“It wasn’t as if I had any choice. They were going to give me the ball Sunday and ask me to go out and win a game. I certainly wasn’t going to give it back.”
After his bullpen on Friday, Glavine sat in the dugout and watched helplessly as the Mets lost again. Oliver Perez was wild from the start, giving up two runs in the first and two more in the third. The two in the third summed up the Mets’ collapse: He hit Dan Uggla to load the bases with no one out, then got Jeremy Hermida to hit into a 5–2 force, keeping the bases loaded with the score still 2–1. Then he struck out Miguel Cabrera, a huge out, giving him a chance to get out of the inning unscathed. Then he hit Cody Ross to force in a run. And hit Mike Jacobs to force in another run. Three hit batsmen in one inning, two forcing in runs. The Mets lost 7–4, beaten by Byung-Hyun Kim, who lowered his ERA to 6.08. The news from Philadelphia was the same as it had been almost every night for two weeks — they won: Phillies 6, Nationals 0.
The Phillies were in first place, one game ahead of the Mets with two games to play.
“The good news was we could stop worrying about blowing the lead,” Glavine said. “We’d blown it. Wasn’t exactly our strategy, as in ‘Way to go, guys; we’re in second place now.’ But in a way it almost relieved the pressure. All we could do now was try to win two games and see what happened. There was no need to worry about collapsing and getting caught. We’d already collapsed and gotten caught.”
30
Götterdämmerung
WHILE GLAVINE WAS SEARCHING for his changeup in New York, Mussina was making his final start of the regular season in Baltimore.
The Yankees clubhouse was as loose as it ever is going into the final weekend. Mussina, even though he was pitching that night, paused for a while to help one of the coaches with a crossword. Joe Torre pushed his cap back on his head as he talked to the media before the game and wondered who he would let manage on Sunday. Traditionally, Torre has let his players run the team on the last day of the regular season with a playoff spot clinched, and he had just remembered that, once again, that would be the case.
On the day after the Yankees secured their postseason spot in Tampa, Mussina went to see Torre. He had been reading in the papers about Torre’s postseason pitching plans: Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and Mussina were the scheduled starters, unless Clemens’s elbow was still too tender for him to pitch. Clemens was insisting — as he had been for a month — that he was fine and ready to go, even though he hadn’t been in a game since he’d had to come out on Labor Day.
Mussina also knew that if the Yankees played Cleveland — as was likely unless they somehow caught the Red Sox — the series would be drawn out under the crazy new postseason schedule baseball had agreed to in order to accommodate television. Game One would be on Thursday, October 4, in Cleveland, Game Two on Friday, Game Three on Sunday in New York, Game Four on Monday, and Game Five back in Cleveland on Wednesday. The idea of two off-days in a five-game series was ludicrous, but that’s the way it was.
“I just want you to know I’m ready to go wherever, whenever you need me,” Mussina told Torre. “If you want me in the bullpen, I have no problem with that. If you want me to start, obviously, I’m ready to do that too. Whatever you need.”
Torre was both impressed and touched by Mussina’s gesture. Mussina was making a point: you don’t have to worry about my ego or my feelings being hurt; I will not make it tough for you no matter what you decide.
“That meant a lot,” Torre said, relaxing in the dugout in Baltimore. “I know he was hurt when I had to pull him from the rotation and by the way it came down. It was hard for me — hell, a guy gives you what he’s given us, and then you have to sit him down? That’s tough. For him to walk in and say, ‘If me being in the bullpen is the best thing for the team, put me in the bullpen’ — that says a lot about him. He just wants us to win. There aren’t a lot of guys with two hundred fifty wins who would walk into your office and say that.”
Mussina meant what he said. But he also wondered aloud while talking to Mike Borzello if Wang-Pettitte-Clemens-Mussina was the way to go.
