DURING THE FIRST NINE DAYS of interleague play, it appeared that National League baseball was exactly what the doctor had ordered for the Yankees. They swept the Pirates and the Diamondbacks and then won two of three from the Mets, winning the final game of the second Subway Series 8–2, behind Chien-Ming Wang, who, after missing almost the entire first month of the season, was now 8–2.
Things were very much looking up. Wang, Andy Pettitte, and Mike Mussina were all pitching well. Pettitte had hit a slide early in June but had bounced back with a 7–1 win against Arizona the day after Mussina’s solid performance against the Diamondbacks. What’s more, help had arrived. The Yankees had melodramatically announced the return of Roger Clemens on a Sunday afternoon in early May, signing him to a contract that would pay him about $1 million a start.
Clemens had made his 2007 debut in the Pirates series, pitching effectively enough for an almost-forty-five-year-old coming out of retirement for the nineteenth time, in a 9–3 win. With a rotation of Wang, Pettitte, Mussina, and Clemens, the Yankees could plug almost anyone into the fifth spot until Philip Hughes was healthy enough to return to the rotation.
“Right now we feel like anybody we run out there, we’re going to have a chance to win the game,” Mussina said. “It wasn’t that way in April and May.”
The Yankees headed west after the Mets series, their record 35–32 and seemingly headed north. They had a nine-game trip: three games in Colorado and then three in San Francisco to wrap up interleague play, followed by three against the always-mediocre-at-best Orioles in Baltimore. There was no reason to think the hot streak wouldn’t continue.
Except it didn’t. Mussina pitched the opener in Colorado against the Rockies and didn’t pitch badly. He gave up scratch runs in the third and fifth and a home run to catcher Yorvit Torrealba in the sixth but was outpitched by Josh Fogg in a 3–1 loss. The notion that the Yankees would go into Colorado and be held to one run seemed all but impossible. Coors Field had been baseball’s launchpad for years because of the thin air in Denver. MLB had taken the audacious step in 2002 of putting baseballs in a humidor before games to keep them moist so they wouldn’t fly so far, and scoring had come down but not so much that one would expect the Yankee lineup to be shut down by Josh Fogg.
The opening game proved to be a harbinger. Jeff Francis beat Pettitte the next night 6–1 in a game that was close until late, and the Rockies completed the sweep the night after with a 4–3 win over Clemens. The last thing in the world anyone would have believed could happen in Colorado was that the Yankees could have Mussina, Pettitte, and Clemens all pitch well and lose. Even less probable was the team scoring just five runs in three games against the Colorado pitching staff.
The Yankees managed to win the opener in San Francisco before blowing a ninth-inning lead the next day to lose in thirteen. That set up Mussina against Noah Lowry, the rapidly improving Giants lefty, in the finale.
From the beginning, the day was a struggle for Mussina. It wasn’t as if the Giants were lighting him up. “It was just that everything was hard,” he said later. “I didn’t have very much confidence in my pitches.”
His struggles may have been defined best by the way the Giants ran the bases. Almost everyone who reached first base stole second base about five seconds later. Poor Wil Nieves had no chance. Mussina was so locked in on trying to deal with the hitter at the plate that he seemed to forget about runners on first.
Barry Bonds, of all people, started the parade. Bonds had once been a feared base runner, but the combination of his change in body type, aching knees, and age (almost forty-three) had virtually brought him to a halt as a runner. Most of the time he didn’t even bother to run out ground balls, and he simply jogged after any ball in the outfield that was more than two or three steps out of his range. About the only time he ran with any enthusiasm was when a pitcher failed to pay attention to him, and he could steal a base by running at three-quarter speed instead of half speed.
After Bonds had singled to start the second in a scoreless game, he immediately stole second. Ryan Klesko walked, and both runners moved up on a ground ball. A Pedro Feliz sacrifice fly scored Bonds, and then Guillermo Rodriguez doubled Klesko in to make it 2–0. Two innings later, Nate Schierholtz led off with a single and — you guessed it — stole second. Trying desperately to make a play, Nieves overthrew the ball, and Schierholtz ended up on third. The Giants then executed a squeeze, Lowry bunting, Mussina fielding, and Schierholtz scoring to make it 3–0.
