THE YANKEES WAITED A FEW DAYS before deciding whether to put Mike Mussina on the disabled list. They had this luxury because baseball rules allow a team to place someone on the DL retroactive to the date when he last played, regardless of when they actually decide to make him inactive.
There are two disabled lists: one that requires a player to be out at least fifteen days, and another that requires him to be out at least sixty days. The sixty-day DL is generally used only for long-term injuries and for players who are out for the season.
Mussina was fairly certain when he walked off the mound in Minnesota that he was looking at a stint on the DL but was certainly willing to wait a few days to see if the hamstring would loosen up more rapidly than he expected. “Nothing to lose by waiting,” he said. “They can wait until they need someone to pitch in my spot before making a decision. But a hamstring isn’t something you want to take a chance with and really hurt yourself. My goal, realistically, was to come back in as close to fifteen days as possible.”
That would be on April 26. The Yankees waited three days to see how Mussina was feeling. He flew with the team from Minnesota to Oakland and tried to throw lightly in the bullpen on Saturday. It only took him a few pitches to know there was no way he could think about trying to throw hard. The next day he was placed on the DL. Chase Wright, a twenty-four-year-old lefty who had spent the 2006 season pitching in A-ball, was called up to take his spot in the rotation. It was the sixth time in seventeen big league seasons that Mussina had been forced to go on the DL.
“Which, if you think about it, is pretty good,” he said.
True. But not as good as Tom Glavine, who was truly a medical marvel, having never been on the DL. He had missed a few starts over twenty years but had never been out long enough to merit the DL.
Glavine had come out of the start in Atlanta disappointed but feeling fine physically, even after throwing 113 pitches. The Mets came home from the first week on the road with a 4–2 record, a good start, although one sullied by the fact that the two losses had come in Atlanta to end the trip.
“It would have been nice to reestablish our superiority on those guys right away,” Glavine said. “We had the chance to do it after Friday night but didn’t. Still, it’s a long season.”
If someone could find a way to get every American to chip in a dollar each time a baseball person says “It’s a long season,” or “There’s still a lot of season left,” there would be no reason for the government to collect taxes. Baseball people talk about how long the season is in February, and they talk about it in September. When the New York media was getting impatient about Pedro Martinez’s return one evening, Mets general manager Omar Minaya shook his head and said, “Hey, fellas, it’s a long season. We’ve got a lot of baseball left to be played.” That was on September 2.
The Mets’ first homestand — of the long 2007 season — was against the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies were off to a brutal beginning, having started 1–5. Already there was talk that Charlie Manuel might be the first manager to lose his job that spring.
Glavine was scheduled to pitch the third game of the series, against Jamie Moyer. This was, to put it mildly, an intriguing matchup. To begin with, Glavine was the youngster of the two, since Moyer was forty-four. In fact, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, Glavine-Moyer represented the oldest combined age of two starting left-handers in a game in Major League Baseball history. Only Elias can come up with stats like that.
Beyond that were the obvious similiarities between the two. When Moyer and Glavine watched each other, they might as well have been looking into a mirror. Glavine was a soft-tossing lefty; Moyer tossed even softer. His fastball almost never cracked 80 miles an hour, but, like Glavine, he had been keeping hitters off-balance for years with a great changeup and pinpoint control. Batters constantly walked to the plate knowing they could crush both pitchers, then walked away wondering why they had just rolled out to shortstop. They were masters of “the comfortable oh for four.” A hitter almost never saw a pitch he couldn’t hit and at the end of the night would be oh for four without ever feeling uncomfortable at the plate.
Moyer is an unabashed fan of Glavine. For years he carried a tape of Glavine’s performance in Game Six of the 1995 World Series with him wherever he went. “To me that game represented as close to a perfect performance by a lefty who has a style like mine as I had ever seen,” he said. “It wasn’t so much the results, which were obviously great, but the way he pitched that game. The way he stood on the mound, his mechanics on every single pitch, his release point.
