AS POORLY AS MIKE MUSSINA had pitched against the Devil Rays, he looked like Cy Young that night compared to what he had witnessed the night before on television.
He had decided to stay up to see a few innings of Tom Glavine’s start against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Even though Glavine and Mussina didn’t know each other well — and in spite of whatever Glavine may or may not have said about Mussina’s contract in 1997 — there was a great deal of mutual respect between the two of them. Mussina was very much rooting for Glavine to get to three hundred wins as quickly as possible.
“I still remember when Roger [Clemens] was going through it,” he said. “Every outing was a big deal, a media circus, especially after he got to two ninety-nine. I think it took him four tries before he got it, and he had this entire troop of friends and family following him around the country. I remember thinking he was going for one of the great milestones you can reach in baseball, and it was torture for him. I hope it isn’t that way for Tom.”
Most baseball players are night owls because of the hours they keep during the season. Since most games are played at night — the Yankees had fifty-two scheduled day games on their 162-game schedule — most don’t get to bed until after midnight, whether at home or on the road, and many stay up considerably later than that since they typically aren’t due at their job — the ballpark — until three o’clock the next day.
Mussina was single when he first got to the big leagues and would go out after games fairly often. Marriage, kids, and age have changed that. “For one thing, you get to a point where you don’t want to wake up in the morning feeling lousy,” he said. “Then, when you have kids at home, you want to get to bed so you can see them in the morning. I don’t really go out on the road at all anymore.”
In fact, according to Mike Borzello, there’s nothing Mussina likes more than going straight to his hotel room, shutting the door, and either going to sleep or reading himself to sleep. “He never even turns on the TV,” Borzello said.
“Sometimes I turn on the TV,” Mussina said. “But not all that often.”
On Thursday night, July 19, Mussina was home preparing for his start the next night against Tampa Bay. With the Mets not playing until ten, his kids were in bed by the time the game started.
“I didn’t watch for long,” he said the next day.
The pitching matchup certainly appeared to be a good one: Glavine versus Derek Lowe, the Dodgers’ veteran righty, who still had one of the better sinkers in the game. The Mets had started their weeklong West Coast swing by losing two of three in San Diego. They still led the division by two and a half games when they arrived in Los Angeles to play four games against the Dodgers.
Glavine, coming off his great performance in New York against the Reds, was brimming with confidence, thinking he was about to get on the run he had been waiting for all year. If he could win in L.A., he would get his first shot at the Number the following Wednesday, at home against the always-awful Pittsburgh Pirates. It was, potentially, an ideal setup: the chance to, as he would say, “do what I’m trying to do” in front of a home crowd. It would also be a lot easier logistically to go for the win at home since the plan was for about thirty family members and close friends to be on hand.
Going for 299 in L.A., the only family members in the ballpark were Chris and their two youngest sons, Peyton and Mason. The boys enjoyed Los Angeles and had come out for the long weekend to see some shows and to watch their dad pitch.
The evening started wonderfully. Glavine felt good warming up, and he had always pitched well in Los Angeles. Most people in the National League thought the Dodger Stadium mound was a tad higher than the standard ten inches, perhaps because the Dodgers were always a pitching-oriented team. True or untrue, Glavine usually felt very comfortable on the mound there.
As if they understood how important it would be to Glavine to get a win, the Mets bombed L.A. starter Derek Lowe for six runs in the first inning. When Glavine came up to bat in the inning, Ron Darling commented on the Mets broadcast that “there aren’t a lot of feelings better for a pitcher than coming up to bat before you’ve thrown a pitch.”
Glavine was certainly happy to have the runs. But he actually felt a bit queasy going to the mound in the bottom of the first, up 6–0. “There’s a tendency to overthink,” he said. “If it’s nothing-nothing or if you’re at home, you have this plan on how you want to pitch, and you aren’t thinking score at all. You get that big a lead, you have to say to yourself, ‘Don’t change the plan; pitch like you would normally pitch.’ Of course the minute you do that, you aren’t thinking the way you normally think.”
Glavine quickly gave two runs back, and it might have been more if Jeff Kent hadn’t been thrown out at third on Luis Gonzales’s two-RBI single, which made the score 6–2. After Matt Kemp homered for the Dodgers with one on in the bottom of the second inning, it was 6–4.
What’s more, Glavine had already thrown fifty-two pitches, a good pitch count for four innings, an okay pitch count for three innings, a horrific pitch count for two innings. “At that point, my thought process was all messed up,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Just get through five with the lead, and maybe I can get the win.’ Not exactly a positive attitude.”
