Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  “I’m not an evangelist,” he will say. “But religion is important to me. I don’t talk about it, and I don’t try to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn’t do. But it’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.”

  Which would make the First Communion of one of his children an important day. And now, he would show up looking like a dork.

  “In life and in baseball, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do,” he said, laughing. He was not amused when the gray hairs were pointed out to him. He could live with being a dork. A gray-haired dork, not so much.

  THE GLAVINE FAMILY SURVIVED the buzz-cut episode, and Peyton’s First Communion went well. Two days later, Glavine was back in New York to pitch against the Chicago Cubs, a team that had spent millions of dollars on new players during the off-season. The Cubs were hoping that their investments might make it possible for them to avoid extending their string of seasons without a World Series title to ninety-nine. With the Red Sox winning a world title in 2004 and the White Sox in 2005, there was no one close to the Cubs anymore when it came to World Series futility.

  Whether it was the new haircut or the gray hairs or the Cubs’ improved lineup, Glavine started poorly, giving up four runs in the first two innings. His control, which had been so good since the weather had begun to warm, had deserted him. With two out in the first, he gave up a run when Alfonso Soriano doubled and third baseman Aramis Ramirez singled him in. “That wasn’t surprising,” Glavine said. “I think he’s hitting about .700 against me for his career. He kills me.”

  Glavine got into more trouble in the second when he walked Mark DeRosa — a former Atlanta teammate — and gave up a double to Angel Pagan. But he seemed close to getting out of it when pitcher Jason Marquis came up. He promptly fell behind Marquis 3–1 and came in with a fastball, not wanting to walk the pitcher and face the top of the order with the bases loaded. Marquis lined a single up the middle scoring two runs, then scored himself on a two-out Cesar Izturis double.

  “Just bad pitching,” Glavine said. “The weather had gotten cold again [it was sixty-one when the game started, but wind gusts of more than twenty miles an hour made it feel a lot colder], and I had trouble getting into a rhythm. I couldn’t locate my breaking pitches early. The good news was that I was able to hang in there for six innings when it looked like I might not make it out of the second.”

  “Classic Tom Glavine,” Rick Peterson said. “Everything was a struggle for him that night, but he still gave us a chance to win the game. If you want to know why people in baseball respect him so much, it’s a game like that, when nothing is easy, but he still hangs in there and stops the other guys when he absolutely has to stop them.”

  The Cubs didn’t score again after the second. The Mets chipped back with two in the fourth and two in the sixth to tie it. They even had a chance to get Glavine a win. With two outs in the sixth and Lo Duca on second base with the go-ahead run, Willie Randolph sent David Newhan up to pinch-hit for Glavine. A hit would give the Mets the lead and give the bullpen a chance to make up for the Braves game three weeks earlier. But Newhan struck out. The Mets did win the game but not until the bottom of the ninth.

  Three days later, the Mets staged a classic four-run ninth-inning rally to steal the last game of the series from the Cubs, arriving at Shea on a high for day one of the first Subway Series. “Is it cold outside?” Glavine asked. “I’m not sure any of us have noticed. Of course if it’s cold tomorrow, I guess I’ll notice since I’m pitching.”

  The Mets won the opener that night 3–2, Oliver Perez outpitching Andy Pettitte. Wagner, who had been lights-out all year, closed it in the ninth for his tenth save. His ERA for the season was a minuscule 0.50.

  “People tell me all the time, ‘Well, you can’t be perfect,’ ” Wagner said. “I always ask them, ‘Why not?’ ”

  Wagner was an improbable baseball star. He was listed at five foot eleven but didn’t look that tall. And yet, a couple of months shy of turning thirty-five in July, he could still throw into the high 90s, and he had been one of the game’s best closers for ten years with the Astros, the Phillies, and was now in his second year with the Mets. The save in the opener of the Yankees series was the 334th of his career, putting him in the top ten of the all-time saves list.

  He and Glavine had become close friends, very much an Odd Couple. Wagner was from southern Virginia and had the drawl to prove it. Glavine was from New England. Wagner would say just about anything to anyone; Glavine almost always measured his words. Glavine’s locker was the one farthest from the clubhouse door in New York, a few steps from the safety of the training room. There was an empty locker next to his, and Wagner’s was the next one down. The two of them shared the empty space, a veteran’s perk.

