Living on the Black

by John Feinstein

  There was also the issue of the fallout after the Marlins game. That could have been handled. All Glavine would have had to do was say at the press conference announcing his signing that September 30 had been the most disappointing day of his baseball career, and he was coming back in 2008 to finish the job that hadn’t been finished in 2006 or 2007. He might have heard some boos the first time he took the mound at Shea Stadium, but they would have turned to cheers as soon as he started getting people out.

  Choice number one — again — was Atlanta. The Braves had shaken up their front office after the 2007 season. John Schuerholz, after seventeen years as general manager, was named team president. His longtime assistant and GM-in-waiting, Frank Wren, was promoted to take his place. That meant Wren, with Schuerholz’s approval, would be making personnel decisions.

  “John is going to be involved,” Glavine said. “He has to be. You don’t give someone the keys to the car for the first time and not supervise the way he drives.”

  Glavine and Schuerholz had never had the rapprochement after the 2002 negotiations that he and Kasten had been able to reach. But they had talked after Schuerholz’s autobiography, and Glavine hoped that any hard feelings were in the past. His first hint that his hopes might be realized came the day after the filing deadline for free agency, when Wren asked Gregg Clifton to let Glavine know the Braves were very interested in signing him.

  “We’ll see what happens,” Glavine said that week. “I don’t think Frank would have called Gregg if they weren’t serious, but there’s no reason to get excited until there’s an actual offer.”

  A week later there was an offer: one year, $8 million. If Glavine wanted to negotiate with the Mets or the Nationals, he might have been able to get more, but he wasn’t going to do that. He happily accepted the Braves’ offer, and on November 16 he was officially welcomed back to Atlanta.

  He would finish his career in a Braves uniform. He had proved, once and for all, that you can go home again.

  Epilogue

  ON DECEMBER 13, 2007, former U.S. senator George Mitchell finally made public his long-awaited report on steroid use in baseball, twenty-one months after MLB commissioner Bud Selig had asked him to undertake the project.

  Neither Mussina nor Glavine was among the eighty-nine names that appeared in Mitchell’s report. Glavine had used the supplement creatine for a couple of years but had stopped using it when baseball began drug testing in 2003.

  “It was cleared by everyone, but I didn’t want to take any chances at all,” Glavine said. “Every time someone tests positive, their excuse is that they were using a legal supplement and got a bad batch. I didn’t want to be the one guy who was taking a legal supplement, did get a bad batch, and had his name sullied forever. It just wasn’t worth the risk, no matter how small.”

  Glavine said the creatine, which he took after starts in season and occasionally during his preseason training, definitely helped him. “I felt a noticeable difference,” he said. “I recovered much more quickly from physical stress when I was on it. I would drink it in the car on the way home after I had pitched, and I was far more able to do my off-day exercises than when I wasn’t taking it.”

  In the end, though, he didn’t think even a 1 percent risk of blowing up his chances for the Hall of Fame was worth it.

  Mussina still took creatine. “I was told categorically that it was legal and taking it would never lead to a positive test,” he said. “So far, that’s proven to be true. I still take it, and I’ve never tested positive.”

  Like Glavine, Mussina could feel the difference when he took creatine, which he only did during the season.

  Neither man was surprised by what was in the Mitchell Report or who was in the Mitchell Report. “The only real surprise to me were some of the names not in the report,” Glavine said. “I think we all know there are guys out there who took steroids who weren’t named. There wasn’t anyone in there who I went, ‘Oh my God, no way.’ ”

  The most prominent Met named in the report was Paul Lo Duca, who signed a free-agent contract with the Washington Nationals when the Mets had no interest in re-signing him. Glavine considered Lo Duca a friend, but, like most baseball people, knew there were far more users than the public suspected.

  Mussina felt the same way. The two most prominent Yankee names in the report were Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, both teammates of his in 2007. Clemens’s miraculous pitching in his midforties — considerably better than he had pitched in his late thirties — was viewed by many with skepticism, in spite of all the stories about his extraordinary workout regimen.

  Earlier in the season, long before the Mitchell Report became public, Ron Darling, who had been on the Oakland Athletics “Bash Brothers” teams led by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire in the early 1990s, explained the fallacy of the “he works out like crazy; therefore, he doesn’t use steroids” theory.

