THINGS HAD CHANGED considerably during the four weeks that had passed since the first Subway Series. The Mets had gone 8–13 since the Yankees had departed Shea Stadium and arrived in the Bronx, having lost five straight games — including being swept by the Dodgers in Los Angeles — and nine of their last ten. The Yankees had used their win in the final game at Shea as a springboard to a 15–8 run and were coming off sweeps of the Pirates and Diamondbacks in interleague series and had won nine in a row.
“What’s not to love about interleague play?” Mussina joked.
The Mets still led the Braves by two games and the Phillies by five — largely because neither had played very well of late either — and the Yankees still trailed the sizzling Red Sox by eight and a half, but the moods in the two clubhouses had shifted dramatically.
“I think we’re all just a little bit frustrated right now,” Glavine said in the visitors’ clubhouse in Yankee Stadium on Friday afternoon. “We know what kind of team we have here, and we’ve been waiting to get on that big hot streak we know we’re capable of having. It just hasn’t come yet.”
In fact, the Mets had yet to piece together a five-game winning streak all season. They managed to end their losing streak in the opener thanks to Oliver Perez, who had become a major Rick Peterson reclamation success story. Perez had come to the Mets the previous July as a throw in to a trade-deadline deal general manager Omar Minaya had made in order to acquire relief pitcher Roberto Hernandez. Perez had been a rising star in 2004 at the age of twenty-two, when he went 12–10 on a bad Pittsburgh team and pitched to an ERA of 2.98.
He had completely fallen apart after that. His ERA had doubled the next year, and he had been sent back to the minors. The Pirates were more than happy to part with him as part of the Hernandez–Xavier Nady trade. He had actually been the Mets’ game-seven starter in the NLCS in October and had pitched well, allowing just one run in six innings, even though the Mets lost the game.
“If you were a stock, I’d buy you now,” Peterson had told Perez during spring training. “Because you have the ability to be worth a lot — especially to yourself — by the end of this season.”
Peterson’s prediction was turning out to be true. Perez pitched seven and a third shutout innings against the Yankees, lowering his ERA to 2.93 in a 2–0 Mets win. The victory stopped the Mets’ bleeding and the Yankees’ winning streak and set up a matchup the next afternoon between Glavine and twenty-two-year-old Tyler Clippard.
For the first time in anyone’s memory, a Mets-Yankees Saturday game was not broadcast on Fox. Even so, Bill O’Reilly, the right-wing talk-show host, was at the game. He turned up in the Mets clubhouse, glad-handing players until a security guard asked him if he had a credential for the clubhouse. O’Reilly’s response was something along the lines of “Don’t you know who I am?” Whether the guard did or did not know who O’Reilly was and whether that would have caused him to remove O’Reilly more quickly or more slowly, no one knows. O’Reilly was asked to leave, which galled him.
What apparently galled him even more was the sight of his archenemy, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, walking around the clubhouse unimpeded. There was a reason for that: Olbermann, who had begun his career in sports and still cohosted an hour-long segment of The Dan Patrick Show, then on ESPN radio, actually covered sports, so he had a credential. That didn’t much matter to O’Reilly, who complained loud and long to Yankee officials, demanding that Olbermann’s credentials be removed. They weren’t.
Glavine probably would have been happier if he had just left with O’Reilly. His day was at least as miserable. As in Detroit, the Mets scored early for him, staking him to a 2–0 lead on a David Wright RBI single in the first and a home run by Ruben Gotay in the second. Once again, Glavine couldn’t stand the prosperity, even though he breezed through the first. The Yankees tied it in the bottom of the second, and the Mets went back ahead 3–2 in the third. Glavine immediately gave up a two-run home run to Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the inning to make it 4–3. Then Ramon Castro answered with a two-run home run in the fourth to make it 5–4, until Derek Jeter hit a two-run home run to make it 6–5.
It was now the Mets’ turn to hit a two-run homer in the fifth. At the rate things were going, the game was going to end up finishing on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
But the Mets missed their turn, failing to score. The Yankees did not. Posada led off with a double that knocked Glavine out — his shortest outing of the season — and the Yankees ended up scoring two more runs in the inning, making it four consecutive innings in which they had scored two runs.
Glavine was disgusted with himself, frustrated with the results, and angry at home-plate umpire Bruce Froemming.