“I was thinking that Wang hadn’t pitched that well on the road,” Mussina said. “So, what if Joe started Andy in Game One and either Roger, if he was healthy, or me in Game Two. That did several things: one, it set things up so that Andy would pitch a Game Five. Two, it meant Wang could pitch at home where he was more comfortable. Three, if it was me in Game Two, I’d always pitched pretty well against the Indians, and one of my best games all year had been in Cleveland. I thought it might set up better for everyone. Either way, I think we knew the guy Joe really wanted to throw twice if it came to that was Andy because he’d been so clutch in big games in the past.”
Torre had considered that scenario. But he liked the idea of Pettitte pitching in Game Two because the argument could be made that no other pitcher in history had won more Game Twos in postseason with his team down 1–0 than Pettitte. Wang had been his best pitcher all year, and pitching him in Game One gave Torre more options — Wang, Mussina, Pettitte — in Games Four and Five if it came to that.
Mussina was hoping to end the season that night with 251 wins for his career and twelve for 2007. He was less than spectacular, but Alex Rodriguez, who was capping off a monster season — fifty-four home runs and 156 RBI — homered and doubled early in the game, and Mussina had a 7–2 lead, with two outs in the fifth inning and Tike Redman on third base. Miguel Tejada hit a one-hop shot wide of third. Rodriguez tried to make a play on the ball and couldn’t, Tejada beating the throw as Redman scored.
“They scored it a hit, and it was a hit, no doubt,” Mussina said later. “But A-Rod almost made the play. If he does make it, the game’s a lot different.”
After that, Mussina just couldn’t get the third out. Aubrey Huff doubled to the gap in left-center to score Tejada; Melvin Mora singled Huff in; and Ramon Hernandez doubled to left to score Huff, making the score 7–6. Fortunately for Mussina, Hernandez foolishly tried to get to third on the throw to the plate and was thrown out to finally end the inning.
He left the game still leading, and the Yankees tacked on runs in the sixth and eighth. Then Mariano Rivera came in to wrap it up in the ninth, with the lead 9–6. Only this time he didn’t wrap it up. The Orioles loaded the bases with two outs, and Jay Payton cleared them with a game-tying triple. The Orioles won the game, with a run in the tenth, 10–9.
“I guess it would have been more frustrating if I’d been going for two fifty that night,” Mussina said. “But it was still a little bit upsetting. I mean, on the one hand, I didn’t pitch great. On the other, how often do you see Mo blow a three-run lead in the ninth? Close to never.
“But it happens. Mo has saved enough games for me through the years that I couldn’t really get on him for blowing one.” He smiled. “Even though I still can’t quite figure out how it happened.”
The loss finally allowed the Red Sox — who beat the Minnesota Twins that night — to wrap up the Eastern Division title. The American League playoff matchups were now set: the Yankees would open their Division Series in Cleveland; the Angels would go to Boston to play the Red Sox.
The National League wasn’t nearly as clear-cut. Only the Chicago Cubs had clinched a playoff spot as of Friday night. The Phillies and Mets were fighting it out in the East; the Arizona Diamondbacks had a one-game lead on the San Diego Padres in the West; and the Colorado Rockies were still alive for a wild-card berth, along with all four of the other teams.
Five teams playing for three spots. It promised to be a fascinating weekend.
THE NEW METS — the ones in second place with nothing to lose — snapped out of their lethargy very quickly on Saturday afternoon. Facing a pitcher who really didn’t belong in the major leagues — twenty-three-year-old rookie Chris Seddon, who was making his fourth big league start as a September call-up — the Mets finally got their offense on track, shelling Seddon from the mound in less than two innings and continuing t
o pile up runs against the Marlins bullpen.
It was 8–0 after three innings, and John Maine was cruising. He would end up pitching a one-hitter, and the Mets won their first laugher in a long time, 13–0.
Unfortunately, though, the game wasn’t all laughs.
It began in the third inning when Lastings Milledge hit a home run. Milledge had played pretty well since his call-up (.275 average, seven home runs, twenty-nine RBI in a part-time role), and his demeanor in the clubhouse had been markedly improved. But he and Jose Reyes were still in the habit of doing their dance outside the dugout whenever one of them got a big hit or hit a home run.
