TOM GLAVINE FINALLY GOT HIS WISH when the Mets came home from Florida. The Braves were in town for three games, and after one more cold, miserable night on Friday, the weather finally broke. The sun came out on Saturday, the temperatures went up, and more than fifty-five thousand people showed up for the second game of the series, which the Mets won, after Tim Hudson had pitched the Braves to a win in the opener.
All of which set the stage for Sunday afternoon, April 22. It was Smoltz versus Glavine again, a rematch of that frigid Saturday in Atlanta two weeks earlier — only this time the temperature was seventy degrees when Glavine walked to the mound, there was a light breeze and no humidity, and Shea Stadium sparkled as much as a forty-three-year-old dowager stadium can sparkle.
The Mets were 11–5; the Braves 11–6. Glavine was 3–1; Smoltz 2–1. It was about as perfect a day for baseball as you could possibly hope to see.
Glavine threw his warm-up pitches, Kelly Johnson stepped into the batter’s box, and the crowd settled in. Glavine threw a fastball that caught a little more of the plate than he planned, and Johnson jumped all over it. The ball disappeared over the right-field fence before many in the crowd even knew Glavine had thrown the first pitch.
“He had struck out four times the day before,” Glavine said later. “He’s a guy who will generally take strike one anyway. I’m thinking he isn’t going to come out flailing after a four strikeout day. But I gave him a pitch that was too good not to swing at. Bad mistake.
“It’s sort of like stepping into what you think is a hot shower, and it’s ice cold. You kind of jump back and go, ‘What was that?’ It’s a shock. You have to take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay, that’s not exactly ideal, but that’s all they get.’ ”
Glavine did just that. In fact, he retired the next eight batters he faced before Johnson got a two-out single in the third. Glavine gave up another single to Edgar Renteria but then got his ex-teammate Chipper Jones to strike out looking. He was settled in.
The problem was it appeared possible that one run might be all Smoltz would need. He retired the first six Mets before Shawn Green singled, leading off the third, and Jose Valentin reached on a Chipper Jones error. That brought Glavine up in a bunting situation. Smoltz threw two fastballs at 96, and Glavine fouled both off, which really annoyed Glavine. On 0–2 he got the bunt down, but Smoltz pounced on it and got the force play on Green, another of the Mets’ slow-footed base runners, at third.
He was even more upset a moment later when Reyes hit a ground ball that would have scored a run had he moved the runners up. Instead, Glavine was forced out at second, and Paul Lo Duca grounded out to end the threat.
Smoltz finally cracked a little in the fifth when Green hit his first pitch of the inning into the Mets bullpen to tie the game at 1–1. The Mets threatened for more when Reyes singled and Lo Duca doubled, but bad luck and good pitching kept them from taking the lead. The bad luck came when Lo Duca’s shot in the right-center-field gap bounced over the wall for a ground rule double. If the ball hadn’t gone over the fence, Reyes could have scored running backward. Instead, he had to stop at third. Smoltz then struck out Carlos Beltran looking, bringing back some not-so-fond memories of Beltran’s final at bat of 2006.
Glavine walked to the mound to start the sixth, frustrated. “In a game like that you figure you’re only going to get so many chances,” he said. “Smoltzie was really dealing the first four innings, so I was thinking the fifth might have been our best shot to get him. You see a ball bounce over the fence the way Paulie’s did, and you kind of flinch and start to wonder, ‘Is this going to be one of those days?’ ”
Glavine was wondering that even more in the sixth. The inning began innocently enough: Glavine struck out Renteria, and then Beltran ran down Chipper Jones’s line drive on the warning track. But Andruw Jones singled to left on a ball that just got past David Wright at third base. Brian McCann then slammed Glavine’s first pitch into the right-field corner, and Green had to make an excellent play in the corner to hold Jones at third.
Up came Jeff Francoeur and out to the mound came Rick Peterson. When Peterson comes to the mound it is for one of six reasons:
• To counsel the pitcher on something he might be doing wrong: overthrowing, something in his mechanics, or pitch selection.