Froemming was in his thirty-seventh and last year as a major league umpire. He had umpired more games than any man in history and had survived as long as he had because he had a self-deprecating sense of humor and most of the time managed to take his job seriously without taking himself seriously. He’d even survived a controversy several years earlier, when he had asked some players to autograph items for him — an absolute no-no if you are an umpire, for obvious reasons.
Froemming had once been one of the better ball-and-strike umpires in the game. That was no longer the case. Players had noticed that Froemming had developed a flinch when working the plate, moving backward just a tiny bit as the ball was delivered. “If you’re moving, even just a little bit, it’s hard to see the ball as it crosses the plate,” said Mussina, who watched closely from the dugout that day. “I felt for Tom because I know how important it is to have your good pitches called strikes. He wasn’t getting it, and it forced him to change the way he pitched. I guess there’s a reason why this is Bruce’s last year.”
Glavine liked Froemming but at that moment could only wish he had retired a year earlier. When Peterson came to the mound to talk to Glavine in the fourth inning, he let some of his frustrations tumble out. Peterson understood. “Tom wasn’t great by any means,” Peterson said the next day. “But Bruce was the worst possible umpire for him to have behind the plate right now.”
Glavine was upset because he felt two umpires he had liked through the years — Tim McClelland in Detroit and now Froemming — had forced him to throw strikes he didn’t want to throw. “Look, if they’d given me every single pitch I thought I deserved, I might still have gotten bombed in those games,” he said. “I wasn’t good. But it isn’t like I can afford to throw the ball over the plate. I can’t. They weren’t giving me pitches I thought should have been strikes. Pitchers and hitters are in a nonstop battle for a few inches one way or the other. If a guy throws ninety-five, he may not need those few inches. If you throw eighty-five, you need them. When I didn’t get those few inches those two days and I had to throw pitches where I didn’t want to throw them, I got hurt.”
Two games had yielded eight and one-third innings of pitching and sixteen earned runs. That jacked Glavine’s ERA from a more than respectable 3.36 to 4.67.
All of that didn’t make for the happiest of Father’s Days, although being with his family was a good distraction. His parents and Chris’s parents were down for the weekend, and they all went to a good Italian restaurant for dinner on Saturday night and took the kids to brunch on Sunday. “Father’s Day may be the only day of the season when it’s a break to play at night,” he said. “I had most of the day with the family.”
The one present Glavine would have liked to get for Father’s Day was an answer to why he had pitched so poorly in back-to-back outings. Part of it, he knew, was the rhythm of the season. “No one goes through an entire year without a bad stretch of some kind,” he said. “I’ve had them every year of my career. It’s like the old baseball saying about bad teams having winning streaks and good ones having losing streaks.
“When you’re going through a streak like this it’s certainly no fun. You’re frustrated, and you do wonder on occasion if you’ll ever get another out or feel good on the mound again. You know that’s not the case, but there are times when it feels that way.”
Pitching poorly in the Subway Series didn’t make things any easier for Glavine. When the Yankees are playing the Mets, even the U.S. Open golf championship, which is the big story of the weekend everyplace else in the sports world, takes a backseat. Sunday’s stories on the game were quick to point out that Glavine hadn’t won a game in a month. No one knew that better than he did.
“The thing is, I haven’t pitched poorly for a month,” he said. “I’ve pitched poorly twice. Before that I pitched well but didn’t get any wins. People are acting like it’s been a month since I pitched well.”
When Glavine walked into the clubhouse on Sunday afternoon it was, naturally, packed. The clubhouses at Yankee Stadium are bigger than the ones at Shea, but not much. The visitors’ clubhouse is narrow, and there aren’t a lot of places for players to hide from the media. The dining area in the back of the room is off-limits, but anyone can walk to the door and stick his head in to talk to someone. No one on the Mets was taking the Miguel Cairo approach and putting tape down to mark the off-limits area, so Glavine dressed quickly and found a spot as far from the door to the dining area as he could so he could watch the golf tournament in semipeace.
After a while he got up to walk to the training room. He was in the hallway leading there when he ran into Peterson. “How are you feeling?” Peterson asked.
“Been better,” Glavine answered.
Peterson had been trying to decide whether to talk to Glavine that day or wait until the team got back to Shea the next day to begin a series against the Minnesota Twins. It would be easier at Shea; they could just go into the coaches’ room in the back of the clubhouse and talk, but if Glavine was stewing, he preferred to do it sooner rather than later. Seeing the look on Glavine’s face, Peterson decided sooner — even in a hallway — was better.
