WHILE GLAVINE WAS SEARCHING for his changeup in New York, Mussina was making his final start of the regular season in Baltimore.
The Yankees clubhouse was as loose as it ever is going into the final weekend. Mussina, even though he was pitching that night, paused for a while to help one of the coaches with a crossword. Joe Torre pushed his cap back on his head as he talked to the media before the game and wondered who he would let manage on Sunday. Traditionally, Torre has let his players run the team on the last day of the regular season with a playoff spot clinched, and he had just remembered that, once again, that would be the case.
On the day after the Yankees secured their postseason spot in Tampa, Mussina went to see Torre. He had been reading in the papers about Torre’s postseason pitching plans: Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and Mussina were the scheduled starters, unless Clemens’s elbow was still too tender for him to pitch. Clemens was insisting — as he had been for a month — that he was fine and ready to go, even though he hadn’t been in a game since he’d had to come out on Labor Day.
Mussina also knew that if the Yankees played Cleveland — as was likely unless they somehow caught the Red Sox — the series would be drawn out under the crazy new postseason schedule baseball had agreed to in order to accommodate television. Game One would be on Thursday, October 4, in Cleveland, Game Two on Friday, Game Three on Sunday in New York, Game Four on Monday, and Game Five back in Cleveland on Wednesday. The idea of two off-days in a five-game series was ludicrous, but that’s the way it was.
“I just want you to know I’m ready to go wherever, whenever you need me,” Mussina told Torre. “If you want me in the bullpen, I have no problem with that. If you want me to start, obviously, I’m ready to do that too. Whatever you need.”
Torre was both impressed and touched by Mussina’s gesture. Mussina was making a point: you don’t have to worry about my ego or my feelings being hurt; I will not make it tough for you no matter what you decide.
“That meant a lot,” Torre said, relaxing in the dugout in Baltimore. “I know he was hurt when I had to pull him from the rotation and by the way it came down. It was hard for me — hell, a guy gives you what he’s given us, and then you have to sit him down? That’s tough. For him to walk in and say, ‘If me being in the bullpen is the best thing for the team, put me in the bullpen’ — that says a lot about him. He just wants us to win. There aren’t a lot of guys with two hundred fifty wins who would walk into your office and say that.”
Mussina meant what he said. But he also wondered aloud while talking to Mike Borzello if Wang-Pettitte-Clemens-Mussina was the way to go.
“I was thinking that Wang hadn’t pitched that well on the road,” Mussina said. “So, what if Joe started Andy in Game One and either Roger, if he was healthy, or me in Game Two. That did several things: one, it set things up so that Andy would pitch a Game Five. Two, it meant Wang could pitch at home where he was more comfortable. Three, if it was me in Game Two, I’d always pitched pretty well against the Indians, and one of my best games all year had been in Cleveland. I thought it might set up better for everyone. Either way, I think we knew the guy Joe really wanted to throw twice if it came to that was Andy because he’d been so clutch in big games in the past.”
Torre had considered that scenario. But he liked the idea of Pettitte pitching in Game Two because the argument could be made that no other pitcher in history had won more Game Twos in postseason with his team down 1–0 than Pettitte. Wang had been his best pitcher all year, and pitching him in Game One gave Torre more options — Wang, Mussina, Pettitte — in Games Four and Five if it came to that.
Mussina was hoping to end the season that night with 251 wins for his career and twelve for 2007. He was less than spectacular, but Alex Rodriguez, who was capping off a monster season — fifty-four home runs and 156 RBI — homered and doubled early in the game, and Mussina had a 7–2 lead, with two outs in the fifth inning and Tike Redman on third base. Miguel Tejada hit a one-hop shot wide of third. Rodriguez tried to make a play on the ball and couldn’t, Tejada beating the throw as Redman scored.
“They scored it a hit, and it was a hit, no doubt,” Mussina said later. “But A-Rod almost made the play. If he does make it, the game’s a lot different.”
After that, Mussina just couldn’t get the third out. Aubrey Huff doubled to the gap in left-center to score Tejada; Melvin Mora singled Huff in; and Ramon Hernandez doubled to left to score Huff, making the score 7–6. Fortunately for Mussina, Hernandez foolishly tried to get to third on the throw to the plate and was thrown out to finally end the inning.
