Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  Too late. Rodriguez scored, Posada went to third, and Abreu reached first. Once again the tying run was at the plate, with the score now 10–7. That was it for Glavine. “I couldn’t watch anymore,” he said. “I walked back into the coaches’ room and turned the TV off. I told the guys to come in and tell me what happened.”

  Fortunately, it didn’t take that long. Wagner jacked his fastball up to 98 and struck out Cano for the second out. Then, with the rain coming down hard, he struck out Phelps to finally end the game.

  “We won ten-seven; Billy got the last two outs,” one of the clubhouse kids reported to Glavine.

  “About time” was his answer.

  Wagner appeared a moment later, carrying the game ball with him. Glavine thanked him but couldn’t resist a question. “What the hell were you doing throwing the ball home?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t get turned around to first,” Wagner answered sheepishly. “Probably should have just held it.”

  “Probably right,” Glavine answered. “Good job anyway.”

  Wagner smiled. “Five to go.”

  Glavine nodded. He was now 5–1 on the season. “Five to go,” he said.

  17

  Drought

  THE YANKEES MANAGED TO SALVAGE the last game of the Subway Series the next night, young Tyler Clippard (who, not surprisingly, had been nicknamed “The Yankee Clippard”) outpitching John Maine, who didn’t have a nickname but had pitched very well all year. The win allowed the Yankees to limp back to the Bronx with a 19–23 record, still ten and a half games behind the Red Sox, who came into town riding high at 30–13.

  For once, the Yankees had their pitching set up exactly the way they wanted it: Chien-Ming Wang would pitch the first game, Mike Mussina the middle game, and Andy Pettitte the finale.

  “If we can’t get something done with the three of us pitching, I don’t know when we will,” Mussina said.

  Before Wang outpitched Tim Wakefield in the opener, there were still rumors swirling that Joe Torre and Brian Cashman were in trouble. That win seemed to quiet things down for the moment. Mussina was matched against Julian Tavarez the next night.

  Unlike Glavine, Mussina has never been especially bothered by the first inning. Like Glavine — and most quality pitchers — he has absolutely no clue what’s going to happen once he reaches the mound, regardless of how he warms up. There is, however, one key difference in his warm-up. Glavine is going to throw fastballs and changeups 80 to 90 percent of the time, mixing in a cutter, a slider, and a curve, no matter how he feels in the bullpen. “If my change isn’t good, I just have to hope it will get better by the time the game starts,” Glavine said.

  Mussina’s warm-up, in contrast, is more like an audition for his pitches. Because he throws so many different pitches — fastball, curve, slider, changeup, sinker, cutter — with almost equal effectiveness at different times, he uses his warm-up to decide which pitches he thinks will work best on a given night.

  “He creates his game plan while he’s in the bullpen,” said Mike Borzello, who has warmed up Mussina before games for seven years now. “He doesn’t pitch off scouting reports very much. He’s aware of what hitters have done off him in the past; he knows who is a dead fastball hitter, who likes the ball down, things like that. But for the most part, he comes out of the bullpen thinking, ‘My slider’s good today; I’ll throw it more.’ Or if he doesn’t think his curve is sharp, he may only use it as a waste pitch [a pitch thrown way off the plate on a pitcher’s count like 0–2 or 1–2, just to show it to the batter] that night.”

  Mussina is also more apt to worry about a shaky warm-up than Glavine, although he understands that the way you warm up frequently has nothing to do with the way you pitch.

  “It’s not as if there’s anything you can do,” Mussina said. “And I’ve had games where I was awful in the bullpen and pitched well. I remember pitching a one-hitter in Texas once when I literally didn’t throw a single strike in the bullpen. You just walk in and go with whatever you think you have that night.”

  The bullpen before a game is not a place to make adjustments. “Ron [Guidry] will usually just hand me a towel when I’m done and ask me how I feel. If the answer is ‘Lousy,’ there’s not much to be done at that point.”

  On the night of May 22, Mussina walked to the mound to face the Red Sox feeling quite unsure about what was to come. He hadn’t been at all happy with the way he had felt in his last outing in Chicago, but a quiet ballpark certainly wasn’t an issue this night: Yankee Stadium was packed and as loud as it gets during the regular season, just as it always is with the Red Sox in town.