That was all the Giants needed as it turned out. Mussina pitched out of further trouble, giving up five hits, walking three, and allowing five steals. The fact that he only gave up the three runs in his five innings was a tribute to his toughness with men in scoring position. That he had to come out after five innings was the result of having thrown 105 pitches by the time he got the last out in the bottom of the fifth.
“That’s just not good enough,” Mussina said. “You have to be able to give your team more than five innings. The three runs were okay; it was good that I hung in there and didn’t let the game get out of hand. But you can’t be over a hundred pitches before the end of the fifth inning. You have to pitch more efficiently than that.”
Watching his friend from the bullpen as he always did, Mike Borzello was discouraged. In May, he had thought Mussina’s unwillingness to go after hitters was strictly a product of his arm strength not being all the way back after the stint on the disabled list. Now though, it was late June and Mussina was still pitching scared.
“He just didn’t want contact,” Borzello said. “There’s a reason why there are eight other guys out on the field with you. You can’t pitch behind in the count all day long because you’re afraid to throw the ball over the plate.”
Mark Mussina, watching on television, felt the same way. “He had gotten to the point where he was afraid to give up home runs,” he said. “He wasn’t giving up that many home runs, but he wasn’t giving himself a chance to pitch deep into games because he was afraid to throw strikes.”
One of the reasons Mussina and Borzello are friends is that Mussina knows Borzello will tell him what he thinks. On the flight home that night, Mussina sat down with Borzello to ask him what he thought about his performance that day.
“You were bad,” Borzello said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was good,” Mussina said. “But three runs in five innings isn’t all that bad.”
“No, it’s not,” Borzello said. “But your pitching was bad. What’s made you a really good pitcher is having confidence in your stuff. You’ve always known if you throw your pitch where you want to throw it you’re going to get outs. You didn’t pitch that way today. You pitched scared. No one can pitch well that way.”
Mussina didn’t exactly love hearing Borzello’s words, but he knew he was right. He had always had so many pitches in his arsenal that if one was off on a given day — or even two — he had other options. Back home, Mark, who had started charting every pitch Mike threw in 1994, noticed a pattern developing. “Fastball away, fastball away, fastball away,” he said. “That was all he was doing. There was one game in that period where forty-four of the first fifty-one pitches he threw were fastballs. After the game I heard Joe [Torre] say, ‘He just needs to have more confidence in his fastball.’ I said, ‘What?!’ He’s throwing eighty-seven percent fastballs, and Joe thinks he isn’t showing enough confidence in his fastball?”
Torre wasn’t talking so much about how many fastballs Mussina was throwing but where he was throwing them. Much like Glavine in 2003 and 2004, Mussina had fallen into the habit of only throwing outside, although for a different reason. Glavine, who had never been a hard thrower, believed he had to stay away from hitters to be successful and had been successful that way for years — before Questech and the Mets came into his life.
Mussina had thrown a good deal harder than Glavine when he was younger, and now he couldn’t do that anymore. Most of his fastballs were in the 86- to 88-mile-per-hour range, and he topped out at 90. Mussina knew he needed to adapt but was having a tough time doing it.
“There’s nothing harder than being able to throw hard when you’re young and waking up one morning and finding out you can’t throw that hard anymore,” said Ron Guidry, who had thrown very hard as a young pitcher but had been able to win twenty-two games at the age of thirty-five after he could no longer blow batters away. “Your mind tells you that you should still be able to do certain things, but your body won’t let you do it. Accepting the fact that you need to pitch differently is half the battle — maybe more.”
Glavine had needed to reinvent himself as a pitcher in 2005. What Mussina was going through wasn’t all that different. And it was every bit as difficult.
THE SUNDAY LOSS IN SAN FRANCISCO dropped the Yankees under .500 again at 36–37. They flew east to Baltimore, hoping a series against the Orioles would be a cure-all as it had frequently been in the past ten years when the once-proud Baltimore franchise had become little more than a laughingstock, owner Peter Angelos changing general managers and managers the way George Steinbrenner once had while his team went through one losing season after another.