He left the game still leading, and the Yankees tacked on runs in the sixth and eighth. Then Mariano Rivera came in to wrap it up in the ninth, with the lead 9–6. Only this time he didn’t wrap it up. The Orioles loaded the bases with two outs, and Jay Payton cleared them with a game-tying triple. The Orioles won the game, with a run in the tenth, 10–9.
“I guess it would have been more frustrating if I’d been going for two fifty that night,” Mussina said. “But it was still a little bit upsetting. I mean, on the one hand, I didn’t pitch great. On the other, how often do you see Mo blow a three-run lead in the ninth? Close to never.
“But it happens. Mo has saved enough games for me through the years that I couldn’t really get on him for blowing one.” He smiled. “Even though I still can’t quite figure out how it happened.”
The loss finally allowed the Red Sox — who beat the Minnesota Twins that night — to wrap up the Eastern Division title. The American League playoff matchups were now set: the Yankees would open their Division Series in Cleveland; the Angels would go to Boston to play the Red Sox.
The National League wasn’t nearly as clear-cut. Only the Chicago Cubs had clinched a playoff spot as of Friday night. The Phillies and Mets were fighting it out in the East; the Arizona Diamondbacks had a one-game lead on the San Diego Padres in the West; and the Colorado Rockies were still alive for a wild-card berth, along with all four of the other teams.
Five teams playing for three spots. It promised to be a fascinating weekend.
THE NEW METS — the ones in second place with nothing to lose — snapped out of their lethargy very quickly on Saturday afternoon. Facing a pitcher who really didn’t belong in the major leagues — twenty-three-year-old rookie Chris Seddon, who was making his fourth big league start as a September call-up — the Mets finally got their offense on track, shelling Seddon from the mound in less than two innings and continuing to pile up runs against the Marlins bullpen.
It was 8–0 after three innings, and John Maine was cruising. He would end up pitching a one-hitter, and the Mets won their first laugher in a long time, 13–0.
Unfortunately, though, the game wasn’t all laughs.
It began in the third inning when Lastings Milledge hit a home run. Milledge had played pretty well since his call-up (.275 average, seven home runs, twenty-nine RBI in a part-time role), and his demeanor in the clubhouse had been markedly improved. But he and Jose Reyes were still in the habit of doing their dance outside the dugout whenever one of them got a big hit or hit a home run.
“To be honest, if they did that sort of thing when I first came up, they would go down at least once a game, every game,” Glavine said. “It’s one of the ways baseball has changed that isn’t good. In the ‘old days,’ that sort of behavior was policed by the fact that guys didn’t want to spend every game diving out of the way of pitches. Now, though, because the inside pitch is policed so tightly, you can behave like that and know you aren’t going to go down that often.
“If you want to know why hitters pose after home runs, it’s because baseball lets them. Once upon a time, you did that to a Bob Gibson, a Nolan Ryan, you better be diving for the dirt the second you stepped back in the box.
“It isn’t just our team by any means. But we’re from New York, which makes a lot of people resent us. We’re the defending Division champions so people want to show us they can play. We spent the entire season in first place — same thing, people want to bring their best against you. The last thing we need to be doing is giving people another reason, especially an emotional reason, to want to beat our butts.”
If Reyes and Milledge thought about that at all, it certainly hadn’t curtailed their act. They’d been spoken to by older players and by Randolph, and their response was, essentially, we’re just being ourselves. “That’s fine,” Glavine said. “You don’t want to stop people from having fun or being enthusiastic about playing the game. But maybe they could have done it inside the dugout.”
In the fifth, Milledge led off with another home run to make it 9–0. Reyes met him in the on-deck circle and they danced again. A moment later, Reyes doubled and moved to third on a wild pitch. Luis Castillo walked. That was it for Harvey Garcia, another September call-up who had come in to pitch.
As catcher Miguel Olivo walked to join manager Fredi Gonzales on the mound, he began jawing with Reyes, still upset about the Mets’ showboating. Reyes and Olivo are friends. Reyes thought Olivo was joking and said something along the lines of “Want to fight about it?”