He felt better after the top of the third when the Mets tacked on three more runs. Glavine was in the middle of the rally, drawing a walk against Lowe — who looked shell-shocked by that point — and scoring the Mets’ eighth run. He had a comfortable 9–4 lead going out to pitch the third and reminded himself that he just needed to throw strikes and let his fielders do the rest.
“On paper,” he said later, “it was a good thought.”
It lasted one pitch: Kent, leading off, hit Glavine’s first pitch (a strike, no doubt) into the pavilion in left-center field to make it 9–5. While Kent was trotting around the bases, Rick Peterson was on the bullpen phone getting Aaron Sele up. No one wanted to see Glavine come out of a game with nine runs already on the board, but, unlike a year ago in Atlanta, the Mets were in a serious pennant race, and Willie Randolph had to think first and foremost about winning the game.
“I saw Aaron get up,” Glavine said. “I understood. I knew I was on thin ice if I didn’t start getting outs.”
He didn’t. Gonzales singled. Then Nomar Garciaparra, once the hero of Boston but a forgotten man there since 2004, also singled. Paul Lo Duca came out to the mound to give Glavine a pep talk that both men knew was nothing more than a stalling tactic to give Sele more time to get warm. “At that point, I figured I was no more than two hitters away from getting yanked,” he said. “Maybe less.”
It was less. James Loney singled to load the bases, and Randolph had no choice. The tying run was coming to the plate; Glavine had now thrown sixty-eight pitches and retired six batters out of sixteen.
Glavine felt slightly sick to his stomach. Watching at home on TV, Mussina felt his pain. “As a pitcher, that’s just about your worst nightmare,” he said. “Your team puts up a lot of runs for you, and you just can’t get anybody out. You feel helpless. You find yourself thinking, ‘Exactly when did I forget how to pitch?’ ”
As embarrassed as he felt, Glavine stayed in the dugout for the rest of the inning, the way he always did when taken out of a game, even though he wanted to run into the clubhouse and hide. Sele did a good job holding the Dodgers to one run after taking over in a bases-loaded, no-out jam. When the inning ended, Glavine sat in the dugout as if unable to move because he was still stunned by what had happened: two innings plus three batters; six runs (all earned); ten hits, two of them home runs; and one walk. His ERA for the season jumped from 4.15 to 4.51.
“It happens to every pitcher at some point but that wasn’t a point where I expected it and certainly not one where it was easy to take,” Glavine said. “But you don’t really have a choice. I had to start thinking about how to get better for my next start.”
Shortly after he arrived in the clubhouse, he received a text message from Chris, who was sitting in the stands with the boys. “Why couldn’t Willie have given you another couple of batters?” she wrote.
Glavine smiled. “Because,” he wrote back, “there was absolutely no evidence I was going to get anyone out between now and midnight.”
It wasn’t quite eight o’clock in Los Angeles. Glavine knew he probably wasn’t exaggerating by much.
THE METS HELD ON THAT NIGHT to win 13–9 and took three of four in Los Angeles, including a satisfying come-from-behind 5–4 win in ten innings in the getaway game on Sunday. They flew home and had an off-day before the Pittsburgh series, meaning Glavine got to stew about his L.A. performance for an extra day since this was one of those times when Peterson had pushed him back a day in order to give him a breather.
“The one thing I wasn’t after the L.A. game was tired,” he said, laughing, as he got ready to face the Pirates in the middle game of three at Shea.
The Pirates were one of baseball’s sadder stories, a franchise with a great history that had not had a winning season since 1992, when they had won the last of three consecutive NL East titles under Jim Leyland. Barry Bonds, who weighed less than two hundred pounds at the time, had left for San Francisco after that season, and Leyland had left a couple of years after that. Little had gone right since then. The Pirates, even with a gorgeous new ballpark, had become the classic, poorly run small-market team. They kept changing general managers and managers with no noticeable effect. They arrived in New York with a record of 41–56 on their way to firing yet another GM and manager by season’s end.
The one thing the Pirates did have going for them, at least for the long-term, were some good young pitchers: Ian Snell, Paul Maholm, and Tom Gorzelanny had all flashed potential early in their big league careers. All three of them were twenty-five, and Maholm and Gorzelanny were lefties who agreed that their role model — since neither threw very hard — was Tom Glavine.
“I grew up in Massachusetts, so I was always aware of him, even when I was little,” said Maholm, who had been five years old when Glavine first reached the majors. “Just watching him pitch made me want to be a pitcher. He’s always so in control of things, handles himself so well. I’m not sure how you could have a better role model, especially if you’re a lefty, than that.”