• To give the pitcher a rest: “Sometimes you just need to catch your breath,” Glavine said. “Rick will come out and say, ‘I’m just here to give you a few seconds to relax.’ ”
• To ask the pitcher if he still thinks he can get people out or if he’s tired. Unlike some pitchers who think admitting to being tired is a weakness, Glavine is always honest. “If I’m gassed, I say so,” he said. “What’s good about that is that Rick knows I won’t lie to him, so if I say I’m okay, he usually believes me. Sometimes he’ll tell me I’m wrong but not usually.”
• To stall so the bullpen can get ready when a pitcher runs into sudden trouble. Although the Braves’ threat had been sudden, and Glavine had thrown ninety-one pitches, that’s not what this visit was about.
• To simply stand on the mound and wait for the umpire to come out to break up the meeting so Peterson can tell him he’s doing a lousy job of calling balls and strikes. Technically, arguing balls and strikes means automatic ejection, but Peterson will chance it on occasion. In eight years as a major league pitching coach, he has been ejected twice. “Sometimes he’ll come out and stand there with his arms folded and just say, ‘Hang on a minute; I’m not here to see you,’ ” Glavine said. “Then the umpire comes out, and he’ll let him have it.”
One of Peterson’s tricks is not to look at the umpire when he’s letting him have it. In fact, more often than not, he will direct his comments to Glavine: “I’ll say something like, ‘You just keep throwing the ball where you’re throwing it, Tommy. Those are good pitches. This guy is too good an umpire to keep missing pitches the way he’s been missing them.’ ”
• To discuss specific strategy on the next hitter.
That last item was Peterson’s purpose as he jogged to the mound with Francoeur approaching the plate. Those who watch Peterson regularly know instantly when he has come out to talk strategy because he won’t put his arm on the pitcher’s shoulder, which is what he does when he has come out to soothe or counsel or stall. The question was whether to pitch to Francoeur or walk him intentionally and pitch to Matt Diaz with the bases loaded.
It was not a righty-lefty question since both are right-handed hitters. It was more about who Glavine felt more comfortable pitching to at that moment. Francoeur has more power, but Diaz is a better hitter for average. Glavine’s control had been excellent all day, but pitchers do occasionally tighten up a little with the bases loaded and get behind in the count, forcing them to groove a pitch to keep from walking in a run. Beyond that, Glavine remembered the home run Diaz had hit against him in Atlanta fifteen days earlier. He opted for Francoeur.
“Francoeur is a free swinger, which means he might get a hit off a good pitch, or you might get him out on a bad one,” Glavine said. “My thought was to pitch to him and not give him anything especially good to hit. If he walked, fine, then I’d deal with Diaz.”
Francoeur didn’t walk. Glavine threw him two changeups, hoping he would bite on one, but he took both, the second for a strike. He then worked outside with two fastballs. On the second, Francoeur leaned across the plate and hit it right up the middle into center field, scoring both runners. The Braves were up 3–1.
Glavine was angry with himself. “I didn’t second-guess pitching to him,” he said. “And it wasn’t a bad pitch. But it was a little too good, especially in those circumstances, against a hitter who will go get a pitch, which is what he did. I’m standing there thinking we should be up in this game at least two-one and now we’re down three-one, and it’s probably my last inning. I was pissed.”
He calmed down long enough to pick Francoeur off to end the inning but still walked into the dugout steaming. The last thing a pitcher wants to do after his team has either gotten him even or put him ahead is give runs right back, especially with two outs. Glavine had violated two cardinal rules of pitching on a day when he thought his opponent might not give up any more runs.
That, however, proved not to be true.
The Mets quickly loaded the bases with one out on singles by Delgado and Alou and a walk to Green. At that point Bobby Cox, convinced that plate umpire Paul Emmel was squeezing Smoltz, got into a heated argument with Emmel. More often than not, Cox gets ejected for arguing balls and strikes, almost always in defense of his pitcher. He got, as the saying goes, “his money’s worth” with Emmel before leaving, still gesturing angrily just in case Emmel was not completely certain that he was unhappy.