The answer was yes. Olivo charged Reyes, and the benches emptied. When order was restored, Olivo was ejected.
Glavine was in the clubhouse when the fight broke out. With the game in hand, he had walked back there to look at some tape of the Marlins’ lineup to prepare for Sunday. He was sitting in the middle of the room in front of a tape machine when he heard a commotion coming from a nearby TV set that was tuned to the game.
“I looked up just in time to see Olivo running at Hosey throwing haymakers,” Glavine said. “I was like, ‘What is this about?’ Maybe there was a misunderstanding between the two of them, but there’s no doubt what had happened earlier had led to it.”
The scene didn’t thrill Glavine. “What is it about letting sleeping dogs lie?” he said. “You’ve got a team that’s playing out the string. The last thing we want them to do is come into Sunday with the idea that it’s a big game for them. There’s no doubt we riled them up, and the fight just added to it.”
If there was any doubt about how the Marlins felt, it was dispelled in their clubhouse after the game. “Fuck the Mets,” Hanley Ramirez said. “I’d play tomorrow if I had a broken hand.”
Glavine didn’t know what Ramirez had said as he drove home, but he had a feeling the next day would be difficult. There was good news later on though: the Phillies, perhaps feeling the pressure of now being the hunted team, had lost to the Nationals. That meant the Mets and Phillies were tied for first place with one game to play.
If they both won or lost on Sunday, there would be a one-game playoff in Philadelphia on Monday. If one won and the other lost on Sunday, the winner would be the Eastern Division champion.
“We have to win,” Glavine said. “The rest we can’t control. We control our own fate again. If we win on Sunday, the worst thing that can happen to us is that we play on Monday.”
He didn’t even want to think about the alternative.
SUNDAY DAWNED CLEAR AND COOL, as gorgeous a day to play baseball as you could ask for. Glavine had slept well after his sister Debbie had made Chicken Parmesan and pasta for dinner. Chris, Amber, Peyton, and Mason had flown in later in the evening to be there for the game Sunday — a change from their original plans to stay home for the weekend.
“Once the game became what it became, there was no way they were going to stay home,” Glavine said. “I knew that.”
Normally Glavine would have driven to the park on a Sunday morning with Billy Wagner. But the team was going to leave for Philadelphia after the game if there was a playoff, and Chris and the kids were going to leave for Atlanta. Glavine’s car was chock-full of stuff he was going to send to Atlanta with them, so he had to drive in alone.
“The plan if we lost was for me to go back and pack up the rest of the house on Monday,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. I was thinking we were either going to Philly or to the playoffs.”
Glavine pulled into the parking lot and took a deep breath. He could feel his nerves jangling, nothing unusual, especially before a game like this one. “You’ve done this a million times,” he told himself. “You can do it again.”
He had, in fact, pitched in a game exactly like this one for the Braves fourteen years earlier. They had gone into the last day of the season tied for first place in the NL West with the San Francisco Giants.
“We won; they lost,” Glavine said, as he pulled on the white uniform top with the blue “47” on the back over his head one more time. “I feel as if I know how to handle a game like this.”
The Mets clubhouse was understandably quiet before the game. None of the usual card or chess games that often took place. Players talked quietly, read newspapers, or watched TV. Glavine, who hadn’t bothered to shave in the morning — “too lazy,” he said — sat on the couch in the middle of the clubhouse watching the replay of a boxing match on TV. His body language was a little more tense than usual: instead of sitting back with his legs crossed, as he normally would, he was leaning forward, as if something was at stake for him in the boxing match.
“No question I was feeling nerves,” he said later. “But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
He went through his usual pregame routine and then headed to the bullpen with Rick Peterson and Dave Racaniello to warm up. Everything felt fine.
“Physically I felt good,” he said. “My pitches felt good coming out of my hand. The only seed of doubt was still about the changeup. I just wasn’t sure about it. I’d pitched a lot of games before where I hadn’t been sure about it. The thing was, this was a game where I would rather have been sure.”
All the Mets were now aware of Hanley Ramirez’s postgame comments on Saturday. In fact, someone had taken a newspaper clipping, complete with a photo of the brawl, and hung it on a wall in the runway leading from the clubhouse to the dugout. Underneath the Ramirez quote was a response: “Bad Mistake to Wake Up the Sleeping Mutt… Someone Pays Today.”