Gorzelanny hadn’t grown up in Massachusetts, but he felt pretty much the same way. It was a thrill for him to match up against Glavine on a comfortable July night. His numbers for 2007 were actually better than Glavine’s: playing on a bad team, he had a record of 9–5 and an excellent 3.20 ERA.
Glavine didn’t like to think about major league pitchers who had been five years old when he got to Atlanta, but he was far more concerned with bouncing back from the debacle in L.A.
Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was the presence of Tony Randazzo behind the plate (the Mets were beginning to feel as if this crew was permanently assigned to them), or maybe it was just the memories of all the shots he had given up in L.A., but Glavine started the night unable to find the plate.
After leadoff hitter Nate McLouth struck out, Glavine promptly walked the next three hitters: Freddy Sanchez, Adam LaRoche, and Jason Bay. The little voice in Glavine’s head was getting louder and louder: Here we go again.
But an ex-teammate bailed him out. Xavier Nady, who had been traded to Pittsburgh in the deal that had brought Oliver Perez to New York, hit a perfect double-play ground ball to shortstop. Jose Reyes flipped to Damion Easley, who threw on to Carlos Delgado, and just like that Glavine was out of the inning.
As soon as the ball settled in Delgado’s glove, Glavine pumped his fist, both relieved and happy.
“That might be the first time in my career I’ve pumped my fist after getting the side in the first inning,” he said. “It was just such a relief because it looked like I was about to get off to a really bad start and then — bang! — I’m out of it. When I pumped my fist, I kind of caught myself and said, ‘Whoa there, this is just the first inning.’ But I guess it shows how tightly wound I was right then.”
The Mets soon got him another early lead. After Lastings Milledge had doubled, both David Wright and Delgado walked. Gorzelanny was visibly unhappy with Randazzo’s strike zone and got flustered. He gave up a two-run double down the left-field line to Lo Duca. Two more singles scored him, and the Mets were up 3–0.
This time having a lead seemed to relax Glavine. “For whatever reason, it does make a difference having an inning under your belt,” he said. “You’re into the rhythm of the game; you’ve set up the way you want to pitch. You don’t walk out there thinking, ‘Oh God, don’t blow this lead.’ You just pitch.”
He pitched well, and the Mets extended the lead to 6–0 in the third, Lo Duca keying the inning with another two-run double. Before the inning was over, manager Jim Tracy had been ejected, arguing about a play in the outfield but clearly far more upset about balls and strikes than about Larry Vanover calling a ball Shawn Green had hit a trap (the Pirates still got an out on a force play) instead of a catch.
All Glavine knew was that he was up six runs and cruising. Until the fifth, when McLouth singled with one out, and Sanchez — the National League batting champion in 2006 — reached out and pushed a double down the right-field line. Glavine stood on the mound cursing after that one. “I threw such a good pitch,” he said. “I still don’t know how he managed to turn it into a hit.” LaRoche drove in a run with a ground ball out, and then Glavine got careless, leaving a fastball up to Jason Bay, who drove it into the left-field bullpen. Suddenly, 6–0 on cruise control had become 6–3, still one out short of the five innings needed by a starter to qualify for a win.
Nady promptly doubled to right — better then than in the first inning — and Glavine was wondering if he was ever going to get the third out. “It wasn’t as if I panicked or I thought Willie was going to come get me,” he said. “The only ball hit really hard was the home run. But still, I was standing there thinking that this had gone from easy to hard very quickly.” He smiled. “I was picturing Chris in the stands staring at the dugout, ready to tackle Willie if he happened to come out of there.”
It never got to that. Glavine got Ryan Doumit to tap back to the mound to end the inning. He hung in for one more inning and left, having thrown 112 pitches, pretty close to the maximum Peterson would allow him to throw. He hadn’t walked anyone after the first, but he had still thrown only sixty-six strikes. Most pitchers would prefer a ball-strike ratio of at least two to one. Glavine was comfortable with that number being lower, but when it backed toward fifty-fifty he got nervous, if only because it pushed his pitch count so high he couldn’t get past the sixth inning. This had been one of those nights, meaning he had to depend on the bullpen to get the last nine outs.
Aaron Heilman and Billy Wagner made it look easy. Heilman, who thought of himself as a starting pitcher doing time as a setup man, was superb, retiring all six Pirates he faced. Wagner was almost as good, hitting McLouth with a pitch with two outs in the ninth, before ending the game by getting Sanchez to fly to Milledge. The final was 6–3.
It hadn’t been pretty, but it was good enough. Glavine was 9–6 on the season, and 299–197 for his career. “Well,” he said afterward. “Now it’s here. At least I know I’ll get a chance to walk out there and try to get this done.”
No one had to ask him what it was he was trying to get done. At that moment, all of baseball was fully aware of it.