  “When I was with the Mets in the ’80s, we would come in at the end of a game, eat the postgame meal, and talk about where we were going that night,” he said. “When I got to the A’s in ’92, guys would come in after the game, change into a T-shirt and shorts, and go down to the weight room for an hour. Then they would come back the next day and do it again — sometimes twice — before the game.

  “What people don’t understand is that steroids don’t just make you big, they allow you to work much harder in order to get big. It’s about recovery. There is no way you can work weights that hard two or three times a day and play baseball without help, without something inside you that allows your body to recover so you can keep up that workout regimen.”

  Like many others, Mussina wasn’t that surprised to see Clemens named in the report. He was surprised to see Pettitte named but not stunned.

  One thing the report made clear, in addition to the names, is that more and more players (in all sports, not just baseball) are using human growth hormone (HGH) as their drug of choice, in large part because it cannot be detected by urinalysis, the current method used to test players in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League. Only through a blood test is it possible to detect HGH, and even that is not infallible.

  “I think there are too many questions about blood testing to start doing it,” Glavine said. “How long do you keep the blood? Who gets to see the test? How reliable is it? I just think they have to come up with some kind of reliable urinalysis test for it as soon as possible.”

  Mussina disagreed. “If you really are serious about stopping guys, I don’t think there’s any choice,” he said. “I know there would be issues and questions, but you have to thrash that all out between the union and the owners. If they wait, then this thing is far from over.”

  Clearly, it is far from over.

  PLAYING BASEBALL will be over for Glavine and Mussina soon. Both went into 2008 thinking it would be their last season — Glavine in his twenty-second year in the majors, Mussina in his eighteenth.

  It is worth noting that Glavine honestly believed that 2007 would be his final year as a pitcher. He never completely closed the door on coming back in 2008, but he said repeatedly, “Once I do what I’m trying to do [this was in the days of the Number That Could Not Be Named], I think I’ll probably want to hang it up.”

  He did what he was trying to do — and more — but could not resist the urge to return to Atlanta for one more season. “Let’s face it,” he said. “I have the rest of my life to not pitch.”

  Mussina’s future was perhaps a little more complicated, though he insisted it wasn’t. He had one year left on his contract for $11.5 million.

  “I’m not going to be one of these players who announces his retirement five different times. But right now, I don’t see myself pitching after this year. I’m not going to be close enough to three hundred, even if I have a good year, that I’m going to want to come back for at least two more years and, realistically, three more years.

  “In 2006, I pitched about as well as I could have hoped to pitch, and
I won fifteen games. If I win fifteen games a year — stay healthy, pitch well, all of that — for the next three-years, I would still be five wins short of three hundred, and I’d be forty-two years old. What’s more, my older son will be a teenager by then, and my younger one is only a few years behind. I don’t want to come home just when they’re saying, ‘See ya, Dad.’

  “I’ve had a good career. I’m lucky to be in a position that whenever I retire, I don’t have to do anything. I can pick and choose what I want to do or what I don’t want to do. If I have a great year, that might make it harder to walk away. But my plan right now is to walk away, and when the calls come the next spring from teams desperate for pitching, my answer — even if I’m tempted — will be no.”

  Whenever Glavine finishes, he will no doubt remain in baseball. He can have a job in TV the day he retires, and with TBS located in Atlanta he could work for them and never leave home. Or he might do one game a week on the road for ESPN or Fox. “Just nothing that means I travel all the time,” he said. “I don’t see myself back in uniform because of the travel.”

  But a front-office job would not be out of the question somewhere down the line. In any event, Glavine will remain around baseball.

  Not Mussina. “The hardest part will be that there’s no gradual pulling away,” he said. “You just cut the cord, and it’s over. You aren’t a player anymore. That will be hard; I know that. But I don’t think I’ll have any problem just hanging out at home, at least for a while. Could I be a pretty good pitching coach or a manager? I’d like to think so. But it isn’t what I want to do.”

  He smiled. “The Little League World Series is right here in town [Williamsport] every August. I’ll go do TV for that for ten days and sleep in my own bed every night. That will be enough.”