A similar message had been posted in the same spot the day before. It had said, “We’ve Come Too Far to Quit Now.”
The atmosphere was electric as the teams went through the last of their pregame rituals. “I’m so nervous I don’t know if I can even watch the game,” Scott Schoeneweis said. “I can handle the one-third of an inning that I’m in the game because I stop thinking. It’s the watching that kills me.”
Glavine wouldn’t have to watch. As always, he was the last player out of the dugout and the last player introduced when Alex Anthony introduced the Mets defense: “And on the mound for the Mets… Number forty-seven… Tom Glavine!”
He held the last syllable of “Glavine” for a couple of extra beats, and the crowd reacted. The ovation for Glavine was longer and louder than for anyone else. He had come a long way from the boos of the first two years.
“You’re trying not to pay attention to anything but getting ready to pitch at that point,” he said. “But you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t hear the crowd. I noticed it, but I had to really make sure I was focused on the task at hand.”
Ramon Castro was catching because Paul Lo Duca’s knee had flared up on him again. The day was perfect: seventy-one degrees, breezy, with 54,457 in the old park ready to push the Mets across the finish line. Glavine looked around for an instant, taking in the scene. He was about to start the 669th game of his big league career.
Ramirez stepped in to lead off. The noise was almost deafening as Glavine threw a fastball that Ramirez fouled off for strike one. The noise got louder. Glavine came back with a cutter, and Ramirez fouled it off again. Now it was 0–2, and the crowd was already on its feet, two pitches into the game.
Glavine wasted a changeup outside and then threw a curve that Ramirez checked his swing on. Glavine asked home-plate umpire Joe West to check with Ed Rapuano at first base to see if Ramirez had gone around.
“I was hoping,” he said later. “I didn’t really think he had swung.”
Neither did Rapuano. It was 2–2.
The next two pitches may very well have defined the day for Glavine and the Mets. Glavine threw two changeups, both good ones — “nasty pitches,” he said — and Ramirez laid off both of them. Either could have been a strike. Neither, in West’s mind, was. Ramirez walked.
A little bell went off in Glavine’s head, not so much because he had walked Ramirez after being up 0–2 but because of the way he had walked him.
“He doesn’t take a lot of walks,” Glavine said. “He goes up swinging. It’s the last day of the season, and you’re facing a team in last place. What you expect is that they come up hacking at everything because they’ve all got planes to catch and they want to get out of Dodge. His approach to that at bat was the kind you see in a big game — he really worked at it. That told me that these guys weren’t here just to get it over with and go home. They had come to play.”
A sleeping mutt had been awakened on Saturday. But it wasn’t the Mets.
As Dan Uggla came up, Glavine happened to glance in the direction of the Marlins dugout. What he saw gave him a little more reason to be worried: every Marlin was on the top step. He had expected to see all of his teammates on the top step — their season was at stake — but not the Marlins. Not on September 30 with a record of 70–91. Okay then, he thought, this won’t be easy. Back to work.
Uggla hit a slow ground ball to Castillo on a 1–1 fastball. He forced Ramirez at second, but the ball wasn’t hit hard enough to turn a double play. One on, one out, and Jeremy Hermida up. The crowd was still loud.
Glavine had thrown four changeups to the first two hitters — none for a strike, even though the last two to Ramirez had been, in his view, good pitches. He didn’t want to fall behind Hermida with Miguel Cabrera on deck. He threw three fastballs to get to 2–1, then decided to try a changeup. “The pitch was down,” he said. “He hit a ground ball, which was what I wanted. But he hit it in the hole.”
Specifically, he hit it into right field. Uggla raced to third. First crisis of the day: runners on first and third with Cabrera, a hitter who had already driven in 118 runs, at the plate.
“Best-case scenario at that point, I’m thinking, ‘Get a ground ball, and get two and get out of this right now,’ ” Glavine said. “Worst-case, I’m thinking, ‘If it’s one-nothing, we’re in good shape.’ ”
It became 1–0 on his second pitch to Cabrera, who singled hard up the middle, a line drive that scored Uggla and moved Hermida to second.
