Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

Neither did Rapuano. It was 2–2.

  The next two pitches may very well have defined the day for Glavine and the Mets. Glavine threw two changeups, both good ones — “nasty pitches,” he said — and Ramirez laid off both of them. Either could have been a strike. Neither, in West’s mind, was. Ramirez walked.

  A little bell went off in Glavine’s head, not so much because he had walked Ramirez after being up 0–2 but because of the way he had walked him.

  “He doesn’t take a lot of walks,” Glavine said. “He goes up swinging. It’s the last day of the season, and you’re facing a team in last place. What you expect is that they come up hacking at everything because they’ve all got planes to catch and they want to get out of Dodge. His approach to that at bat was the kind you see in a big game — he really worked at it. That told me that these guys weren’t here just to get it over with and go home. They had come to play.”

  A sleeping mutt had been awakened on Saturday. But it wasn’t the Mets.

  As Dan Uggla came up, Glavine happened to glance in the direction of the Marlins dugout. What he saw gave him a little more reason to be worried: every Marlin was on the top step. He had expected to see all of his teammates on the top step — their season was at stake — but not the Marlins. Not on September 30 with a record of 70–91. Okay then, he thought, this won’t be easy. Back to work.

  Uggla hit a slow ground ball to Castillo on a 1–1 fastball. He forced Ramirez at second, but the ball wasn’t hit hard enough to turn a double play. One on, one out, and Jeremy Hermida up. The crowd was still loud.

  Glavine had thrown four changeups to the first two hitters — none for a strike, even though the last two to Ramirez had been, in his view, good pitches. He didn’t want to fall behind Hermida with Miguel Cabrera on deck. He threw three fastballs to get to 2–1, then decided to try a changeup. “The pitch was down,” he said. “He hit a ground ball, which was what I wanted. But he hit it in the hole.”

  Specifically, he hit it into right field. Uggla raced to third. First crisis of the day: runners on first and third with Cabrera, a hitter who had already driven in 118 runs, at the plate.

  “Best-case scenario at that point, I’m thinking, ‘Get a ground ball, and get two and get out of this right now,’ ” Glavine said. “Worst-case, I’m thinking, ‘If it’s one-nothing, we’re in good shape.’ ”

  It became 1–0 on his second pitch to Cabrera, who singled hard up the middle, a line drive that scored Uggla and moved Hermida to second.

  That brought up Cody Ross, a young outfielder who’d had a solid second half of the season. “Decent hitter,” Glavine said. “But I’m thinking as long as I don’t give him anything middle in [of the plate], he can’t really hurt me.”

  He started with a changeup, which bounced. Back to the fastball. On 2–1, Ross sliced a ball down the right-field line. The ball looked like it might go foul, but it didn’t, bouncing just inside the right-field line. Milledge, positioned more toward right-center against a right-handed hitter, chased it. Hermida scored, with Cabrera following him. Milledge got to the ball and threw home. The ball arrived in plenty of time to beat the slow-footed Cabrera, but it was well wide of the plate. Castro, trying to grab it and swipe-tag Cabrera, bobbled it, and the ball dribbled to the left of home plate. Seeing the throw go home, Ross had rounded second and was heading to third. Glavine, who had been backing up the plate, spotted him and scrambled to pick the ball up after it squirted away from Castro.

  “I had him by fifteen feet — at least,” Glavine said. “But I was a little off-balance when I picked up the ball, and I made a bad throw.”

  He threw it past David Wright into left field. Instead of being an easy out, Ross scrambled to his feet and scored, while Moises Alou retrieved the errant throw. Suddenly, shockingly, the Marlins led 4–0. The silence was deafening.

  “I can’t say I was in shock at that point,” Glavine said. “Stunned, yeah, probably, but not shocked because it wasn’t as if they were hitting line drives all over the place. I couldn’t believe we were down four-nothing just like that. But we hadn’t even been up yet. Dontrelle [Willis] wasn’t having a good year, so there was no reason we couldn’t score runs on him. I had the bases clean. I needed to stop the bleeding right there.”

  He couldn’t. He worked the count to 2–2 on Mike Jacobs, a left-handed batter the Marlins had gotten from the Mets in the Carlos Delgado trade two years earlier. On 2–2, Glavine threw a slider off the outside corner, and Jacobs reached out and blooped it over Reyes’s head into left for another base hit.

