His struggles may have been defined best by the way the Giants ran the bases. Almost everyone who reached first base stole second base about five seconds later. Poor Wil Nieves had no chance. Mussina was so locked in on trying to deal with the hitter at the plate that he seemed to forget about runners on first.
Barry Bonds, of all people, started the parade. Bonds had once been a feared base runner, but the combination of his change in body type, aching knees, and age (almost forty-three) had virtually brought him to a halt as a runner. Most of the time he didn’t even bother to run out ground balls, and he simply jogged after any ball in the outfield that was more than two or three steps out of his range. About the only time he ran with any enthusiasm was when a pitcher failed to pay attention to him, and he could steal a base by running at three-quarter speed instead of half speed.
After Bonds had singled to start the second in a scoreless game, he immediately stole second. Ryan Klesko walked, and both runners moved up on a ground ball. A Pedro Feliz sacrifice fly scored Bonds, and then Guillermo Rodriguez doubled Klesko in to make it 2–0. Two innings later, Nate Schierholtz led off with a single and — you guessed it — stole second. Trying desperately to make a play, Nieves overthrew the ball, and Schierholtz ended up on third. The Giants then executed a squeeze, Lowry bunting, Mussina fielding, and Schierholtz scoring to make it 3–0.
That was all the Giants needed as it turned out. Mussina pitched out of further trouble, giving up five hits, walking three, and allowing five steals. The fact that he only gave up the three runs in his five innings was a tribute to his toughness with men in scoring position. That he had to come out after five innings was the result of having thrown 105 pitches by the time he got the last out in the bottom of the fifth.
“That’s just not good enough,” Mussina said. “You have to be able to give your team more than five innings. The three runs were okay; it was good that I hung in there and didn’t let the game get out of hand. But you can’t be over a hundred pitches before the end of the fifth inning. You have to pitch more efficiently than that.”
Watching his friend from the bullpen as he always did, Mike Borzello was discouraged. In May, he had thought Mussina’s unwillingness to go after hitters was strictly a product of his arm strength not being all the way back after the stint on the disabled list. Now though, it was late June and Mussina was still pitching scared.
“He just didn’t want contact,” Borzello said. “There’s a reason why there are eight other guys out on the field with you. You can’t pitch behind in the count all day long because you’re afraid to throw the ball over the plate.”
Mark Mussina, watching on television, felt the same way. “He had gotten to the point where he was afraid to give up home runs,” he said. “He wasn’t giving up that many home runs, but he wasn’t giving himself a chance to pitch deep into games because he was afraid to throw strikes.”
One of the reasons Mussina and Borzello are friends is that Mussina knows Borzello will tell him what he thinks. On the flight home that night, Mussina sat down with Borzello to ask him what he thought about his performance that day.
“You were bad,” Borzello said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was good,” Mussina said. “But three runs in five innings isn’t all that bad.”
“No, it’s not,” Borzello said. “But your pitching was bad. What’s made you a really good pitcher is having confidence in your stuff. You’ve always known if you throw your pitch where you want to throw it you’re going to get outs. You didn’t pitch that way today. You pitched scared. No one can pitch well that way.”
Mussina didn’t exactly love hearing Borzello’s words, but he knew he was right. He had always had so many pitches in his arsenal that if one was off on a given day — or even two — he had other options. Back home, Mark, who had started charting every pitch Mike threw in 1994, noticed a pattern developing. “Fastball away, fastball away, fastball away,” he said. “That was all he was doing. There was one game in that period where forty-four of the first fifty-one pitches he threw were fastballs. After the game I heard Joe [Torre] say, ‘He just needs to have more confidence in his fastball.’ I said, ‘What?!’ He’s throwing eighty-seven percent fastballs, and Joe thinks he isn’t showing enough confidence in his fastball?”
Torre wasn’t talking so much about how many fastballs Mussina was throwing but where he was throwing them. Much like Glavine in 2003 and 2004, Mussina had fallen into the habit of only throwing outside, although for a different reason. Glavine, who had never been a hard thrower, believed he had to stay away from hitters to be successful and had been successful that way for years — before Questech and the Mets came into his life.
