WHILE MIKE MUSSINA WAS CRASHING, Tom Glavine was soaring.
He had pitched well in three straight starts after Los Angeles leading to three hundred: the win against Pittsburgh, the no-decision in Milwaukee, and the climactic win in Chicago.
Now, with the three hundred pressure removed, Glavine was enjoying pitching more than at any time since he arrived in New York, perhaps even longer than that. He pitched the opening game of a series in Washington on August 17, a night when the Mets badly needed a strong pitching performance. They had been embarrassed the night before in Pittsburgh, rallying from an early deficit to lead 7–5, only to see the bullpen completely blow up in a 10–7 loss.
The Mets still had a three-game lead, but there was evidence of some tension in the tiny visitors’ clubhouse in RFK Stadium. Willie Randolph had said to the media after the game in Pittsburgh that “you have to tip your cap to the Pirates.”
In most places that would have been seen as a gracious nod to a bad team that had managed to piece together a good night. In New York it was seen as Randolph — again — not being fiery enough to go after his team when it gave away a game it should have won. Randolph had plenty of fire. He had been an extremely competitive player, and he had a temper. But, much like Torre, whom he had worked for as a coach for eleven years, he didn’t often show it.
“Just because I don’t jump up and down in front of the cameras and act like an asshole doesn’t mean I can’t be one,” he said, perhaps not meaning it quite that way. His point was that he got angry behind closed doors when he felt the need. To most in New York, the need to get angry had arrived.
The players didn’t feel quite that way. Glavine had said repeatedly during the season that a real pennant race was the norm; 2006 had been an aberration. And yet, there was a feeling that the chance to run away with the race had been there and hadn’t been taken.
The latest issue was the catching situation. Lo Duca had strained his hamstring again during the Florida series and had been placed — angrily — on the disabled list on August 12. Within minutes, or so it seemed, of Lo Duca being deactivated for fifteen days, Ramon Castro, his backup, began complaining of back pains. Almost as if not wanting to admit they had acted hastily with Lo Duca, the club kept him active for almost a week while thirty-eight-year-old Mike Difelice, a classic journeyman major leaguer — he had played twelve seasons with seven different teams, playing in a total of 543 games — did all the catching. Finally, after the team got to Washington, Castro was DL’d and forty-one-year-old Sandy Alomar Jr. was called up. If nothing else, the Mets now had the oldest catching duo in baseball.
None of that seemed to bother Glavine. He was superb once more against the Nationals. On a typically sultry August night in Washington — it was ninety degrees at game time but felt considerably warmer with the humidity — he threw seven innings that looked effortless.
The Nats had one quick rally against him when Ryan Zimmerman singled with two outs in the third and Dmitri Young doubled him home. But that was it. The rest of the night was a breeze for the Mets and for their many fans in the small crowd (23,636 announced) that rumbled around in the old ballpark. Damion Easley got the Mets started with a home run in the second and then Jose Reyes scored a “Reyes run” in the third: walk, stolen base, advance to third on an error by the catcher, and then score easily on a David Wright single. Moises Alou homered in the fourth, and it was 4–1 by the time Glavine went out to pitch the seventh.
The beginning of that inning was his only real moment of trepidation. He had walked in the top of the inning, and after running the bases he thought Randolph and Peterson might take him out since he had thrown 104 pitches. Peterson asked him how he felt, and he told him, honestly, okay. They let him go out, in part because of that, in part because they really didn’t want to go to the bullpen before they absolutely had to. Glavine proceeded to pitch a one-two-three seventh, and even though Jorge Sosa wobbled in the eighth, the final was 6–2.
“Vintage Tommy Glavine,” Randolph called it. “We needed a well-pitched game from our starter tonight, and he gave us just that.”
Glavine had thrown 116 pitches on a hot night and felt like he could pitch the next day if necessary. “When your pitches are going almost exactly where you want them to, it doesn’t feel like work,” he said. “You feel it physically, of course, but mentally you’re flying. My changeup is going almost exactly where I want it to go on almost every pitch right now. When I’ve got that going, I’m probably going to pitch well.”