  It took four batters for Mussina to get that sinking feeling about his night and his season. He struck out Julio Lugo to start the game, eliciting a huge roar from the crowd, which wanted to see the Yankees build on the modest two-game winning streak they had started at Shea Stadium.

  Kevin Youkilis, one of those players who always seem to be on base in critical situations for the Red Sox, singled to right field. That brought Mussina to what is arguably the most dangerous twosome in baseball: David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez.

  When Yankee fans think of the Red Sox, dating to the 2004 series when the rivalry changed forever after Boston came back from a 3–0 deficit to win the American League Championship Series, they think of Ortiz hitting big home runs. Ramirez is the no-doubt future Hall of Famer on the team, but Ortiz is the more feared clutch hitter. Mussina pitched Ortiz carefully, but he lined a single to right, putting men on first and second with one out.

  Up came Ramirez, who grew up in the Bronx and has always hit well in what was his home team’s ballpark as a kid. Ramirez is difficult to pitch to under any circumstances because he hits for average as well as for power, and, even though left field in Yankee Stadium is much more difficult to reach than right field, his power is such that if he gets a pitch to hit, it really doesn’t matter what direction the ball goes, it’s going out.

  “What makes Manny tough is that he’s patient,” Mussina said. “He doesn’t go up there flailing. You’re going to have to throw him a decent pitch. If you don’t, he’ll take the walk. At that point in the game, I really don’t want to walk him because then the bases are loaded for [J.D.] Drew and [Mike] Lowell. Either way, I’ve already put myself in trouble by letting Youkilis and Ortiz get on. Especially Youkilis. The way you want to pitch to Ortiz and Manny in an ideal world is two outs and nobody on or leading off. That way, worst case, if they take you deep, it’s just one run.”

  Mussina quickly got behind Ramirez 2–0, hoping he might swing at a breaking pitch off the plate. “Now I’m in a bad place,” he said later. “Bad things happen on bad counts. There aren’t many counts in the world worse than two and oh to Manny with runners on base.”

  He tried to throw a fastball on the corner, but the pitch strayed a little too close to the white, and Ramirez jumped on it. The ball disappeared into the left-field bullpen in the blink of an eye, and six minutes after throwing his final warm-up pitch, Mussina was down 3–0.

  “It’s a little bit of a sick feeling,” he said. “You’ve got a packed ballpark; it’s the Red Sox; we’re already in a deep hole; we really kind of need to sweep them to get ourselves on a roll. And I walk out there and put us down three-nothing right away.”

  It could have been worse. After Drew grounded out, Lowell doubled, and catcher Jason Varitek, another Yankee killer, singled. Lowell had to hold at third though, and Mussina managed to get center fielder Coco Crisp on a grounder to first to keep the margin from growing.

  “I actually had a chance to salvage the night after that,” Mussina said. “Three’s not good, but you’re still in the ball game. And it wasn’t as if [Josh] Beckett was pitching for them.” (Beckett is the Red Sox ace.)

  Julian Tavares, who was pitching, is a career journeyman, a fifth starter at best. But he breezed through the first three innings and didn’t give up a run until the fourth. By then Lowell had homered to lead off the fourth, and the s
ingle runs the Yankees scored in the fourth and the fifth sliced the margin to 4–2.

  Still, Mussina was hanging in, and the Yankees were in the ball game when Mussina started the seventh. “At that point I had taken what started out as a bad night and given us a chance to make it a good night,” he said. “That’s what you have to do when you have a first inning like that. Your goal becomes ‘Get to the seventh or the eighth, and hold them where they are.’ I had almost done that. Then I screwed up and walked Varitek to start the seventh and pretty much ruined everything.”

  Actually he almost pitched himself clear after the Varitek walk. Crisp hit into a force, and Dustin Pedroia, the rookie second baseman, flied to right. Mussina was one out away from giving his team seven innings, after a shaky start, and a chance to rally against the Boston bullpen. But Crisp stole second, and Lugo singled him home to make it 5–2. Then the ever-pesky Youkilis doubled into the gap in right center, and Lugo, running all the way with two outs, scored to make it 6–2. That was Mussina’s ninety-ninth pitch of the night. He never threw the hundredth. Torre brought in Mike Myers, who promptly gave up an RBI single to Ortiz to make it 7–2. The Red Sox won 7–3.