The Orioles had already fired another manager, Sam Perlozzo, early in 2007, and replaced him with minor league–lifer Dave Trembley. At the same time they had revamped their front office, hiring Andy McPhail, who had successfully put together teams in Minnesota and Chicago. The hiring of McPhail was viewed in baseball circles as a step forward for owner Peter Angelos, who had frequently refused to give final say on trades and signings to his general managers. Most people believed McPhail wouldn’t have agreed to come to Baltimore unless he was given complete control by Angelos.
His hiring was, the long-suffering fans in Baltimore hoped, a long-term solution. Short-term, the Orioles still weren’t very good. They were 32–43 when the Yankees got to town and headed for another ninety-loss season. Their gorgeous ballpark, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, had become known in recent years as “Yankee Stadium South,” because so many Yankee fans made the short trip from New York to snap up tickets they couldn’t get for sold-out games in New York. The Orioles had drawn well over three million fans on a regular basis after first moving in to Camden Yards in 1992, but their attendance had been in free fall in recent years, as each hopeful April turned into a wait-till-next-year July. Even the presence of the Yankees didn’t fill every seat, although crowds of close to forty thousand showed up — considerably higher than the usual average of under thirty thousand.
The Yankees always seemed to play well in Baltimore. The 2006 season had been typical: even though they were only 5–4 against the Orioles in New York, they were 7–3 in Baltimore. The small dimensions of the ballpark played to their power, and the fact that half the crowd was on their side most nights didn’t hurt either.
But they were at the tail end of a long road trip and not playing well. It showed the first two games: a 3–2 loss and a 4–0 loss. In the second game, Clemens was outpitched by Baltimore lefty Erik Bedard, who was becoming one of the best pitchers in the game.
Prior to the second game, Torre decided to send Mussina home to New York a day early, meaning he would miss the final game of the series. Managers will often send a starting pitcher to the place where he is going to pitch next a day or two early so he can be rested for his start, but more often it happens when a coast-to-coast trip is involved or during postseason. The Yankees’ trip from Baltimore to New York was the shortest they would make all season — other than when they played the Mets at Shea Stadium. But with the third game at night and bad weather in the forecast, Torre decided to send Mussina home early.
“If you think about it, it makes sense,” Mussina said. “Best-case scenario we’re going to play a three-hour game, which means the earliest we get to the airport is between eleven thirty and midnight. We land at twelve thirty, have to bus to Yankee Stadium to get to our cars, and by the time we’re home it’s two o’clock. That’s if the game doesn’t run long or if there’s no rain.”
Mussina was long past feeling any qualms about coming back to Baltimore in a visiting uniform. He had expected boos when he first left to sign with the Yankees, but they hadn’t been nearly as loud as what Glavine heard when he left Atlanta. Many, if not most, Oriole fans knew that Mussina had signed with the team once for a hometown discount and had been willing to sign in the spring of 2000 for five years at $60 million, considerably less than the $88 million for six years he got after the season from the Yankees.
What’s more, the presence of all the Yankee fans frequently drowned out any boos he might hear. “Actually, it doesn’t sound much different than the old days when they used to yell ‘Mooooose,’ ” he said, smiling.
On this trip, he heard no boos since he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. As it turned out, Torre’s notion that getting Mussina home and to bed on Thursday would be good for him proved to be a smart one. The teams played a long game that came to a halt because of rain after the Yankees had scored four runs to take an 8–6 lead in the top of the eighth inning. The umpires waited until almost midnight before suspending the game — since the Orioles hadn’t gotten a chance to bat in the eighth and the game was official (having gone more than five innings) — meaning it would be completed the next time the Yankees came to Baltimore. It was three o’clock in the morning by the time the bus pulled into Yankee Stadium.
Mussina was sound asleep.
GLAVINE WAS SLEEPING a lot better too, after his performance against Oakland. The A’s were the Mets’ last interleague series — 2007 was a year in which the AL East played the NL West, and the NL East played the AL West — meaning the Yankees were in San Francisco when the Mets hosted the Athletics, and the St. Louis Cardinals came into Shea for their only scheduled visit of the season after the Mets had completed their sweep of the A’s.