THE FIRST TRY — the only try, Glavine hoped — would come in Milwaukee. As Glavine had suspected, logistics were a bigger headache than anything else. In all, thirty people would be coming to the game as part of Team Glavine, including his parents; his sister and brother-in-law (and their three kids); his two brothers; Chris and all four of the kids; neighbors from Billerica and Atlanta; and a couple of old friends from the Braves. They would fly in from various locations around the country and be seated behind the Mets dugout on the third-base side of Miller Park.
“Had to pay for all the tickets myself,” Glavine said. “Goddamn IRS.”
The Internal Revenue Service had changed the law several years ago on the number of comp tickets teams were allowed to give to their players, apparently because comped tickets couldn’t be taxed. Glavine could afford the tickets, but he couldn’t resist the half-joking swipe at the government.
Glavine tried to lie as low as he could in the days between starts, but it was close to impossible. On Friday, before the Mets began a series at home with the Washington Nationals, he had a press conference, the point being to get as many of the “three hundred” questions out of the way as possible in one fell swoop. Of course, that didn’t keep reporters from stopping by his locker for “one question,” and Glavine, being Glavine, wasn’t about to pull the “I already talked about that in the press conference” line on them. The Mets split four games with the Nationals and flew to Milwaukee, still leading the division by three and a half games over the red-hot Phillies and by four and a half over the not-so-hot Braves. The Brewers were also in first place, clinging to a one-game lead over the Cubs, after it had looked early in the season as if they might run away with the National League Central. They were now 57–49 and not running away with anything.
Milwaukee is a town with a decidedly mixed baseball history. When the Braves first moved there from Boston in 1953, the place went baseball mad, aided by the presence of superstars Henry Aaron and Eddie Matthews. The Braves won the World Series in 1957 and lost it in seven games to the Yankees a year later. Seven years later, they were gone, spirited off to Atlanta after attendance had fallen as the team dropped in the standings. Four years later, the expansion Seattle Pilots, having spent one year in what had been a minor league ballpark, were bought by a group led by car salesman Alan (Bud) Selig and moved to Milwaukee just prior to the start of the 1970 season.
The Brewers had been bad a lot more than they had been good in their thirty-eight seasons in Milwaukee. They had won the American League pennant in 1982 but had not been in the playoffs since. They had been moved to the National League in order to accommodate the addition of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Colorado Rockies as expansion teams in 1998.
But now, after years of wandering in the depths of the NL Central, the Brewers were legitimate contenders. Doug Melvin, who had scouted Mike Mussina years ago for the Baltimore Orioles, was the general manager. Ned Yost, who had first told Tom Glavine he needed another breaking pitch when he was in Double-A ball, was the manager. The star of the team was young slugger Prince Fielder, the son of former American League MVP Cecil Fielder.
The Brewers were not all that concerned about Glavine’s quest for three hundred. When Ned Yost was leaving for the ballpark on Tuesday, his wife, who had known Glavine well during the days when Yost had been a coach in Atlanta, said to him, “Gee, I really hope Tom can get three hundred tonight.”
“What?” Yost answered. “We’re in a pennant race. We need to win every game. You can’t root for him.”
“Not even for one night?” she replied, sending her husband off to the park in a semihuff.
In both clubhouses there was considerably more media than would be normal for a Tuesday-night game at the end of July, even with both teams in pennant contention. It could have been far worse, but many in the national baseball media were trailing Barry Bonds, who was one home run short of Henry Aaron’s record. What’s more, a lot of the New York media had stayed back in the Bronx because Alex Rodriguez was one home run shy of five hundred.
“If Bridget Moynahan has her baby tonight, I might win three hundred and only make the agate,” Glavine said, relaxing with his feet up in his locker.
Moynahan was the actress who was due to give birth to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s child at any minute. Glavine didn’t really mind the idea that he wasn’t getting as much attention as he might have if not for Bonds, A-Rod, and, well, Moynahan. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “I’m glad right now there aren’t more people here. But if I get it, I’ll probably be saying ‘Where is everybody?’ ”
There were a number of people in the clubhouse — notably the other pitchers — who didn’t think Glavine was getting the attention he deserved. Some of that stemmed from a comment Willie Randolph had made after Glavine had won number 299 the previous week.
“It’s not as big a deal in the clubhouse as it is to you guys,” Randolph had said to the media. “I really don’t think any of our guys are talking about it very much.”
Randolph has a tendency to try to low-key things. If the media thinks something is really big, he will go out of his way to tell them that it’s not. This time, though, he had said something that shocked — and annoyed — some of his players.