Glavine’s performance was the start of a roll for the Mets. They swept the Nats and won the opener of a series at Shea against the San Diego Padres, who were in a battle for the NL West title and the wild-card spot.
Glavine was in the weight room on Monday afternoon when he saw Greg Maddux coming toward him. Maddux and Glavine were the same age, and Maddux was still pitching well for the Padres — the third team he had been with since leaving the Braves. He and Glavine were still friends but not the way Glavine and Smoltz were friends. Maddux lived in Las Vegas during the off-season, and he and Glavine weren’t in touch all that often. Glavine hadn’t heard from Maddux since his three hundredth win.
“Looking back, I probably should have called him or sent a message or something,” Maddux said. “But I knew we were playing them in a couple weeks, so I figured I’d wait and talk to him in person.”
As soon as Maddux saw Glavine, he walked right over to him with a big smile on his face.
“So,” he said, “what took you so long?”
Glavine cracked up. It was exactly the kind of comment he would have hoped for from Maddux. The two then had a lengthy conversation about families, about their teams, and about next season.
“He said if I keep feeling good, I might as well pitch next year,” Glavine said. “To be honest, by that point I was pretty much thinking the same thing.”
There had been very little talk during the march to three hundred about 2008, even in the Glavine household. “Honestly, I have no idea what he’s going to do,” Chris Glavine said in mid-August. “I’m not going to be surprised if he wants to pitch. And if he does, it’s fine. We’ll deal with it.”
There had been a little bit of a stir late in July when the New York Daily News had reported that the Glavines were about to put their Greenwich house on the market. The story was accurate, but Glavine didn’t feel as if it committed him one way or the other: “If we get an offer, we can always turn it down,” he said. “If we do sell and I come back here next year, we might want to get an apartment in Manhattan. The boys are old enough to enjoy the city now, and Chris and I have always thought it might be fun to do that for a year.”
In short, he was keeping his options open. The way he was pitching, it was likely he would have a number of them. “If I do pitch, it’s Atlanta or New York — period,” he said. “Gregg [Clifton] told me last winter that if I went on the open market I could probably get several offers. I don’t want that. Both places feel like home to me now. The difference, obviously, is in Atlanta, Chris and the kids don’t have to fly back and forth all season long.”
The win in the opener over the Padres had ballooned the Mets’ lead to five games. Jake Peavy, who would go on to win the National League Cy Young Award, stopped the winning streak the next night.
Glavine then pitched the final game of the series. His analysis of the start was succinct: “I sucked,” he said. “I guess I was due for a game like that, but it caught me by surprise because I’d been pitching so well. I kept throwing pitches in places I hadn’t been throwing them since Los Angeles. It was frustrating.”
The night began innocently enough, Glavine pitching out of a two-out, two-on jam in the first, and the Mets giving him a 1–0 lead when Carlos Beltran drove Wright in with a two-out double in the bottom of the inning. It unraveled for Glavine after that. The Padres scored one in the second and one in the third, which would have been more if Milton Bradley hadn’t been thrown out at the plate on a call in which the Mets appeared to catch a break from plate umpire Derryl Cousins. They scored two more in the fourth and the fifth, the last two coming after two were down. Khalil Greene had doubled, Josh Bard singled with one out, and Marcus Giles tripled in a ten-pitch span. Glavine finally got the last out, but he knew he wouldn’t be back for the sixth.
“I just couldn’t get the third out,” he said. “I think they scored five of the runs with two out. I was completely frustrated. But I really thought it was just one of those nights, not the beginning of a trend or anything. It wasn’t one of those deals where Rick and I had to sit down and go over it in chapter and verse. It was just a night where I went home pissed off.”
The Mets actually rallied to lead, scoring six runs in the sixth but — sound familiar? — lost in ten after another bullpen meltdown. Even so, the loss hardly appeared to be a big deal. The Mets took two of three from the Dodgers over the weekend and headed to Philadelphia for a four-game series, with a six-game lead on the Phillies and a seven-game lead on the Braves, who were fading badly, even after pulling a major trade to get slugger Mark Teixeira from Texas at the trade deadline.
“They just don’t have what they always used to have,” Glavine said. “Enough starting pitching.”