  Mussina was now officially disgusted with where his season was going. He could live with a lost April, but now it was almost the end of May and he was 2–3 with an ugly ERA of 6.52.

  “You get to a point where you say, ‘I know I’m a better pitcher than this, but where is it?’ #8221; he said. “It wasn’t as if I was getting crushed every time out, but I wasn’t good. You’re not looking to be mediocre or barely okay. You’re looking to be good.”

  Mussina is never afraid to ask for help or suggestions. As it happened, that week, ex–Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre was visiting. John Flaherty, the former backup catcher who was now a Yankee broadcaster on YES — the Yankee-created TV network — was also around. Looking for different voices and opinions, Mussina asked each of them what they thought might be the problem. At the same time, he was still talking to Guidry and Borzello and Torre, seeking as much input as he could find.

  “What you really hope for in that situation is that they all say the same thing,” he said. “Maybe they see something in your motion, and they say, ‘Do this,’ and you feel better. That wasn’t the case this time.”

  In fact, he got five different answers from five different people: Stottlemyre thought his location was off, that he was missing his spots by trying to be too fine; Flaherty thought he needed to throw more fastballs early in counts to get ahead and set up hitters for his breaking pitches; Borzello thought his velocity hadn’t come all the way back to where it needed to be after the hamstring injury; Guidry thought he needed to work on his mechanics, most notably from the stretch; Torre thought he was “pitching away from contact,” afraid to throw strikes because he didn’t have enough confidence in his stuff.

  Five different answers but, in a sense, all the same: because Mussina didn’t have confidence in what he was throwing, he was pitching away from contact and frequently getting into bad counts as a result.

  “You have to remember who you are,” Torre told him. “You didn’t win two hundred forty games without having good stuff. Trust it and you’ll be fine.”

  Mussina took in all the advice and decided that everyone was right. “Which meant I just had to go out there and go with what I had and believe it was good enough.”

  Simple as that sounds, this was a constant issue with Mussina: not so much believing in himself — he knew he was a good pitcher — but in remembering what he had done to make himself a good pitcher.

  “Sometimes he listens too much to outsiders,” Borzello said. “He spent some time with [ex–Orioles teammate] Todd Frohwirth earlier this month, and Todd said something to him like, ‘You have to remember you’re thirty-eight, not twenty-eight.’ All of a sudden he thinks he has to be a completely different pitcher. I told him that was bullshit, that what he had was plenty good enough if he’d just throw it with some confidence.”

  Mussina went to the mound five days later to face the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (perhaps the silliest name in the history of sports) on a sparkling Sunday afternoon. The Angels had been the Yankees’ jinx team dating back to the 2002 playoffs, when they had beaten the Yankees in four games and gone on to win their first World Series. They had also knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs in 2005 and were the only team in the American League with a winning record against them in the Joe Torre era.

  The weekend in New York had been like most Angels-Yankees series. The Angels had won the first two games, and Mussina now had to face John Lackey, their best pitcher, in the finale.

  The first pitch Mussina threw was a 91-mile-an-hour fastball to leadoff hitter Reggie Willits. He proceeded to strike out the side in the first inning and walked off to calls of “Mooooose,” which sound like boos if you don’t know what they are. They were like music to Mussina’s ears at that moment, not having heard them all season.

  The Yankees went ahead 1–0 in the second inning, when Wil Nieves, the seldom used backup catcher, lined a two-out RBI single to center to score Bobby Abreu. Nieves was in the lineup because Torre liked to give Jorge Posada one day off a week, and he had kept him in the lineup throughout the Boston series and for the first two days of the Angels series. Coming into the game, Nieves was one for twenty-six for the season.

  Mussina is not a pitcher who worries about who his catcher is. Some pitchers don’t like throwing to certain catchers or prefer a specific catcher. Years ago, Steve Carlton was so insistent that he pitch to Tim McCarver — first with the Cardinals and then with the Phillies — that McCarver liked to joke that when he and Carlton died they would be buried sixty feet, six inches apart. When Randy Johnson was with the Yankees, he had preferred pitching to Flaherty, so Posada’s off-days almost always coincided with the days Johnson pitched.

