Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  He stood up to go. He had been in Cucuzza’s office for, by Mussina’s estimate, ninety seconds.

  “I felt bad then, I feel bad now, about the way it all came down,” Torre said later. “Obviously, a lot of discussion and thought went into deciding what to do. You don’t pull Mike Mussina from the rotation without giving it serious thought. But once we made the decision that afternoon, I didn’t want someone — anyone — walking up to him and saying, ‘So I hear you aren’t starting on Saturday.’ Nothing stays secret around here for very long. The tough thing was I didn’t have the time to sit and talk to him about it then because it was so close to game time.”

  Mussina and Torre had always had an excellent relationship, dating to the phone call in November 2000 when Torre had, for all intents and purposes, recruited Mussina to play for the Yankees. Now, Mussina felt betrayed, not only by the decision but by the way it was relayed to him.

  “I just couldn’t believe it,” Mussina said. “I’d made four hundred ninety-eight straight starts in the big leagues without ever being skipped, and I’m told in ninety seconds, ‘You’re out, and I can’t tell you when or if you’ll ever be back in.’ Had I been bad for three straight starts? Yes. Awful in the last two. But the four starts before that I had been very good. All of a sudden, it felt as if my entire career had boiled down to a three-game tryout and I’d flunked.

  “I was angry and I was confused. I really didn’t know what to do or who to turn to.”

  By the time Torre told the media about the change that night, Mussina had left the clubhouse. For one of the few times in his life, he called Jana on the way home to tell her what had happened. Short of an injury, there was really no baseball news that Jana Mussina needed to hear before Mike got home. This was different.

  “I really didn’t sleep much that night,” he said. “I had never been benched in my life in any sport at any level, and that was what had happened. If Joe had said, ‘We’re going to skip a start to try to get you healed up,’ it would have been different. That wasn’t what he had said. He said, ‘You’re out.’ End of conversation. That hurt.”

  Mussina was still stewing over the whole thing the next day when he walked into the clubhouse. He walked past Torre’s office en route to his locker and saw the manager sitting by himself. He poked his head into the room.

  “I think we need to talk,” he said.

  Torre nodded. “Anytime. I’m available right now if you want.”

  Mussina walked to his locker to drop off his things, went back to Torre’s office, and shut the door. “Joe hadn’t even shut the door when he came in the day before,” Mussina said. “For some reason, that burned me too. I mean, when kids get sent down to the minors, they go in the manager’s office, even if it’s for five minutes, and the door gets shut.”

  For several minutes, Mussina vented. “It wasn’t so much about the decision,” he said. “I might agree with it or disagree with it, but I understood where it came from. We’re in a playoff race, I’m pitching badly, they want to try the kid. Tampa’s a good team to do it against because even though their lineup is good, their pitching is so bad the kid will probably have a touchdown to work with.

  “What I said, ultimately, was that I knew — knew — there was no way if Joe had to bench Jeter or Pettitte or Posada or Mo for any reason that he would have treated them that way. He just wouldn’t have. And they were the only guys who had been on the team longer than me. I thought I deserved better.”

  Torre didn’t disagree. He explained the circumstances and told Mussina he was sorry and knew he was hurt. Torre soothed — as he always did. It wasn’t working. “I was just raw at that moment,” Mussina said. “To be fair to Joe, there probably wasn’t anything he could have said in there, short of ‘We’ve changed our minds; you’re starting on Saturday,’ that was going to make me feel better.”

  The meeting lasted about ten minutes. Mussina walked back into the clubhouse and found a slew of reporters lingering by his locker. That was to be expected. “Not today, guys,” he said.

  “I just couldn’t talk about it then,” he said. “I was too upset, and I was afraid I might say something I’d regret.”

  Two days later, Mussina talked to everyone and apologized for not being willing or able to talk on the day after he had been removed from the rotation. He talked bluntly about being upset about the decision and how it had come down, without going into great detail. He said he would do whatever he could do to help the team and be ready when he was called on. What’s more, he meant it.