That brought up Cody Ross, a young outfielder who’d had a solid second half of the season. “Decent hitter,” Glavine said. “But I’m thinking as long as I don’t give him anything middle in [of the plate], he can’t really hurt me.”
He started with a changeup, which bounced. Back to the fastball. On 2–1, Ross sliced a ball down the right-field line. The ball looked like it might go foul, but it didn’t, bouncing just inside the right-field line. Milledge, positioned more toward right-center against a right-handed hitter, chased it. Hermida scored, with Cabrera following him. Milledge got to the ball and threw home. The ball arrived in plenty of time to beat the slow-footed Cabrera, but it was well wide of the plate. Castro, trying to grab it and swipe-tag Cabrera, bobbled it, and the ball dribbled to the left of home plate. Seeing the throw go home, Ross had rounded second and was heading to third. Glavine, who had been backing up the plate, spotted him and scrambled to pick the ball up after it squirted away from Castro.
“I had him by fifteen feet — at least,” Glavine said. “But I was a little off-balance when I picked up the ball, and I made a bad throw.”
He threw it past David Wright into left field. Instead of being an easy out, Ross scrambled to his feet and scored, while Moises Alou retrieved the errant throw. Suddenly, shockingly, the Marlins led 4–0. The silence was deafening.
“I can’t say I was in shock at that point,” Glavine said. “Stunned, yeah, probably, but not shocked because it wasn’t as if they were hitting line drives all over the place. I couldn’t believe we were down four-nothing just like that. But we hadn’t even been up yet. Dontrelle [Willis] wasn’t having a good year, so there was no reason we couldn’t score runs on him. I had the bases clean. I needed to stop the bleeding right there.”
He couldn’t. He worked the count to 2–2 on Mike Jacobs, a left-handed batter the Marlins had gotten from the Mets in the Carlos Delgado trade two years earlier. On 2–2, Glavine threw a slider off the outside corner, and Jacobs reached out and blooped it over Reyes’s head into left for another base hit.
“Now I’m starting to wonder if they are ever going to hit a ball at someone,” Glavine said. “I was frustrated and shaken up.”
It showed when he walked catcher Matt Treanor on five pitches. Peterson trotted to the mound. Arm on Glavine’s shoulder, he told him he just needed to take a little break and get out of the inning. “It was nothing mechanical,” Glavine said. “It was just, ‘You’re okay; just throw a good pitch now, and we’ve got nine at bats,’ ” he said. “I knew I had run out of time to get my act together.”
In fact, Jorge Sosa was warming in the Mets bullpen. This wasn’t one of those days when Randolph could afford to let Glavine work through early trouble or when he was going to worry about saving the bullpen. This was all hands on deck. Sosa was first up.
Glavine wasn’t feeling great about his changeup so he started Alejandro De Aza with fastballs. De Aza hit the second one into left field for another hit. The bases were loaded with Willis, a good hitter, coming to the plate. Carlos Delgado trotted to the back of the mound and picked up the resin bag.
“Come on, Tommy, one good pitch and we’re out of this,” he said.
Glavine knew Delgado wasn’t there to give him a pep talk. He was stalling to give Sosa time to get ready. “I knew if I didn’t get Dontrelle, I was done,” Glavine said. “Willie couldn’t wait any longer for me to find some momentum.”
Glavine got ahead of Willis 1–2 — the first hitter he had gotten two strikes on since Hernandez. He had thrown three fastballs. Against most pitchers, Glavine would have thrown another fastball. But Willis was a legitimate big league hitter, and Glavine treated him as such. “The right pitch was a changeup,” he said. “He’d seen three fastballs. If I put the change in the right place, he should swing early and swing over it, and that should be it.”
Even though he knew the changeup was the correct pitch, there was doubt in his mind about whether he could throw it right. He had already bounced a couple. “I tried to put a little extra into it,” he said. “Instead of following through and down off the hill, I actually pushed it, trying to make sure I had enough on it. I just pushed the ball out of my hand, and the result was a terrible pitch.”
