LIKE A LOT OF BASEBALL PEOPLE, Mike Mussina was watching as Glavine went for number three hundred in Chicago. He was sitting in a hotel room in Toronto, having flown there earlier in the evening with the rest of the Yankees after he had won his third straight start, beating the Kansas City Royals 8–5 in New York.
Once again, the Yankees had produced a lot of early offense, and Mussina had made it stand up — then watched the bullpen wobble before Mariano Rivera came in to wrap up the victory.
The win raised Mussina’s record for the season to 7–7 and put him at 246 for his career. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like three hundred, does it?” he joked.
Someone pointed out that while 246 wasn’t 300, it did make Mussina the winningest pitcher in major league history without a twenty-win season, surpassing Dennis Martinez, who had 245. “I’m not exactly sure what that means,” Mussina said. “I guess it means people have kept running me out there for a lot of years; I’m grateful for that.”
The Yankees were now officially a hot team: they were 19–7 since the All-Star break and had wiped out almost their entire wild-card deficit. They were a half game behind the Tigers (who were a half game behind the Indians in the Central Division) and percentage points behind the surprising Seattle Mariners. They had even sliced the Red Sox lead to seven games.
Mussina’s resurgence had coincided with the team getting hot. He had been terrible against Tampa Bay, better in Kansas City, solid in a laugher against the White Sox, and even better in his return engagement against the Royals.
“Worth noting who we’re playing,” he said. “Things will start to get tougher here very soon — for all of us.”
After the Yankees wrapped their series against the Royals, their road trip would take them to Toronto (where the Blue Jays were playing respectably) and Cleveland. After that would come a homestand that would start with the Orioles — against whom they were 3–6 on the season — and then the toughest two weeks of the season to date: four games at home against the Tigers, three in Anaheim against the Angels, four more against the Tigers in Detroit, and then, finally, three back at Yankee Stadium against the Red Sox.
The consensus was that everyone would know a lot more about where this Yankees season was headed once the Red Sox pulled out of New York following an afternoon game on August 30.
Like everyone else in the clubhouse, Mussina was aware of the schedule but wasn’t yet ready to worry about it. He had been matched against Gil Meche in the finale of the Royals series, and even though Meche had become a kind of punch line when the subject of overpaid pitchers came up — “Hey, if Gil Meche can get $55 million for five years, anyone can get rich in this game” — he had been a good pitcher all season. His record was only 7–8 coming into the game, but his ERA was a very respectable 3.70 on a team that was 48–61 and trying to avoid yet another last-place finish.
Meche had always pitched well against the Yankees, especially during his time in Seattle. Fortunately, this was one day when the Yankees got to him early. They scored four runs in the second inning after two were out, Bobby Abreu driving in the final pair with a single up the middle. The cushion grew to 6–0 over the next two innings, while Mussina sailed along.
“You start to feel like you’re really in a groove after a while, which is one of the amazing things about the game,” Mussina said. “Two weeks earlier I wondered if I would ever get anyone out again. Now, I felt comfortable on the mound, the ball felt good coming out of my hand, and I just felt like I was going to get outs.”
He faltered only in the sixth inning when he hit Emil Brown with a pitch and Ross Gload hit a two-run homer on the next pitch. “Sometimes trying to get that first-pitch strike with a fastball is a mistake,” he said.
The Yankees answered quickly with two more runs in the sixth. Torre let Mussina start the seventh, even though he’d thrown ninety-seven pitches and there wasn’t much reason to stretch him a lot further than that. When Joey Gathright led off with a single, Torre quickly went to the bullpen, which almost turned into a disaster. Brian Bruney and Mike Myers managed to turn the 8–2 lead into an 8–5 lead with two on and two out in the eighth. Taking no chances, Torre brought in Rivera for a four-out save, and Rivera blew the Royals away — four batters, eleven pitches — to wrap up the game.
That made three straight wins in three starts for Mussina. The wins had all been over weak teams — the Royals twice and the White Sox once — but that didn’t really matter. He knew he felt better on the mound, and he knew those teams probably would have pounded him a few weeks earlier.
“The next few weeks will be interesting, given the schedule,” he said, as someone picked up his equipment to put it on the bus for the trip to Toronto. “We’re playing well now, but there’s no doubt who we have been playing has helped.”
He was looking forward to getting to Toronto and relaxing in front of the television that night. “I really hope Tom gets it this time,” he said. “My guess is, he’ll do fine.”
