Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  He had also been playing cards in the clubhouse during extra innings of a Mets playoff loss to the Braves in 1999, something most of the players in the 2007 clubhouse might not know about, but certainly something all Met fans and anyone with any connection to the team remembered.

  No one was sure which Rickey would show up as a coach: the Rickey who could help make Jose Reyes even better, who could help everyone in the clubhouse run the bases better and hit better, or the Rickey who might encourage laziness and showboating.

  Which brought up the subject of the other new arrival: Lastings Milledge had been called back up from Triple-A. Milledge was, arguably, the Mets’ most talented young player. At twenty-two he had speed and power and could be spectacular at the plate and in the outfield. But he had proven himself remarkably immature a year earlier when called up, showboating constantly, and clearly having no idea what Glavine or Mussina meant when they said that being in the big leagues did not make you a big leaguer.

  When he bridled at the tradition of rookies being forced to wear costumes for a late-season road trip — every team does it — Billy Wagner hung a large sign in his locker that said “Know Your Place, Rook.”

  The veterans on the team were less than amused with Milledge’s notion that being part of rookie hazing was beneath him. “Actually, we were pretty mild with the rookies that year,” Glavine said. “We only made them wear superhero costumes. It’s been a lot worse in the past. I can remember the year my brother came up in September, they all had to wear belly-dancer-type costumes. Mike was dressed like Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, and we dropped all of them off two blocks from the hotel in Chicago and made them walk the rest of the way dressed in their outfits. Now that might have been something to complain about. Not this.”

  Now, Milledge was back, saying he had learned lessons from a year ago and just wanted to help the team. How that would work out with Henderson as one of his coaches was the subject of a good deal of speculation inside the clubhouse.

  “I guess,” Glavine said, “we’ll just have to wait and see what we see.”

  Actually, what he should have said, given the changes on the team, was “Tom will just have to wait and see what Tom sees with Hall of Fame first-base coach and rookie outfielder.”

  GLAVINE WOULD PITCH third to start the second half, Rick Peterson thinking a couple of extra days off couldn’t hurt. “It’s a good idea,” Glavine said. “To come back after not picking up a ball for three days and pitch has never worked that well for me. This way I get in the bullpen before I pitch, and I should be ready to go.”

  He was more than ready on a sweltering Saturday night after the teams had split the first two games of the series. The game started late because of ceremonies honoring Ralph Kiner, and a rain delay, but it didn’t bother Glavine. He had none of his normal first-inning troubles, getting the Reds one-two-three on only twelve pitches. The second didn’t start nearly as well: second baseman Brandon Phillips, who was having a career year, blasted a 2–2 fastball that drifted too close to the plate over the right-center-field fence, and the Reds led 1–0.

  Glavine was superb after the Phillips home run. He didn’t give up another hit until the seventh inning, a ground single by Ken Griffey Jr., and he had the Reds off-balance. He struck out five and made it look easy most of the night.

  There was only one problem: Matt Belisle was pitching just as well. The Mets had a great chance in the third when they got three hits, but they failed to score because Reyes was thrown out stealing, and Carlos Delgado, still struggling with a .243 batting average, hit a fly ball to left, with two on and two out. In the sixth, the Mets finally tied the game at 1–1 when David Wright singled and stole second, then scored on a two-out Shawn Green single.

  It stayed that way until the eighth. Glavine got the side in order and wondered if he might get to pitch the ninth. He had thrown 104 pitches, but it was a humid evening. “Great job,” Peterson said when he walked into the dugout, offering his hand. Glavine knew that meant he wouldn’t pitch the ninth. He understood, given the conditions and his pitch count, but he was disappointed. He had pitched his best game of the season, and now, unless the Mets could score in the bottom of the eighth, it would only produce another no-decision.

  It looked like that was exactly what was going to happen when Mike Stanton, the ex-Met and ex-Yankee (who would be one of the players named in the Mitchell Report in December), quickly got the first two outs of the inning. The no-decision looked like an absolute certainty when Green hit a slicing drive to left field that most outfielders would have caught without too much trouble.