The Cardinals were a far different team than the one that had upset the Mets in the NLCS the previous October. They had been rocked by injuries, controversy, and even death. The death had occurred in May when relief pitcher Josh Hancock slammed his SUV into the back of a tow truck that was working on a disabled car. He died almost instantly. An autopsy determined that he had been drunk at the time of the accident, which led MLB and the players union to ban all alcohol from major league clubhouses. For years, many players routinely drank a beer or two (or more) in the clubhouse after games.
The Yankees and the Mets had already banned alcohol before the Hancock accident. Mussina, as the Yankees’ player rep, took part in a conference call with other player reps a few days later, in which it was decided to formally ban all alcohol from clubhouses. “It probably should have been done long ago,” Mussina said. “But after this, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”
Hancock hadn’t been drinking in the Cardinal clubhouse; he’d been in a bar. But MLB and the union had to let the public know that drinks weren’t being handed out like candy bars inside their stadiums after games.
Hancock’s death came less than two months after Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa had been charged with DUI during spring training, when he fell asleep at the wheel of his car at a stoplight. LaRussa was an icon in St. Louis, especially after winning the World Series. He had been a major league manager since 1979 and had enjoyed success with the White Sox, the Athletics, and the Cardinals, regularly making the postseason, even though the 2006 World Series was “only” his second world championship — the first having come in 1989 in Oakland during the “earthquake” World Series.
But while LaRussa was seen as one of baseball’s best managers and smartest people, there were also those who found him to be arrogant and difficult. Probably everyone on both sides of the argument was right: LaRussa was a great manager, was extremely smart, was arrogant, and could certainly be difficult. His DUI was cause for glee in some circles, especially among those who liked to mockingly call him “the Genius,” a phrase that had followed him since he had been featured in a bestselling George Will book on baseball that had portrayed him as one.
All of LaRussa’s brilliance was going to be needed to keep the 2007 Cardinals afloat. The pitching staff was in tatters, with Chris Carpenter, the 2005 Cy Young Award winner, out for the season; closer Jason Isringhausen hurt; and others who had pitched well at the end of 2006 not pitching nearly as well. Slugger Albert Pujols had been on the disabled list, as had starting shortstop David Eckstein.
The Mets had very little concern for the Cardinals’ troubles when they came to town. “Talking about revenge is silly,” Glavine said. “There’s nothing we can do to change what happened last year. They went to the World Series and won. That chance is gone. But it’s still nice to go out and beat them.”
The Cardinals limped into Shea Stadium with a 33–39 record, although they were still in contention in the National League Central because no one was playing very well. In 2006, the Cardinals had won the division with eighty-three victories — the Mets won ninety-seven — and it was beginning to look as if eighty-three to eighty-five wins would be good enough to win the Central again.
LaRussa was a big Glavine fan. “Don’t misunderstand, when he pitches against us I want to beat his butt,” he said. “But I’ve been around the game long enough to appreciate the kind of competitor he is and to appreciate the way he’s carried himself through the years. He’s one of those guys who you can say without hesitation is good for the game. When he wins three hundred, I’ll be standing up somewhere and applauding.”
Glavine was focusing on 297 when he took the mound in the third game of the series. The teams had split eleven-inning marathons in the first two games, and the weather had turned miserably hot and humid. It was ninety-three degrees when Glavine threw his warm-ups, with the skies getting darker by the minute. “One of those nights where you want to get a lead early and get through five fast,” Glavine said.
He knew of what he spoke. The Mets did get an early lead when David Wright hit a two-run home run with Paul Lo Duca on first base in the bottom of the first. From there, Glavine worked quickly and efficiently. With one out in the second, Scott Rolen hit a soft line drive over shortstop for a base hit. No one realized it at that moment, but it was the Cardinals’ final hit of the night. Glavine was full of confidence coming off the game against Oakland, and against the weak-hitting St. Louis lineup he was dominant. After Rolen’s hit, he gave up a two-out walk to shortstop Aaron Miles. But he got Brendan Ryan to ground to shortstop and then got the Cardinals one-two-three in each of the next four innings.
The Mets weren’t doing a lot more against winless (0–10) St. Louis starter Anthony Reyes (no relation to Jose), but it didn’t matter. When Glavine got Ryan Ludwick for the final out of the sixth inning and his thirteenth consecutive out, it was pouring, and plate umpire Mark Carlson ordered that the tarp be brought out to cover the field.