  “Now I’m starting to wonder if they are ever going to hit a ball at someone,” Glavine said. “I was frustrated and shaken up.”

  It showed when he walked catcher Matt Treanor on five pitches. Peterson trotted to the mound. Arm on Glavine’s shoulder, he told him he just needed to take a little break and get out of the inning. “It was nothing mechanical,” Glavine said. “It was just, ‘You’re okay; just throw a good pitch now, and we’ve got nine at bats,’ ” he said. “I knew I had run out of time to get my act together.”

  In fact, Jorge Sosa was warming in the Mets bullpen. This wasn’t one of those days when Randolph could afford to let Glavine work through early trouble or when he was going to worry about saving the bullpen. This was all hands on deck. Sosa was first up.

  Glavine wasn’t feeling great about his changeup so he started Alejandro De Aza with fastballs. De Aza hit the second one into left field for another hit. The bases were loaded with Willis, a good hitter, coming to the plate. Carlos Delgado trotted to the back of the mound and picked up the resin bag.

  “Come on, Tommy, one good pitch and we’re out of this,” he said.

  Glavine knew Delgado wasn’t there to give him a pep talk. He was stalling to give Sosa time to get ready. “I knew if I didn’t get Dontrelle, I was done,” Glavine said. “Willie couldn’t wait any longer for me to find some momentum.”

  Glavine got ahead of Willis 1–2 — the first hitter he had gotten two strikes on since Hernandez. He had thrown three fastballs. Against most pitchers, Glavine would have thrown another fastball. But Willis was a legitimate big league hitter, and Glavine treated him as such. “The right pitch was a changeup,” he said. “He’d seen three fastballs. If I put the change in the right place, he should swing early and swing over it, and that should be it.”

  Even though he knew the changeup was the correct pitch, there was doubt in his mind about whether he could throw it right. He had already bounced a couple. “I tried to put a little extra into it,” he said. “Instead of following through and down off the hill, I actually pushed it, trying to make sure I had enough on it. I just pushed the ball out of my hand, and the result was a terrible pitch.”

  The ball never broke down or, for that matter, broke at all. It went straight at Willis, who tried to back out of the way. For a second it appeared Glavine might have gotten lucky, and the ball had hit the bat. Joe West — correctly as it turned out — didn’t see it that way. He ruled that Willis had been hit by the pitch and sent him to first base, as Jacobs jogged in with the fifth run.

  Glavine saw Randolph leaving the dugout, even while Castro was still arguing with West that the ball had hit Willis’s bat. He felt sick to his stomach. As soon as Randolph crossed the first-base line, his day was over. There would be no chance to regroup, no chance to make up for what had happened. He was done.

  As soon as he handed the ball to Randolph, the boos started. They followed him all the way to the dugout. Nineteen minutes after he had been cheered to the skies, boos rained down from all sides.

  “I understood it,” he said later. “I wasn’t expecting a standing ovation.”

  That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. He sat in the dugout for the rest of the inning while Sosa allowed two of his inherited runners to score. When Sosa finally got the third out, the entire team heard boos as the players came to the dugout trailing 7–0.

  Glavine walked up the runway to the clubhouse past the sign about wa
king the sleeping mutt. He walked in and collapsed on the couch, where a couple of hours earlier he had watched the boxing match, and stared at the TV.

  Wagner, still inside, said something to him. Glavine didn’t really hear it. He stared at the television. He really didn’t see it. Everything had gone blank.

  THE METS AND MARLINS had started playing at 1:11. The Yankees and Orioles were starting their finale in Baltimore that day at 1:35. Joe Torre had made Jorge Posada manager for the day, and he had made Mike Mussina the pitching coach.

  Shortly before 1:30, Mussina walked into the dugout and glanced out toward right field where the out-of-town scores were flashed.

  He looked at the Marlins-Mets score and saw a “7” next to “FLA” on the board.

  “What?” he said out loud. “They scored seven in the first? Is that a mistake?”

  Someone told him it was no mistake. “Glavine was pitching,” Mussina said, still speaking to no one and everyone. “Glavine gave up seven in the first? I can’t believe that.”

