The Angels game, even though it had not resulted in a victory, had given him a confidence boost. It had reminded him that Mike Borzello was right — he still had the pitches to be successful as long as he didn’t pitch from behind, which he had been doing on a regular basis prior to that game.
The Yankees flew straight from New York to Toronto after the final game of the Angels series. With their record 21–27, the team held a meeting prior to the opener against the Blue Jays. Then they went out and lost 7–2.
“Guess that shows you just how much team meetings mean,” Mussina said. “Of course, if we had won that night, we all would have said that the meeting really focused us. Good pitching focuses you. We just weren’t getting enough of it.”
Andy Pettitte pitched well — and lost — the next day, before the Yankees escaped Toronto by winning the finale. From there, it was on to Boston for three more with the Red Sox, who had now built their lead to thirteen and a half games — bringing back memories of 1978 when they had led by fourteen and a half in July, before being caught by the Yankees in September en route to the Bucky Dent playoff home run in October. Except there was no reason to believe in early June 2007 that this Yankees team had any chance to match what the 1978 team had accomplished.
Chien-Ming Wang outlasted Tim Wakefield in the opener in Boston, which sent Mussina to the mound against Curt Schilling in game two for another Saturday Fox TV broadcast. It was warm and overcast in Boston when the game started, and the weather got worse as the game wore on.
Both pitchers were solid early, but the Red Sox broke a 1–1 tie in the fourth on a David Ortiz walk, a Manny Ramirez double, and a Kevin Youkilis walk that loaded the bases. Mike Lowell singled one run in, and then Jason Varitek grounded into a double play to score another run. Soon after that, it started to rain quite hard, and the umpires ordered that the tarpaulin be put on the field.
Often after a rain delay, a manager will change pitchers, especially if the starting pitcher is older. Trying to warm up a second time in the same day can be difficult, and sometimes a pitcher will go back out without being completely loose and pitch poorly. Pitchers hate rain delays. They lose their rhythm and their feel for the game, and they can’t ice their arms if they’re going back in to pitch. This time, though, both pitchers came back out after the delay because it lasted only twenty-nine minutes.
“Much longer than that, and it’s probably too tough,” Mussina said. “But half an hour isn’t that much longer than sitting through a long inning in the dugout — except you get extra warm-up pitches after it rains. I told Joe I thought I was fine to go back out. It was warm [eighty-one degrees and humid], so it wasn’t hard to work up a sweat again.”
Schilling didn’t fare so well after the delay. He got through the fifth but gave up four runs in the sixth, giving Mussina a 5–3 lead going into the bottom of the inning.
“In that situation you have to go out there and put up a zero,” Mussina said. “Your guys have just turned the game around for you. Your job is to keep it right there. I failed pretty miserably.”
He worked Lowell, who was having a fabulous season, to 3–2, then hung a breaking pitch that Lowell hit over the Green Monster. That made it 5–4. The crowd was still cheering Lowell when Varitek hit an 0–1 pitch to dead center field for another home run. Torre was out of the dugout almost before Varitek’s shot landed.
“Not good,” Mussina said. “I really felt okay going into the inning. They had dinged me a little in the fourth, but I felt like I was going along pretty well and now we had the lead. If I get through one more inning there, I think we’ve got a shot. I didn’t get through one batter.”
The Red Sox ended up battering the Yankees bullpen and winning the game 11–6. It was a discouraging loss in many ways. “We win the first game; if we can win that one, we’ve got Pettitte going the next night, and maybe we can sweep them and put a dent in their confidence a little,” Mussina said. “I go out in the sixth and get blown up and we lose. That was a loss that really hurt for a lot of reasons.”
The Yankees did come back to win the last game on an Alex Rodriguez home run in the ninth but headed for Chicago still way back and still six games under .500. They won two of three in Chicago before Mussina pitched the finale agains-t ex-Yankee Jose Contreras.