His guess turned out to be right. The Mets returned home for a three game series against the Braves, meaning that Glavine’s wish to reach three hundred before the Mets and Braves met again had just barely been granted. It might have been a bit more dramatic if Glavine had gotten the milestone win against his old team, but he was just as glad to have it over with and to accept congratulations from old friends like Bobby Cox and Andruw and Chipper Jones.
Celebrations were being planned. On Wednesday, Glavine and family would make a trip to downtown Manhattan to accept the key to the city from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The following Sunday, the Mets planned a ceremony to honor him. The timing had turned out perfectly: Peyton and Mason started school on August 14, and Chris was flying home with them Sunday night to get them ready.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have this done before they start school,” he said. “I didn’t want them flying all over the place and missing school so they could see me go after it. This way, they can go home and get the school year going and feel happy that they got to see me do it and got to be part of the ceremony.”
Glavine was excited about going to City Hall to get the key. “It’s an actual key,” he said. “Apparently there was a big key that opened the back door to the building, and this is a replica. “It’s kind of cool.”
Alex Rodriguez would receive a similar key during the Yankees’ next homestand. He didn’t go to City Hall, though — Bloomberg and the key came to Yankee Stadium, and the key was presented to him behind home plate. There was, no doubt, some kind of symbolism in that. Or it just might have been that Glavine has always been able to enjoy getting to do things most people don’t get to do — like being given the key to New York City.
Glavine left City Hall after the key ceremony and headed straight to the ballpark for the second game of the Braves series. He had been awash in congratulatory calls and e-mails and letters. The one that had really hit home was from another left-hander: Sandy Koufax. “That was cool,” he said. “I mean, growing up, when you thought about great pitchers, you thought about Koufax. He was just terrific about it.”
Koufax had only won 165 games in his career but was in the Hall of Fame largely on the strength of what were probably the four most dominant years (1963–66) any modern-day pitcher has ever had. Unlike most retired players, he didn’t spend a lot of time in the public eye. He didn’t do card shows, and he had given up his job as a Dodgers spring-training instructor several years ago. He might occasionally be spotted in a golf gallery, following his friend Billy Andrade, from the PGA Tour, around, and he almost always went to the Final Four since he was a basketball nut. But that was about it.
With all the calls and notes and interviews and the key to the city, Glavine hadn’t given much thought to baseball. “As I was driving to the park, it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Hey, I have to pitch again in a few days,’ ” he said. “The last time I’d been through anything that was as big a deal was when we won the World Series [in 1995]. That was different because the season was over. Our season was very much still going on. I had to pause and think for a moment about who we were playing on the weekend.”
That would be the Marlins. The Mets (again) lost two of three to the Braves, leaving their record for the season against them at a dreadful 4–8. The Braves and Phillies were playing leapfrog for second place, with the Braves jumping back up after winning the final game of the series. The Braves trailed by three and a half, the Phillies by four.
The Yankees, in the meantime, were in a three-way wild-card chase coming out of Toronto. After winning two of three against the Blue Jays — with Chien-Ming Wang getting bombed in the last game of the set — they were a half game behind the Mariners and in a flat-footed tie with the Tigers.
From Toronto, they headed to Cleveland to begin a three-game series with the Indians, who had moved into first place in the Central Division, a game and a half ahead of the Tigers. Philip Hughes, finally off the disabled list, made his return in the opener and pitched well in a 6–1 win. That sent Mussina to the mound on Saturday night against soft-tossing Paul Byrd, who was kind of a poor man’s Glavine. His fastball almost never touched more than 86 miles per hour but he had ninety-seven career wins and was 10–4 for the season going into the game.
For the first time in four starts, Mussina gave up a first-inning run, the kind of soft run a pitcher hates to give up: a Grady Sizemore single, a sacrifice by Kenny Lofton, a wild pitch, and a sacrifice fly by Victor Martinez. The 1–0 lead didn’t last long — the Yankees bombed Byrd in the second inning for seven runs. Mussina went back to the mound in the second inning feeling very comfortable. For the next six innings, he was virtually untouchable.
“Every once in a while you pitch a game where you feel like you can’t do anything wrong,” Mussina said. “It’s as if you’re on autopilot. Everything you do turns out right: You hang a pitch, the guy fouls it off. You throw one down the middle, he takes it. They swing at your best pitches. You feel like you can throw the ball through the eye of a needle if someone asks you to. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience. Once we put up the touchdown in the second, I was out there thinking, ‘Now look at me go.’