Mussina had thrown a good deal harder than Glavine when he was younger, and now he couldn’t do that anymore. Most of his fastballs were in the 86- to 88-mile-per-hour range, and he topped out at 90. Mussina knew he needed to adapt but was having a tough time doing it.
“There’s nothing harder than being able to throw hard when you’re young and waking up one morning and finding out you can’t throw that hard anymore,” said Ron Guidry, who had thrown very hard as a young pitcher but had been able to win twenty-two games at the age of thirty-five after he could no longer blow batters away. “Your mind tells you that you should still be able to do certain things, but your body won’t let you do it. Accepting the fact that you need to pitch differently is half the battle — maybe more.”
Glavine had needed to reinvent himself as a pitcher in 2005. What Mussina was going through wasn’t all that different. And it was every bit as difficult.
THE SUNDAY LOSS IN SAN FRANCISCO dropped the Yankees under .500 again at 36–37. They flew east to Baltimore, hoping a series against the Orioles would be a cure-all as it had frequently been in the past ten years when the once-proud Baltimore franchise had become little more than a laughingstock, owner Peter Angelos changing general managers and managers the way George Steinbrenner once had while his team went through one losing season after another.
The Orioles had already fired another manager, Sam Perlozzo, early in 2007, and replaced him with minor league–lifer Dave Trembley. At the same time they had revamped their front office, hiring Andy McPhail, who had successfully put together teams in Minnesota and Chicago. The hiring of McPhail was viewed in baseball circles as a step forward for owner Peter Angelos, who had frequently refused to give final say on trades and signings to his general managers. Most people believed McPhail wouldn’t have agreed to come to Baltimore unless he was given complete control by Angelos.
His hiring was, the long-suffering fans in Baltimore hoped, a long-term solution. Short-term, the Orioles still weren’t very good. They were 32–43 when the Yankees got to town and headed for another ninety-loss season. Their gorgeous ballpark, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, had become known in recent years as “Yankee Stadium South,” because so many Yankee fans made the short trip from New York to snap up tickets they couldn’t get for sold-out games in New York. The Orioles had drawn well over three million fans on a regular basis after first moving in to Camden Yards in 1992, but their attendance had been in free fall in recent years, as each hopeful April turned into a wait-till-next-year July. Even the presence of the Yankees didn’t fill every seat, although crowds of close to forty thousand showed up — considerably higher than the usual average of under thirty thousand.
The Yankees always seemed to play well in Baltimore. The 2006 season had been typical: even though they were only 5–4 against the Orioles in New York, they were 7–3 in Baltimore. The small dimensions of the ballpark played to their power, and the fact that half the crowd was on their side most nights didn’t hurt either.
But they were at the tail end of a long road trip and not playing well. It showed the first two games: a 3–2 loss and a 4–0 loss. In the second game, Clemens was outpitched by Baltimore lefty Erik Bedard, who was becoming one of the best pitchers in the game.
Prior to the second game, Torre decided to send Mussina home to New
York a day early, meaning he would miss the final game of the series. Managers will often send a starting pitcher to the place where he is going to pitch next a day or two early so he can be rested for his start, but more often it happens when a coast-to-coast trip is involved or during postseason. The Yankees’ trip from Baltimore to New York was the shortest they would make all season — other than when they played the Mets at Shea Stadium. But with the third game at night and bad weather in the forecast, Torre decided to send Mussina home early.
“If you think about it, it makes sense,” Mussina said. “Best-case scenario we’re going to play a three-hour game, which means the earliest we get to the airport is between eleven thirty and midnight. We land at twelve thirty, have to bus to Yankee Stadium to get to our cars, and by the time we’re home it’s two o’clock. That’s if the game doesn’t run long or if there’s no rain.”
Mussina was long past feeling any qualms about coming back to Baltimore in a visiting uniform. He had expected boos when he first left to sign with the Yankees, but they hadn’t been nearly as loud as what Glavine heard when he left Atlanta. Many, if not most, Oriole fans knew that Mussina had signed with the team once for a hometown discount and had been willing to sign in the spring of 2000 for five years at $60 million, considerably less than the $88 million for six years he got after the season from the Yankees.