As soon as Cox was gone, Jose Valentin ripped a single to left to make it 3–2, Alou’s lack of speed forcing him to stop at third. The good news for Glavine was his team was rallying. The bad news was that, with the bases loaded, Willie Randolph sent Julio Franco up to pinch-hit for him. Glavine understood. Smoltz was on the ropes, and Randolph had to go for the knockout. Still, he had only thrown ninety-five pitches and had hoped to go one more inning.
“I hadn’t seen the seventh inning yet,” he said. “I felt like I had plenty left. But there was no choice in that situation.”
Franco flied out to short right field, failing to advance the runners. But Reyes made up for that, hitting a line drive into the right-field corner. All three runners scored. Reyes was jumping up and down on third base clapping his hands, and the Mets led 5–3. Shea Stadium rocked with noise. A moment later Lo Duca singled to left to make it 6–3, and, remarkably, Smoltz was gone. No one was more shocked than Glavine.
“To me, Smoltzie seemed locked in, which is why I was so upset when I gave up the two runs in the top of the inning,” he said. “I thought at that point my job was to try to keep it at one-one and hope we could get to their bullpen — that it was that kind of game. But baseball is completely unpredictable that way. There were a couple pitches John wanted that he didn’t get, and then Hosey [Reyes] just crushed that pitch. If you think about it, that was about the fifth or sixth time in two games we needed a big two-out hit, and he was the first one to get it.”
Smoltz conceded later that he probably let Emmel’s strike zone get to him a little bit. “That’s not an excuse,” he said. “In fact, that’s on me. As a pitcher you have to overcome that stuff. Especially when you’re as experienced as I am. You can’t sulk. You have to get outs.”
That’s easier said than done. Both Glavine and Mussina agree that as they’ve gotten older, they have become more short-tempered with umpires, particularly when they don’t get a key pitch that they think is a strike. “It’s about margin of error,” Mussina said. “When I was younger, if I threw a two-and-two pitch that I thought was strike three, I felt fairly confident I could come back and get the guy on the next pitch. Now, I’m not as certain. I haven’t got as many really good pitches in me per game as I used to have. And, when the next pitch becomes a hit, which it seems to a lot nowadays, I really get angry.”
Both Glavine and Mussina have reputations among umpires as “pros.” They don’t argue often, and when they are upset they don’t show it in a way that “shows up” the umpire. Major league umpires are obsessed with not being “shown up.” If a catcher argues balls and strikes without turning around, he is likely to get away with it. If he turns around or takes off his mask, he’s probably gone. If a pitcher walks off the mound shouting at an umpire, he’s probably going to be in trouble. If he says something walking off the mound at the end of an inning without pointing a finger or being obvious, the umpire will frequently let it go. Especially if he knows the pitcher was right.
“Sometimes I’ll come in the dugout, and Paulie [Lo Duca] will say to me, ‘The ump said he missed that one,’ referring to a pitch I was upset about,” Glavine said. “Once I hear that, I’m not going to give the guy a hard time about that pitch. It’s over. Umpires make mistakes; so do pitchers.” He smiled. “Of course we pay a higher price for our mistakes. But if someone says, ‘I got that one wrong,’ they aren’t going to have any trouble with me.”
Mussina is the same way. Like Glavine, if he walks down off the mound to say something to an umpire, that means he is really angry. “I worked the plate for him probably forty or fifty times,” said Rich Garcia, a retired umpire who now works evaluating umpire performances. “He was always a pro. In fact, if he walked up behind me right now and started talking I would have no idea who it was because I’m not really sure I ever heard his voice. Occasionally you could see in his body language that he didn’t like a call — and when he got upset it was probably because you missed one — but I don’t ever remember him actually saying anything.”
Or, as one current umpire put it: “If Tom Glavine or Mike Mussina gives you a hard time, you probably deserve it.”