“What is he thinking?” asked Billy Wagner. “Not talking about it? We have been talking about it all year. This is something we all want for Tom, and we all want to feel we’re a part of it when he gets it. How can you say this number isn’t a big deal? How many guys have done it in history — twenty-two? Plus, he might be the last three hundred–game winner for a very long time.”
That was very possible. Roger Clemens was first in wins among active pitchers, and Greg Maddux was next, followed by Glavine. After Glavine came Randy Johnson, who was stuck on 284 and was about to undergo back surgery at the age of forty-four. Whether he would ever pitch again, much less be capable of winning sixteen more games, was a serious question mark. Next in line after Johnson? Michael Cole Mussina, who that night was going after win 245. All the other pitchers with more than two hundred wins were a long way from three hundred, and most were late in their careers: pitchers like Jamie Moyer, Kenny Rogers, and Pedro Martinez.
In fact, the argument can be made that a pitcher winning three hundred games is a far more significant achievement in this day and age than a hitter reaching five hundred home runs. Once, those were two of the numbers — along with three thousand hits — that guaranteed entry to the Hall of Fame. Now, with smaller ballparks, juiced baseballs, and juiced players, five hundred home runs isn’t the iconic number it once was.
“I’m not even sure I would vote for someone with six hundred [homers],” Glavine said. “It doesn’t have the same meaning.”
At the same time, getting to three hundred wins has become more difficult. Pitchers aren’t allowed to pitch as deep into games as they once did because they are kept on such strict pitch counts. On the day that Tom Seaver won his three hundredth game, he was forty years old and threw 146 pitches.
Because home runs have gone up — although not so much since steroid testing came to baseball — and the number of innings starters pitch has gone down, getting wins is tougher. “You’re certainly far more dependent on your bullpen,” Glavine said. “I would like to think whenever I get there, I’ll pitch a complete game that night. But I know the chances are I won’t. Billy [Wagner] will probably throw the last pitch. But that’s the way it is nowadays.”
The last two pitchers to reach three hundred wins were Clemens and Maddux. Clemens had pitched six innings in reaching the number; Maddux five.
The fact that A-Rod was about to reach five hundred home runs at age thirty-two was more proof of how the numbers had changed in terms of degree of difficulty. Even before he hit the home run — which, as it turned out, took him quite a while — Rodriguez was already being anointed by baseball people as the man to someday overtake Ruth and Bonds.
Clearly, no pitcher will ever challenge Cy Young’s 511 wins or 749 complete games. Those numbers were achieved in a completely different era of baseball. Even so, of all the unchallengeable records in baseball, many of them dating to that period, Young’s was by far the most unimaginable.
“Let’s see,” Glavine said. “If you win twenty games for twenty years, you’re still more than one hundred wins away. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no one quite gets there.”
Later, when Randolph was asked what he meant when he said that three hundred wasn’t “that big a deal,” he more or less recanted.
“I certainly wasn’t trying to put Tommy down or what he was trying to do,” he said. “I guess I’m still a hitter at heart. To me, five hundred home runs is a number I can identify with and understand. Three hundred wins is almost something in another sport because I never pitched. But if I think about it, I know what a big deal it is. All you have to do is look at how few guys have it and how few guys are close to it.”
On a steamy night in Milwaukee, Glavine really wasn’t focused on who might or might not get to three hundred after him or how many home runs Bonds or Rodriguez might ultimately hit. He was focused on the Brewers’ lineup. Peterson had decided it would relax Glavine to get the pregame meeting out of the way early, so he had come into the training room with catcher Ramon Castro when Glavine first arrived, rather than waiting until an hour before game time.
That it was Castro who was catching and not Paul Lo Duca was the subject of considerable conversation in the Mets clubhouse. Lo Duca had been saying half-jokingly all season that he would catch Glavine’s three hundredth win if he had to do so on a broken leg. That bit of hyperbole had ceased being a joke when Lo Duca pulled a hamstring running to first base the previous Saturday against the Nationals. Hamstrings are tricky injuries. Come back too fast, and you are likely to hurt yourself again. Lo Duca insisted he was okay to catch in Milwaukee. That wasn’t what the Mets’ medical people thought, and they told Randolph just that.
Lo Duca was in the clubhouse early that day to get treatment when Randolph called him into his office.
“I just can’t let you go tonight,” he told his catcher.
“Willie, I can do it,” Lo Duca said. “I can catch tonight and then take a few days off.”
Randolph shook his head. He didn’t want to risk a long-term injury, and he didn’t want someone playing on one leg. Lo Duca was crushed.