What’s more, the presence of all the Yankee fans frequently drowned out any boos he might hear. “Actually, it doesn’t sound much different than the old days when they used to yell ‘Mooooose,’ ” he said, smiling.
On this trip, he heard no boos since he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. As it turned out, Torre’s notion that getting Mussina home and to bed on Thursday would be good for him proved to be a smart one. The teams played a long game that came to a halt because of rain after the Yankees had scored four runs to take an 8–6 lead in the top of the eighth inning. The umpires waited until almost midnight before suspending the game — since the Orioles hadn’t gotten a chance to bat in the eighth and the game was official (having gone more than five innings) — meaning it would be completed the next time the Yankees came to Baltimore. It was three o’clock in the morning by the time the bus pulled into Yankee Stadium.
Mussina was sound asleep.
GLAVINE WAS SLEEPING a lot better too, after his performance against Oakland. The A’s were the Mets’ last interleague series — 2007 was a year in which the AL East played the NL West, and the NL East played the AL West — meaning the Yankees were in San Francisco when the Mets hosted the Athletics, and the St. Louis Cardinals came into Shea for their only scheduled visit of the season after the Mets had completed their sweep of the A’s.
The Cardinals were a far different team than the one that had upset the Mets in the NLCS the previous October. They had been rocked by injuries, controversy, and even death. The death had occurred in May when relief pitcher Josh Hancock slammed his SUV into the back of a tow truck that was working on a disabled car. He died almost instantly. An autopsy determined that he had been drunk at the time of the accident, which led MLB and the players union to ban all alcohol from major league clubhouses. For years, many players routinely drank a beer or two (or more) in the clubhouse after games.
The Yankees and the Mets had already banned alcohol before the Hancock accident. Mussina, as the Yankees’ player rep, took part in a conference call with other player reps a few days later, in which it was decided to formally ban all alcohol from clubhouses. “It probably should have been done long ago,” Mussina said. “But after this, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”
Hancock hadn’t been drinking in the Cardinal clubhouse; he’d been in a bar. But MLB and the union had to let the public know that drinks weren’t being handed out like candy bars inside their stadiums after games.
Hancock’s death came less than two months after Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa had been charged with DUI during spring training, when he fell asleep at the wheel of his car at a stoplight. LaRussa was an icon in St. Louis, especially after winning the World Series. He had been a major league manager since 1979 and had enjoyed success with the White Sox, the Athletics, and the Cardinals, regularly making the postseason, even though the 2006 World Series was “only” his second world championship — the first having come in 1989 in Oakland during the “earthquake” World Series.
But while LaRussa was seen as one of baseball’s best managers and smartest people, there were also those who found him to be arrogant and difficult. Probably everyone on both sides of the argument was right: LaRussa was a great manager, was extremely smart, was arrogant, and could certainly be difficult. His DUI was cause for glee in some circles, especially among those who liked to mockingly call him “the Genius,” a phrase that had followed him since he had been featured in a bestselling George Will book on baseball that had portrayed him as one.
All of LaRussa’s brilliance was going to be needed to keep the 2007 Cardinals afloat. The pitching staff was in tatters, with Chris Carpenter, the 2005 Cy Young Award winner, out for the season; closer Jason Isringhausen hurt; and others who had pitched well at the end of 2006 not pitching nearly as well. Slugger Albert Pujols had been on the disabled list, as had starting shortstop David Eckstein.
The Mets had very little concern for the Cardinals’ troubles when they came to town. “Talking about revenge is silly,” Glavine said. “There’s nothing we can do to change what happened last year. They went to the World Series and won. That chance is gone. But it’s still nice to go out and beat them.”
The Cardinals limped into Shea Stadium with a 33–39 record, although they were still in contention in the National League Central because no one was playing very well. In 2006, the Cardinals had won the division with eighty-three victories — the Mets won ninety-seven — and it was beginning to look as if eighty-three to eighty-five wins would be good enough to win the Central again.
LaRussa was a big Glavine fan. “Don’t misunderstand, when he pitches against us I want to beat his butt,” he said. “But I’ve been around the game long enough to appreciate the kind of competitor he is and to appreciate the way he’s carried himself through the years. He’s one of those guys who you can say without hesitation is good for the game. When he wins three hundred, I’ll be standing up somewhere and applauding.”