  “It took me a couple of days to wrestle the whole thing to the ground emotionally,” he said. “I had always thought of myself as a guy who did what it took to help the team in any way. But this was really a test of all that. If I was the long man in the bullpen, well then, I better be ready when they called on me. What mattered, in the end, was the team. Guys pay lip service to that all the time, but in a sense this was an opportunity — granted, not one I wanted — for me to kind of put my money where my mouth was. The question was ‘Is this about me or about us?’ The answer had to be us.”

  On his regular throw day, he went to the bullpen with Guidry and Borzello and a slew of others. One day it was bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan; on another it was Triple-A pitching coach Dave Eiland, who had joined the team at the end of the minor league season. Rich Monteleone, another ex-pitcher, who was listed among the Yankees’ endless list of coaches as a “special pitching instructor,” was out there too.

  Mussina decided to alter his normal routine. He tried different pitches, mixing a few split-fingered fastballs into his session. That was the pitch that had extended Roger Clemens’s career. Maybe a strikeout pitch that didn’t look like anything else he threw could help him.

  “I’d always been able to throw it but never really threw it in games,” he said. “Maybe two, three times in my life. I figured it was worth at least thinking about.”

  He threw harder and longer than he normally did in his session between starts because his body wasn’t as beaten up as it normally was after throwing a hundred or so pitches at maximum effort every fifth day.

  “Basically, I was trying to find a way to feel comfortable throwing the ball again,” he said. “Each time out, I felt a little better, a little more confident. Of course, there was no way to know if I was fooling myself or if it really was getting better until I got to pitch in a game.”

  He talked often to Borzello about what was going on. Guidry had not said a word to him since his benching. “Of all the things that happened during that time, that may have been the most upsetting,” he said. “I like Gator, I really do, but he just didn’t seem able to handle what was going on. I’d go by him in the clubhouse, and he’d look right through me. It was as if I’d become a ghost. He never said a word, not even ‘Hang in there’ — I mean nothing. I guess he just figured he had nothing to gain by engaging me in conversation. But it bothered me a lot.”

  As usual, Borzello was honest with him. When Mussina talked about his whole career coming down to a three-game tryout, Borzello nodded in assent. “And you were awful,” he said. “We’re in a playoff race here. If this was May, it might be different. It’s not. Your next start was going to be in September.”

  Mussina listened. He respected Borzello’s opinions. Finally, one day when they were eating, Borzello asked Mussina the $11.5 million question: “If you had been Joe, would you have done what he did or not?”

  Mussina thought about that one for a while. “I guess,” he finally said, “I might have done the same thing. I just would have handled it differently.”

  Ian Kennedy started on Saturday, September 1, against the Devil Rays. He pitched extremely well: seven innings, three runs (only one earned), five hits, one walk. Although the bullpen had another semi-implosion, Mussina’s touchdown prediction proved conservative and the Yankees won the game 9–6. Not surprisingly, Torre said afterward that Kennedy would start the following weekend in Kansas City. Earlier that day, Mussina had b
een told that he might start on Monday against the Seattle Mariners. Clemens’s groin was bothering him again and if he couldn’t start, Mussina was told to be ready.

  Mussina had not been called on out of the bullpen since he had been sent there. Now, he was told he might be starting in two days. Or he might not. “It was very weird,” he said. “I came to the park that day and went through all my usual game-day routines as if I was starting. Roger went through all of his. Then I went and sat in the dugout while he warmed up in the bullpen and waited for a call saying ‘You’re starting,’ or ‘Relax, you’re not starting.’ That’s what my life had come down to: I was the backup. Be ready, but if we’re lucky we won’t need you.”

  The call came shortly before the 1:05 start time. Clemens said he was okay to start. Mussina headed for his new home — the bullpen — soon after the game began.

  The phone rang in the fourth inning. “Roger’s hurting,” Kerrigan told him. “Get ready.”

  And so, the highest-paid long man in Major League Baseball history, one who was three wins shy of 250, got up to warm up. In the top of the fifth, with the Yankees trailing 5–1, he jogged to the mound for the first regular-season relief appearance of his life.