  Mussina was comfortable pitching to Posada. The two had worked together for seven years, and Posada, who has almost no ego as a catcher, was perfectly comfortable with Mussina shaking him off. “With some pitchers, you call pitches,” he said. “With Mike and some others, you make suggestions.”

  Mussina also liked throwing to Nieves, for the simple reason that he was smaller than Posada and provided a naturally lower target for him. He also liked him personally. At twenty-nine, Nieves was the classic journeyman ballplayer. He had made it to the major leagues with San Diego in 2002 for twenty-eight games and a year earlier had been in six games for the Yankees. Making the team in 2007 as the backup catcher was the highlight of his baseball career. He was, without question, the friendliest person in the clubhouse. Three weeks after the Angels game, on Father’s Day, he made a point of asking each male member of the media if he was a father. If he was, Nieves wished him a Happy Father’s Day and said he was looking forward to being a father someday himself.

  The second inning RBI was the fourth of his big league career and his first in five years. More important to Mussina, it gave him a lead to work with. In the fourth, the lead became 2–0 when Robinson Cano doubled with one out, Doug Mientkiewicz was hit by a pitch, and Nieves again drove in a run with a base hit.

  “Those hits were huge,” Mussina said. “Because you really aren’t expecting Wil to pick up your offense. What was too bad was we couldn’t build anything else out of it.”

  The Nieves single put men on first and second with one out and the top of the order coming up. But Melky Cabrera grounded into a double play to snuff the possibility of a big inning. “A guy like Lackey, you only get so many chances,” Torre said later. “We had a couple chances to pounce on him early and didn’t.”

  Mussina continued to pitch like, well, the old Mike Mussina. He gave up a run in the fifth when he struggled, giving up four singles, but was bailed out by a double play. He came back with a one-two-three sixth and walked to the mound in the seventh up 2–1, knowing he was being watched closely by Guidry and Torre, having thrown eighty-five pitches on the first hot day of the year. His goa
l was to get through the seventh and hope the setup guys could work the eighth and give the ball to Mariano Rivera for the ninth.

  He started fine, getting Gary Matthews Jr. looking at a good curveball. On a 3–2 pitch to Casey Kotchman, he threw a changeup he thought might be strike three. Plate umpire Jim Wolf didn’t see it that way and called ball four.

  “It wasn’t like he missed it,” Mussina said. “It was a close pitch, and he just didn’t give it to me. That’s the biggest difference with Questech. Once, a veteran pitcher, if he could throw to a certain spot, even if it was a ball or two off the plate, he got the call. Now, most of the time, you don’t get that pitch anymore.”

  Instead of two outs and no one on, Kotchman was on first with one out. Torre decided ninty-five pitches was enough for Mussina. As he walked to the mound, the crowd booed, thinking the hook was a quick one.

  “I had two thoughts: one, that it was warm and Mike hadn’t been stretched out very much yet,” Torre said. “Two, though, was more important: this was the best he’d pitched all year. I wanted to make sure he left the mound with a good feeling. I didn’t want to leave him in too long and have a bad inning mess up the confidence he’d built by pitching so well.”

  Mussina wasn’t surprised to see Torre. “I pretty much knew going out for the seventh that if someone got on that was going to be it,” he said. “I didn’t have a problem with it.”

  He left to a standing ovation, his first of the season. Mussina walked off the mound, head down, and crossed the first-base foul line. A couple of steps across it, hearing the cheers, he paused for a moment, then stopped and took off his cap and waved it to the crowd in thanks.

  “I was thinking to myself as I left the mound, ‘Was I good enough that I should tip my cap?’ ” he said. “Believe it or not, I think fans are often too generous with us. I’ve had games where I leave leading seven-five, and they give me an ovation. I don’t deserve it. I’m leaving with the lead because the guys scored a lot of runs, and I’m ahead even though I wasn’t very good. I don’t like to tip my cap when that happens because I just feel the cheers are undeserved.”