  Time will tell for both men. If 2008 is their last season as pitchers, each can walk away from the game — as difficult as that will be — knowing that he got everything he could possibly get from the talent he was given. Neither ever came up short on effort.

  “I think all of us are the same in one sense,” Mussina said. “When we’re kids and we’re playing the game strictly for fun, we never seriously think we’ll pitch in the major leagues. We dream it, but we don’t really think it will happen. I grew up in a small town; I know Tom did too. We both loved the game and wanted to play it for as long as we could, as well as we could.

  “Neither one of us ever imagined we would pitch as long as we have, get paid anywhere close to what we’ve been paid, or pitch as well as we’ve both pitched.”

  In fact, when Glavine wrote his autobiography in 1995 at the age of twenty-nine after the Braves won the World Series, he wrote, “I can see myself pitching until I’m thirty-five but not beyond that.”

  When Mussina signed his six-year contract with the Yankees that would keep him in the majors until he was thirty-seven, a friend he had grown up with in Montoursville pointed out to him that he had said he wouldn’t pitch much past thirty and certainly not past thirty-five.

  “I know that,” Mussina joked. “But I never thought I’d be this good.”

  Glavine and Mussina are still out there, grinding through another off-season, and another spring training, and another marathon season because they love what they do and they can still do it well.

  They are pitchers. Even when they stop pitching, they will still be pitchers. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, just under eight thousand men had pitched in the major leagues through the end of the 2007 season.

  Among them, Glavine ranks twenty-first in all-time victories. Mussina is forty-fifth.

  Put simply, they are two of the best pitchers of all time. And they aren’t quite done yet.

  Acknowledgments

  AS MIKE MUSSINA AND I wrapped up our final interview for this book last December, I thanked him for all the time he had given me during 2007 and for his patience in answering all my questions, even in what was the most difficult season of his baseball career.

  “I know it wasn’t always fun for you,” I said. “At the very least I think I learned a lot about pitching.”

  Mussina gave me one of his “tell me something I don’t already know” smiles and said, “Two guys with five hundred fifty-three wins should know something about pitching, right?”

  Indeed. Mussina has won 250 games in seventeen major league seasons; Tom Glavine has won 303 in twenty-one. They both know how to pitch and how to explain what goes into pitching, which is why I asked them to be the subjects of this book. They agreed, and even though each went through what may have been the most emotionally charged season of his career, neither backed away from any questions; both were remarkably patient; and, yes, I think I learned a lot about pitching, especially for someone whose career as a baseball player didn’t last a second beyond high school.

  There really is no way for me to adequately thank Tom and Mike for all the time they gave me. The best I can hope for is that this book is a reflection of how they feel about what they do, and, in spite of the ups and downs of the season, something they will look back on with at least some fondness.

  Mike and Tom made this book happen. But they, and I, needed a lot of help.

  In the Mets’ clubhouse I have to thank Willie Randolph and Rick Peterson, first and foremost, for all of their time and patience. Thanks also to Omar Minaya, Billy Wagner, Aaron Heilman, Paul Lo Duca, Shawn Green, and Scott Schoeneweis.

  I told Jay Horwitz, who has been the Mets’ PR guy since the beginning of time, that I might dedicate the book to him. I lied. But Jay was helpful enough to deserve serious consideration from beginning to end, in what was a difficult season. I can’t thank him enough for putting up with me, dating back to our first meeting in 1983. Additional thanks to Ethan Wilson and Shannon Forde from Jay’s staff.

  On the Yankees’ side, I owe huge thanks to Joe Torre, whose ability to find time for everyone who asks for it and make it look easy constantly amazes me. The team will miss him in 2008; the New York media — with all due respect to Joe Girardi — will miss him more. Thanks also to Brian Cashman, Jorge Posada, Wil Nieves, Alex Rodriguez, Ron Guidry, Don Mattingly, and Joe Kerrigan. Extra special thanks to Mike Borzello, Mussina’s best friend on the team, who spent a lot of time helping me understand Mike, the Yankees, and pitching.