Whether Emmel deserved a hard time from Smoltz or Cox was hard to say, but Smoltz was clearly affected by his strike zone. “I had great control that day,” he said. “Check the numbers.”
The numbers bear him out: ninety-eight pitches, seventy-one strikes. By comparison, Glavine, who didn’t walk anyone, threw fifty-nine strikes in ninety-five pitches.
If Glavine had been home watching the game, he undoubtedly would have empathized with his pal. But he wasn’t in a very empathetic mood in the bottom of the sixth. “My only disappointment was that we didn’t get to him for four or five more,” he said.
Glavine was smiling as he walked up the runway to the clubhouse after Beltran popped up to end the Mets’ sixth. At that moment, he thought he had stolen a win. “When you get pinch-hit for because you’re behind, you know the odds of getting a win that day aren’t great,” he said. “If you win two or three of those a year, you’ve been very lucky. After we scored the five and got Smoltzie out, I thought maybe I had stolen one. You tell yourself ‘Don’t count the win yet,’ but mentally, with a three-run lead and the bullpen pitching well, I think I was counting the win.”
While Glavine headed for the training room to put ice on his arm, Ambiorix Burgos took over. Burgos had been picked up in what would turn out to be a disastrous off-season trade with the Kansas City Royals (Brian Bannister, the pitcher traded for Burgos, ended up being an effective starter, while Burgos found himself back in the minor leagues). He got the first two outs in the seventh but then gave up a pinch-hit double to Scott Thorman. Randolph decided to go lefty-lefty at that point and brought Scott Schoeneweis in to face Kelly Johnson, who had already homered and singled off of Glavine in a lefty-lefty matchup.
Schoeneweis promptly walked Johnson, bringing Edgar Renteria to the plate with the tying run. Glavine wasn’t thinking in those terms as he sat on the training table staring at a TV set. “I was thinking, ‘Let’s get this guy and not let Chipper or Andruw come up with men on base,’ ” he said.
He got his wish — sort of. Renteria launched a 1–1 pitch over the left-field fence to clear the bases, tie the score, and ensure that Glavine couldn’t be the winning pitcher. Icing his arm, Glavine felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. A moment later, he got a text message from his wife, Chris, who frequently sends messages when he has come out of a game. It was succinct. “DAMMIT,” it said.
A few minutes later, Schoeneweis came into the clubhouse looking sick. A Duke graduate who had beaten cancer while in college and gone on to a solid major league career, Schoeneweis had been signed by the Mets during the off-season to give them another left-handed arm in the bullpen. He and Glavine had become friends quickly. Both liked to play golf, and both had interests that tended to range beyond box scores.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” he said, seeing Glavine.
“Hey, Scott, no worries,” Glavine said, trying to sound casual. “It happens. We’ll get ’em the next time.”
At that moment Schoeneweis wasn’t thinking about the next time. Like all the Mets relievers, he felt extra pressure whenever he came into a Glavine game with a lead.
“Anytime you come into a game, you want to pitch well,” Schoeneweis said. “But any of us would be lying if we said we weren’t aware of what Tom is trying to do. Any time he has a lead, you want to be sure you don’t blow it for him because that’s an opportunity gone. When Renteria went deep, I just felt sick to my stomach. What makes it harder is knowing who Tom is. I knew he would never give me a hard time about it, that, in fact, he’d try to boost my spirits about it. That’s Tom. He’s just the kind of teammate you don’t ever want to let down, but especially not when he’s so close.”
It’s worth noting that Schoeneweis never mentioned the number three hundred. It had almost become code in the Mets clubhouse not to specifically talk about three hundred wins. Glavine had simply stopped saying it. He would talk about “the goal I’m trying to reach” or “where I’m trying to get to” or “what it is I’m hoping to get done here.” But he never said he was trying to win three hundred games. The relief pitchers had picked up on that. It had become “The Number That Must Not Be Named.”