“I always say that I can watch a pitcher release a ball and, without looking, tell you where the pitch went and how it broke or didn’t break. That night, every pitch he threw was a good pitch — regardless of what the hitter did or, in most cases, didn’t do with it. That game was what I was striving to achieve for years.”
Moyer no longer carries the tape because several years ago, in a game in St. Louis, he finally pitched a game he thought was comparable. “When I look at that tape now, that’s what I want to be every single time I pitch,” he said. “But Glavine was the model for me. Even now, I love to watch him pitch. I think I learn something every time I watch him.”
Moyer is a remarkable story. He had been drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1984 out of St. Joseph’s University — hardly a baseball power — and made it to the big leagues in 1986. But he hurt his arm in 1989 and was released by the Texas Rangers at the end of the 1990 season. That led to several years of wandering in the baseball hinterlands. He spent 1991 in St. Louis and was released again at the end of that season. The Cubs re-signed him, then released him before the 1992 season began. He finally signed a minor league contract with the Detroit Tigers in May and spent that year pitching in their minor league system, where he began to develop his changeup. At the end of that season, he signed with the Baltimore Orioles and made it back to the big leagues for good in 1993.
In Baltimore he became friends with a veteran pitcher named Jimmy Key and a young pitcher named Mike Mussina.
“We spent hours talking about pitching,” Moyer said. “We would talk about it in the clubhouse, in the bullpen, in the outfield during batting practice. We talked about how you set up hitters, about improving your mechanics, about how to have a good bullpen. I mean everything. I never got tired of listening to those two guys. What’s really too bad is you don’t see young pitchers do that anymore. Everyone’s got an iPod or a cell phone going all the time. There’s very little talking in baseball anymore.”
Sitting in a comfortable chair, Moyer gestured around the Phillies clubhouse. Sure enough, several players were sitting in their lockers talking on cell phones; several others stared into space with headphones on. The only person who appeared to be having a conversation at that moment was Moyer — with a reporter.
“Talking to Key was great back then because he’d been at it for so long,” he continued. “Mussina hadn’t been, but it didn’t matter. Even then when he was very young, he really understood the art of pitching. In a way, I think I learned how to pitch from those two guys, not just how to throw but how to think on the mound and off the mound. In those days, Moose could throw hard, but that wasn’t how he won. He won because he was always a step ahead of the hitter. Sort of like Glavine, only from the right-hand side.”
Sort of like Moyer. After three-years in Baltimore, Moyer signed with the Red Sox for the 1996 season. At that point he was in the midst of a very ordinary career: he was thirty-three-years old and had a big league record of 59–76. He had started to see improvement in Baltimore but was still learning to throw his changeup where he wanted with consistency. He pitched well in Boston, going 7–1 through the first half of the season, but was sent to Seattle in what appeared to be an unremarkable trade deadline deal for Darren Bragg.
In Seattle, Moyer became a star. Over the next ten years he was 145–81 for the Mariners, including twenty-win seasons in 2001 at the age of thirty-eight and in 2003 at the age of forty, when he was 21–7 with a 3.27 ERA. He and his wife, Karen, the daughter of former Notre Dame basketball coach and ESPN commentator Digger Phelps, established the Moyer Foundation to raise money for kids at risk. The foundation has raised almost $10 million, and Seattle is still home during the off-season for the Moyers and their six children.
With the Phillies trying to make a late run in 2006, they traded for Moyer, bringing him to the team he had rooted for as a little boy. He had pitched well, going 5–2, but the Phillies — as always seemed to be the case — had come up short of making the playoffs, their thirteenth straight year without a postseason appearance. Moyer knew the end was near but still felt he could get batters out enough to contribute.
“I won’t have to ask anyone to tell me when I’m done,” he said. “The hitters will tell me. That’s how baseball works.”
The night of Thursday, April 12, was hardly one for two senior citizens of baseball to be out trying to pitch. It would be forty-four degrees when Glavine walked to the mound, with the wind whipping through Shea Stadium so hard that it brought back memories of the New York Jets and Joe Namath playing on this same field on cold, windy, late-fall afternoons.