“You have a game like that once, maybe twice a year. I call it pitching mindlessly. You don’t have to think about anything. You look up and it’s the sixth or seventh inning. You feel as if you could go out there and pitch an inning left-handed, and they’d hit three ground balls right at people.”
He smiled and folded his arms. “Problem is, it’s a double-edged sword. Like I said, once, maybe twice a year you can go out there in a mindless state and everything will go right. But that’s not the way you normally pitch. The way you normally pitch, you need to be focused and aware of what you’re doing on every pitch. Often, after you have a mindless game, the next one isn’t very good.
“It’s a little bit like pitching on autopilot, and then someone turns off the autopilot and there’s no one in the cockpit. You do that, you’re going down.”
Mussina wasn’t really thinking in those terms in Cleveland. He pitched into the eighth inning, coming out with two men out after a pair of doubles by the Indians narrowed the gap to 10–2. Torre, thinking long-term, figured eighty-nine pitches was enough.
“I guess the difference between now and when I was younger is when I had a mindless game in those years, I would flirt with a no-hitter or pitch a shutout. Now it means I might get to the eighth or ninth inning.”
He certainly wasn’t complaining. He was 8–7 on the year, the first time he had been over .500. He had started the season feeling confident he would win at least eleven games and get to 250 for his career. In mid-July that had seemed like a pipe dream. Now, sitting on 247 with, he figured, nine starts left, 250 appeared to be close to a lock.
“Two fifty isn’t three hundred by any stretch,” he said. “But it isn’t a bad number.”
GLAVINE NO LONGER needed to worry about numbers. He no longer needed to talk about what he was trying to do or where he was trying to get to or the goal he was trying to reach. He could just say, “It feels great to be one of twenty-three pitchers in history with three hundred or more wins.”
He was still floating when he took the mound to face the Marlins in the second game of the weekend series. As he trotted from the dugout to throw his eight warm-up pitches, many in the crowd of 50,773 began to stand and clap. By the time PA announcer Alex Anthony had finished introducing the Mets defense, concluding with “and on the mound, Tom Glavine,” everyone in the place was on their feet.
“I had expected something,” Glavine said. “It was my first time back home since Chicago, and I thought that I’d get a nice hand when they introduced me. But I never imagined it would be like that.”
As the cheers grew louder, Glavine tried to go about the business of throwing his warm-up pitches. Finally, he knew that just wouldn’t work. He stopped, backed off the rubber, took off his cap, and acknowledged the cheers, which only grew louder.
“It really was neat,” he said. “Because it was spontaneous. It wasn’t planned, and it wasn’t part of a ceremony or anything like that. Given the rocky start I’d gotten off to in New York, it really meant a lot to me.”
Glavine had to settle his emotions before Hanley Ramirez stepped in to lead off the game. He immediately gave up a leadoff single to Ramirez but then retired the Marlins without any further damage in the first. “That was kind of nice,” he said. “I wouldn’t have felt too good if I’d gotten an ovation like that and then given up a four-spot or something.”
For five innings, he didn’t give up anything. David Wright hit a two-run home run in the fourth for a 2–0 lead, and it looked like Glavine would roll to win number 301 without much resistance.
“It’s hard to describe how good I felt that night,” he said. “From the minute I got to the mound, even putting the ovation aside, I felt completely different than any game I had pitched in years. It was as if there was no pressure. Obviously, it was still important because we were in a pennant race, but I wasn’t pitching not to screw up. When I got the lead, I didn’t start thinking, ‘Okay, this is an opportunity to get another win closer; don’t blow it.’ I think I’d been doing stuff like that without even knowing it. Now, I was just out there pitching, enjoying it, having fun. It felt almost the way I used to feel in high school. I was completely relaxed. It was actually fun again.”
He gave up a run in the sixth, but Wright answered with another home run in the bottom of the inning, and Glavine took a 3–1 lead into the seventh. Cody Ross led off with a single, and Glavine got pinch hitter Todd Linden to fly to left. That was the moment when Randolph, aware of the fact that Glavine had thrown 104 pitches on a hot night, decided to go to the bullpen. And in came Guillermo Mota as everyone shuddered.
Unfortunately, the result was almost exactly the same as in Milwaukee and Chicago. Ramirez singled to put runners on first and third. Mota then struck out Alejandro De Aza, but Ramirez stole second on strike three. That left Randolph with a decision: pitch to the dangerous Miguel Cabrera or walk Cabrera intentionally to load the bases and pitch to Josh Willingham.
