-game series into a one-game series.

  The Phillies decided to move Moyer back a day so that Freddy Garcia, one of their big free-agent acquisitions who had started the season on the DL, could make his 2007 debut. The Mets opted not to move anyone back, meaning Glavine would pitch the one game in Philadelphia, and Orlando Hernandez and John Maine would pitch the two games in Miami against the Marlins.