Only this wasn’t an afternoon. “This will be worse than Atlanta,” Glavine said, pulling on the requisite extra T-shirt and sipping hot coffee in the clubhouse. “Because it’s night, it will only get colder as the game goes on. It will be almost impossible to feel the ball.”
Glavine hadn’t pitched much better against the Phillies in his Mets career than he had against the Braves. He had been 24–10 against the Phillies while in Atlanta but was 2–7 against them as a Met, with an ERA of 5.27. Beyond that, his ring finger had started to feel cold while playing against the Phillies the previous August. What’s more, even though the Phillies were off to a terrible start, the Mets had reason to want to hammer them early and often. During spring training, Jimmy Rollins, the Phils’ talented shortstop had said, “I think we are the team to beat in the National League East.”
That comment rankled the Mets since they had finished twelve games ahead of the Phillies the previous season and saw no evidence that they weren’t at least twelve games better than the Phillies again. “It would be nice to make him eat those words,” Glavine said. “And there’s no reason why we can’t do it.”
At that moment, Rollins was hitting .250 and the Phillies were 2–6. So far, so good, as far as the Mets were concerned.
As always, Rollins led off for the Phillies. On 2–1, Glavine threw what he thought was a perfect changeup. Rollins laid off, and plate umpire Ed Montague — one of Glavine’s favorite umpires — called the pitch a ball.
“Perfect example of why it’s important, especially at this point in my career to get the close pitch,” he said. “If it’s two and two, I can throw any pitch I want to throw. At three and one, I really don’t want to start the game by walking Rollins because there’s a decent chance he’s going to steal second and then you feel like you’re in trouble right away. So, I threw him a fastball and got a little more of the plate than I wanted to get.”
The pitch also didn’t have much on it — the radar gun clocking it at 79 miles per hour, as Glavine tried to get his velocity up in the cold. Rollins jumped on the pitch and hit it into the left-field bullpen. “Nice start,” Glavine joked later.
Before the inning was over, Glavine had walked the bases loaded. Fortunately, he got Wes Helms to strike out on a 3–2 changeup, and walked to the dugout relieved but not exactly thrilled after another thirty-pitch first inning. “Right away the chances of going deep into the game are pretty much gone after an inning like that,” he said. “But at least it was only one-nothing.”
The weather wasn’t any better for Moyer, and he was quickly in trouble too, giving up singles to Jose Reyes and Paul Lo Duca and an RBI single to Carlos Beltran, to tie the game at 1–1, with no one out and runners on first and third. But, as veteran pitchers will do, Moyer took a deep breath and found a way out. He struck out Carlos Delgado and got David Wright to ground into a double play.
Rollins hit another home run in the second, this time on a 3–2 changeup that left Glavine kicking at the mound. The Mets got one back in the second and then took a 4–3 lead in the fourth when Reyes singled two runners home with two men out. The reason the runners were both in scoring position? Glavine had sacrificed with one out, laying down a perfect bunt.
“Perfect example,” he said, “of why every pitcher should know how to bunt.”
Glavine managed to get Rollins to ground to shortstop the third time he came up, and fought his way through six innings without giving up any more runs. Moyer also made it through six before both old men headed for well-deserved ice packs for their arms and hot showers for their aching bodies.
“You see in a game like that why Tommy is Tommy,” Rick Peterson said. “Five outs into the game he’s given up three runs and two home runs. And then he puts his head down and that’s it for the night. A lot of guys under those conditions, with the start he had, throwing fifty pitches [actually forty-nine] the first two innings, don’t make it to the fourth. He hangs in there through six and gets a win.”
The final was 5–3, the Mets bullpen again pitching well behind Glavine, giving him his 292nd win. Moyer took the loss and remained at 217 wins. In all, not too bad for a couple of pitchers who were more likely to hit a dozen home runs apiece than throw a single pitch at 90 miles per hour before season’s end. Glavine hit 86 a couple of times over the course of the evening; Moyer hit 80 — once.