The Mets pulled into Philadelphia thinking they had a chance to just about finish off the pennant race. After struggling to create some space all summer, they now had some. They had doubled their lead, from three games to six, since the embarrassing loss in Pittsburgh, winning six of nine while their pursuers continued to slide backward.
But the opener in Philadelphia was a disaster. Brian Lawrence had been filling the fifth starter spot while the Mets continued to wait for Pedro Martinez to have enough rehab starts to be ready to pitch. The Mets, and the media, were so obsessed with Martinez’s return that if there wasn’t a daily update on his status, everyone wondered if something had gone wrong.
Lawrence’s results had been mixed at best, and he got bombed by the Phillies, the Mets losing 9–2. Glavine pitched the second game and could not have pitched better. Citizens Bank Park is as good a hitter’s venue as there is in baseball, and keeping hitters in the park for an entire game is a major challenge for any pitcher. Glavine made it look easy. The Phillies appeared to be out front of everything they swung at as Glavine kept them off-balance.
Joe Kerrigan, the Yankees bullpen coach who had watched Glavine for years, laughed later when he remembered watching Glavine pitch that night. “He’s made a living for twenty years out of the fact that his baseball IQ is so much higher than that of the batters he faces,” he said. “He always makes them hit his pitch, and when they do, they roll over it [hitting the ball with the bottom of the bat] and hit easy ground balls. Maybe in another twenty years, they’ll figure him out.”
They didn’t that night in Philadelphia. Glavine pitched seven shutout innnings, walking no one and scattering eight hits. Unfortunately for the Mets, Adam Eaton, who had been having a terrible year, was almost as good as Glavine, giving up just two runs in five and two-thirds innings. Even so, Glavine left with a 2–0 lead after Peterson told him 102 pitches was enough for the night.
What happened next was, as Yogi Berra liked to say, déjà vu all over again. Glavine was icing his arm when Pedro Feliciano came in to start the eighth. Jimmy Rollins hit Feliciano’s fourth pitch over the left-field fence to make it 2–1. Pat Burrell walked with one out, and Shane Victorino ran for him. Feliciano managed to get Ryan Howard out, and Aaron Heilman came in needing one out to get the ball to Wagner.
He didn’t get it. Victorino stole second and went to third when Paul Lo Duca, just off the DL, threw the ball into center field. Victorino scored a moment later when Aaron Rowand hit a dribbler down the third-base line and beat Heilman’s throw. It was 2–2 — another chance for a Glavine win by the boards. Worse than that, the Philllies won the game 4–2 when Howard hit a mammoth two-run homer off Guillermo Mota in the tenth.
The loss was a damaging one. The Mets had wasted an excellent performance by Glavine and had allowed the Phillies to pull within four games instead of knocking them back to a six-game deficit. The next two days were even more frustrating. The Phillies won 3–2 on Wednesday, the game ending when Marlon Anderson was called for interference trying to break up a double play, while what would have been the tying run was scoring. Umpire C.B. Bucknor said that Anderson had thrown his arms into the air in an attempt to interfere with the relay throw to first base. Instead of a tie game, the Mets were in the clubhouse, literally screaming with frustration.
“That was the first time all season everyone was really mad,” Glavine said. “Willie came in screaming, and a lot of guys were genuinely pissed off. I wasn’t happy we lost, but I thought the anger was a good thing.”
Anger is all well and good, but there’s a reason for the old baseball saying that momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher. For the Mets the next day, it was Orlando Hernandez, and he got shelled early, putting the Mets in a 5–0 hole. Still, they came back to lead 10–8 in the eighth, and Randolph, not trusting anyone in the bullpen but Billy Wagner, sent him out to get a two-inning save for the first time all season. It seemed like a good idea at the time, given that Wagner was rested and the rest of the bullpen had been shaky. But the Phillies got one back on a home run in the eighth by Pat Burrell and then scored two in the ninth to win 11–10.