  “I was just glad,” he said later, “that I was able to get from the pen to the mound without getting lost.”

  27

  On a Roll

  WHILE MIKE MUSSINA WAS CRASHING, Tom Glavine was soaring.

  He had pitched well in three straight starts after Los Angeles leading to three hundred: the win against Pittsburgh, the no-decision in Milwaukee, and the climactic win in Chicago.

  Now, with the three hundred pressure removed, Glavine was enjoying pitching more than at any time since he arrived in New York, perhaps even longer than that. He pitched the opening game of a series in Washington on August 17, a night when the Mets badly needed a strong pitching performance. They had been embarrassed the night before in Pittsburgh, rallying from an early deficit to lead 7–5, only to see the bullpen completely blow up in a 10–7 loss.

  The Mets still had a three-game lead, but there was evidence of some tension in the tiny visitors’ clubhouse in RFK Stadium. Willie Randolph had said to the media after the game in Pittsburgh that “you have to tip your cap to the Pirates.”

  In most places that would have been seen as a gracious nod to a bad team that had managed to piece together a good night. In New York it was seen as Randolph — again — not being fiery enough to go after his team when it gave away a game it should have won. Randolph had plenty of fire. He had been an extremely competitive player, and he had a temper. But, much like Torre, whom he had worked for as a coach for eleven years, he didn’t often show it.

  “Just because I don’t jump up and down in front of the cameras and act like an asshole doesn’t mean I can’t be one,” he said, perhaps not meaning it quite that way. His point was that he got angry behind closed doors when he felt the need. To most in New York, the need to get angry had arrived.

  The players didn’t feel quite that way. Glavine had said repeatedly during the season that a real pennant race was the norm; 2006 had been an aberration. And yet, there was a feeling that the chance to run away with the race had been there and hadn’t been taken.

  The latest issue was the catching situation. Lo Duca had strained his hamstring again during the Florida series and had been placed — angrily — on the disabled list on August 12. Within minutes, or so it seemed, of Lo Duca being deactivated for fifteen days, Ramon Castro, his backup, began complaining of back pains. Almost as if not wanting to admit they had acted hastily with Lo Duca, the club kept him active for almost a week while thirty-eight-year-old Mike Difelice, a classic journeyman major leaguer — he had played twelve seasons with seven different teams, playing in a total of 543 games — did all the catching. Finally, after the team got to Washington, Castro was DL’d and forty-one-year-old Sandy Alomar Jr. was called up. If nothing else, the Mets now had the oldest catching duo in baseball.

  None of that seemed to bother Glavine. He was superb once more against the Nationals. On a typically sultry August night in Washington — it was ninety degrees at game time but felt considerably warmer with the humidity — he threw seven innings that looked effortless.

  The Nats had one quick rally against him when Ryan Zimmerman singled with two outs in the third and Dmitri Young doubled him home. But that was it. The rest of the night was a breeze for the Mets and for their many fans in the small crowd (23,636 announced) that rumbled around in the old ballpark. Damion Easley got the Mets started with a home run in the second and then Jose Reyes scored a “Reyes run” in the third: walk, stolen base, advance to third on an error by the catcher, and then score easily on a David Wright single. Moises Alou homered in the fourth, and it was 4–1 by the time Glavine went out to pitch the seventh.

  The beginning of that inning was his only real moment of trepidation. He had walked in the top of the inning, and after running the bases he thought Randolph and Peterson might take him out since he had thrown 104 pitches. Peterson asked him how he felt, and he told him, honestly, okay. They let him go out, in part because of that, in part because they really didn’t want to go to the bullpen before they absolutely had to. Glavine proceeded to pitch a one-two-three seventh, and even though Jorge Sosa wobbled in the eighth, the final was 6–2.

  “Vintage Tommy Glavine,” Randolph called it. “We needed a well-pitched game from our starter tonight, and he gave us just that.”