Soon after, when Glavine walked into the clubhouse, he checked the lineup and saw that Castro was catching. Glavine didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t a “you’ll get ’em next time” moment because he didn’t want there to be a next time. He walked over to Lo Duca and saw that he was near tears. “They won’t let me play,” he told Glavine.
Catching Glavine was a thrill for Lo Duca. Like most of the Mets, he looked up to Glavine and admired everything about him. The thought that he would be spectating while Glavine went for the milestone win was heartbreaking for him.
The good news for Glavine was that having Castro catch didn’t change the game much for him. Unlike some pitchers, Glavine has never been choosy about catchers. Maddux, while he was in Atlanta, didn’t ever want to pitch to Javier Lopez, so the Braves always had their backup catcher assigned to Maddux. Glavine would pitch to a batting-practice cage if that was what he was asked to do.
It can be argued that there’s never been a great player more low key about almost everything than Glavine. That was never more evident than in Milwaukee, as he sat at his locker and chatted with a gaggle of reporters as if he were about to throw his second bullpen session of spring training. When it was time to head out to the field, he stood up and said to the group, “I’m afraid you guys are going to have to carry on without me. I have some work to do.”
If anything, everyone else in the clubhouse was tighter than Glavine. “If you’ve been around the guy, you just want to see it happen for him,” Peterson said. “I feel a little bit like I’m caddying for a great golfer. He’s doing the work, but maybe I’m helping just a little, and that’s a feeling I want to hold on to.”
It was a sultry midwestern summer evening, the game-time temperature eighty-six degrees, though it felt much warmer because of the humidity and because Miller Park — which has a retractable roof — is virtually enclosed, even with the roof open, meaning there is almost no breeze going in or out.
From the start, Glavine was sharp. There was no first-inning struggle at all. He retired the Brewers one-two-three, needing just twelve pitches to get two ground balls and a lazy fly ball to Shawn Green in right. He didn’t give up a hit during the first three innings, the only base runner coming when he walked second baseman Tony Graffanino with one out in the third.
But the Mets weren’t having any more luck at the plate than the Brewers. Jeff Suppan, who had been a key part of the Cardinals’ rotation during their World Series run in 2006, was the Milwaukee starter. He had signed a big-money free-agent contract during the off-season but had done little to justify the expense. He came into the game with a record of 5–7 and an ERA of 5.21. But he picked this night to pitch the way he had a year earlier.
The Mets threatened in the first when David Wright singled and stole second with two out, but Carlos Delgado grounded to short for the third out. That was it in the early innings, as Suppan kept throwing ground balls.
What made the performance of the two pitchers even more remarkable was home-plate umpire Chad Fairchild’s strike zone. “About the size of a postage stamp” was the way Ned Yost described it. “There were times I wanted to scream at him about squeezing Jeff, but he was doing the same thing to Tommy, so I really couldn’t complain.”
Glavine spent most of the night pitching from behind. He ended up walking five batters and threw more balls (forty-eight) than strikes (forty-seven). But the Brewers couldn’t hit him. “Every time we had a man on base, he would throw an eighty-five-mile-an-hour fastball, and we’d roll one to second base or shortstop,” Yost said. “If I hadn’t wanted to win the game so much, I’d have just sat back and watched in awe because it was vintage Tom Glavine. We just couldn’t touch him.”
The Brewers finally dinged Glavine in the fourth when he walked shortstop J.J. Hardy leading off, and third baseman Ryan Braun doubled down the line in left. With the infield playing back, Glavine got Fielder to ground to newly acquired second baseman Luis Castillo. Hardy scored to make it 1–0, and Braun went to third. But Glavine got Bill Hall to pop to Delgado, and then, after a very careful walk to Kevin Mench, he induced catcher Damian Miller into a fly ball to Shawn Green in right field.
“I wasn’t happy to be behind,” Glavine said. “But I really figured we had to score sooner or later.”
The Mets finally did score in the sixth. Jose Reyes, often the catalyst, led off with a double. Randolph, wanting to at least get the game tied, had Castillo sacrifice him to third. Wright singled to left to tie the game at 1–1, and Delgado moved him to third with another single. Sitting on the bench, Glavine sensed a chance to break the game open.
“I was thinking this inning was going to decide what kind of night it was going to be,” he said. “If we could score four or five, I thought we’d be in good shape, because I felt good and we had a rested bullpen. But if we didn’t score a bunch, then it was going to be a struggle.”
Glavine’s baseball instincts proved correct. With runners on first and third and one out, Moises Alou hit a fly ball deep enough to right field to score Wright. The Mets led 2–1. At that moment, Glavine was twelve outs from three hundred. Still, some cushion would be nice.