Suddenly, the Mets’ comfortable six-game lead was a two-game lead, and the Phillies were flying, the town gripped by pennant fever, not having hosted a playoff game since 1993. Jimmy Rollins, who had so angered the Mets with his “We are the team to beat” declaration in spring training, was backing up his words with his play. After going three for five in the finale, Rollins was hitting .293 with twenty-four home runs, seventy-five RBIs, and twenty-seven stolen bases. If nothing else, he was certainly the player to beat.
The Mets limped into Atlanta for their final road series with the Braves, knowing they needed to find something to turn them back around.
They found it: John Maine, who had appeared to be hitting the wall since the All-Star break, won the first game 7–1, outpitching Tim Hudson. The Mets then got a huge boost when Mike Pelfrey, who had pitched so poorly the first half of the season that he had been sent to the minors, pitched his best game of the season and got his first win, 5–1, in the middle game of the set. The Phillies had split their first two games in Miami, which meant the Mets had a three-game lead again (six and a half over the Braves) going into the final game of the series. With a win, they would finish the season 5–4 in Atlanta.
The pitching matchup: Tom Glavine versus John Smoltz, naturally.
In the back of his mind, Glavine couldn’t help but consider the fact that this might be his last start in Atlanta. “If it was going to be my last start there, I wanted it to be a good one,” he said. “I wanted to beat the Braves, and I wanted to beat Smoltzie.”
He was 0–2 on the year in three starts against Smoltz, even though he had pitched pretty well all three times.
It took two batters for Glavine to find trouble in the first inning. Rookie shortstop Yunel Escobar singled, and Glavine nemesis Matt Diaz singled up the middle, bringing up Chipper Jones. Glavine managed to get him to fly to deep center field, with Escobar moving to third.
Pitching carefully, Glavine walked Teixeira, loading the bases. Great. His last game, maybe, in Atlanta, and the bases were loaded with one out in the first. Glavine gave himself his usual talking to: “Don’t try to do too much. Get a ground ball. Get out of this down no worse than one-nothing.”
Jeff Francoeur, another headache for Glavine in ’07, hit a ground ball to David Wright that wasn’t hit hard enough to go for a double play. Wright threw Francoeur out as Escobar scored to make it 1–0. Still pitching carefully, Glavine walked his old pal Andruw Jones to again load the bases. That brought up catcher Brian McCann. One bad pitch — or one good pitch turned into a bad one — and the Mets might be in a hole they couldn’t climb out of for the rest of the afternoon.
“You have to figure when you’re facing Smoltzie that if you get down three-nothing or anything beyond that, you’re in serious trouble,” Glavine said. “I really wanted to hold them right there at one-nothing.”
He did, reverting to his old ways — staying away from McCann the entire at bat. On 2–2, he threw a changeup down and away, and McCann reached for it and hit a harmless ground ball to Delgado at first. Disaster averted.
Even so, Glavine was angry when he came into the dugout. “Why does this always happen with these guys?” he said, ostensibly to Peterson but really talking to himself out loud. “Sometimes I just feel as if they’ve got some kind of hex on me.”
He felt less frustrated after the top of the second when he produced a run with a fly ball to center field that scored Moises Alou from third. The Mets could have scored more, but Jose Reyes struck out looking with two on and two out. Coincidence or not, Reyes hadn’t been the same player since the All-Star break when Rickey Henderson and Lastings Milledge had arrived. His batting average was now under .300 — .295 — and at times he and Milledge had upset opponents with their post-home-run celebration dances and some of their showboating. The Mets desperately needed him to be their catalyst for the stretch drive.
In the fifth inning, with the game still locked at 1–1, Reyes did just that, leading off with a single. Two batters later, Smoltz grooved a first-pitch fastball to David Wright, and Wright hit it into orbit, giving the Mets a 3–1 lead.
Glavine kept the score right there into the seventh. When Kelly Johnson led off the inning with a single, Randolph decided one hundred pitches on a hot day was enough and went to get him. As Glavine handed the ball to Randolph and started toward the dugout, a remarkable thing happened.
For the first time since he had left Atlanta five years earlier, he heard cheers. Section after section, the fans in the sold-out stadium began standing. By the time Glavine crossed the third-base line, they were all on their feet. Of all the ovations Glavine had received before and after three hundred, this one might have meant the most. This was the place he had started as a player, the place where he had become a star, won two Cy Young Awards and a World Series. It was also the park where he had been booed more than any other place.