Glavine was focusing on 297 when he took the mound in the third game of the series. The teams had split eleven-inning marathons in the first two games, and the weather had turned miserably hot and humid. It was ninety-three degrees when Glavine threw his warm-ups, with the skies getting darker by the minute. “One of those nights where you want to get a lead early and get through five fast,” Glavine said.
He knew of what he spoke. The Mets did get an early lead when David Wright hit a two-run home run with Paul Lo Duca on first base in the bottom of the first. From there, Glavine worked quickly and efficiently. With one out in the second, Scott Rolen hit a soft line drive over shortstop for a base hit. No one realized it at that moment, but it was the Cardinals’ final hit of the night. Glavine was full of confidence coming off the game against Oakland, and against the weak-hitting St. Louis lineup he was dominant. After Rolen’s hit, he gave up a two-out walk to shortstop Aaron Miles. But he got Brendan Ryan to ground to shortstop and then got the Cardinals one-two-three in each of the next four innings.
The Mets weren’t doing a lot more against winless (0–10) St. Louis starter Anthony Reyes (no relation to Jose), but it didn’t matter. When Glavine got Ryan Ludwick for the final out of the sixth inning and his thirteenth consecutive out, it was pouring, and plate umpire Mark Carlson ordered that the tarp be brought out to cover the field.
The umpires waited almost two and a half hours before calling the game. When they did call it, Glavine had his first official complete game of the season and a one-hit shutout. Of course if Glavine hadn’t given up the hit to Rolen and if the game had been able to continue, the question then would have been whether Glavine would have gone out to pitch the s
eventh inning.
Traditionally, pitchers don’t come back after a long rain delay, especially older pitchers. The only exception to that rule would come if a no-hitter was involved. Glavine had never pitched a no-hitter — the closest he had come was taking one into the eighth inning in 2004 against the Colorado Rockies — which wasn’t all that surprising. More often than not, no-hitters are pitched by power pitchers, frequently power pitchers with control problems, who keep the hitters off-balance by throwing very hard, often in the wrong direction. Nolan Ryan, who exploded all records for no-hitters by pitching seven of them (Sandy Koufax is next with four), is the career leader in both strikeouts and walks.
A pitcher like Glavine, who isn’t going to strike out a lot of people, is far less likely to get twenty-seven outs without surrendering a hit. The more batters make contact, the more likely someone is to poke the ball someplace where it can’t be caught. “Realistically my chances for a no-hitter at this point in my career are pretty slim,” he said. “My chances early in my career weren’t all that great either.”
What would he have done had he been pitching a no-hitter and the game had resumed after the delay? “I’m pretty sure Rick [Peterson] wouldn’t have wanted me to go out there again,” he said. “Too risky.”
But a no-hitter? “I guess we would have at least talked about it,” he finally conceded. “It’s probably a good thing it wasn’t an issue.”
Far more remarkable than Glavine having not pitched a no-hitter is the fact that the Mets — in forty-six seasons of baseball — have never had a no-hitter. This is a team that had Tom Seaver pitch for it, Nolan Ryan (briefly), Dwight Gooden, and Jerry Koosman. The first two are power pitchers in the Hall of Fame; the third would be there if he hadn’t blown up his career with drug use; and the fourth was a borderline Hall of Famer who was a dominant pitcher when young and with the Mets.
Seaver pitched five one-hitters while he was a Met, including coming within two outs of a perfect game in 1969 against the Chicago Cubs. An obscure outfielder named Jim Qualls, who was in the lineup that night only because the regular center fielder Don Young had made a defensive blunder the day before, broke it up with a solid single to left-center. Seaver, who finally did pitch a no-hitter after being traded to the Cincinnati Reds, always called that his imperfect game. Gary Gentry, another young power pitcher on that 1969 team, pitched two one-hitters for the Mets. Ryan pitched one, as did Gooden. Remarkably, Steve Trachsel, whose only real place in baseball lore is as the pitcher who gave up Mark McGwire’s sixty-second home run in 1998, pitched two one-hitters for the Mets.
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