“We all feel this every time Tom pitches,” said Billy Wagner, the closer, who lockered next to Glavine and drove with him to the ballpark most days. “Look, it’s entirely possible he may be the last guy to do this. We all want to be a part of it; we all want to help him get it done. But with that comes extra pressure. I know if he can’t pitch a complete game, there’s nothing in the world I want more than to have that ball in the ninth inning when he gets to that doorstep. But if I somehow blow it…” He shook his head. “Don’t even want to think about it.”
Schoeneweis had no choice but to think about it that day. Glavine was fully aware of the pressure the relievers were feeling. His three closest friends on the team were the three guys most likely to be put in a position to either fail or succeed with his three hundredth win on the line: Schoeneweis, Wagner, and Aaron Heilman, who had become the team’s set-up man.
“What you really don’t want to do is sit around and talk about it,” Glavine said. “But it does become the elephant in the room. We all know it’s there. In theory, if I pitch well, getting ten wins should not be a problem. But you don’t want it to linger. You don’t want it hanging over the team’s head. You want to get it done and then focus on the pennant race and nothing else. But I think we all know it isn’t a subject that’s going to go away. When you think you’ve got one and then you lose it, everyone feels it. Not just me — everyone. I know that, I understand it, and I also know that, realistically, there’s nothing I can do or say except pitch well and win seven more games.”
That was how many wins Glavine needed after the Braves went on to win 9–6 on that sparkling Sunday. They had now won four of six from the Mets to start the season and had jumped into first place. There weren’t a lot of smiles in the Mets clubhouse late that afternoon.
“You hate to blow any lead,” Willie Randolph said.
Especially to the Braves. Especially with Glavine seven outs away from number 294.
ACCORDING TO THE TOM GLAVINE THEORY OF PITCHING, there are ten starts a year (if you are a successful starting pitcher) that you should absolutely win.
Glavine had one of those ten starts in Washington, six days after the lost game against the Braves.
Only he didn’t get the win. The reason, in the minds of all the Mets, was an umpire named Tony Randazzo.
Umpires come in all shapes and sizes and, perhaps most important, personalities. More than any other officials in sports, they are given the independence to call a game in almost any manner they wish when working home plate. That’s been reined in to some degree by Questech in recent years and by Major League Baseball telling them to call the “high strike.” The strike zone, top to bottom, is supposed to be from the letters across the batters’s jersey to the top of the batter’s knees. The upper part of the zone had crept so far down in the late 1990s that hitters were taking belt-high pitches, and umpires were calling them balls.
Even now though, umpires have distinctly different strike zones — so much so in fact that players scout them. Some umpires have wider plates than others, and some will give pitchers the low strike, something that makes Glavine very happy. “When I see a guy giving me the low strike early, I know I’ve got an excellent chance to have a good night if I’m even decent,” he said. Umpires also have different styles: Some make a strike call instantly; others take their time. Some make their calls loudly; others can barely be heard.
In 2007, there were sixty-nine full-time major league umpires, ranging in experience from Bruce Froemming, who was in his thirty-seventh season (Froemming had been around so long that players occasionally asked him what the weather was like on the day Babe Ruth hit his 714th home run), to Lance Barksdale, who was entering his fourth full season. Umpiring is a little bit like being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court: once you are in the majors, it will take an act of God or Bud Selig — God being more likely to intervene — to get an umpire fired.
Randazzo is one of the least experienced umpires in the majors, even though he was in his eighth big league season. He had been one of twenty-four umpires brought to the majors in 1999 when twenty-two umpires had resigned as part of their union’s attempt to force the owners to give them a new contract. MLB had accepted the resignations, and it had taken a court battle of several years for some of the umpires to get their jobs back.
In the meantime, Randazzo and twenty-three others were promoted, either at the start of 1999 or midway through that season. During that period, MLB had changed the way umpires worked, doing away with the tradition of American League umpires and National League umpires as part of the changeover in the way all of MLB was run. Now, there are no longer league offices or league presidents. Everyone reports to the commissioner of baseball.