The umpires waited almost two and a half hours before calling the game. When they did call it, Glavine had his first official complete game of the season and a one-hit shutout. Of course if Glavine hadn’t given up the hit to Rolen and if the game had been able to continue, the question then would have been whether Glavine would have gone out to pitch the seventh inning.
Traditionally, pitchers don’t come back after a long rain delay, especially older pitchers. The only exception to that rule would come if a no-hitter was involved. Glavine had never pitched a no-hitter — the closest he had come was taking one into the eighth inning in 2004 against the Colorado Rockies — which wasn’t all that surprising. More often than not, no-hitters are pitched by power pitchers, frequently power pitchers with control problems, who keep the hitters off-balance by throwing very hard, often in the wrong direction. Nolan Ryan, who exploded all records for no-hitters by pitching seven of them (Sandy Koufax is next with four), is the career leader in both strikeouts and walks.
A pitcher like Glavine, who isn’t going to strike out a lot of people, is far less likely to get twenty-seven outs without surrendering a hit. The more batters make contact, the more likely someone is to poke the ball someplace where it can’t be caught. “Realistically my chances for a no-hitter at this point in my career are pretty slim,” he said. “My chances early in my career weren’t all that great either.”
What would he have done had he been pitching a no-hitter and the game had resumed after the delay? “I’m pretty sure Rick [Peterson] wouldn’t have wanted me to go out there again,” he said. “Too risky.”
But a no-hitter? “I guess we would have at least talked about it,” he finally conceded. “It’s probably a good thing it wasn’t an issue.”
Far more remarkable than Glavine having not pitched a no-hitter is the fact that the Mets — in forty-six seasons of baseball — have never had a no-hitter. This is a team that had Tom Seaver pitch for it, Nolan Ryan (briefly), Dwight Gooden, and Jerry Koosman. The first two are power pitchers in the Hall of Fame; the third would be there if he hadn’t blown up his career with drug use; and the fourth was a borderline Hall of Famer who was a dominant pitcher when young and with the Mets.
Seaver pitched five one-hitters while he was a Met, including coming within two outs of a perfect game in 1969 against the Chicago Cubs. An obscure outfielder named Jim Qualls, who was in the lineup that night only because the regular center fielder Don Young had made a defensive blunder the day before, broke it up with a solid single to left-center. Seaver, who finally did pitch a no-hitter after being traded to the Cincinnati Reds, always called that his imperfect game. Gary Gentry, another young power pitcher on that 1969 team, pitched two one-hitters for the Mets. Ryan pitched one, as did Gooden. Remarkably, Steve Trachsel, whose only real place in baseball lore is as the pitcher who gave up Mark McGwire’s sixty-second home run in 1998, pitched two one-hitters for the Mets.
In all, there have been twenty-three complete-game one-hitters in Mets history. Technically, Glavine’s was the twenty-fourth, but a six-inning one-hitter hardly resonated with him. What did was the win, his seventh of the season. He was now three wins away with three starts left before the All-Star break.
“Boy, would it be nice to go away for a few days with that part of the season behind me,” he said. “It probably isn’t realistic, but it would sure be nice.”
What was most important was that he was pitching well again. Since the two bad games against the Yankees and Tigers and the slight adjustment on the rubber, he had pitched fourteen innings, given up one run — the home run by Shannon Stewart in the Oakland game — and had won twice.
“It’s always a relief when you come out of a little slump,” he said. “Because you know then it was only a slump.”
MUSSINA WAS IN A LITTLE SLUMP of his own. He had lost twice on the western road trip, and, even though he hadn’t pitched horribly in either game, he knew Borzello’s succinct analysis of the game in San Francisco — “You were bad” — was accurate.
Well-rested, he went to the mound against the Oakland Athletics on Friday night, June 29. It was exactly a week since Glavine had gotten back on track against the A’s. The Athletics had come into Shea Stadium playing good baseball, but the trip to the East Coast had not gone well. After being swept by the Mets, they had gone to Cleveland and lost three of four. Tired at the end of a long trip, they were probably just what the doctor ordered for a pitcher trying to find himself again.