  All around Major League Baseball, that was the response as the score was posted. As the Phillies took the field for their 1:35 start with the Nationals, a huge roar went up in Citizens Bank Park’s sellout crowd of 44,865. The Phillies glanced around to see what the commotion was about, and there it was on the scoreboard: Florida 7, New York 0.

  “How much do you think it helped those guys to see we’d given up seven in the first,” Glavine said later. “They were playing with house money before a pitch was thrown.”

  That first pitch was thrown by Jamie Moyer, who was going for his fourteenth win of the season and the 230th of his career. For Moyer, who had grown up a Phillies fan, this day was a dream come true: a chance to pitch the Phillies into the playoffs before a wild, sellout crowd. Glavine’s nightmare made Moyer’s dream even better than he had dared imagine.

  Back in New York, the Mets tried gamely to get something going against Willis, whose 5.20 ERA for the season had to give them some hope.

  Willis was hardly dominant. After Jose Reyes — whose batting average had dropped to .280 — had flied to right to start the first inning, Luis Castillo doubled. David Wright also flied out, but Carlos Beltran dribbled a ball in front of the plate and beat the throw for an infield single. Willis then threw a wild pitch with Moises Alou at the plate, and it was 7–1. The crowd stirred. Alou blooped a single to right, and Delgado was hit on the hand by a pitch. The bases were loaded. Willis was all over the place. An extra base hit by Castro, and the Mets could be right back in the game.

  Willis fell behind 2–0, and Castro looked for a fastball. He got it, and the ball flew off his bat, headed toward the left-field fence. The crowd screeched. In the clubhouse, Glavine, who had come out of his trance as the inning developed, almost jumped off the couch.

  “I thought he’d gotten it,” he said. “I thought we were right back in the game.”

  But Castro hadn’t quite gotten it. As the ball got closer to the fence, it began to die. It settled, finally, in Cody Ross’s glove on the warning track. Glavine sat down with a thud. In the press box, public relations director Jay Horwitz, who had been following the ball through his binoculars, slammed them on the desk in front of him in frustration. In a sense, he spoke for all Mets fans at that moment.

  That turned out to be the Mets’ best chance. In the third, Willis walked the bases loaded with two outs, and manager Fredi Gonzales, again showing that he was taking the game very seriously, yanked him. Logan Kensing came in and got Lo Duca — pinch-hitting for Orlando Hernandez, who had come in to pitch in the top of the inning — to tap back to the mound to end the inning.

  The only hope left really was the Nationals. The Phillies had taken a 1–0 lead in the first when Jimmy Rollins, of course, singled, stole second, stole third, and scored on a Chase Utley sacrifice fly. They extended the lead to 3–0 in the third before the Nationals got one back in the fourth. In the sixth, Moyer tired. Ronnie Belliard singled and, with one out, Dmitri Young also singled.

  Phillies manager Charlie Manuel — whose job was no longer in jeopardy — was taking no chances. He brought in Tom Gordon, normally his eighth-inning pitcher. In the press box at Shea, a feed of the Phillies game was on a TV in the back row. The two games were now both in the sixth inning, the Phillies and Nats having caught up, since the first inning in New York had taken forty-three minutes. The Marlins were leading 8–1, and people crowded around the TV to see if the Nats could rally.

  They couldn’t. Gordon got Austin Kearns to hit a ground ball up the middle, which was scooped by Utley, who stepped on second and threw to first for a double play. The Phillies got two more in the sixth and another in the seventh on Ryan Howard’s forty-seventh home run of the year and took a 6–1 lead in the eighth.

  The Mets could do nothing with the Marlins bullpen. The outs dwindled. In the clubhouse, Glavine had gone through several different emotions: He had been angry. “I blew it. I cost my team the season. I had the ball in my hands, and I dropped it.” Then he became analytical. “I sat there and went through every batter. If I get a call on Hernandez, if Uggla’s ball is hit a little harder, if Hermida’s grounder goes at someone.… The only really hard-hit ball was Cabrera. The one truly awful pitch had been the changeup to Dontrelle. The results were terrible, but I hadn’t been that bad. Put it this way: I’ve pitched worse, but I’ve never had a worse result at a worse time.”