The crew assigned to work the Mets-Nationals series in Washington the last weekend in April was led by Larry Vanover, a fourteen-year veteran umpire, though a relatively inexperienced crew chief. The home plate umpire for the second game of the series was Greg Gibson, another member of the class of ’99. Randazzo was at first base, Charlie Reliford at second, and Vanover at third.
It was a cool, comfortable Saturday night in Washington, and Glavine was matched up against the Nationals’ Jerome Williams, who had struggled mightily in his first three starts, much the way the rest of the Washington staff had. The Nats were in their third season in Washington, D.C., since Major League Baseball had abandoned Montreal following the 2004 season. Perhaps more important, they were in their final season in RFK Stadium, a decrepit relic that had been built at the start of the “multipurpose” stadium era. It had housed bad baseball teams — the expansion Washington Senators from 1962 to 1971 — and had been home to the Washington Redskins until 1996, when the team had moved to suburbia, into perhaps the worst-planned stadium in sports history. From 1996 to 2004 RFK existed for two reasons: to give the local Major League Soccer team, D.C. United, a home and to be available if the day ever came when Major League Baseball returned to Washington.
Baseball had finally come back in 2005, and the Nationals’ first season had been a huge success. The team had been a surprising 81–81 and even spent some time in first place in early summer. Attendance was more than 2.7 million, and MLB was going through the lengthy process of finding the team an owner — something the franchise had not had for five years, beginning in Montreal. In 2006, Washington real estate mogul Theodore Lerner had been selected as the team’s owner. The team had not played as well, and Hall of Famer Frank Robinson had been fired as manager at the end of the season.
Now, the Nationals were in full rebuilding mode. Stan Kasten, the man who had hired John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in Atlanta, was the new team president. Manny Acta, a former Mets coach, was the manager. And most of the pitchers were like Williams: very young, inexperienced, and trying — without much success — to learn on the job.
At twenty-five, Williams was one of the Nationals’ more experienced pitchers, having pitched two full seasons in San Francisco and part of two others with the Cubs. He had a big league record of 23–24 coming into the season, but his ERA as he walked to the mound on a cool, comfortable night with a crowd of just under thirty thousand in attendance, was 6.25. On the surface, this was a pitching mismatch.
Baseball, however, isn’t played on paper. Williams kept walking hitters and then pitching out of trouble. Through six innings he had walked six, given up one hit, and left five men on base. Glavine was better. He had given up just three hits through five innings. In the sixth, with one out, Williams came to bat. Glavine quickly got ahead of him 1–2 and almost struck him out on a changeup that he barely fouled off.
If Williams had struck out it would have been the twenty-five hundredth strikeout of Glavine’s career. “Which isn’t too bad for a soft-tossing lefty,” Glavine joked. “I was glad he fouled the pitch off. I didn’t want twenty-five hundred to be against a pitcher.”
He got his wish because Williams crushed the next pitch, a fastball Glavine got careless with and left over the plate. “For a minute I thought he’d hit it out,” he said. “Which would have been both bad and embarrassing. I was actually relieved when it hit the fence.”
Williams had hit the ball off the bottom of the left-field fence. He was so surprised to have hit the ball that far that he spent some time at the plate admiring his work before jogging to first, turning what should have been a double into a single.
Grateful for that break, Glavine faced lead-off hitter Felipe Lopez. He promptly got him to hit a ground ball to shortstop, the proverbial tailor-made double-play ball. Reyes flipped the ball to Damion Easley, who relayed it to Carlos Delgado for the inning-ending six-four-three. Glavine took a step off the mound toward the dugout, then stopped in disbelief. Tony Randazzo had his arms spread, palms down, giving the safe signal.
Glavine uses less profanity than about 99.9 percent of the athletes on earth. If he says he’s “pissed off” about something, that is enough to turn heads. Now though, seeing Randazzo’s call, he began walking in the direction of first base screaming. “What? What? Are you fucking kidding me?!”