  But Adam Dunn isn’t just any outfielder. He got a bad break on the ball, lumbered over toward the line, and finally slid and hoped it might hit his glove as he was going down. It short hopped off of him while Green raced to second, with what had to be scored a double, simply because Dunn spent so much time circling it that in the end he had little chance to make the catch.

  The reprieve brought Milledge to the plate. He had been given the left-field job after being recalled because Moises Alou was still on the disabled list. Milledge was two for eleven since his return, but he jumped on Stanton’s first pitch and lined it cleanly into center field. Green scored to make it 2–1, and suddenly Glavine and the other veterans didn’t think Milledge was that bad a guy after all.

  Billy Wagner came in to pitch a one-two-three ninth, and, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, Glavine had an unlikely win, even though he had pitched brilliantly. “That’s one where you walk out and feel like you might have stolen one,” he said. “I pitched well, but with two outs and nobody on in the eighth, it certainly doesn’t look like I have much chance to get a win.”

  Someone among the writers gathered around Glavine’s locker after the game pointed out that he was now only two wins away from three hundred. Glavine winced. “Don’t say it too loud,” he said.

  It was getting tougher and tougher not to.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON IN TAMPA, Mike Mussina was looking for career-win number 243, not a sexy number but an impressive one nonetheless.

  The Yankees had won two of the first three games against the Devil Rays to get to .500 at 44–44, but no one was jumping up and down with excitement about that. The Rays were, arguably, the worst expansion team in baseball history. As bad as the Mets had been their first seven years, they had won a World Series in their eighth year. The Angels had needed forty-one years to win a World Series but had good teams along the way. The Astros had never won a World Series and hadn’t played in one until their forty-fourth season but had plenty of playoff teams through the years.

  The Rays had never finished at .500 since coming into existence in 1998. In fact, they had never won more than seventy games. And they played in what might have been the worst indoor ballpark ever created — worse even than the Kingdome in Seattle, best described by Sparky Anderson, who said, “It’s the only place I’ve ever been where it is always overcast indoors.”

  Tropicana Field — another lovely corporate name — was even worse. It wasn’t so much overcast as dark. Add in the fact that the team was always awful, and you hardly had a festive atmosphere. As in Baltimore, large chunks of the crowd were Yankees fans, the difference being that Camden Yards was a wonderful place to watch bad baseball, as opposed to “The Trop,” which was a bad place to watch bad baseball.

  The Rays had improved their hitting in 2007. They could score runs. They simply couldn’t stop anyone from scoring, which was why they were their usual 35–55.

  Mussina didn’t mind coming to Tampa. For one thing, he got to sleep in the house he owned there. For another, he knew the chances that his team would score for him against the Rays’ pitching staff were pretty good. His mound opponent was one Edwin Jackson, who came into the game with an ERA of 7.35. Naturally, though, at least in Mussina’s mind, Jackson spent the first four innings pitching like Johan Santana, the Yankees going down quickly and quietly.

  In the meantime, Mussina was struggli
ng again: with his stuff, with his location, and with home-plate umpire C.B. Bucknor, another of the umpires hired during the 1999 purge, whose reputation for calling balls and strikes was, to put it politely, not good.

  Mussina gave up two runs in the first and was instantly in trouble in the second, giving up a single to Ty Wigginton and a bunt hit to former Yankee catching prospect Dioner Navarro. Then he settled down and got Akinori Iwamura to pop to Rodriguez and thought he had Carl Crawford struck out on a 2–2 slider.

  Bucknor called it ball three. Mussina already felt squeezed, and that call, on what Joe Torre calls “a bastard pitch” — because there’s just no way to hit the bastard, really — made Mussina angry. Crawford grounded the next pitch into right field for an RBI single, and Mussina was off the mound, halfway to home plate, screaming at Bucknor almost as soon as the ball found the hole. This from someone who most umpires say never shows anger, except occasionally in his body language.