  There were four people on the Mets who almost never ducked the media, and their lockers were all around Glavine’s: Wagner on one side, with reliever Aaron Heilman next to him. Paul Lo Duca and David Wright were on the other side of Glavine, in the next row over. Wagner, Lo Duca, Heilman, Scott Schoeneweis, Wright, and Carlos Delgado were the players on the team Glavine was closest to — each for a different reason.

  Glavine played golf with Heilman and Schoeneweis. Wright was young and bright and always looking to learn from the veterans, so he often reached out to Glavine on how to handle off-field situations. Wright really didn’t need that much help because his instincts were good. “Sometimes I think I should be asking him for advice,” Glavine said. “He walked in here in 2004 and handled himself like he’d been in the majors for ten years from day one.”

  Delgado was like that too — someone who had been a leader on every team he had played on: in Toronto, in Florida, and now in New York with the Mets. He was especially important as an influence on the young Hispanic players on the team. Major League Baseball in 2007 is made up primarily of four groups: Caucasian Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans, the last group’s number dropping rapidly.

  The Mets had no Asians on the team after Chan Ho Park was optioned to Triple-A, and when the season began they had one African American on the team — Damion Easley — until Lastings Milledge was called up at the All-Star break. The rest of the roster was a split between Hispanics and whites.

  Rarely is race or ethnicity an issue in a baseball clubhouse. For one thing, the sport has been worldwide for so long now that hearing more than one language spoken is a given. The Hispanics tend to play cards with the Hispanics so they can yell at each other in Spanish, and the English speakers do the same. The Mets actually had some chess players on their team: Shawn Green and John Maine frequently stared at one another across a board before games. Heilman and Easley also played.

  “We’re like any team,” Glavine said. “We get along better when we’re winning than when we’re losing. But I think there’s a natural tendency for the younger Hispanic players to look up to Carlos [Delgado] because their backgrounds are similar and their experiences are similar. Plus, if he really needs to give one of them a talking-to, he can do it in Spanish. If Jose Reyes needs to talk to someone, the natural person for him to go to in my mind is Carlos. Now, if Jorge Sosa has an issue, he might come to me and want to talk pitcher to pitcher. It depends on the situation.”

  Lo Duca and Glavine talked most often as pitcher and catcher. But there was mutual respect between the two. Glavine appreciated how hard Lo Duca had worked to make himself into a catcher. He had done very little catching until his fourth year in professional baseball, when the Dodgers had told him he was being sent from Double-A ball to A-ball to learn how to catch.

  “My problem had been that I really didn’t have a position,” Lo Duca said. “When I was in college [Arizona State] my position, to be honest, was hitter. That’s the reason I was drafted so low — I didn’t have a position.”

  The Dodgers drafted him in the twenty-fifth round of the 1993 draft after he had hit .446 at ASU and driven in eighty-eight runs in a seventy-five-game season. He had bounced around in th
e minors until the decision to make him a catcher. Mike Sciosia, now the Angels’ manager, was then the minor league catching instructor for the Dodgers and taught him the position. Lo Duca proved an eager student. Even so, he was still splitting time between the major leagues and Triple-A as late as 2000, before having a breakout year with the Dodgers in 2001, at the age of twenty-nine, when he hit .320 with twenty-five home runs and ninety RBI in his first full big league season.

  He was a three-time All-Star when the Mets got him from Florida in return for two minor leaguers during one of the Marlins’ periodic salary dumps. He had been an All-Star for a fourth time in 2006, even though he had gone through a very public divorce and been the subject of rumors that he had a gambling problem. In spite of all that, he was still the most outgoing player in the clubhouse, the one guy guaranteed to be wandering around before a game willing to talk to anyone. He loved catching Glavine.

  “You can’t ask for an easier guy to catch,” he said. “He almost never shakes me off, which, as a catcher, makes it easier to call the game because you aren’t constantly worried that you’re calling the wrong pitch. He never blames anyone but himself for a mistake. When I called that slider against Bonds in San Francisco, I started to say something in the dugout, and he just waved me off and said, ‘I threw a bad pitch; forget it.’