He was halfway to first base before he realized that he was screaming. Seeing his pitcher screaming at the top of his lungs while walking toward an umpire and his first baseman also yelling in dismay, Willie Randolph sprinted from the dugout. A manager comes out at a moment like that for several reasons. First on the list is making sure none of his players — especially his starting pitcher — gets ejected. Hearing Glavine screaming the f-word got Randolph moving instantly, because umpires are very sensitive to that word. In fact, one of baseball’s unwritten rules is that if you say “motherfucker” to an umpire, you are automatically ejected. Umpires and players call it the magic word. Glavine hadn’t said the magic word, but Randolph wasn’t taking any chances.
Beyond that, when a call is missed that clearly, a manager has to go out to show support for his players. There is no way a base umpire is going to change a call like that once he’s made it. Nevertheless, a manager has to go out and protest so his players know he’s backing them and to make sure the next close call is likely to go his team’s way. As in, “You owe us one.” Good umpires never give anyone a “makeup” call. But not everyone is a good umpire.
“I used to say to coaches, ‘I owe you one, but I’ll never pay you back,’ ” said Hank Nichols, a great college basketball referee who works as an evaluator of umpires for MLB. “You make one mistake, fine. You should try never to make it two.”
Randolph got to Randazzo with Glavine still several steps away, standing with his hands on his hips, still jawing, but a bit calmer now that his manager had arrived. According to Randolph, the first thing he said to Randazzo was “Just tell me you missed it, and I’ll go back in the dugout.”
Randazzo adamantly insisted he had the call right, that Lopez had been safe.
“You’re joking, right?” Randolph said. “You have to know you missed that one.”
Umpires don’t miss safe or out calls on the bases very often. A play involving a force — no tag needed — is about as easy a call as an umpire can make. As long as he is in position and can see the runner’s foot hit the bag and hear the ball hit the glove, he shouldn’t miss very often. The most famous missed call at first base was in Game Six of the 1985 World Series, when Don Denkinger called Jorge Orta safe at first, leading off the bottom of the ninth inning for the Kansas City Royals. The St. Louis Cardinals led the game 1–0 and were three outs from winning the World Series. Orta was out by about a step. Denkinger called him safe, and the Royals scored two runs, won the game, and then won Game Seven the next night (11–0, the Cardinals completely failing to show up) and their first and only World Series title.
Since then, all truly bad calls at first base bring up Denkinger’s name. This call wasn’t anywhere close to being as critical as Denkinger’s, but Randazzo had missed it just as badly. His reaction to Randolph wasn’t much better than the call. He started shouting at Randolph that he had the call right all the way.
“That’s when I went off,” Randolph said the next day. “Look, umpires miss calls. They’re human. I make mistakes every day. But at least admit you missed it. Don’t start shouting at me that you didn’t. While he was screaming, he bumped me. That’s when I really got angry.”
The argument grew heated quickly, and Randazzo ended up throwing Randolph out of the game. By now, all the Mets were angry. After Randolph left, Glavine had to get his mind off the call and back on the game.
“Something like that happens, you have to pitch through it,” he said. “On the one hand, Randazzo blew the call. On the other hand, it’s up to me to get the third out, get in the dugout, and cool off. I didn’t do it.”
He hung a changeup to Ronnie Belliard who smashed it into the gap in left-center field. Lopez scored easily, and the Nationals led 1–0. Glavine was now officially pissed. He was pissed at Randazzo and pissed at himself. He got the third out of the inning and walked off the mound barking angrily at Randazzo.
“I was staring at him to see if he would look at me and say anything,” he said. “He didn’t look at me. I started to say something else, to really get on him, but I caught myself. You have to think about the next time he’s behind the plate and you’re pitching. Do umpires hold grudges? Of course they do. I’m not questioning their integrity; I’m just saying it’s human nature. A guy has given you a hard time in the past; you remember it. Maybe subconsciously you don’t give him borderline pitches. You have to be aware of stuff like that. I really wanted to go at him because the whole notion that everyone in the park knew he’d missed it but him really got to me. But I held back. I had to.
“I would say the number of times I’ve done that in my career is less than five,” he said. “I would love to know what he thought when he looked at the tape after the game.”