This time, he was the Good Mussina, much as he had been in New York against the Angels. He breezed through six innings, allowing only two hits. The Yankees weren’t much better against Contreras but managed to scratch a run in the fourth for a 1–0 lead. Mussina entered the seventh clinging to that lead.
Jim Thome led off the inning with what amounted to a swinging bunt. The ball dribbled toward second baseman Robinson Cano but was hit so slowly that Cano, playing practically in right field against Thome, couldn’t make the play at first base. Then Paul Konerko singled to left, and Thome made it all the way to third. Mussina took a deep breath. He knew he had to bear down to try to get out of the inning without giving up the tying run.
He walked back onto the mound and was about to look in for a sign when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone pop out of the Yankee dugout. “I figured it was [Ron] Guidry,” he said later. “My first thought was, ‘Okay, he’s coming out here just to give me a breather before I pitch to [A.J.] Pierzynski.’ ”
When he looked up though, it wasn’t Guidry walking toward him; it was Torre. He wasn’t jogging either, the way he would if he was just coming out for a consult. In fact, he was waving his arm in the direction of the bullpen, signaling for Mike Myers to come in to the game.
Mussina was stunned. He didn’t know his pitch count at that moment (it was seventy-nine), but he knew it was low. It was a warm evening in Chicago — eighty-six degrees at game time — but he felt fine. And he was pitching well. It wasn’t as if either ball in the inning had been hit that hard. This wasn’t Boston; balls were not flying over fences. And yet, there was Torre, walking up onto the mound, hand extended, waiting for Mussina to hand him the ball.
Which he did. Mussina would never show up a manager or a pitching coach on the mound, especially Torre. The only time in his career he could ever remember being angry enough to say something to a pitching coach had been in Baltimore when one of his many pitching coaches there — he thinks it was Bruce Kison but isn’t absolutely sure — came out to the mound and said, “You have got to start throwing better pitches.”
To which Mussina replied, “No shit. Thanks for the encouragement.”
More often than not, Mussina is likely to be funny when someone comes to the mound to get him. But now he said nothing, simply handed the ball to Torre and walked off. “I was a little bit in a state of shock,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe he came and got me that quickly.”
Mussina walked into the dugout, received congratulations from his teammates, and went up the runway to the clubhouse. He had just walked inside, planning to “ice and sulk,” when he heard cheers coming from the field and from the clubhouse TVs. Pierzynski had singled off of Myers to tie the game. “Took even less time to lose the chance for a win than the Angels game,” he said later with a wry smile. “At least this time we won.”
The Yankees scored three in the eighth and six in the ninth to turn the game into a rout, but it was Scott Proctor who got credited for the runs and the win. That was disappointing. What really hurt, though, was the quick hook.
Torre knew Mussina was upset. “It isn’t as if he’s hard to read,” Torre said. He knew why and understood why. “It was purely situational. We needed a strikeout, and Myers had struck Pierzynski out four times in five at bats. After that I was hoping to get Proctor in to get a ground ball or another strikeout and maybe get out of it with the lead. It had nothing to do with the way Moose was pitching.”
Mussina read those comments in the newspaper the next day back in New York but wasn’t really assuaged. Torre didn’t expect him to be. The next day when the two passed in the clubhouse, Torre said, “Do we need to talk?”
“Y
eah, I think we do,” Mussina said.
They walked into Torre’s office and sat down. “You thought I took you out too fast,” Torre said. “It was situational.”
“I read that,” Mussina said. “What bothers me is the feeling that I’ve lost your confidence. You didn’t think I could get out of the inning. I know I haven’t pitched well this year, but if you don’t trust me to get out of a jam anymore that really bothers me.”
Torre understood. He knew he was dealing with a pitcher with a great deal of pride who had pitched out of a lot of tougher jams than the one in Chicago. “All I had to do was think back to ’03 [Game Seven against Boston] for a perfect example of that,” Torre said. “I told him again it had nothing to do with losing confidence or trust in him. I still feel very confident with the ball in his hands. I just thought the inning lined up better with Myers coming in for Pierzynski. As it turned out, I was wrong and I was right. Myers didn’t get Pierzynski, but Proctor got the next three. Maybe Moose would have done as well or better, but I had to do what I thought was best for the club. We were in a tight game that we badly needed to win. But I understood his frustration.”