Mussina was in control from the start. He had worked in the bullpen during the week on locating his pitches, on making sure he could hit his spots so as not to fall behind in too many counts. He knew he couldn’t afford to pitch behind and that he had to stop worrying about giving up home runs and pitch to contact more often.
“The thing about Moose is, he’s smart,” Joe Torre said. “That sounds simplistic, but there are some guys who are book smart but not baseball smart. Moose is both. He knew what happened in San Francisco, and he couldn’t go out and pitch like that and expect to have any kind of real success. So, he adjusted. That’s what guys who don’t have overpowering stuff have to do: make adjustments all the time. He did that.”
As is often the case, getting out of trouble in the first inning proved key. There’s no better example of how important it is to get to a good pitcher early than Glavine, who gives up almost half his runs in the first inning. But it is true of all good pitchers.
“The first inning you often aren’t completely comfortable on the mound,” Mussina said. “It takes a while to get yourself to feel exactly the way you want to feel in the game. You throw thirty to forty pitches in the bullpen, then you only get eight warm-ups on the mound. That’s why a lot of times if you see a guy who is good get through a tough first inning, he settles down and pitches well. When you’re on the bench facing someone good and you get men on in the first, you automatically think, ‘Better get him now because there might not be another chance this good.’ ”
That was certainly the case with Mussina against the A’s. With one out in the first, he walked Shannon Stewart, with Oakland’s two best power threats, Nick Swisher and Jack Cust, coming up. Stewart promptly stole second, which put him into scoring position. “The inning can go either way at that point,” Mussina said.
It went his way. He struck out Swisher with a fastball that hit 90 and got Cust to fly out to Hideki Matsui in left. Threat averted. The Yankees then scored twice in the bottom of the inning, and Mussina felt a surge of confidence.
“Remember in my last two outings, we’d scored a total of one run while I was pitching,” he said. “Going out to the mound with a two-oh lead after that felt more like ten-oh. I had to remind myself what it was like to pitch with the lead.”
He relearned the art quickly. All night long he was around the plate, allowing the A’s to put the ball in play. He worked ahead of hitters and only walked one batter. Of the twenty-one outs he got, eighteen came on balls that were put in play; he struck out three. He completely shut down Oakland until the seventh inning, when Eric Chavez led off with a double, and Mark Ellis singled, Chavez stopping at third.
It was Mussina’s first jam of the night. He got out of it immediately, getting Dan Johnson to hit the ball right back to him. Quickly, he turned it into a one-four-three double play, allowing Chavez to score to make it 2–1. Bobby Crosby flied to center, and the inning was over. Torre and Guidry decided right then, even though Mussina had only thrown eighty-four pitches — his most efficient performance of the season — that they wanted to let the bullpen get the last six outs.
“When a guy’s been struggling, and he goes out and pitches that well for that long, you want to make sure he walks away with a good feeling,” Torre said. “He had started to look a little bit tired in the seventh, even though he did a good job pitching out of trouble. I thought getting him out was not only the best way to win the game but the best way to make sure he went into his next start with some confidence.”
Torre was proven correct, although it wasn’t easy. He brought in the always-flammable Kyle Farnsworth. There was no enigma on the Yankees quite like Farnsworth. He could throw harder than anyone on the team, often reaching 98 on the radar gun. But he was maddeningly inconsistent, frequently walking batters at crucial moments, then giving up a key hit — often a home run — to give up a lead.
Plus, it was never his fault. When the media would try to ask him about a poor outing, he would snarl and say it was somehow their fault (shades of Carl Pavano?) and that he really didn’t care what anyone other than his family and friends thought of him. He didn’t include his teammates in that speech or the team that was paying him $7 million a year to pitch considerably better than he had pitched.
Farnsworth coming into a 2–1 game in the eighth was about as sure a bet as Wall Street in November of 1929. He started the inning by getting Jason Kendall on a ground ball back to the box, but then promptly gave up back-to-back singles to Shannon Stewart and Mark Kotsay. Icing his arm in the clubhouse, Mussina couldn’t help thinking another chance to get a win was about to go by the boards. Torre got Mariano Rivera up but had to let Farnsworth pitch to one more batter while Rivera got warm.