Umpires are required to look at tape after games, especially of controversial calls. There is a DVD machine in every umpire’s locker room, and they are given a DVD of the game as soon as it is over.
The Mets were able to tie the game in the seventh, but their mini-rally forced Glavine out of the game. With runners on second and third, acting manager Jerry Manuel had to put in a pinch hitter for Glavine to try to get the runs home. He got the tying run in when Nats pitcher Jesus Colome — who had replaced Williams when he hurt his foot at the start of the inning — threw a wild pitch to pinch hitter David Newhan. But with Easley on third with the go-ahead run, Newhan grounded out.
Glavine had thrown eighty-four pitches, meaning he had at least another inning in him or perhaps two on a cool, comfortable night. He had given up one run — with some help from Randazzo — and had been in control the entire evening. Yet, he headed up to the clubhouse after Newhan ended the inning, with no chance to get a win.
“I felt like I had studied to take a test, had gone in and aced it, and then someone came up and said, ‘We gave you the wrong test; you have to take it again in five days,’ ” he said. “Some nights you know you were lousy and you deserve to get beat. Other nights you were okay and it could go either way. But when you pitch the way I pitched that night, and you come away with nothing, at least in part because an umpire blew an easy call, that’s frustrating.”
The game ended up dragging on for four hours before the Mets won it in the twelfth, aided by another blown Randazzo call in the ninth, that helped them tie the game. “Give the guy credit,” Mets TV announcer Gary Cohen said. “He had three calls to make that night, and he missed all three.”
The first had come in the fifth inning when Randazzo had called Easley and Reyes out on back-to-back dazzling plays by Zimmerman. Reyes’s call was close; Easley’s was not. “I probably should have gone out then,” Randolph said the next day. “Maybe if I had said something in the fifth, he’d have gotten it right in the sixth.” Good umpires will let players and managers know when they know they’ve made a mistake. “I remember in Baltimore when I was playing, Steve Palermo threw me out because he thought I was getting on him about a check swing from the dugout,” Randolph said. “It wasn’t me though, it was [Bucky] Dent and [Graig] Nettles. But he nailed me.
“In those days George [Steinbrenner] was involved in everything. When he heard what happened he wrote a letter to [American League president] Lee McPhail and got everyone on the team to sign it, saying that it was Bucky and Graig, and Palermo got the wrong guy. I got a letter of apology from McPhail, and when I saw Palermo he told me he was sorry, that he’d made a mistake.”
Frequently when an umpire misses a pitch or two, he will send word to a pitcher through his catcher that he missed a call. “The older guys, the ones who are more secure about themselves tend to be that way,” Glavine said. “Randy Marsh, Tim McClelland, Ed Montague, John Hirschbeck — guys who are usually right — will tell you when they know they got one wrong. Once they do that, there’s nothing left for you to say.”
It can go both ways. Earlier in the month, when Glavine had pitched against Jamie Moyer, Montague had ruled that a Moyer pitch had hit David Wright in the foot. Moyer didn’t see it hit him or hear it, so he argued with Montague adamantly. “When I got in the clubhouse and saw the tape, I saw Ed had it right,” Moyer said. “He confused me a little because he didn’t give the sign you usually give for a hit batsman, but he had the call right. I picked up the phone, called the umpire’s room, and said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I gave you a hard time. I saw the tape. You had it right.’ ”
Like Glavine, Moyer was thinking about the next time he pitched with Montague behind the plate. “True,” he said. “But it was also the right thing to do.”
If Randazzo regretted what had happened, he never let either Randolph or Glavine know. “Haven’t heard from him,” Randolph said the next day. “And I don’t expect that I will.”
The fact that the Mets won the game was a little bit soothing for Glavine, but not getting a win when he had pitched so well was aggravating. “If I’m being honest, I want to get this done in part because I want it to happen but also so it can be off the table for everyone,” he said. “A night like tonight just sets it back at least another five days.”
Glavine was 3–1 as April came to an end. He could easily have been 5–1. The bullpen had blown one game, and Tony Randazzo had helped blow another.