  Jason Zillo walked into one of the hardest jobs in baseball — Yankees’ PR director in 2007 — and had the added bonus of some guy who wasn’t really covering the team hanging around most of the year. He could not have been more gracious or helpful. Thanks also to his assistant, Michael Margolis.

  Obviously, I talked to a lot of baseball people from a lot of baseball teams, and I’m grateful to them for their time too. Among them are: Bobby Cox, Bill Acree, Tony LaRussa, Jim Leyland, Ned Yost, Leo Mazzone, Frank Wren, Mike Scioscia, Bud Black, Doug Melvin, and my old friend Stan Kasten, who was funny, forthright, honest, and, as Glavine likes to say, “typical Stan” throughout the project. Thanks also to players on other teams: Jamie Moyer, Aaron Boone, Ken Griffey Jr., David Wells, Paul Maholm, Mike Cameron, and, of course, John Smoltz, who himself is more than worthy of a book on pitching. Thanks also to ex-pitchers Don Sutton and Ron Darling, who know both the pitchers I wrote about — and pitching — as well as anyone.

  I have known Phyllis Merhige and Rich Levin from MLB since 1992, when I did my first baseball book. They helped me greatly then, and they both helped me greatly again in 2007. They’re very good at what they do and are terrific friends. Thanks also to Mike Port, who patiently answered all my questions about umpires and umpiring. In 1992 one of the people who helped me most was Andy Dolich, then of the Oakland Athletics. Somehow, I didn’t thank him then. So, fifteen years later, I thank him now, if only for putting up with me for the past twenty-five years as a friend.

  Thanks also to Bill Stetka in Baltimore and John Dever in Washington, who went out of their way to help me on a project that had little to do with their teams. I’m also grateful for the help I received from Warren Mill
er, Greg Casterioto, Mike Swanson, Tim Mead, Mike Herman, Kevin Behan, and my old pal Rick Vaughn.

  I spent a lot of time from spring training to season’s end in press rooms and press boxes. I was, as Marty Noble of MLB.com pointed out to me, an adjunct member of the New York chapter of the baseball writers for one season. The list of writers and broadcasters who welcomed me to that group is a lengthy one, and I will undoubtedly fail to mention people here who should be mentioned. But I thank all of the writers for their hospitality to an outsider, notably: Jay Cohen, Mike Vaccaro, Joel Sherman, Wally Matthews, Mark Herrmann, Kat O’Brien, Adam Rubin, Bill Madden, Roger Rubin, John Harper, Ben Shpigel, Peter Boddy, Tyler Kepner, Jack Curry, Dave Anderson, George Vecsey, Ian O’Connor, Bob Klapisch, and the aforementioned Marty Noble.

  On the broadcast side, the list is equally lengthy: Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, Howie Rose, Tom McCarthy, Ed Coleman, John Sterling, Suzyn Waldman, Michael Kay, Ken Singleton, Chip Caray, and the always entertaining Sweeney Murdy. Thanks again to my local guys: Joe Angel, Fred Manfra, Bob Carpenter, Dave Jaegler, and Charlie Slowes, for pregame meal entertainment and stories. Thanks also to Ted Robinson, who has been a baseball/tennis friend for many years, and to Skip Caray, who is still as good a baseball listen as anyone out there. Special thanks also to Bill Shannon, Jordan Sprechman, and Howie Karpin.

  And then, of course, there are the usual suspects, starting, as always, with my agent Esther Newberg, who gritted her teeth and put up with a book that was about a hated Yankee and a not-as-hated Met. Esther believes the Red Sox should win the World Series every year from here to eternity, and the way things are going, they might. Her patience is often tried working with me, and, when it (often) fails, Kari Stuart usually picks up the pieces.

  Michael Pietsch has proven himself as an editor and a friend more times than I can count. He even went along with this title although not quite sure what it meant. Thanks also to Michael’s many assistants: Eve Rabinovits, Vanessa Kehren, and, gone but not forgotten, Stacey Brody. Michael and I and everyone at Little, Brown are fortunate to have Heather Fain, Heather Rizzo, Katherine Molina, and Marlena Bittner working in the publicity department. Holly Wilkinson is gone but also not forgotten. She would kill me if it were otherwise.