“Slow, slower, slowest,” Mets’ closer Billy Wagner joked. “But they get people out.”
Twenty years after arriving in the major leagues, they both still got people out.
BY THE TIME THE METS AND PHILLIES MET for two more games a week later at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, it appeared likely that Charlie Manuel wouldn’t make it out of the month of April as Phillies manager.
Both teams had only played twice since they had met in New York as the awful April weather continued in the East. The Mets had been rained out of the last game of their series against the Washington Nationals, and then both teams had watched it rain all day in Philadelphia the next day. That made the two-game series into a one-game series.
The Phillies decided to move Moyer back a day so that Freddy Garcia, one of their big free-agent acquisitions who had started the season on the DL, could make his 2007 debut. The Mets opted not to move anyone back, meaning Glavine would pitch the one game in Philadelphia, and Orlando Hernandez and John Maine would pitch the two games in Miami against the Marlins.
“We need to ask Glavine if he’s not being a little bit of a prima donna not moving back a day,” WFAN’s Christopher Russo said on the air that day to his partner Mike Francesa. “Might be better for the team if he pitches in Miami, wouldn’t it?”
Actually it might have been better for Glavine to pitch in Miami, where the temperature would be about forty degrees warmer than in Philadelphia. Rick Peterson had come to Glavine after the rainout and informed him that he and Randolph wanted him to take his turn in Philly. Hernandez was very delicate, and they didn’t want him to pitch in the cold weather.
“Which was fine with me,” Glavine said. “I was planning on pitching in Philly, and I was mentally ready to pitch in the cold again. But I wouldn’t have minded being pushed back at all.”
The reason Russo and Francesa got a chance to ask Glavine about the rotation was because WFAN paid him $35,000 a year to appear weekly with their afternoon drive duo, who had, arguably, the most popular local sports talk show in the country. It is now com-monplace for broadcast media outlets to pay athletes and coaches to appear regularly on the air, but WFAN must have the largest pay-the-jocks budget in the country. In addition to Glavine, the station paid both local managers, Joe Torre and Willie Randolph, to appear on a weekly basis, and it also paid a number of local pro football players and coaches for appearances. Glavine didn’t mind going on with Russo and Francesa, especially when it gave him a chance to correct a misconception, because unlike some talk-show hosts they would ask him the question rather than talk behind his back.
Having explained to WFAN’s listeners why he was pitching that night, Glavine went out to pitch. In a way, it was an ideal night to pitch because, even though it was again frigid and windy, the wind was blowing straight in from left field. With the Phillies playing horribly, and the weather just as bad, the crowd in Citizens Bank Park was tiny — far smaller than the announced 27,058.
Attendance figures can be deceiving, especially early in the season when the weather’s bad or late in the season when a team is out of contention. Major League Baseball announces the number of tickets sold, which means that season-ticket holders who stay away or those who buy a ticket but don’t show because of bad weather or a bad team are counted as being there.
There were probably no more than fifteen thousand fans in the park when Garcia, wearing a red glove, walked to the mound. Before he could throw a pitch, the umpires made him return to the dugout to change gloves — the red was too distracting for the hitters. He returned with a bright blue glove, which was somehow deemed to be less distracting.
Apparently the glove didn’t distract Moises Alou, who twice hit balls through the wind into the left-field bleachers, the first time with David Wright on first base, the second time leading off the sixth inning. Carlos Beltran added an RBI double in the fifth, and that was plenty for Glavine who pitched what was becoming a typical game for him: six innings, 103 pitches (exactly the same number as five days earlier), five walks and a hit batter, and six hits. He pitched into trouble, then he pitched out of trouble.
The first inning was typical: Shane Victorino doubled to left, and Chase Utley walked. That brought up Ryan Howard, the 2006 National League MVP and one of baseball’s best hitters with men on base. Glavine’s first pitch was an outside fastball that Howard hit right back at him. Always prepared to field his position, Glavine grabbed the ball and turned it into a one-six-three double play. End of threat.