  “I’m not sure people understand how much everyone on this team wants to see Tom get to three hundred.” (As a nonpitcher, Lo Duca was allowed to utter the number.) “I can’t even begin to tell you how much that night will mean to me. If I have a broken leg that night, I’m catching. There’s no way I’m going to miss being a part of that.”

  Wagner, the person Glavine talked to most often on the team, felt the same way about the Number and often said he would probably tackle any other pitcher sent out to pitch the ninth inning that night. Most days, he and Glavine drove to Shea together. Wagner had gotten very good at reading Glavine’s game-day moods. “When he’s really nervous, he can’t stop talking,” he said. “Most of the time, I’m the talker. But if Tom’s really wired before a game, I may not say a word from Greenwich until the Triboro Bridge.”

  According to Wagner, Glavine was quite talkative on the drive in prior to game two of the Subway Series. He knew that, even in weather worse than the night before — raw, rainy, and windy — Shea would be sold out and the game would be on national TV. Plus, he had only won once in his last five starts — although he hadn’t lost — and he wanted to get back on track and moving in the direction of, as he put it before the game, “the place I’m trying to get to.”

  You know, that place.

  It was raining at game time, one of those 3:55 starts for the benefit of Fox. Even so, the place was almost full, the no-shows among the 56,137 who had bought tickets remarkably minimal, given the weather.

  As was often the case, Glavine struggled in the first inning, although this time he had help. His favorite umpiring crew was in town. Tony Randazzo was working first base — “Of course, where else would he be?” Glavine joked before the game. Larry Vanover, the crew chief, was behind the plate. It took one batter — Johnny Damon — for Glavine to feel as if he was being squeezed.

  “I threw two pitches to Damon that I thought were strikes that were called balls,” he said. “I’m out there thinking, ‘Oh boy, here we go.’ The last thing I need against that lineup is a guy with a postage-stamp strike zone.” Damon walked.

  Glavine did strike out Derek Jeter before Hideki Matsui singled. He pitched carefully to Alex Rodriguez — who already had fifteen home runs — and walked him on a 3–1 pitch he thought had caught the corner. Very quickly he was in trouble — bases loaded, one out.

  “You have to take a deep breath and stay calm in those situations,” Glavine said. “You tell yourself that you’re one good pitch from being out of the inning. You don’t think about the alternatives.”

  Glavine threw a good pitch to Jorge Posada, a slider down and in, and Posada chopped it to Reyes. The ball was hit slowly enough that even with Posada running, Reyes and Easley couldn’t turn the double play. They forced Rodriguez while Damon scored to make it 1–0. But Glavine got Bobby Abreu to fly to Carlos Beltran in center to stop the bleeding right there.

  Watching from the dugout, Mussina could see that Glavine was getting squeezed by Vanover. He was happy to see his team load the bases, but, as a pitcher, he could relate to the frustration he knew Glavine was feeling. “I was hoping we’d score ten on him,” he said. “But I could see he wasn’t getting anything from the home-plate ump. Obviously as a pitcher you relate because you’ve had days like that too.”

  The day soon got better for Glavine and much worse for the Yankees. Darrell Rasner, their latest number four starter, lasted two batters. Reyes led off with a single. Then, on Rasner’s ninth pitch of the day, Endy Chavez hit a shot up the middle that ricocheted hard off Rasner’s pitching hand. Chavez reached first while Reyes sprinted around to third. Clearly hurt, Rasner tried to throw four warm-up pitches, but the pain was overwhelming. As it turned out, he had fractured his index finger. The next day he joined Pavano on the sixty-day DL.

  Mike Myers, who normally came into a game late to get out a batter or two, had to come in to relieve. He got Beltran to fly to center, with Reyes scoring, and struck out Delgado. But he got a 3–2 fastball up to David Wright, and Wright hit one of the longest home runs ever seen at Shea Stadium. It flew over the left-field bleachers and landed about 460 feet from home plate. The Mets led 3–1.

