Jose Reyes managed to change that sound temporarily, leading off the bottom of the inning with a long home run off of Bergmann. Lastings Milledge greeted Reyes coming into the dugout, where the two did their home-run dance, which always annoyed the opposition and baffled many of their older teammates, especially in a game when the team was down by three runs.
“It wasn’t my place to talk to those guys; there were other guys who were more appropriate,” Glavine said later. “I know Carlos [Delgado] tried to talk to them, and Willie did too. It just never seemed to register.”
The Mets got another run in the second, but Glavine gave it back in the third on a Zimmerman double and a Wily Mo Pena single. It was still 5–2 in the fourth when Justin Maxwell came to the plate for the Nationals. Maxwell was a talented young outfielder who had spent a good portion of the year playing Single-A ball. The Nationals thought he was probably still a year away from being ready to be a full-time big leaguer but wanted to give him a September look at what might be in his future.
Maxwell had performed well. But he had looked completely hopeless against Glavine in the second inning. “A young hitter like that seeing my changeup for the first time shouldn’t have a chance,” he said. “If I throw the pitch right, he’s going to swing over it and be back in the dugout.”
Maxwell did just that on the first pitch, swinging wildly as the ball darted downward. He then took a ball. Then Glavine threw another change. Only this one didn’t get down enough; it simply hung up over the plate. Maxwell jumped on it, hitting it into the left-field bullpen to make the score 6–2.
“All three home runs were changeups,” Glavine said. “That was bad. Having the kid hit one out was really bad. It shook me up. I’d been telling myself that the home runs Utley and Cabrera hit were mistakes that really good hitters took deep, which they were. But the three that night were bad pitches that almost anyone, even a kid a few weeks out of Class-A, could take out. That one was just a bad pitch. Not only did it hang, but it was actually going in the wrong direction. That was a major concern.”
Glavine stayed away from his changeup for the remaining two innings he pitched. He threw fastballs — most of them away — and a few cutters and curveballs. He didn’t want to throw the changeup anywhere near the plate until he had a chance to get to the bullpen with Peterson to figure out what was wrong. He knew something was wrong; he just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
He lasted through five innings, having thrown ninety-seven pitches. The Nationals built their lead to 10–3 before the Mets staged a furious ninth-inning rally, actually cutting the gap to 10–9 on Nats closer Chad Cordero with the tying run on second base and only one out. But Jon Rauch came in to relieve Cordero and struck out Delgado and got Lo Duca to fly to right to end the game.
So close… again.
“It seems like every night we either build a lead we can’t hold or fall behind and come almost all the way back,” Glavine said after the game. “Tonight is on me. I was bad. I put us in a hole, and we couldn’t quite climb out of it.”
Some pointed out that if the bullpen hadn’t given up three more runs after Glavine left, the ninth-inning rally would have won the game. Others noted that in the midst of a lousy season, Delgado had again failed in the clutch. Glavine didn’t want to hear that. “I had the ball in my hands,” he said. “And I didn’t come through.”
His ERA, which he had gradually brought down to 3.88 from a season high of 4.67, had jumped back to 4.14.
The only good news of the evening had come from Philadelphia, where the Braves had come from behind to beat the Phillies, keeping the margin at two. The magic number had actually been reduced to four. With the Mets losing, the Braves’ rally had created one of the stranger scenes in recent history: Mets fans, on their feet, doing the Braves’ tomahawk chop, the same chop that for years had nauseated the Mets and their fans when practiced in Atlanta. Now, with the Braves out of the race and the Phillies chasing the Mets, the fans at Shea were chopping for their lives.
Prior to that night’s game, someone had asked Glavine if he had talked to Randolph and Peterson about whether he would pitch on Sunday, the last day of the season, if the pennant had been clinched, or if he might just pitch a couple of innings that day to get ready for his first playoff start.
But as soon as Lo Duca’s fly ball had died into Austin Kearns’s glove to end the game, Glavine was beginning to prepare mentally for a start on Sunday that he was certain would be critical.