The sensible move was to avoid pitching to Cabrera at all costs. But loading the bases, especially for a pitcher who isn’t pitching with much confidence, can be tricky.
“You always pitch a little differently with the bases loaded,” Glavine said. “You’re a little more concerned about falling behind because unless you have a big lead you don’t want to walk in a run. It’s just a different feeling psychologically when you have a base open. You’re less likely to give in to a hitter if you fall behind. Most of the time, if I’m given the option, I would rather not intentionally walk someone to load the bases. But I could certainly understand Willie not wanting to pitch to Cabrera.”
Mota quickly got behind Willingham 2–0, as the crowd, which had gotten in the habit of booing him whenever anything went wrong (much the way the Yankee crowd did whenever Kyle Farnsworth got into trouble), began to boo. Down 2–0, not wanting to walk in a run with a two-run lead, Mota made sure his next pitch was over the plate.
It was — a fastball right down Broadway — and Willingham crushed it over the left-field fence for a grand slam. Glavine would not get win number 301 in spite of another good performance. The Marlins now led 5–3, and Randolph had to go get Mota as the boos reached a crescendo.
“I guess I was thankful that I was at three hundred and not trying to get there anymore because that would have really hurt,” Glavine said. “As it was, it was disappointing that we ended up losing the game, but I came away feeling good because I pitched well after all the distractions of the week. I felt as if I was starting to get on the roll I really hadn’t been on all season.”
The team was most definitely not on a roll. The loss was their fourth in five games since Glavine’s three hundredth and cut their lead over the Braves to two and a half games. It did not, however, dampen the celebration the next day when the Mets honored Glavine.
Team Glavine was back — the logistics made easier by the fact that the Billerica group could drive and a lot of the family could stay at the house. The Mets brought Tom Seaver in to be master of ceremonies. Almost always when the Mets honor someone, Seaver comes to town. He had been their first great player, the heart and soul of the Miracle Mets of 1969, and had been the first player whose bust in the Hall of Fame wore a Mets cap.
There was no escaping the irony that Seaver had won his three hundredth game in a White Sox uniform and Glavine had won his three hundredth in a Mets uniform. Glavine would go into the Hall of Fame as a Brave when his time came, but he was now the first pitcher to win his three hundredth game as a Met.
Glavine had talked to the media so much in the previous week that there really wasn’t much left for anyone to ask him. It didn’t matter: Seaver was going to do most of the talking anyway. “To win three hundred games, like Tom has done, you have to be an artist, not just a pitcher,” Seaver said, clearly talking about himself at least as much as Glavine. “I think what’s important, though, is the way Tom has conducted himself throughout his career, not just on the mound but off it.”
That was the theme for the day. Glavine wasn’t thrilled about all the hoopla, even though he understood it. “I like to be the center of attention when I’m on the mound and have the ball in my hands,” he said. “Stuff like this is a little embarrassing.”
He sat and listened while one speaker after another went on about him, and he was presented with various awards by friends and teammates and, for some reason, former New York Rangers hockey player Rod Gilbert, and he watched a videotape the Mets had put together of other great athletes congratulating him. He got a chuckle when Wayne Gretzky appeared, wondering if he might have made something of himself had he pursued hockey. The only glitch came when Seaver forgot it was time to introduce Glavine and went to sit down. Someone nudged him, and he ran back to the podium and said, “I almost forgot. Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Glavine.”
Not the most dramatic introduction, but Glavine didn’t mind. The only surprising moment in his thank-you speech came when Glavine went out of his way to talk about how important it was to him that he had conducted himself the way he had during his career. It was very un-Glavine-like for Glavine to pat himself on the back publicly in any way.
“I just thought it was the right forum to make the point that you can be successful as a professional athlete and not be a jerk,” he said. “There’s so much focus on the guys that screw up and a tendency to forget that there are guys who perform well and conduct themselves well too. I wanted to make the point that you can do both.”
Glavine also noticed that all the Marlins were in their dugout, watching from the top step, as he spoke. He was touched by that. He knew his teammates would be out there; he wasn’t so sure about the opponents. “I thought that was cool,” he said. “It was a sign of respect.”
As the ceremony broke up, Glavine made a point of walking in the direction of the Florida dugout to say thanks. He had no idea how the Marlins would repay him for his courtesy.