  Pleased to be leading, Glavine walked to the mound to throw his warm-up pitches for the second inning. As he crossed the foul line, he heard Vanover calling his name.

  “Hey, Tom,” Vanover said. “You just keep throwing the pitches you were throwing in the first inning, and you’ll be fine.”

  Glavine was stunned. In twenty years in the big leagues, he had never been told by an umpire during a game that pitches that had been called balls were actually strikes, which was what Vanover was doing.

  “It shocked me,” he said. “I mean, occasionally an umpire will adjust his strike zone during a game, but not often. You have to understand what they’re giving you on a given day and adjust. But I had never had an ump tell me to keep doing what I was doing after an inning in which I walked two and was behind in the count. I was pretty amazed.”

  He might still have been in shock when Robinson Cano blasted his second pitch of the inning over the right-field wall to cut the margin to 3–2. But from that point he settled down, began throwing strikes — at least according to Vanover — and shut the Yankees down for the next five innings.

  “He did make an adjustment after the first inning,” Glavine said. “Nothing big, but the close pitches that had been balls in the first inning were, for the most part, strikes after that. I was happy about it, but I also thought, even if it seemed strange, that the guy deserved credit for maybe thinking he was a little off in the first inning and adjusting. It’s no different than giving up a couple of runs early and thinking maybe you need to change something.”

  While Glavine was breezing, the Mets were pummeling the Yankees’ overworked bullpen. Glavine helped build a fourth run with a sacrifice bunt in the second, and Wright hit another home run, this one a two-run shot in the third, to make it 6–2. By the time Glavine walked out to start the seventh, he had an 8–2 lead.

  He knew he was on a short leash at that point. He had thrown ninety-nine pitches — twenty-seven of them in the long first inning — and with a six-run lead Willie Randolph and Rick Peterson weren’t going to push him very far past one hundred pitches. “I would have liked to have gotten through that inning just because I wanted to go seven and not six,” Glavine said. “But after [Josh] Phelps got the hit, I knew Willie was coming to get me.”

  Phelps had singled on an 0–1 pitch. That made 101, and Randolph figured the bullpen could handle a six-run lead for nine outs. He brought in Scott Schoeneweis, hoping to get him through the eighth inning unscathed and give Wagner the d
ay off. It didn’t work out quite that way. Schoeneweis gave up one run in the seventh, which wasn’t a big deal since the lead was 8–3.

  Glavine, icing his arm in the clubhouse, didn’t feel any tension as he walked from the training room to the couches in the middle of the clubhouse to watch the eighth.

  Alex Rodriguez led off with a home run. Then Posada homered. It was 8–5. Abreu walked, and Randolph waved in Pedro Feliciano. Getting just a little bit nervous, Glavine walked into the coaches’ conference room, which wasn’t that far from his locker. He felt bad for Schoeneweis, who he knew was pitching on a bad leg he had not said anything about publicly. But right now his concerns were more immediate. Feliciano gave up a double to Phelps that made it 8–6 and brought Derek Jeter up with the tying run.

  Glavine decided to try the training room again. Maybe a little time in the whirlpool would change the Mets’ luck. It worked. Jeter grounded to third. Then the Mets scored two runs in the bottom of the eighth to extend the lead back to 10–6. Taking no chances, Randolph brought Wagner in to pitch the ninth, even though it was not a save situation. (If a pitcher starts an inning and the lead is more than three runs, he cannot be credited with a save.) Wagner didn’t care if it was a save situation. He just wanted to get Glavine the win. Glavine wasn’t taking any chances either. He stayed put in the whirlpool, even though he was getting kind of warm.

  Wagner retired Matsui to start the inning, and Glavine felt himself relaxing. Then Rodriguez and Posada singled. Glavine unrelaxed. Abreu hit a roller in front of the plate and Wagner pounced on it.

  “First base!” Glavine heard himself scream.

  But Wagner was a little off-balance when he picked up the ball and decided his best chance for an out was Rodriguez, charging for the plate. He tried to throw the ball to Lo Duca and threw it past him. Glavine heard himself screaming again: “No, Billy, no! Not there! Get the out at first!”