And now, realizing this might be the last time they saw him in a baseball uniform, Atlanta’s fans were cheering him. “It meant a lot,” he said. “After all that had gone on, if that was the last time I walked off a field in Atlanta, I really couldn’t think of a much better ending.”
Of course there was the little matter of winning the game. This time the bullpen hung on. Barely. Billy Wagner, who had been so good the first four months of the season before having a tough August, gave up a run in the ninth and allowed the tying run to reach second. But he got Diaz to ground out to second for the final out. The Mets had won 3–2. Glavine had beaten Smoltz. The Braves were seven and a half back, and the Phillies, having lost in Miami that day, were four back.
Glavine was 12–6, and his ERA was barely over 4.00 after being 4.63 following the disaster in Los Angeles. All was well. There were twenty-six games left.
THE DAY AFTER GLAVINE’S VICTORY in Atlanta, Mike Mussina got to pitch again. Called from the bullpen to replace Roger Clemens — who was officially removed from the game because he was injured but just as clearly taken out because he had given up five runs in four innings — in the top of the fifth inning against the Seattle Mariners.
Relief or not, Mussina was happy to be in a game. He had decided that whenever he was allowed to pitch again, he wasn’t going to worry so much about giving up home runs, something that both Mike Borzello and Mark Mussina had counseled him on.
“I had gotten to be like Darrell Royal [the old University of Texas football coach],” he said. “I figured if I let guys hit the ball, three things could happen and two of them were bad.”
Royal, who was famous for not wanting to throw the football, had once said: “If you throw the ball, three things can happen, and two of them [interception, incompletion] are bad.” For Mussina the two bad things were home runs and base hits. Royal had been retired from coaching for almost thirty years, and it was time for Mussina to retire his approach from baseball.
Mussina wasn’t great against the Mariners, but he was considerably better than he had been against the Angels and Tigers. The Mariners got to him for seven hits in three and two-thirds innings (Torre took him out with two down in the eighth inning so a lefty could pitch to Ichiro Suzuki), but there were far fewer ringing line drives, and there were quite a few more outs. Mussina retired eleven batters while giving up two runs. In the two starts before his benching, he had gotten fourteen batters out while giving up thirteen runs.
“It was hardly the kind of performance you write home about, but it was better,” he said. “I felt like I had figured some things out about how to pitch. I was getting outs. I didn’t feel like every time I threw a pitch it was going in a gap someplace.”
Once Mussina had stopped brooding — “about three days, I’d say” — he had gone to strength coach Dana Cavalea and asked him to come up with a new regimen. “I needed to be doing stuff that involved more energy,” he said. “I tend to get on cruise control in the weight room once the season starts. I needed to be working harder to strengthen myself so I wouldn’t hurt so much anymore.”
Even while he was working on some parts of his body he was resting others. All the nagging injuries were nagging a little bit less. Following a bullpen session two days after pitching against the Mariners, in which he felt as good as he had felt since July, he told Borzello, “I think I’m really close to being a good pitcher again.”
Borzello agreed. “This is the best I’ve seen you throw in three months,” he said. Mussina knew Borzello wouldn’t say that if he didn’t believe it.
The question was when he would get a chance to prove it. He was still the long man in the bullpen. The Yankees won the last two games of the Mariner series to move into first place in the wild-card race. Then they went to Kansas City and swept the Royals to push their record to 81–62 — 39–19 since the All-Star break. At that stage, Mussina was just along for the ride.
“When guys go on the disabled list, they talk about feeling invisible in the clubhouse because there is no way they can help the team,” Mussina said. “They’re there, but they’re not there. I was in that kind of place, except I wasn’t on the DL. I was there but not there. It was pretty much a certainty every day that I wasn’t going to help the team because I wasn’t going to pitch. Having my pitching coach look right through me whenever he saw me just made it that much worse.”
After a while, Mussina was able to adapt a gallows sense of humor about the whole thing. “Why should I complain about anything?” he said one day, standing at his locker. “I told my wife, ‘Think about it, I get to travel the country and do absolutely nothing — for free. I get to go to Kansas City and Toronto this week — for free. I get to eat — for free. I get to stay in a nice hotel — for free.’ I mean, what more could you ask?”