Shawn Green tried to get it for him. The veteran right fielder, who had struggled most of the season with men on base, smashed a ball into the gap in left-center field. With two men out, Delgado was running all the way, and he was waved in by third-base coach Sandy Alomar Sr. The Brewers executed the relay throw perfectly: center fielder Hall to second baseman Graffanino to catcher Miller, who slapped the tag on Delgado as he slid across the plate.
“Out!” was Fairchild’s correct call. The middle of the Mets’ lineup — Delgado, Alou, Green, and Castro (or Lo Duca) — is painfully slow of foot, and this was one of those moments when their lack of speed hurt them.
Instead of having a chance to break the game open, the Mets had a 2–1 lead. In the bottom of the inning, starting to feel the heat both literally and figuratively, Glavine walked Braun — his fifth walk of the night. He then wild-pitched Fielder, allowing Braun — the tying run — to advance to second base. With Fielder at the plate, Peterson trotted to the mound.
He put his arm on Glavine’s shoulder and said quietly, “You’re fine. Just take a breather here for a minute until Fairchild gets here.”
Glavine understood. A minute later, Fairchild came to the mound to break up the conference. As soon as he sensed Fair-child over his shoulder, Peterson began talking. “Just keep throwing the same pitches you’ve been throwing,” he said. “This guy is a good balls-and-strikes umpire, he’s not going to keep missing these pitches all night.”
Glavine smiled. He’d heard this routine before. As long as Peterson had his back to the umpire and his voice wasn’t raised, he probably wasn’t going to get tossed. As Peterson turned to leave, Fairchild was clearly giving him a look.
“Chad, you gotta get a better look at these pitches,” Peterson said.
“Rick, we aren’t going to discuss balls and strikes,” Fairchild answered.
“I’m not talking about balls and strikes,” Peterson said. “I’m talking about vision.”
Fairchild said nothing, which surprised Peterson. “I’ve been tossed for less,” he said. “If he had run me, it wouldn’t have shocked me. I was trying to make a point, and I was willing to take the risk of getting tossed right there to make it.”
Given both a breather and a light moment, Glavine gathered himself and got Fielder to fly to Alou, and Mench to fly to Green to end the inning.
Green, who had been the last batter of the sixth, took the ball he caught off of Mench’s bat straight into the clubhouse to put in his locker. He wanted it for Glavine to sign if he won his three hundredth that night. Billy Wagner was getting ready to leave the clubhouse to head for the bullpen, wanting to be available as early as the eighth inning if needed. He saw Green come in with the ball and laughed.
“Yeah, sure; no one on the team is thinking about three hundred,” he said.
Glavine was due up third in the seventh. On another night, Randolph might have pinch-hit for him, but this night wasn’t like any other night. Even with Ramon Castro on second base, Randolph let Glavine hit, hoping to at least get him through the seventh inning and to then turn the last six outs over to Heilman and Wagner.
Glavine reached on an error by Braun, with Castro holding at second. Another chance for the Mets. Reyes singled up the middle, but again the Mets’ lack of speed came into play when Alomar held Castro up at third. Still, the bases were loaded. That was it for Suppan. Yost, who was also managing the game as if it might decide a pennant, brought Carlos Villanueva in to pitch to Castillo.
Although Castillo is a renowned bunter, Randolph didn’t want to risk a squeeze with Castro the runner at third. Under different circumstances, he might have pinch-run for Castro, but with his other catcher hurt, he couldn’t take him out of the game. So, Castillo swung away and hit a fly to left — too shallow for Castro to try to score. Wright, undoubtedly trying too hard, grounded into a force to end the inning.
Glavine went to the mound in the seventh knowing he was being watched closely by Randolph and Peterson. He had thrown ninety-two pitches, so there was no doubt this would be his final inning. It didn’t last long. Damian Miller led off with a ringing single to center. It was only the Brewers’ second hit, but it was enough for Randolph, who came to get his pitcher.
Glavine wasn’t surprised to see someone coming to get him, but he was a little surprised to see Randolph. The manager had undergone rotator cuff surgery during the All-Star break and had been in considerable pain. He had been wearing a sling in the dugout to make sure the shoulder didn’t get banged around accidentally and, by his own admission, had struggled to sleep. To make life easier, he had been sending Peterson out, not just to talk to pitchers but to make the pitching changes.
Now, he popped out of the dugout. “If someone was taking Tommy Glavine out going for his three hundredth, it was going to be me,” he said. “I did it out of respect for him.”
Glavine appreciated that. He was momentarily surprised to see Randolph, but when he thought about it he knew it made sense. What did surprise him was what happened when he handed Randolph the ball and started for the dugout. With the exception of Team Glavine and a handful of others — Stan Kasten had flown in for the game — everyone in the sellout crowd of 41,790 had rooted ardently for the Brewers all night. Now, as soon as Glavine left the mound, the entire stadium was on its feet, cheering.