In the third inning, Glavine did something that very few pitchers, if any, would think of doing. He intentionally, though technically unintentionally, walked Howard, with a 2–0 lead and the bases loaded.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “No way was he going to see a fastball with the bases loaded. I would rather let him drive in one with a walk than four with a homer.”
And so Glavine threw five changeups and one curve ball, which was way outside, and walked in a run. Then he got Pat Burrell to ground out to end the inning.
It helped Glavine that the Phillies grounded into three double plays. That allowed him to pitch six shutout innings. He also got a hit and scored his first run of the season in the fifth. “I’m not as fast as I used to be,” he said. “But I can still move a little when there’s a run to be scored.”
The only bad moment of the night for Glavine came in the fifth inning. Shawn Green had doubled with one out and moved to third on a Valentin ground out. Glavine came up. As a pitcher will always do in a situation with a runner on third, Glavine stood outside the batter’s box for a moment checking with third-base coach Sandy Alomar Sr. to see if anything — a squeeze bunt perhaps — had been called by Willie Randolph from the dugout.
Nothing was on. Glavine took a rip at the first pitch and was stunned to see Green barreling down the third-base line. A squeeze bunt had been on, but Alomar had given Glavine a sign that indicated nothing was on and Glavine swung away. Green was easily thrown out, which was a lot better than what might have happened if Glavine had somehow hit a line drive in his direction.
Signs get changed all the time in baseball. Since stealing signs is considered part of the game, teams constantly change their signs. In doing so, players have to be reminded that what might have been a bunt sign last week is now a take sign. In every set of signs, there is one sign that indicates to a player that something is on or that, no matter what comes after this, nothing is on. Glavine had seen the sign that indicated nothing was on. Alomar had given it inadvertently, forgetting for an instant that the signs had been switched.
“It happens a couple times a year,” Glavine said. “We were lucky I swung and missed and lucky that, in the end, it didn’t affect the outcome of the game. As it turned out, it was just embarrassing.”
The signs between a pitcher and a catcher are different than base-running signs, which involve things like touching one’s face, wiping a hand across the shirt, or touching the bill of one’s cap. A catcher will put down fingers — which can be a problem if a pitcher is at all nearsighted — to suggest to the pitcher what he wants him to throw. The standard signs are one finger for a fastball, two for a curve, three for a changeup or a slider, and, if a pitcher has a fourth pitch — say a cutter in Glavine’s case — that might be four fingers.
But there are times when those signs change too. When a runner gets to second base, signs almost always change because the runner might see a sign and relay it to the hitter. Normally, the catcher will give two signs: the first one will be the indicator. If he puts down one finger, that means the next sign the pitcher sees is the pitch he wants him to throw. If he puts down two fingers first, that means the second sign he sees is the pitch he wants. It can get more complicated than that. A catcher can give a double indicator, meaning that the second sign he puts down — say a two followed by a three — is the sign indicator. In that case, the third sign that follows the indicator is the pitch that’s called.
Glavine is fairly simplistic about signs because he rarely shakes off his catcher. “Maybe once a game he’ll do it,” catcher Paul Lo Duca said. “If you have experience catching Tom, you have a good idea what he wants to throw, and he doesn’t worry all that much about what he’s throwing as much as where he’s throwing it.”
Mussina is different. His catcher, Jorge Posada, knows that his sign is nothing more than a suggestion to Mussina, who will probably shake him off about 50 percent of the time — not unusual for an experienced pitcher who throws as many different pitches as Mussina does. When there’s a runner on second base, Mussina insists on a completely different set of signs from the indicator through the actual pitch call. “He’s as careful with a runner on second as anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Posada said. “That’s part of Mike being Mike; he doesn’t leave anything to chance.”
The Mets were able to joke about the missed sign in Philadelphia because no one was hurt, and they went on to win the game 8–1. Things were a lot worse for the Phillies. Not only did they lose, but after Glavine struck out to end the inning, the Phils threw the ball around the infield, forgetting that Glavine had just made the third out. Not one of the nine men on the field made a move for the dugout.