One of the clubhouse kids arrived at that moment with a fax Mussina had been trying to send. “You see,” Mussina said, gesturing to the fax. “I get fax service — for free.”
“Mike, there’s something wrong with the number you gave me,” the clubhouse kid said. “It didn’t go through.”
Mussina shrugged. “So maybe not so much the free fax service.”
He was smiling. A week earlier that would have been impossible.
The first hint that he might escape from purgatory had come not long after Clemens had come out of the Seattle game. Clemens had claimed the injury was minor, and he didn’t see any reason to miss a start. But as often happens with older players — especially really old players — the injury proved more nagging than he had expected or hoped.
Clemens’s next turn was scheduled for Sunday, September 9, in Kansas City. But the team had an off-day after the Seattle series, which gave Torre some flexibility. Rather than push Chien-Ming Wang back to start the first game in Toronto, as they would have done if Clemens had been healthy, Torre and Guidry decided to pitch him on his regular fifth day in what would have been Clemens’s spot. Wang had pitched arguably his worst game of the season in the Yankees’ last trip to Toronto, and the thinking was he would do better in Kansas City.
On the day before the Yankees left on the road trip, Torre told Mussina that Wang was going to pitch on Sunday in Kansas City and that Mussina might pitch the middle game in Toronto. Kennedy, who had continued to pitch well, was also experiencing some soreness, and the last thing the Yankees wanted to do was push him too hard.
“You might pitch on Wednesday in Toronto,” Torre told Mussina.
“Might?”
“Can’t be sure. I’ll let you know as soon as I possibly can.”
There wasn’t much Mussina could say. “Might, maybe, could be, might not be,” he said. He smiled. “Hey, just remember, I’m getting to go to Canada — for free.”
“MIGHT, MAYBE, COULD BE” became “definitely” the following Monday. Clemens wasn’t ready to pitch, and the Yankees had decided to let Kennedy skip at least one start. Torre told Mussina he would pitch on Wednesday against the Blue Jays “and then we’ll see.”
Mussina was fine with that. He had pitched once in sixteen days, throwing sixty-two pitches on Labor Day. If nothing else, he figured he was rested.
“Actually I did feel a lot better physically,” he said. “Sometimes when Joe does things, you wonder what he’s thinking. More often than not, though, he’s proven right. There’s no doubt after pitching once in sixteen days I felt better and stronger. The aches and pains were more or less gone, and I felt fresh, or maybe more accurately, I felt refreshed.”
He didn’t feel especially nervous warming up in Toronto. He knew he could pitch a shutout and might not get another start, or he could give up five runs in four and two-thirds and perhaps start again in five days. His future depended more on the health of Clemens and Kennedy than it did on him. Maybe that relaxed him just a little bit. So did the Yankees’ scoring two quick runs in the top of the first.
Mussina had decided to make one tactical change, one that both his brother and Borzello had been pushing him to try all season: pitch inside more often. It wasn’t all that different than what Glavine had gone through two years earlier. Mussina had become predictable and batters were diving across the plate, anticipating pitches on the outside corner.
In the first inning, working to all corners of the plate, Mussina got three ground-ball outs, the third coming after Alex Rios had singled with two out. The always-frightening Frank Thomas rolled over a slider and hit into a six-four force play.
“It wasn’t as if I let out a big sigh of relief or anything,” Mussina said. “It was one inning. I might have gone out there in the second and gotten bombed. But I felt good, the ball felt good coming out of my hand. My foot didn’t hurt. I could really drive down the hill. It felt completely different than it had in the three starts before I got taken out.”
He kept getting batters out. It was almost as if the Blue Jays were seeing a pitcher they weren’t familiar with, because they were: Mussina stayed ahead of most hitters, pitched carefully when behind — he walked three — and kept getting outs. The Yankees added two runs in the fourth to make it 4–0.