“It took me by surprise,” Glavine said. “I hadn’t really thought about it much, but I guess I thought I might get a little more response than usual from a road crowd, but nothing like that. I’d never gotten a standing ovation on the road before. I wasn’t sure what I should do.”
As he crossed the foul line, Glavine decided one response was the right one: he took off his cap and waved it to the crowd. “When you’re cheered, you should acknowledge the cheers,” he said. “It really was a nice feeling getting a response like that from a road crowd.”
Heilman, by his own admission as nervous as a cat, took the ball in Glavine’s stead. He quickly calmed his own nerves by getting Graffanino to ground to Delgado, who turned a nifty three-six-three double play. Bases empty. Seven outs away. Craig Counsell pinch-hit and pushed a bunt single, but Heilman got Corey Hart to ground to shortstop to end the inning.
Six outs.
Glavine went to the clubhouse to go through his postouting routine. He headed for the training room and began icing while the Mets failed to score in the eighth. He was sitting on a training table when the Brewers came up in the bottom of the inning.
J.J. Hardy, the young shortstop, led off with a bloop between Reyes and Alou. Reyes knew it was trouble right away and turned his back to the plate and ran full speed after the ball. For an instant, Glavine thought he had caught it.
“I saw him lunge for the ball and it disappeared,” he said. “I thought he had it, and I went, ‘Wow, what a play!’ Then I saw Hosey reaching for the ball, and I realized he hadn’t gotten it.”
The ball had just eluded Reyes’s glove. Hardy stopped at first. Then Heilman got Braun to fly to left.
Five outs to go. “At that point, I was counting outs,” Glavine said. “I really thought if we could get it to Billy, there was no way we wouldn’t win the game.”
Wagner was in the bullpen, ready to warm up and come into the game in the eighth. He wasn’t up, though, because Randolph had Pedro Feliciano and Guillermo Mota up. Feliciano was a lefty, and Randolph wanted him to pitch to Prince Fielder.
Feliciano had been one of the team’s most reliable relievers against both lefties and righties, ranking just below Wagner and Heilman in the bullpen pecking order. Now, though, he plunked Fielder with his fourth pitch, putting men on first and second. Randolph came right back out and waved Mota in, which didn’t thrill Glavine or anyone from Team Glavine or Team Mets.
A year earlier, Mota had been a key midseason pickup and had pitched extremely well down the stretch. Unfortunately, it turned out he’d had some extra help — from steroids. He had tested positive during the off-season and, unlike most players who test positive, had admitted his guilt. Perhaps that was why the Mets had given him a two-year contract, even though he had to sit out the first fifty games of the season under baseball’s drug-testing rules.
When he had come back, Mota wasn’t anywhere near the pitcher he had been a year earlier. He almost never pitched out of trouble and often pitched into it. His ERA was 5.29 and even that was deceiving because it didn’t take into account inherited runners allowed to score.
Now, Mota inherited two runners. Bill Hall, who had popped out in the fourth against Glavine with runners on second and third, did considerably better against Mota. He slammed a 1–1 pitch down the line for a clean double. Both runners probably would have scored, but the ball hopped over the fence for a ground rule double, meaning only Hardy could score. Fielder stopped at third. The game was tied 2–2.
In the training room, Glavine’s heart sank. Regardless of the final outcome of the game, he would not get his three hundredth win. On TV, fans could see a close-up of Chris Glavine, tears of frustration in her eyes. Later, she saw that Andruw Jones, an old friend from the Braves, had sent her a text message at that moment: “Chris, don’t you know there’s no crying in baseball?” Knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to congratulate Glavine on number three hundred at the end of the game, Stan Kasten stood to leave. He was going to walk over to the Glavines to offer a word of consolation, but when he saw the looks on their faces, he decided to take a pass.
It took five innings and another ninety minutes before Geoff Jenkins finally ended the game with a two-run home run for the Brewers in the thirteenth inning. Surrounded by reporters, Glavine was his usual calm self. He was pleased he had pitched well, disappointed not to get the win, unhappy the team hadn’t won the game. But there would be other chances; he knew that. He was disappointed but okay.
The crowd thinned. It was almost midnight. Glavine looked very tired. “The worst part of this,” he said, forcing a smile, “is now I’ve got to figure out how to get thirty people to Chicago on Sunday night.”
He would also have to dig up thirty tickets and pay for them.
“Goddamn IRS,” he said, shaking his head as he walked to the door.