At game’s end, while the Mets prepared to head for Miami with an 8–4 record, the Phillies clubhouse was not a happy place to be. The team was 3–9, and Charlie Manuel got into a shouting match with a radio reporter who wondered what in the world was wrong with a team that was supposed to be a contender.
There were no shouting matches in the Mets clubhouse. Glavine was now 3–1, and his ERA after four starts was 2.70. He had only one complaint at that moment: “Is the temperature ever going to hit fifty?” he asked.
IT WAS STILL APRIL, and for Mike Mussina the month of April felt like a long season. When he began to do rehabilitation exercises on his leg, he was relieved to find that the injury wasn’t serious. The team had done an MRI to be certain there was no tear, and once that had been confirmed he began working toward being able to get back on a mound, throw with some velocity, and land on the injured leg without feeling pain.
As it turned out, that took about two weeks. Which meant that his first goal — to return to pitching in the minimum fifteen days — wasn’t going to be met.
“You can’t rush these things,” Joe Torre said. “You especially can’t rush them with a thirty-eight-year-old. I know Moose wants to get back out there, especially with the staff struggling, but he’s smart enough to know the point is to get him out there and keep him out there, not have him go out and hurt it again.”
Mussina did understand that. He also understood the various steps in coming back from an injury because he had been there before. Once he was back on the mound throwing in the bullpen without pain, he could begin to plan a rehab start. Since he hadn’t been out for that long, one would probably be enough.
A player can be placed on a rehab assignment for as long as thirty days. After that, if he isn’t called up to the major league team, he must either be assigned to the minor league team or just remain on the DL and not play at all. That rarely happens. Most rehabs last no more than a week for a position player and a start or two for a pitcher.
Mussina was ready for his rehab start on April 27. The plan was for him to pitch for the Trenton Thunder in a game in Harrisburg, and then, if all went well, he would pitch the following Wednesday on his regular four days’ rest in Texas.
“It feels fine right now,” he said, sitting in the dugout at Yankee Stadium on the day before the planned rehab game. “But you really can’t tell for sure until you really push it. Even the rehab game doesn’t tell you for sure, but it should give you a pretty good indicator. At least you hope so.”
There was one problem with the rehab plan: weather.
“We’re trying to find a place where it isn’t supposed to rain tomorrow,” Torre said. “Right now, there’s no place. Everywhere he could pitch, there’s supposed to be rain.”
Mussina couldn’t help but roll his eyes when he heard the various weather reports. “Into my life rain always falls — especially when I’m supposed to pitch,” he said, smiling. “I remember one spring it rained so much on days I was pitching that I started to think I was related to Noah. Right now, sitting here, I have no idea where I’m pitching tomorrow. I know it will be someplace, but the last thing I want to do is get on a plane, fly someplace, and not be able to pitch.”
The alternative to flying someplace to pitch in a minor league game was to stay in New York and pitch a simulated game, either on the Yankee Stadium mound or, if it were raining in New York (which was predicted), in the bullpen. Neither Torre nor Guidry was terribly excited about that idea.
“I think you need to pitch in a real game of some kind,” Torre said. “You just push yourself harder by instinct when there are fielders around, real hitters at the plate, and a scoreboard behind you. If there’s anyone I would trust to know how hard he needs to push himself, it’s Moose, but I’d much rather get him into a real game.”
The decision was made not to make a decision until after that night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays. Mussina’s return was very much under the radar at that moment anyway. The Yankees were floundering at 8–12 and had called up twenty-year-old phenom Philip Hughes, who had been scheduled to spend the season in Triple-A.
On the same day that Mussina had gone on the DL, Carl Pavano had also gone on the DL. After his impressive outing in Minnesota, he had reported some tightness in his right forearm. The so-called tightness would eventually lead to season-ending surgery. Chien-Ming Wang had made his first start of the season two days earlier, but with Pavano gone and Mussina not back yet and the rookies who had been given starts all struggling, the Yankees were desperate enough to push up Hughes’s schedule by several months.