Mussina rolled through the fifth, meaning he was eligible to get the win. In the sixth, he began to falter a little. After Russ Adams singled to lead off, Mussina threw another good slider and got Rios to bounce into a five-four-three double play. But Thomas walked and Matt Stairs singled. Mussina had thrown eighty-seven pitches, ordinarily a comfortable pitch count. But he hadn’t pushed himself this way for sixteen days — “It was almost like a first start coming off the DL,” he said later — and Torre wanted to be sure he came out of the game feeling good. A bad pitch now would leave a sour taste in his mouth.
“The funny thing about Moose is that as good as he’s been for so many years, he’s really kind of fragile,” Torre said. “Not fragile in the way he pitches or competes but in terms of self-belief. Part of his problem was when he lost some velocity, he didn’t think he was good enough to pitch to contact — when in fact he was. He had pitched really well; he was a little tired. I wanted him smiling, feeling good about what he’d done the next few days, not moping around doubting himself again.”
Torre waved in Edwar Ramirez, who promptly walked Aaron Hill to load the bases and bring the tying run to the plate. But he got Lyle Overbay to fly to Abreu in right, and Mussina’s line for the night was complete: five and two-thirds innings pitched, five hits, no runs, one strikeout, three walks. Obviously the stat that mattered most was the runs — or lack of them.
When he came into the dugout, the entire team greeted him with handshakes and pats on the back. “After so many years, the handshakes run together a little bit,” Mussina said. “But that felt pretty good.”
The Yankees went on to win the game 4–1, even though Joba Chamberlain had his first shaky outing since joining the team and had to be rescued by Mariano Rivera in the eighth.
The victory put the Yankees at 83–62 and, remarkably, in complete control of the wild-card race. Both the Mariners and the Tigers had faded badly since Labor Day, and the Yankees now led Detroit by four games and Seattle by five and a half.
“It was amazing how that happened,” Mussina said. “Obviously we played very well. [Brian] Cashman and Torre deserve a lot of credit for not panicking at the trade deadline and sticking with the young guys — who came through. But I don’t think people really appreciate Joe. If you look at some of the rotations we’ve run out there the last few years and still made the playoffs every year, I think it’s amazing.
“This year we didn’t have Clemens until June, and then he was up and down and hurt most of September. Andy was good; Wang was good. I had the worst year of my career. We ran a bunch of untested kids out there the first half, and then in August and September we had Hughes and the Kennedy kid in the rotation and we still played really well.
“It helped that Detroit and Seattle faded. That was a surprise. Usually teams going after the wild card play really well in September because they’re good teams that have gotten hot. We were the only ones that stayed hot. I don’t think any of us expected that.”
The Yankees went from Toronto to Boston for what should have been a crucial series. Only it didn’t feel crucial. They won two of three to cut their deficit to four and a half games, but the real suspense was gone. Barring an unlikely collapse, the Yankees were going to make the playoffs for a thirteenth straight season. They left Boston with a three-and-a-half-game lead on the Tigers with thirteen games left to play.
They went home to play the Orioles, who had won eight of twelve from them. With Kennedy and Clemens still hurting — Kennedy would not pitch again as it turned out — Mussina was told he was back in the rotation. He had never pitched all that well against his old team — he was 9–6 with a 4.45 ERA — but pitching the middle game of the series, he completely shut them down.
The case can be made that the Orioles, heading for another ninety-plus-loss season, were playing out the string, but they had played well against the Yankees all year and always came to play when Mussina was pitching. Mussina walked Brian Roberts leading off the game but got Tike Redman to hit the ball right back to him, starting a one-six-three double play. The Orioles got a single from Ramon Hernandez in the third and another single from Hernandez in the sixth. In the seventh, Miguel Tejada hit a dribbler down the third-base line and beat it out for an infield hit.
That was it. Three scratch singles, one walk. The Yankees exploded for six runs in the fourth, added a single run in the fifth, and then scored five more in the seventh against the pathetic Orioles bullpen. That made it 12–0, and Torre saw no reason to leave Mussina or any of his other starters in the game, allowing a group of September call-ups to finish it. (Major league rosters can expand to forty players on September 1. Contending teams don’t often play their call-ups, but teams like the Orioles do to take a look at some of their younger players.)