“Sometimes you just have a feel for things as a ballplayer,” he said. “I was hoping we’d have it wrapped up by Sunday, but in my gut I just knew I was going to be pitching, and the season was going to be on the line.
“I don’t know why I knew or how I knew; I just knew.”
THERE WAS NO SUCH SUSPENSE in the Yankees clubhouse. They had flown to Tampa after the loss to Toronto, trailing the Red Sox by two but, more important, leading the Tigers by five and a half, with six games to play. That meant the magic number to clinch the wild card was one — a Yankee victory or a Detroit loss.
“I think we were all shocked that we’d pulled away as easily and as quickly as we did,” Mussina said. “But we certainly weren’t complaining.”
The trip to Tampa meant that Mussina could sleep in one of his own beds for three nights, even though his family couldn’t come because school was in session. He felt good about himself: about getting his 250th win, about keeping his ten-wins-in-a-season streak alive, but most of all he felt good about pitching well again.
“I still think if those three bad starts had come in May or June, we would have just worked it out in the pen and I would have gone out and pitched five days later,” he said. “On the other hand, being out did give me a chance to heal from all those nagging injuries. My ego was hurt by it, but it may very well have worked out for the best.”
Mussina was scheduled to make his last start of the regular season on Friday in Baltimore, a game the Yankees were hoping wouldn’t mean much. While Torre would have been happy to run the Red Sox down and win the Division title, the goal was to get into the playoffs, and the wild card would suit that purpose. Home-field advantage means less in baseball than in any other sport as had been proven often in recent years: wild-card teams had won three straight World Series between 2002 and 2004, without the benefit of home-field advantage in either the Division Series or the Championship Series. There hadn’t been a seven-game World Series since 2002, so the new All-Star-game gimmick of giving the winning league home field for the deciding game hadn’t yet come into play.
“We wanted to get the wild card wrapped up in Tampa,” Mussina said. “If we somehow caught the Red Sox, all the better, but it wasn’t really on our minds that much.”
The Yankees played the opener in Tampa as if very little was on their minds. They built a 5–0 lead, and Kei Igawa, called back up to start because both Clemens and Kennedy were still hurt, managed to hang on through five innings, even though he walked five. But Edwar Ramirez and Brian Bruney gave up six runs in the sixth, the last four scoring when second baseman Jorge Velandia, who had not homered all year, hit a grand slam off of Bruney. The Yankees tied it, but the Rays won it in the tenth, when Dioner Navarro homered off of Jeff Karstens leading off the inning.
So, the magic number was still one because the Tigers won that night. The next night, with Chien-Ming Wang pitching, the Yankees built a 9–1 lead after five innings. They weren’t going to blow that. Just to be sure, Torre sent Rivera in to get the last three outs, even with a 12–4 lead. At 10:40 p.m. on the night of September 26, with all of 21,621 (announced) watching, at always overcast (indoors) Tropicana Field, the Rays’ Greg Norton hit a pop-up to short right field. When the ball dropped into Robinson Cano’s glove, the Yankees were in the playoffs for a thirteenth straight year, twelve of them under Torre.
“Think about this for a minute,” Mussina said later. “We were the only team that made the playoffs in ’07 that also made it in ’06. No one else made it
two years in a row. We’ve made it thirteen. That’s an accomplishment. The problem is, around here, anything short of winning the World Series is considered failure. It’s as if they’ve all forgotten the Yankees didn’t make postseason once between 1981 and 1995. They were a bad team when I first came up. If you’re going to say that only winning the World Series is a successful season, most of your seasons are going to end as failures.
“I know that night in the clubhouse, we felt like we’d really accomplished something, given the way we started, given the injuries, given everything that had happened. It was a nice feeling.”
That same night, the Mets started rookie Philip Humber against the Nationals — because they didn’t want Pedro Martinez to have to start on four days’ rest — and blew a 5–0 lead en route to a 9–6 loss. They had dropped five of six to the Nationals in the past two weeks. The Phillies beat the Braves, so the lead was down to one, with four games to play for both teams. There was no need, really, to discuss magic numbers.