While Mussina was studying weather reports, Torre sat a few feet away in the dugout going through his daily meeting with the media, who surrounded him at the start of batting practice each day with microphones, TV cameras, and notebooks. Getting close enough to Torre to actually hear him was so important that some media members would take up spots near where Torre always sat twenty minutes before he was due to arrive.
One of the Japanese reporters asked Torre the day’s opening question: “Joe, is there panic in the locker room at this point?”
“Absolutely,” Torre replied, deadpan. “That’s the way we always do things around here.”
With Hughes making his debut and a series with the Red Sox — who already had a five-and-a-half game lead — beginning the next day, the subject of Mussina’s rehab start was not front-page (or, in New York, back-page) news. Which was fine with Mussina.
“The less questions I’m asked right now the better,” he said. “Because until I get on a mound and try to throw hard, I really don’t have any answers.”
He wasn’t nervous about the rehab start because there was really nothing to be nervous about. “Either I’m good enough to pitch next week or I’m not,” he said. “It isn’t as if I have to prepare mentally. This is all physical. The mental part will come again when I can actually pitch in a game.”
Hughes was unimpressive that night, and the Yankees lost again, this time 6–0. After the game Torre studied the weather reports and made a decision.
“Nothing looks good,” he told Mussina when Mussina came into his office to check in before driving home. “The last thing we need is for you to not pitch tomorrow because if you’re healthy we need you to pitch Wednesday.”
Mussina knew that. “I really think I can find out what I need to find out if I stay here and pitch a simulated,” he told Torre.
Reluctantly, Torre agreed.
“If we hear something different about the weather, I’ll call you in the morning,” Torre said. “Otherwise, let’s do it here early tomorrow afternoon.”
Mussina woke up the next morning to find it raining hard. There had been no change in the weather report for any of the cities where he might go to pitch. He arrived back at Yankee Stadium at 1:30, and, with the rain still coming down steadily, he walked under the stands along with Guidry; Ramon Rodriguez, the number two bullpen catcher; and pitching instructor Rich Monteleone, to the Yankee bullpen in right field.
Mussina warmed up as if he were about to pitch in a game, throwing to Rodriguez, while Guidry stood behind him watching. After Mussina had thrown about thirty pitches, Monteleone stood in at the plate as a batter, and Mussina began to pitch to him. There were differences between this and a real game, of course: Monteleone didn’t swing at any of his pitches, and there was no umpire calling balls and strikes, although Mussina made a mental note about where his pitches were going, and Guidry made a point of noting location.
He threw about twenty pitches, mixing them up the way he might in a game. Then he sat down for about ten minutes to simulate the wait he would have in the dugout while his team was at bat. He pitched the second “inning” from the stretch, then sat down again. The third inning was from the windup, then one more inning — after another break — from the stretch. In all, he threw about sixty-five pitches. He was a little bit tired when he was finished, but there was no pain in the hamstring. He had made a point of focusing on trying to throw hard, trying to imagine a batter swinging at his pitches. He told Guidry he felt fine. He was ready to pitch on Wednesday in Texas.
“Joe’s right. Being out in the bullpen with no one around, and a hitter who isn’t swinging at your pitches isn’t the same as pitching in a game,” Mussina said. “But I wasn’t really trying to find out that day if I had good stuff or location, even though I was aware of both. I was trying to find out if I could pitch, sit for a while, pitch again and sit again, and not get stiff or tight or feel pain in my hamstring. I was able to do it, and that’s what was important.
“I didn’t feel relieved; I just felt more like, ‘Okay, let’s go. Let’s get this season on track.’ ”
Once Torre got the report on Mussina’s performance in the bullpen, he penciled him in to start the next Wednesday in Texas. That would be May 2 — a month into the season. The first month had been a complete washout for Mussina: two starts, six innings pitched, six runs allowed, and a record of 0–1. By the time he took the mound in Texas, the Yankees’ record would be 11–14.
Not exactly the start anyone had envisioned. But, in case you’ve never heard it before, it’s a long season. It had certainly been a long month.