Mussina had only thrown ninety-eight pitches — sixty-four of them strikes, he had been so precise — and might have been able to finish the game. Neither he nor Torre were worried about that. The time to start looking ahead to the playoffs had come, and Torre, now figuring Mussina as his number four starter in the postseason, saw no reason to leave him in a 12–0 game.
For Mussina, the win had more significance than might meet the eye. It was his tenth victory of the season, meaning he had won at least ten games in sixteen straight seasons. He had never failed to win ten games in a complete big league season. No American League pitcher had a streak as long. The only pitchers in major league history who had won at least ten games in sixteen or more seasons were Greg Maddux (twenty years), Cy Young (nineteen), Steve Carlton (eighteen), Don Sutton (seventeen), Warren Spahn (seventeen), and Nolan Ryan (sixteen). The only one of those six pitchers not in the Hall of Fame was Maddux, and the only reason he wasn’t there was that he hadn’t gotten around to retiring yet.
It was also the 249th win of Mussina’s career.
Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon in Yankee Stadium, Mussina went for number 250 against the Blue Jays. His wife and kids were in the stands, but the game wasn’t on national TV, and there was absolutely no fanfare surrounding the attempt.
“Two fifty isn’t three hundred,” he said. “I understand that.”
Two fifty isn’t three hundred, but it is still an impressive number. Among the nearly eight thousand men lucky enough to have pitched in the major leagues, Mussina was trying to become the forty-fifth to win 250 games. That would put him in pretty elite company.
Mussina hadn’t allowed a run in his two starts since returning to the rotation. But he allowed three runs in the second inning, and the Yankees trailed 3–0. They answered with three in the bottom of the inning and scored three more in the fifth to give Mussina a 6–3 lead. He had settled down after the second. In fact, the Blue Jays only got three hits over the next five innings.
Mussina was now pitching with the confidence of the Mussina of old. He wasn’t afraid to come inside, and he wasn’t afraid to throw strikes, especially since he now felt he could hit or just miss corners whenever he wanted to. He had found the black again.
“Once I got out of Darrell Royal mode, I was a pitcher again,” he said. “Unless you throw ninety-eight [miles an hour], you have to worry about how you locate your pitches. But you can’t be afraid to let batters hit the ball, and you can’t be predictable. I’d become predictable, and I was afraid to throw anything near the plate. Once I stopped doing that I could pitch again.”
The Blue Jays made it interesting for Mussina, who waited in the clubhouse after Torre took him out following the seventh inning. Luis Vizcaino, who had pitched well for a long stretch during the summer, took over in the top of the eighth, allowed two quick runs, and Torre had to bring in Joba Chamberlain with two on and two out. Mussina was icing his arm by then. The rest of him was sweating.
“It wasn’t as if not getting two fifty that day meant I wasn’t going to get it,” he said later. “I had another start, and I knew I was coming back next year. But I was close enough to it that I figured it would be nice to get it done then.”
Chamberlain got it done for him. He struck out Adam Lind to get out of the eighth-inning jam, then pitched a one-two-three ninth, striking out Reed Johnson for the final out. The Yankees had won the game 7–5. Mussina stayed in the clubhouse in the ninth.
One of the clubhouse kids brought Mussina a ball that he had pitched with in the game. Most teams keep a bucket of game-used balls in the dugout so that players who want a game ball can have one and others can be signed by players as souvenirs. Balls are marked so that a player knows if it was in play when he was in the game. Mussina wanted Chamberlain to keep the ball Chamberlain had ended the game with because it was the kid’s first major league save.
A number of players stopped by Mussina’s locker to congratulate him, as did Torre and Guidry — “He was talking to me again, now that I was back in the rotation,” Mussina said. He answered questions about the milestone win and talked about how good it felt to be pitching well again.
Then he got in the car and drove back to Westchester. Jana and the kids had gone directly from the game to the airport because the kids had school the next morning. He made dinner and relaxed by himself in front of the TV before going to bed.
“That was my celebration,” he said. “A night at home by myself. I was happy I was pitching well again. Actually, I was happy I was pitching again. I didn’t need a party. I was perfectly satisfied.”