As he always did with a struggling pitcher, Peterson reminded Glavine about “the process.” He wasn’t that far off, he told him. The umpires certainly hadn’t helped matters the last two games, and he’d been facing good lineups where there really wasn’t any margin for error. There were things they could work on when he threw his bullpen the next day, and it probably wasn’t a bad thing that there was an off-day Thursday, which meant he would get an extra day of rest before pitching against Oakland on Friday.
“With Tommy, you know you’re saying a lot of things he already knows,” Peterson said. “There isn’t anything in baseball he hasn’t been through. I just want to make sure he doesn’t get too focused on results when they haven’t been good, because I know and he knows those results aren’t who he is. There was nothing seriously wrong with the way he was pitching, nothing that couldn’t be corrected fairly easily.”
Glavine leaned on the wall while Peterson talked, and listened. He liked the fact that Peterson never seemed to lose his cool or get upset; in many ways it was a nice change from the in-your-face approach he had dealt with during his years in Atlanta with Leo Mazzone. But right then, right at that moment, in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, knowing people were again questioning whether he could still get hitters out, and that many of those people were standing a few yards away waiting to talk to him, Glavine really didn’t want to talk about the process or how many clubs he had in his bag when he went to the mound.
“I hear you, Rick,” he said finally, when Peterson paused. “But right now, the way I feel, to be honest, is fuck the process; I want to win a fucking game.”
Peterson got it. “I know, Tom,” he said. “So let’s go out tomorrow and figure out how to win one.”
That was good enough for Glavine. He squared his shoulders and prepared to enter the Lion’s Den.
HE HADN’T EVEN REACHED his locker before he saw trouble. A camera crew from one of the local New York TV stations was waiting. Glavine had noticed the camera and cameraman and the reporter holding a microphone when he had darted from the dining area to the training area. Maybe, he thought, they’re just waiting for someone — anyone. Now, it was apparent they were waiting for him.
“Tom, have you got a minute?” came the query as he approached.
Ninety-nine times out of one hundred — no, nine hundred ninety-nine times out of one thousand — Glavine’s answer would have been “Sure, I’m okay until we go out to stretch.”
Now he looked at the TV reporter, microphone in hand, a friendly smile on his face, and said, “What’s it about?”
The reporter, probably a little bit surprised at the cool in Glavine’s voice, said, “Well, you know, I’d just like to talk about pitching, I guess. About your pitching and what’s been going on the last month.”
As much as Glavine didn’t want to talk at that moment, he probably would have sucked it up and done it if not for the words “what’s been going on the last month.” As soon as he heard them, Glavine stiffened. “Look,” he said evenly, gazing into his locker as if the treasure of the Sierra Madre might somehow be buried inside, “I don’t want to be a jerk, but today, I’m really not up for that. I’m really sorry. I just don’t think that’s a conversation I want to have right now.”
The reporter wisely waited to see if Glavine would say anything else. Sometimes, especially when dealing with a good guy, reporters know that silence is the best way to get someone to change his mind. Not this time. “I understand,” the reporter said, sticking his hand out. “Maybe some other time?”
“Almost any other time,” Glavine said. “I appreciate your patience.”
Which he did.
“You see, that’s what’s tough about playing in New York sometimes,” Glavine said a few minutes later, as the room was clearing with players headed to the field for stretching and batting practice. “The perception is I’ve pitched poorly for a month because I haven’t won in a month. The fact is I’ve had two bad outings. That’s it. So, if I go on camera and the guy asks me something about a lost month, and I answer by saying it’s really only been a bad week and I was pitching well before then, I just didn’t get any runs, it sounds like I’m throwing my team under the bus. Even if I just say, ‘I was just unlucky for a few starts,’ people will read into that.
“So, my other option is to say no, which I probably haven’t done five times in my career, and then the guy may think I’m a jerk. Fortunately, he seemed like a good guy, and he didn’t get mad. But it’s still hard.
“The best thing for me to do would be to win a game.” He smiled. “Of course, to do that I need to stay with the process.”
Stay with the process. And win a fucking game.