“To be honest, if they did that sort of thing when I first came up, they would go down at least once a game, every game,” Glavine said. “It’s one of the ways baseball has changed that isn’t good. In the ‘old days,’ that sort of behavior was policed by the fact that guys didn’t want to spend every game diving out of the way of pitches. Now, though, because the inside pitch is policed so tightly, you can behave like that and know you aren’t going to go down that often.
“If you want to know why hitters pose after home runs, it’s because baseball lets them. Once upon a time, you did that to a Bob Gibson, a Nolan Ryan, you better be diving for the dirt the second you stepped back in the box.
“It isn’t just our team by any means. But we’re from New York, which makes a lot of people resent us. We’re the defending Division champions so people want to show us they can play. We spent the entire season in first place — same thing, people want to bring their best against you. The last thing we need to be doing is giving people another reason, especially an emotional reason, to want to beat our butts.”
If Reyes and Milledge thought about that at all, it certainly hadn’t curtailed their act. They’d been spoken to by older players and by Randolph, and their response was, essentially, we’re just being ourselves. “That’s fine,” Glavine said. “You don’t want to stop people from having fun or being enthusiastic about playing the game. But maybe they could have done it inside the dugout.”
In the fifth, Milledge led off with another home run to make it 9–0. Reyes met him in the on-deck circle and they danced again. A moment later, Reyes doubled and moved to third on a wild pitch. Luis Castillo walked. That was it for Harvey Garcia, another September call-up who had come in to pitch.
As catcher Miguel Olivo walked to join manager Fredi Gonzales on the mound, he began jawing with Reyes, still upset about the Mets’ showboating. Reyes and Olivo are friends. Reyes thought Olivo was joking and said something along the lines of “Want to fight about it?”
The answer was yes. Olivo charged Reyes, and the benches emptied. When order was restored, Olivo was ejected.
Glavine was in the clubhouse when the fight broke out. With the game in hand, he had walked back there to look at some tape of the Marlins’ lineup to prepare for Sunday. He was sitting in the middle of the room in front of a tape machine when he heard a commotion coming from a nearby TV set that was tuned to the game.
“I looked up just in time to see Olivo running at Hosey throwing haymakers,” Glavine said. “I was like, ‘What is this about?’ Maybe there was a misunderstanding between the two of them, but there’s no doubt what had happened earlier had led to it.”
The scene didn’t thrill Glavine. “What is it about letting sleeping dogs lie?” he said. “You’ve got a team that’s playing out the string. The last thing we want them to do is come into Sunday with the idea that it’s a big game for them. There’s no doubt we riled them up, and the fight just added to it.”
If there was any doubt about how the Marlins felt, it was dispelled in their clubhouse after the game. “Fuck the Mets,” Hanley Ramirez said. “I’d play tomorrow if I had a broken hand.”
Glavine didn’t know what Ramirez had said as he drove home, but he had a feeling the next day would be difficult. There was good news later on though: the Phillies, perhaps feeling the pressure of now being the hunted team, had lost to the Nationals. That meant the Mets and Phillies were tied for first place with one game to play.
If they both won or lost on Sunday, there would be a one-game playoff in Philadelphia on Monday. If one won and the other lost on Sunday, the winner would be the Eastern Division champion.
“We have to win,” Glavine said. “The rest we can’t control. We control our own fate again. If we win on Sunday, the worst thing that can happen to us is that we play on Monday.”
He didn’t even want to think about the alternative.
SUNDAY DAWNED CLEAR AND COOL, as gorgeous a day to play baseball as you could ask for. Glavine had slept well after his sister Debbie had made Chicken Parmesan and pasta for dinner. Chris, Amber, Peyton, and Mason had flown in later in the evening to be there for the game Sunday — a change from their original plans to stay home for the weekend.
“Once the game became what it became, there was no way they were going to stay home,” Glavine said. “I knew that.”