Mussina felt a little better after he and Torre talked. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still bother me,” he said a couple of days after the game. “I hear Joe and I know he’s always honest, but in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if a year ago, same situation, he doesn’t let me pitch out of it. If your manager doesn’t trust you, that’s a problem.”
Six days after the game in Chicago, Mussina finally got his third win of the year against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Yankees staked him to a 7–1 lead in the fourth inning, and he breezed into the eighth inning. The only glitch came in the sixth when Conor Jackson hit a two-out home run to make it 7–2. This time when Torre came to get him, he had no problem with taking the rest of the night off.
“At least I got you tired this time,” Torre said, referring to the fact that Mussina had thrown 101 pitches. Mussina laughed. The lead was safe, he had pitched well — there was no hesitation when he doffed his cap — and for the first time in a month he was a winning pitcher.
“I’d almost forgotten what it was like,” he said. “It was nice, really nice, to pitch with a lead and feel like one bad pitch wasn’t going to ruin the whole night. I gave up the home run to Jackson and I wasn’t happy about it, but it wasn’t as if the whole night was ruined because of it. I just had to get the next guy out.”
Which he did. The win was the Yankees’ eighth in a row. They had won the last three in Chicago, swept the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates, and had now won a pair against Arizona to get to 32–31, the first time they had been over .500 since early April.
Mussina was 3–3 for the season, halfway through June. Not what he had planned for or hoped for, but it was where he was. Whether he liked it or not.
MUSSINA’S CATCHER in the win over the Diamondbacks was Wil Nieves. It was the fourth straight time he had been the catcher with Mussina on the mound.
Torre hadn’t planned to make Nieves into Mussina’s personal catcher, and Mussina had never requested it. But it had evolved into that, even though Nieves was hitting just .122. Twice with Nieves behind the plate, Torre had used Jorge Posada as the DH to keep his bat in the lineup — he was hitting over .340.
“It was something we just sort of fell into,” Torre said. “It was Wil’s day to catch when Moose pitched against the Angels on the last Sunday in May. As it happened, he pitched his best game of the year, and Wil got two hits. The next Saturday in Boston, it was a day game after a night game, and that’s usually a good time to give Georgey [most of the Yankees call Posada “Georgey,” even though the correct way to say his name is “Hor-hay”] a day off from catching. Moose wasn’t great that day but he was okay, and I thought the rain was a factor too. He had a nice rapport with Wil. So, I decided to just go with it that way for a while and see what happened. When he pitched well in Chicago and then again against Arizona, I figured we’d just ride it that way for a while.”
Mussina was fine with the change. “One of the things that made it different for me was that Wil was only catching one game a week,” Mussina said. “That meant his focus was different. Jorge is catching six times a week. He basically has a few hours to prepare for each game mentally. Wil had four or five days. That meant he spent extra time on the hitters, and when we would sit down and talk he would have ideas and thoughts on what we could do different from the last game and what the next lineup’s weaknesses might be. That’s not a knock on Jorge at all, it was just a fact created by their roles being so different.”
New York being New York, the Mussina-Nieves-Posada “triangle” became a story. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ longtime TV play-by-play man, who also hosted a radio show, wondered on air exactly what Mussina had done to deserve a personal catcher. Although Mussina gets along with most of the media now, he and Kay had never repaired the bad start they had gotten off to in 2001. Others who got along better with Mussina wondered how Posada felt about the whole thing.
Which was a legitimate question to raise. Posada had been one of the best catchers in baseball for most of ten years. He was part of that core of players — along with Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and the now-retired Bernie Williams — Yankees who had come up in the organization and had been part of the four Yankees World Series titles in five seasons between 1996 and 2000. He had become the full-time catcher in 1998 and had improved steadily both as a hitter and as a catcher since then. In 2007, with his thirty-sixth birthday in August and his contract up in October, Posada was having his best offensive season ever.