  He began preparing himself for what he knew was coming after the game. Billy Wagner would point out that twenty-five guys had blown the pennant, that it had taken a team effort to lose a seven-game lead in seventeen games. But it was Glavine who would now be the poster boy for the collapse. “I knew,” he said, “that I was going to have to wear it. I was going to have to answer the questions. The only thing comparable in my career had been in ’92 in Atlanta, when I got knocked out of Game Six of the playoffs in the second inning. That night I really got hit hard. But even that was different. We were still tied three-three. We had another game to play. After a while, watching what was going on in Philly, it was apparent we weren’t going to have another game to play.”

  He thought about the day, about his family sitting in the stands, and, remarkably, began to feel a little better. “I knew how disappointing it was for them and for everyone,” he said. “But at moments like that, you almost find yourself rationalizing. It’s still just a baseball game. It was the most disappointing baseball game of my life. But I still had a wonderful life and a wonderful family. The world wasn’t ending. The day sucked, but my life didn’t.”

  In the eighth inning, Horwitz came into the clubhouse to begin to prepare for the postgame. He asked Glavine how he wanted to meet the media. “I just thought I’d stand by my locker like I usually do and talk,” Glavine said.

  Horwitz suggested he come into the interview room next door after Randolph had finished. The place was swarming with media, and this way he could get everything done at once.

  “Whatever you say, Jay,” Glavine said.

  He wasn’t going to argue. “Either way, it wasn’t going to be fun,” he said.

  The Mets came up in the ninth needing seven runs to tie. The Nationals were coming up in the ninth in Philadelphia. Marlon Anderson, who had sparked so many rallies with pinch hits late in the season, led off, pinch-hitting for Aaron Heilman. He popped to Ramirez. Reyes, now hearing boos whenever he came to the plate, grounded meekly to second base.

  The Mets were down to one last out. Luis Castillo came up to face Kevin Gregg, the Marlins’ sixth pitcher. Those who were left in the stadium tried bravely to conjure one last “Let’s Go, Mets” chant. It faded quickly. Castillo swung at a 1–2 fastball for strike three.

  At 4:31 p.m. the Mets’ season was over: Marlins 8, Mets 1. Four minutes later, while the players were still shuffling silently into the clubhouse, Phillies closer Brett Myers froze Wily Mo Pena with a rising fastball for strike three in south Philadelphia.

  Phillies 6, Nationals 1.

  P
hillies 89–73, Mets 88–74.

  It was over. The 2007 Mets, like the once-mighty gods of Götterdämmerung, the final opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, had been destroyed.

  31

  Into the Twilight

  TOM GLAVINE WAS DRESSED in a green shirt and blue jeans when he followed Willie Randolph into the interview room at a few minutes before five. He’d had three hours to think about dealing with this moment, had thought about all the questions he would face and the answers he would give in response.

  It was the very first question that set the tone.

  “Tom,” someone asked, “how devastating is this?”

  Glavine visibly flinched. He was not, under any circumstances, going to sit in front of the media and get weepy eyed. That wasn’t him. He was the stoic New Englander. Never let them see you sweat. Beyond that, he simply couldn’t bring himself to attach the word devastating to baseball.

  And so, he said that.

  “Devastation is for much more important things in life than baseball,” he said. “I wouldn’t use that word.”

  Glavine’s press conference, like Randolph’s, was being broadcast live on WFAN, the Mets’ flagship station. Thousands of fans — most of them pretty close to devastated — were sitting in their cars trying to get out of the parking lot when they heard Glavine, sounding cool, calm, and collected, say that he wasn’t devastated.

  The screaming and yelling that “he doesn’t even care” began before Glavine had left the interview room.

  Weeks later, Glavine understood the fans’ reaction but also believed his answer had been misunderstood.

  “I think once you become a parent, your entire outlook on life changes,” he said. “To me, devastating is finding out that a neighbor’s eight-year-old is going to lose a leg to cancer. Hurricane Katrina was devastating. Devastating to me involves life and death or the health of a child.

  “If the question had been ‘Tom, how disappointing is this?’ I think my answer would have been something like ‘I’ve never had a more disappointing day on a baseball field.’ So maybe I should have said that right then and there. Because it was. I mean, I was beyond pissed; I was upset, I was angry, I was frustrated. But I just wasn’t going to let someone put the word devastated in my mouth.”