Normally Glavine would have driven to the park on a Sunday morning with Billy Wagner. But the team was going to leave for Philadelphia after the game if there was a playoff, and Chris and the kids were going to leave for Atlanta. Glavine’s car was chock-full of stuff he was going to send to Atlanta with them, so he had to drive in alone.
“The plan if we lost was for me to go back and pack up the rest of the house on Monday,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. I was thinking we were either going to Philly or to the playoffs.”
Glavine pulled into the parking lot and took a deep breath. He could feel his nerves jangling, nothing unusual, especially before a game like this one. “You’ve done this a million times,” he told himself. “You can do it again.”
He had, in fact, pitched in a game exactly like this one for the Braves fourteen years earlier. They had gone into the last day of the season tied for first place in the NL West with the San Francisco Giants.
“We won; they lost,” Glavine said, as he pulled on the white uniform top with the blue “47” on the back over his head one more time. “I feel as if I know how to handle a game like this.”
The Mets clubhouse was understandably quiet before the game. None of the usual card or chess games that often took place. Players talked quietly, read newspapers, or watched TV. Glavine, who hadn’t bothered to shave in the morning — “too lazy,” he said — sat on the couch in the middle of the clubhouse watching the replay of a boxing match on TV. His body language was a little more tense than usual: instead of sitting back with his legs crossed, as he normally would, he was leaning forward, as if something was at stake for him in the boxing match.
“No question I was feeling nerves,” he said later. “But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
He went through his usual pregame routine and then headed to the bullpen with Rick Peterson and Dave Racaniello to warm up. Everything felt fine.
“Physically I felt good,” he said. “My pitches felt good coming out of my hand. The only seed of doubt was still about the changeup. I just wasn’t sure about it. I’d pitched a lot of games before where I hadn’t been sure about it. The thing was, this was a game where I would rather have been sure.”
All the Mets were now aware of Hanley Ramirez’s postgame comments on Saturday. In fact, someone had taken a newspaper clipping, complete with a photo of the brawl, and hung it on a wall in the runway leading from the clubhouse to the dugout. Underneath the Ramirez quote was a response: “Bad Mistake to Wake Up the Sleeping Mutt… Someone Pays Today.”
A similar message had been posted in the same spot the day before. It had said, “We’ve Come Too Far to Quit Now.”
The atmosphere was electric as the teams went through the last of their pregame rituals. “I’m so nervous I don’t know if I can even watch the game,” Scott Schoeneweis said. “I can handle the one-third of an inning that I’m in the game because I stop thinking. It’s the watching that kills me.”
Glavine wouldn’t have to wat
ch. As always, he was the last player out of the dugout and the last player introduced when Alex Anthony introduced the Mets defense: “And on the mound for the Mets… Number forty-seven… Tom Glavine!”
He held the last syllable of “Glavine” for a couple of extra beats, and the crowd reacted. The ovation for Glavine was longer and louder than for anyone else. He had come a long way from the boos of the first two years.
“You’re trying not to pay attention to anything but getting ready to pitch at that point,” he said. “But you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t hear the crowd. I noticed it, but I had to really make sure I was focused on the task at hand.”
Ramon Castro was catching because Paul Lo Duca’s knee had flared up on him again. The day was perfect: seventy-one degrees, breezy, with 54,457 in the old park ready to push the Mets across the finish line. Glavine looked around for an instant, taking in the scene. He was about to start the 669th game of his big league career.
Ramirez stepped in to lead off. The noise was almost deafening as Glavine threw a fastball that Ramirez fouled off for strike one. The noise got louder. Glavine came back with a cutter, and Ramirez fouled it off again. Now it was 0–2, and the crowd was already on its feet, two pitches into the game.
Glavine wasted a changeup outside and then threw a curve that Ramirez checked his swing on. Glavine asked home-plate umpire Joe West to check with Ed Rapuano at first base to see if Ramirez had gone around.
“I was hoping,” he said later. “I didn’t really think he had swung.”
Living on the Black Page 49