  “That changes as you get older,” Mussina said. “When you’re older and you just aren’t as good as you used to be and you know it, a guy misses a pitch like that and you find yourself thinking, ‘I’ll never throw this next pitch that well, and I’ll bet this is going to cause a problem.’

  “I’m not even sure it’s a conscious thought, but it’s definitely there rolling around in your mind somewhere. When Crawford gets that hit to drive in a run when I had him struck out, I just lost it for a minute.”

  The very best umpires know when they’ve missed a call and will usually let a player vent for at least a moment afterward. Most umpires aren’t that good, Bucknor included. And all of them hate being shown up. When Mussina came down off the mound yelling at Bucknor, Bucknor took off his mask and started walking toward Mussina. In seventeen major league seasons, Mussina has never been ejected from a game. This had that potential.

  Fortunately, Nieves jumped in between his pitcher and the umpire. He was hot too, but he figured if someone was going to get ejected, better him than Mussina. His quick thinking gave Torre time to come out and take over the argument.

  “It was over pretty quickly,” Mussina said. “I was hot, really hot. But Wil and Joe got in there, and I realized that yelling at Bucknor wasn’t going to make him get the call right. So, I went back to the mound and told myself it was three-nothing, and I needed to keep it there, that we were bound to score some runs sooner or later.”

  He did hold them there, although it wasn’t easy. “The good news was they got a lot of hits off me [eleven], but they all ended up being singles,” Mussina said. “I wasn’t good, that’s for sure, but I managed to hang in there and scratch my way through six innings.”

  He actually left with the lead because the Yankees finally got Jackson for four runs in the fifth, which put them ahead 4–3. Technically, Mussina produced a “quality start” — six innings pitched, three runs or fewer allowed. But it was nothing short of a miracle that the Rays had only three runs when he left.

  The next day Mark Mussina called his older brother. “That may have been the worst quality start in the history of baseball,” he told him.

  “I wasn’t great, that’s for sure,” Mike responded. “But I got through six because all the hits I gave up were singles.”

  “No,” Mark said. “You got through six because they don’t know how to run the bases. Think about it: you faced twenty-seven hitters and got fourteen guys out.”

  He was right. Mussina had given up eleven hits and walked two. In addition to three runners being thrown out on the bases, he had gotten B.J. Upton to ground into a double play in the fifth. That meant almost half the hitters he had faced had reached base.

  “You could just see that he was struggling again,” Mark said. “It worried me. He was so concerned with not giving up home runs that he wasn’t coming inside at all. You can’t pitch that way. Batters start diving over the plate, knowing the pitcher isn’t going to drive them back at all. They have no fear of the inside pitch. I didn’t say what I said to him to put him down or to make him mad, just to try to make him understand that what he was doing wasn’t working.”

  Mussina understood. He didn’t get the win that day because Ron Villone came in to relieve in the seventh and instantly gave up a two-run homer to Carlos Pena (another ex-Yankee farmhand, who would finish the season with 121 RBI) to put the Rays back in front. The Yankees rallied again to win 7–6, but Mussina ended up with a no-decision.

  “Which is probably what I deserved that day,” he said. “I hung in there, I got some outs when I had to, but I certainly wouldn’t ever claim I pitched well or deserved a win that day.”

  Mussina had hoped the start in Tampa would be a springboard to getting the second half off to a good start. The team had won three of four and was over .500 at 45–44. But Mussina still had just four wins.

  The Yankees went home from Tampa and promptly won the first three games of a four-game series against the Blue Jays, before Wang blew a 2–0 lead late in the finale, allowing Toronto to salvage the game 3–2. Still, with Tampa Bay coming to New York for a four-game series, there was a strong sense in the clubhouse that the team was getting on a roll. They were now 6–2 since the All-Star break, and they had won nine of the last twelve.

  The opener against Tampa Bay was the same matchup as the last game in Tampa five days earlier: Jackson versus Mussina. Once again, it was not unreasonable to think the Yankees would score early and often.

  And, once again, it didn’t happen that way.