FIVE DAYS LATER, Glavine had stuck with the process and walked to the Shea Stadium mound on a breezy, cloudy, but comfortable early-summer Friday night to pitch against the Oakland Athletics. The A’s had last visited Shea Stadium in 1973 for the third, fourth, and fifth games of the World Series, which they ultimately won in seven games. Their presence in the building brought up two of the better trivia questions in baseball history, one related to the 1973 World Series, the other strictly related to the A’s:
Question one: What did the Mets’ leadoff hitter do in the first inning of Game Three in each of the Mets’ first three World Series? Answer: Hit a home run. Tommie Agee had done it against the Orioles in 1969; Wayne Garrett had done it against the A’s in 1973; and Lenny Dykstra had done it in Fenway Park against the Red Sox in 1986.
Question two: Who was the last American League Most Valuable Player that was a switch hitter? Answer: No, not Mickey Mantle. It was Vida Blue — the A’s pitcher who was the MVP in 1971 after winning twenty-four games. The DH didn’t come into play until 1973, so Blue, a switch hitter, came to bat on a regular basis throughout his MVP season. He was 12 for 102 at the plate, a batting average of .118, but he did switch hit and he did win the MVP that year.
Glavine wasn’t much concerned with history or trivia as he took the mound that evening. During his two bullpen sessions that week, he had worked hard on the mechanics of his delivery, trying to be sure he wasn’t coming across his body with his arm as he let go of the ball. “If you do that, you’re flying open toward the plate,” he said. “It’s just like in golf. If you’re too open, the ball will go sideways. You want to feel as if you’re following straight through in the direction of the plate. It means you have more power, and on your breaking pitches the ball will move from side to side or down, the way you want it to, rather than going in just about any direction when you’re too open.”
He and Peterson had also decided he needed to work a little bit faster. Glavine has always pitched fast, but Peterson thought he was working a little more slowly, especially when he wasn’t feeling confident about the pitch he was about to throw. “Hitters see that,” Peterson said. “It gives them more confidence, makes them think you’re concerned. Let’s be a little bit faster in between pitches, not give them time to feel comfortable.”
Glavine has always believed that body language is an important part of pitching. “If you show frustration, the hitters see it,” he said. “If your shoulders droop or if you’re acting like you can’t get a break, they can tell. It empowers them. But if you catch the ball, look in for a sign, and get set to pitch again without showing them anything, it says to them, ‘This guy wants to pitch; he’s fired up.’ I needed to let the hitters know I wanted to pitch.”
As Glavine warmed up for the first inning, he still felt like he was coming across his body a little bit in spite of all the work in the bullpen. Through the years he has moved the spot he pitches from on the rubber more and more toward the third-base side because, as a left-hander, he believes he is less likely to come across his body while aiming for the outside corner against right-handed batters from there.
To use one of Peterson’s beloved golf analogies: if you’re hitting the ball too far to the right, aim left. By standing on the third-base side, Glavine almost has to aim left to get the ball to the outside part of the plate against righties. Even though he pitches inside far more now, his bread-and-butter pitches are still fastball outside and changeup outside.
“Throwing the ball a little bit differently against lefties isn’t really that difficult,” Glavine said. “On a percentage basis, the number of pitches I throw where I want the ball to go to my right [across his body] is pretty small compared to the other way.”
Most pitchers move around the rubber during their career, searching for the best release point they can find. In a game where inches always matter, the decision on exactly where to pitch from isn’t a small one. Mussina, who has always pitched inside and outside throughout his career, has always felt comfortable smack in the middle of the rubber. That’s where most pitchers start out as kids. Some never move. Others experiment. Glavine has always been an experimenter, although he settled on the third-base side years ago in Atlanta.
After his third warm-up pitch prior to the first inning, still feeling as if he was pulling his pitches a little bit from left to right, Glavine decided to try something on the spur of the moment. When Paul Lo Duca tossed the ball back to him, Glavine caught it, and then, before throwing his next warm-up pitch, moved a few inches to his right, putting himself almost on the corner of the rubber on the third-base side. The shift was three, perhaps four inches.
“It was something I’d done a few times in the past,” he said. “I decided to give it a shot and see how it felt because I just didn’t feel the way I wanted to feel at that moment.”
His five remaining warm-ups felt good. He didn’t feel as if he had to exaggerate his motion to the left anymore in order to drive straight down the mound in the direction of the plate. “It just felt better right away,” he said.
Whether by coincidence or not, he had an easy first inning. That was good, but he didn’t get too excited because he hadn’t had any trouble against the Yankees in the first inning either. The Mets gave him a quick 1–0 lead on what had come to be known as a “Reyes run.” The shortstop led off with a bunt single to third base and reached second when Eric Chavez threw the ball away. He scored a moment later on a Carlos Beltran single. Reyes was leading the National League in stolen bases, and letting him reach first base was almost like giving up a double because of his baserunning ability.