What’s more, he was very much a part of the team’s heart and soul. Jeter was the captain, the unquestioned leader in the clubhouse, but Posada was probably a close second. He was completely respected by all his teammates, and the pitchers enjoyed throwing to him, even though he could get angry with them at times.
“Sometimes you have to kick someone in the butt,” he said. “Other times you have to stay calm. It’s part of my job to know what’s best for each guy.”
Posada was from a baseball family. His dad, Jorge Sr., had grown up in Cuba but had escaped the country as a young man by stowing away in the bottom of a cigar boat that was bound for Spain. “Things had gotten so bad there he felt he had no choice,” Jorge Jr. said. “No one was working, there was no food, nothing.”
From Spain, Jorge Posada Sr. eventually found his way to Puerto Rico, where he found work and started a family. He had played baseball as a kid and loved the game and became friends with Pat Gillick, who at the time was working for the Yankees. When Gillick became the general manager in Toronto, he hired Posada as a scout. Jorge Jr. played everything as a kid — “No one believes me when they see me run now, but as a kid I ran track, and I was pretty fast,” he said, laughing — but always knew that baseball was the sport his dad wanted to see him play.
“I actually liked basketball better when I was young,” he said. “But I liked baseball too. We got the game of the week down there on Saturdays and then the Cubs on WGN and the Braves on TBS. My dad really pushed me to play baseball. He never had a chance to live out his baseball dreams, so he wanted to be sure that I did.”
He was a good enough high school infielder to be recruited by many of the top college baseball programs in the United States, and though he had planned to go to Miami or Florida State or the University of Florida, he had to regroup because his SATs were 730, and at the time he needed 800 to get a scholarship. He thought he would go to Miami Dade Community College, one of the top junior-college programs in the country, but his dad didn’t think going to school in Miami was a great idea.
He was scouting for the Braves by then, and one of the other scouts told him that Calhoun Community College (in Decatur, Alabama) had a very good program and a very good coach. The coach, Fred Frickie, called Jorge and offered him a scholarship. Posada wasn’t sure.
“To be honest, I had no idea where Alaba
ma was,” he said. “I asked him if the weather there was hot. He said yes, so I said fine.”
He was there for two years (and it was hot) and had signed a letter of intent to play at Alabama when the Yankees took him in the twenty-fourth round of the 1990 draft. “They offered me $35,000 to sign, which was a lot of money and a lot more than you usually offer to someone drafted that low,” he said. “I decided to take it and see what happened.”
It was during his second year in the organization that the team decided to make him a catcher. Major league teams are always looking for players with arms strong enough to catch who can also hit because good hitting catchers are hard to find. The Yankees saw that potential in Posada and sent him to the Instructional League in the fall of 1991 to learn how to catch.
It was a slow process. He only caught part-time in Greensboro in 1992, but the next year he was a full-time catcher. “I think I had thirty-eight passed balls,” he said. “I felt like I spent the whole season chasing balls to the backstop. I simply had trouble following the arc and the movement of the breaking pitches. I mean, it was tough enough trying to hit those pitches, but catching them, wearing the mask — it was all new and it was hard. It was embarrassing. But I was determined to get better at doing it.”
His work paid off in a move up to Triple-A Columbus in 1994, but he broke an ankle that summer. “It set me back, and it slowed me down,” he said, smiling. “Until then I still ran pretty well. People who have seen me since I got to the majors don’t believe me when I tell them that.”
His first invitation to a major league camp was in 1995, and he still remembers arriving at seven o’clock every morning — “I thought I was an eager beaver,” he said — and checking Don Mattingly’s locker. “His clothes were already there, and he was out on the field. It struck me that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that the hardest worker on the team was also the best player.”
Posada had brief stints in the majors in ’95 and ’96 and was with the team throughout postseason in ’96. Joe Girardi, the incumbent catcher, kept telling him, “I’m just holding the job for you.”
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