“The magic number is one,” Glavine said. “As in we need to win one game. Then we can worry about winning another one.”
The day after the Nationals left town, the St. Louis Cardinals came in to play one game. It was a makeup game dating back to the four-game series in June that had been plagued by rain.
Prior to the game, Glavine went to the bullpen with Peterson and bullpen catcher Dave Racaniello for his normal second-day side session. Glavine and Peterson had talked about the changeup the previous day and decided to try some different drills to see if Glavine could get his feel back for the pitch.
Normally, Glavine will begin a bullpen session by throwing fifteen to twenty pitches from behind the mound. “It’s a way to get loose, but it also makes me feel as if I have more power once I get up on the mound,” he said. “Usually I throw all my pitches — two or three of each — and then I get up on the mound.”
On this particular day, every pitch he threw from behind the mound was a changeup, the hope being that if he could feel the pitch from flat ground, he would feel it even better from the mound. Then, when he got on the mound, instead of throwing from the windup, he threw about fifteen more pitches that weren’t so much pitches as throws. “I kind of threw with the kind of motion an infielder throws with,” he said. “You take sort of a little jump-step into the throw instead of winding up and going through your motion. It was all about trying to find the right feel for one pitch.”
When he finally began to throw from his normal windup, the changeup felt a little better but not much. “To be honest, it was more of the same,” he said. “Some were good; others weren’t. But I did think that I had a better feel for what I needed to do to throw the good one when the session was over.”
Glavine was looking for consistency. He wanted to throw the pitch the same way each time and get the same result — a pitch that fooled the hitters because of its lack of speed, and if it didn’t was still hard to hit because it broke down.
“When I’m throwing it well, I just keep aiming at the catcher’s feet,” Glavine said. “If it starts to drift up, well, I just aim in the dirt. But if I don’t know where it’s going or how hard I need to throw it to get it where I want it to go, then I’m in trouble. That’s where I was. Some went right where I was aiming. Others didn’t.
“It’s a lot like in golf when you have to start thinking about your swing. If you’re playing well, you stand up to the ball, pick your target, and just take the club back and hit the ball. In pitching, it’s the same thing: you stand there, pick your target, and throw at the spot, knowing the ball will go there. When it’s not and you have to start thinking — ‘Do I throw harder or softer? Do I throw it lower or higher? Do I try to change my motion to make sure it goes down?-’ — that’s when you get into trouble.”
Glavine felt a little better after the side session, but not great. He felt a little bit worse when the Mets lost again that night, shut out 3–0 by Joel Pineiro, who had spent most of the season in the Red Sox bullpen, before the Cardinals, desperate for starters because of injuries, had picked him up and put him in their rotation. For one night, Pineiro was Bob Gibson, allowing three hits. Pedro Martinez pitched well but not well enough. The Phillies beat the Braves again. So much for the tomahawk chop at Shea Stadium.
The Mets were now 87–72, with three games to play. The Phillies were also 87–72. The seven-game lead was completely gone. The Marlins were coming to New York for the final three games of the season, and the Nationals headed for Philadelphia.
The Yankees flew from Tampa Bay to Baltimore, still with an outside chance to catch the Red Sox. Even if they didn’t, they knew they would be playing the next week when postseason play began.
The Mets could only hope that they would be playing too.
GLAVINE AND PETERSON returned to the bullpen on Friday for Glavine’s “stretch” throwing session. Most pitchers only throw in the bullpen once between starts, so they will mix that session up, throwing from the windup and from the stretch. Since Glavine throws twice between starts, the first time he will throw strictly from the windup, the second time only from the stretch.
They went through the same drills — throwing changeups from behind the mound to warm up, then working on the infield-type throws, before going through the regular throwing session. This time, Glavine felt a real difference.