The lead was a brief one. Shannon Stewart, the A’s second hitter in the second, crushed a 1–2 fastball into the left-field bullpen to tie the score at 1–1. “Normally you give up a home run, you tell yourself, ‘Okay, it’s one bad pitch, let’s move on and finish the inning,’ ” Glavine said. “At that moment, though, I was still a little shell-shocked because of the two games I’d pitched leading up to that one. The thought ‘Oh God, not again’ did cross my mind.”
Glavine doesn’t panic often, and this was no exception. He got out of the inning with no further damage, and the game settled into a pitching duel between Glavine and A’s starter Lenny DiNardo. Oakland had been a consistent contender for years under the much ballyhooed leadership of general manager Billy (Money Ball) Beane. Bob Geren was the new manager in ’07, and once again they were a solid club. They arrived in New York with a record of 39–32, a half game better than the Mets, who had slid to 38–32.
It was Glavine who helped get the lead back. He led off the bottom of the third with a double down the left-field line. Reyes sacrificed him to third, and he scored on a sacrifice fly by Lo Duca to make it 2–1. “Pure speed run,” Glavine joked. “I did it all with my legs.”
His pitching arm was now firmly in command. After Stewart’s home run, he didn’t give up a hit until back-to-back one-out singles in the fourth. Here some luck came into play. Bobby Crosby hit a wicked shot toward the middle that Reyes somehow got to, scooped on a short hop, and turned into a spectacular double play.
“That ball was hit so hard, if Hosey doesn’t make the play he made, it’s probably in the gap and they score two and take the lead,” Glavine said. “He makes a play, we’re out of the inning, and the whole game changed right after that. That’s just the way the game is: some nights you’re better than what you get, other nights you aren’t quite as good. If Hosey doesn’t make that play, who knows how the rest of that inning goes.”
Instead, Glavine settled into a groove, and the Mets broke the game open in the sixth with five runs after Shawn Green had homered in the fifth to make it 3–1. Glavine again contributed with his bat during the big rally. With two down and a man on second, Geren opted to walk rookie left fielder Carlos Gomez to pitch to Glavine.
Standing in the on-deck circle, Glavine turned to the dugout with a big smile on his face. “Obviously they haven’t done a very good scouting job,” he said. “Don’t they realize how hot I am?”
He actually was hot with the bat, having had hits in four of his previous five at bats, including the double in the third. His batting average was well over .300 at that point. He continued hot, with an RBI single that made the score 8–1. Reyes followed with a shot into the left-center-field gap.
“As soon as I saw where the ball was going, I knew I had a problem,” Glavine said. “The ball was too well hit for me to not try to score. I hadn’t run that hard for that long in a while.”
Maybe if he hadn’t been wearing his jacket, Glavine would have been okay. Years ago, pitchers routinely put on jackets to run the bases, the thought being that they wanted to keep their pitching arms warm. Nowadays, a lot of pitchers are never on base because of the DH, and, more often than not, when a pitcher does reach, he eschews the jacket. Glavine is old-fashioned enough that with a little chill in the air he had put on the jacket.
“Bad aerodynamics,” he said. “Slowed me down.”
He was out at the plate on a bang-bang play. He had no choice but to try to score, though, since Reyes was practically running up his back by the time he got around third. “I’m just not as fast as I used to be,” Glavine said.
That was perhaps the only disappointment of the night. Coincidence or not, the two changes — working more quickly and moving a few inches on the rubber — yielded positive results. Even after his long run, Glavine set the side down in order in the seventh and breezed through the eighth. He had thrown 109 pitches through eight innings, and Randolph and Peterson decided to let him start the ninth with a 9–1 lead to see if he might be able to get through it quickly and get a complete game.
“I knew the deal was one batter gets on, and I’m done,” he said. “I was okay with it.”
Chavez led off the inning with a single, and Aaron Heilman came in to finish. The Mets breathed a deep sigh of relief. Glavine had his first win in five weeks, his sixth of the season, and the 296th of his career. Four away from the Number felt like a lot closer than five away had.
“I felt like I’d been running in mud for a while,” he said. He smiled. “Rick was right. The process worked.”
And he finally got a f—— win.