Most of the time in key situations, Farnsworth would do one of two things: give up a home run (and blame it on the media) or get a strikeout. This time, he struck out Nick Swisher. Torre wasn’t going to push his luck. He strolled to the mound as slowly as possible and waved Rivera into the game.
If Rivera is not the greatest closer in the history of baseball, he is certainly part of the conversation. He has probably pitched in more crucial situations than any relief pitcher in history, becoming a critical part of the Yankee bullpen in 1996 when Torre moved him from the starting rotation to being a two-inning setup man for then-closer John Wetteland. Torre called that decision “the Formula” — Rivera in the seventh and eighth and Wetteland in the ninth — and saw it as the key to the Yankees taking control of the American League East en route to their first World Series title in eighteen years.
Wetteland was allowed to leave as a free agent after that season, and Rivera has been the closer ever since. He entered the 2007 season with 413 saves, which put him fourth on the all-time saves list. Beyond that, he had a staggering thirty-four saves in postseason play, a number put in better perspective by the fact that Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley had fifteen.
Of course Rivera had been given more postseason opportunities than any other closer in history, having been on a team that had been in the playoffs all ten years that he had been closing games. Still, he had proven himself in the clutch so many times that when he failed — in the 1997 Division Series against Cleveland, the 2001 World Series against Arizona, and the 2004 American League Championship Series against Boston — it was man-bites-dog news.
Rivera was now thirty-seven, and the first half of the season had been a struggle for him. On the rare occasions when he’d had a chance to close a game in April, he had pitched poorly. He had started to pitch better as his chances to pitch increased, but he still had only nine saves as he jogged in from the bullpen to try to bail out Farnsworth.
Seeing him come in, Mussina breathed a sigh of relief. Rivera might not be the sure thing he had once seemingly been, but he was still about as good as it got. And Mussina would rather have him in the game than Farnsworth. So, clearly, would Torre, who had more or less reinvented the closer’s role as Rivera’s manager. In the 1980s, Tony LaRussa had changed the game by making Eckersley strictly a three-out closer. Eckersley never came into the game before the ninth, and he almost always came in to start the ninth, regardless of how well the starter — or whoever pitched the eighth — was pitching.
Baseball people copy success, so other managers began using their closers to get three outs and three outs only. Torre changed that with Rivera. If he felt he needed a win badly enough, he would bring Rivera in during the eighth, sometimes even to start the eighth, especially in postseason. Frequently the Yankees set up postseason games to use whoever they had to in order to get through the seventh and try to get the ball to Rivera with the lead because they were almost certain he would get the final six outs.
Now, needing four outs, Rivera struck out Jack Cust. He got two quick outs in the ninth, before one of his cutters got away and he hit Dan Johnson with a pitch. But he made up for that by striking out Bobby Crosby to end the game, giving Mussina his fourth win of the season.
“If you had told me before the season that on June 29 I’d get my fourth win and Mo would get his tenth save, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. “But right now it feels like a big deal. It’s been a long three months for all of us. I just hope this is the start of a good run for all of us. We could certainly use it.”
The Yankees were 38–39 after the win and in third place, eleven games behind the Red Sox. That same day the Mets went into Philadelphia and swept both ends of a day-night doubleheader to up their record to 45–33. They had a four-game lead on the Braves and a five-game lead on the Phillies, who dropped back into third place at 41–39 after being swept.
Driving into the stadium the next morning, Mussina switched on the radio, which he will do on occasion just to hear what people are saying. “I like to know what they think about what I know,” he said with a smile.
The discussion centered that morning on the Mets. Would Pedro Martinez be part of the postseason rotation? If so, would he pitch Game One or would Tom Glavine pitch Game One? Could John Maine and Oliver Perez be relied on in October?
Mussina laughed. “We’re not even at the All-Star break yet, and people are setting up postseason rotations for the Mets,” he said. “And us? We don’t exist anymore. All I could think was ‘Wow, these guys really don’t get baseball.’ ”
And since neither the Mets nor the Yankees had quite reached the halfway point of their seasons, there was still a lot of baseball yet to play.