“Throwing the changeup felt noticeably better from the stretch,” he said. “My hope was that it was just better, period, and that it had nothing to do with whether I was throwing from the windup or from the stretch. I felt more comfortable, more like I could make the pitch do what I wanted it to do.”
Some people might wonder why one pitch would be so important since Glavine could throw a fastball, a curve, a cutter, a slider. But every starting pitcher in baseball needs at least one effective breaking pitch to go with his fastball. Even someone who can throw a fastball 98 miles an hour needs a breaking pitch because batters will eventually figure out the fastball and hit it. A relief pitcher might get away with having only one pitch — Mariano Rivera throws his cutter about 90 percent of the time — because he is only going to face hitters once in a game. A starter needs different pitches for the second, third, and fourth at bats.
Glavine had become a good pitcher in 1989 when he discovered the grip that allowed him to throw his changeup at least 10 miles an hour slower than his fastball, with the exact same arm motion. The fact that the pitch went down most of the time made it that much more effective. It was what separated him from most pitchers, especially with a fastball that rarely reached 90 miles per hour. He had to count on his ability to keep hitters off-balance with change of speed. The changeup allowed him to do that.
Now, facing one of the biggest games of his career, he wasn’t sure about his big pitch. Glavine without an effective changeup is the same as Tiger Woods when he can’t make putts or Michael Jordan when he couldn’t make a jump shot. Woods is the best player in the world because he makes more pressure putts than anyone; Jordan was Jordan because he never seemed to miss a jumper in the clutch.
“I’ve gone into a lot of games in my career when I knew it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be,” he said. “That’s kind of the frustration and the beauty of baseball. No one, and I mean no one, goes through a season without having stretches where they just can’t do what they want to do. I’ve never had a season where I didn’t hit stretches where I couldn’t locate the ball like I wanted to or throw my changeup the way I wanted to or keep my fastball off the plate. Every pitcher goes through it, just like every hitter goes through slumps.”
Mussina agrees. “I’ve never had a year where I didn’t feel for a while like I’d never get another out,” he said. “This year was worse than usual, but in my best years those periods happened. My guess is when Ron Guidry went twenty-five and three in 1978 and had one of the great years in baseball history, he had a couple times where he felt terrible.” (Guidry confirms this, saying the Yankees got him off the hook on several o
ccasions that season when he didn’t feel right.)
“That’s just the game. Look at the year A-Rod has had. But in May he did almost nothing. He had a twenty-five-game stretch where he hit about .220 and drove in four or five runs. Twenty-five games is most of my season. If I have twenty-five games where I’m that bad, I’m released.
“No one ever has a perfect season. No one.”
Glavine had pitched remarkably well for most of 2007. Until the start in Florida, he had started thirty-one games and had produced a “quality start-” — three runs or less in at least six innings — on twenty-three occasions. His record on the eight occasions when he hadn’t produced a quality start was 0–4, meaning the Mets had not stolen a game or two on off-nights as would normally be expected from a good team. He had been 13–2 on the nights he had pitched well, with eight no-decisions in games he had pitched well enough to win, several of them games where he had left with a lead only to have the bullpen blow the game.
In short, he easily could have won eighteen games, perhaps more if he’d been lucky. He’d had one real slump — the games in Detroit and in New York in June when he’d been bombed by the Tigers and Yankees. He hadn’t had poor back-to-back outings again until the game in Florida and the game in New York against the Nationals.
“I think, to some degree, there was a little bit of a hangover after the start in Florida,” he said. “I don’t want to say I lost confidence, but I got concerned about my changeup, and I didn’t throw it with any consistency at all in the Washington game.
“You go through these periods during a season and you understand them. But this was the worst possible timing. I was going to pitch a game on Sunday that might mean our whole season, and I really didn’t know what I was going to have going out there. I’d pitched a lot of big games in my career; I knew how to handle preparing for them mentally and physically, but wondering which breaking pitch would show up — the good one or the bad one — was a little bit unnerving.
Living on the Black Page 48