  In fact, Jackson completely shut down the Yankees over six innings, allowing just four hits before turning the game over to the bullpen. By then, the Rays had a 9–0 lead because Mussina and his bullpen had completely melted down.

  It started innocently enough. Mussina gave up a first-inning single to Carl Crawford but struck out the side, hitting 90 with several pitches. “My velocity was good,” he said. “My arm felt good. I felt fine warming up in the bullpen. There were really no warning signs.”

  He pitched a one-two-three second. Then came the third. Greg Norton led off with a single, and Navarro doubled to put men on second and third. Iwamura hit a sacrifice fly to left to score Norton, making it 1–0. “At that moment, I can’t even tell you why I felt like I’d lost the game,” Mussina said. “It didn’t make sense. It was one-nothing. I just felt like we weren’t going to score any runs.”

  He gave up an RBI single to Crawford to make it 2–0. Guidry trotted to the mound. It was strictly an “I’m here to give you a breather” visit. Mussina listened, sort of, while Guidry talked. Guidry wasn’t trying to tell him anything, he was just waiting for plate umpire Scott Barry to come out and shoo him back to the dugout.

  B.J. Upton stepped in. Crawford led from first. He had already stolen one base in the game, and Mussina didn’t want to let him get into scoring position. “I was thinking about him more than the pitch,” he said. “When I threw the pitch, it was a fastball right down the middle.”

  Any major league hitter can hit a fastball down the middle a long way, especially one at 87 miles per hour. Upton, a rapidly improving young hitter, proved that in spades. He hit a rocket that still appeared to be climbing when it finally crashed down three rows deep in the upper deck in left field. Players frequently reach Yankee Stadium’s upper deck in right field, where it is only 314 feet to the seats in the lower deck, and the upper deck is almost directly overhead. In left field it is 365 feet, and the upper deck doesn’t hang as far over the lower deck as it does in right field. It takes a mammoth blast to reach it.

  “If you’re going to give one up, it might just as well go in the upper deck,” Mussina said, able to joke about the shot later — much later. “I told people Gator [Guidry] came out and said to me, ‘Why don’t you throw one down the middle and see how far this guy can hit it?’ I certainly found out.”

  Upton’s moonshot made it 4–0. Mussina didn’t give up any more runs in the inning, but he walked the bases loaded before getting the last out on a ground ball to second by No
rton, the tenth man to bat. Mussina had thrown forty-six pitches in the inning, which is half a game for some pitchers. It may not have been the worst inning of his career, but it had to be one of the longest.

  “After Upton’s shot, he didn’t want to throw a strike,” Joe Torre said the next day. “He was pitching scared. At the end of the inning, I just said to him, ‘You have to trust your stuff more.’ He goes out next inning and gets the side on eight pitches. You would hope that would tell him something.”

  Mussina didn’t last much longer than that. He gave up doubles to Upton and Brendan Harris in the fifth, and came out, having thrown ninety-three pitches. The bullpen only made things worse, and after almost four hours the final score was 14–4.

  Mussina was devastated. He’d had good nights, and he’d had bad nights throughout the season, but this was really bad. This wasn’t April, when the weather made it tough to pitch, and he wasn’t coming off an injury. In fact, his arm felt as good as it had ever felt. He just couldn’t get people out.

  For one of the few times in his baseball career, he couldn’t leave the game behind when he left the park. He was brooding. Usually the silence of the car relaxed him, allowed him to unwind. He always made a point of putting himself into “PG” mode before he got home, leaving the language of the clubhouse behind him by the time he walked in the front door.

  “The only good thing was that it was a fast turnaround,” he said the next morning. “It was midnight when I got home, and I had to get up and leave right away. My family really didn’t need to be exposed to me right at that moment.

  “I can leave physical things behind me, that’s not a problem. But when it’s mental, that’s a lot harder. If you need to work on your mechanics in some way, you come to the park, work on them in the pen or something, and go home. If you’re injured, you know what you have to do that day in terms of rehab or getting your arm ready to pitch again, and that’s it, you go home.