  Glavine had thrown 116 pitches on a hot night and felt like he could pitch the next day if necessary. “When your pitches are going almost exactly where you want them to, it doesn’t feel like work,” he said. “You feel it physically, of course, but mentally you’re flying. My changeup is going almost exactly where I want it to go on almost every pitch right now. When I’ve got that going, I’m probably going to pitch well.”

  Glavine’s performance was the start of a roll for the Mets. They swept the Nats and won the opener of a series at Shea against the San Diego Padres, who were in a battle for the NL West title and the wild-card spot.

  Glavine was in the weight room on Monday afternoon when he saw Greg Maddux coming toward him. Maddux and Glavine were the same age, and Maddux was still pitching well for the Padres — the third team he had been with since leaving the Braves. He and Glavine were still friends but not the way Glavine and Smoltz were friends. Maddux lived in Las Vegas during the off-season, and he and Glavine weren’t in touch all that often. Glavine hadn’t heard from Maddux since his three hundredth win.

  “Looking back, I probably should have called him or sent a message or something,” Maddux said. “But I knew we were playing them in a couple weeks, so I figured I’d wait and talk to him in person.”

  As soon as Maddux saw Glavine, he walked right over to him with a big smile on his face.

  “So,” he said, “what took you so long?”

  Glavine cracked up. It was exactly the kind of comment he would have hoped for from Maddux. The two then had a lengthy conversation about families, about their teams, and about next season.

  “He said if I keep feeling good, I might as well pitch next year,” Glavine said. “To be honest, by that point I was pretty much thinking the same thing.”

  There had been very little talk during the march to three hundred about 2008, even in the Glavine household. “Honestly, I have no idea what he’s going to do,” Chris Glavine said in mid-August. “I’m not going to be surprised if he wants to pitch. And if he does, it’s fine. We’ll deal with it.”

  There had been a little bit of a stir late in July when the New York Daily News had reported that the Glavines were about to put their Greenwich house on the market. The story was accurate, but Glavine didn’t feel as if it committed him one way or the other: “If we get an offer, we can always turn it down,” he said. “If we do sell and I come back here next year, we might want to get an apartment in Manhattan. The boys are old enough to enjoy the city now, and Chris and I have
always thought it might be fun to do that for a year.”

  In short, he was keeping his options open. The way he was pitching, it was likely he would have a number of them. “If I do pitch, it’s Atlanta or New York — period,” he said. “Gregg [Clifton] told me last winter that if I went on the open market I could probably get several offers. I don’t want that. Both places feel like home to me now. The difference, obviously, is in Atlanta, Chris and the kids don’t have to fly back and forth all season long.”

  The win in the opener over the Padres had ballooned the Mets’ lead to five games. Jake Peavy, who would go on to win the National League Cy Young Award, stopped the winning streak the next night.

  Glavine then pitched the final game of the series. His analysis of the start was succinct: “I sucked,” he said. “I guess I was due for a game like that, but it caught me by surprise because I’d been pitching so well. I kept throwing pitches in places I hadn’t been throwing them since Los Angeles. It was frustrating.”

  The night began innocently enough, Glavine pitching out of a two-out, two-on jam in the first, and the Mets giving him a 1–0 lead when Carlos Beltran drove Wright in with a two-out double in the bottom of the inning. It unraveled for Glavine after that. The Padres scored one in the second and one in the third, which would have been more if Milton Bradley hadn’t been thrown out at the plate on a call in which the Mets appeared to catch a break from plate umpire Derryl Cousins. They scored two more in the fourth and the fifth, the last two coming after two were down. Khalil Greene had doubled, Josh Bard singled with one out, and Marcus Giles tripled in a ten-pitch span. Glavine finally got the last out, but he knew he wouldn’t be back for the sixth.

  “I just couldn’t get the third out,” he said. “I think they scored five of the runs with two out. I was completely frustrated. But I really thought it was just one of those nights, not the beginning of a trend or anything. It wasn’t one of those deals where Rick and I had to sit down and go over it in chapter and verse. It was just a night where I went home pissed off.”