The ball never broke down or, for that matter, broke at all. It went straight at Willis, who tried to back out of the way. For a second it appeared Glavine might have gotten lucky, and the ball had hit the bat. Joe West — correctly as it turned out — didn’t see it that way. He ruled that Willis had been hit by the pitch and sent him to first base, as Jacobs jogged in with the fifth run.
Glavine saw Randolph leaving the dugout, even while Castro was still arguing with West that the ball had hit Willis’s bat. He felt sick to his stomach. As soon as Randolph crossed the first-base line, his day was over. There would be no chance to regroup, no chance to make up for what had happened. He was done.
As soon as he handed the ball to Randolph, the boos started. They followed him all the way to the dugout. Nineteen minutes after he had been cheered to the skies, boos rained down from all sides.
“I understood it,” he said later. “I wasn’t expecting a standing ovation.”
That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. He sat in the dugout for the rest of the inning while Sosa allowed two of his inherited runners to score. When Sosa finally got the third out, the entire team heard boos as the players came to the dugout trailing 7–0.
Glavine walked up the runway to the clubhouse past the sign about waking the sleeping mutt. He walked in and collapsed on the couch, where a couple of hours earlier he had watched the boxing match, and stared at the TV.
Wagner, still inside, said something to him. Glavine didn’t really hear it. He stared at the television. He really didn’t see it. Everything had gone blank.
THE METS AND MARLINS had started playing at 1:11. The Yankees and Orioles were starting their finale in Baltimore that day at 1:35. Joe Torre had made Jorge Posada manager for the day, and he had made Mike Mussina the pitching coach.
Shortly before 1:30, Mussina walked into the dugout and glanced out toward right field where the out-of-town scores were flashed.
He looked at the Marlins-Mets score and saw a “7” next to “FLA” on the board.
“What?” he said out loud. “They scored seven in the first? Is that a mistake?”
Someone told him it was no mistake. “Glavine was pitching,” Mussina said, still speaking to no one and everyone. “Glavine gave up seven in the first? I can’t believe that.”
All around Major League Baseball, that was the response as the score was posted. As the Phillies took the field for their 1:35 start with the Nationals, a huge roar went up in Citizens Bank Park’s sellout crowd of 44,865. The Phillies glanced around to see what the commotion was about, and there it was on the scoreboard: Florida 7, New York 0.
“How much do you think it helped those guys to see we’d given up seven in the first,” Glavine said later. “They were playing with house money before a pitch was thrown.”
That first pitch was thrown by Jamie Moyer, who was going for his fourteenth win of the season and the 230th of his career. For Moyer, who had grown up a Phillies fan, this day was a dream come true: a chance to pitch the Phillies into the playoffs before a wild, sellout crowd. Glavine’s nightmare made Moyer’s dream even better than he had dared imagine.
Back in New York, the Mets tried gamely to get something going against Willis, whose 5.20 ERA for the season had to give them some hope.
Willis was hardly dominant. After Jose Reyes — whose batting average had dropped to .280 — had flied to right to start the first inning, Luis Castillo doubled. David Wright also flied out, but Carlos Beltran dribbled a ball in front of the plate and beat the throw for an infield single. Willis then threw a wild pitch with Moises Alou at the plate, and it was 7–1. The crowd stirred. Alou blooped a single to right, and Delgado was hit on the hand by a pitch. The bases were loaded. Willis was all over the place. An extra base hit by Castro, and the Mets could be right back in the game.
Willis fell behind 2–0, and Castro looked for a fastball. He got it, and the ball flew off his bat, headed toward the left-field fence. The crowd screeched. In the clubhouse, Glavine, who had come out of his trance as the inning developed, almost jumped off the couch.
“I thought he’d gotten it,” he said. “I thought we were right back in the game.”
But Castro hadn’t quite gotten it. As the ball got closer to the fence, it began to die. It settled, finally, in Cody Ross’s glove on the warning track. Glavine sat down with a thud. In the press box, public relations director Jay Horwitz, who had been following the ball through his binoculars, slammed them on the desk in front of him in frustration. In a sense, he spoke for all Mets fans at that moment.
That turned out to be the Mets’ best chance. In the third, Willis walked the bases loaded with two outs, and manager Fredi Gonzales, again showing that he was taking the game very seriously, yanked him. Logan Kensing came in and got Lo Duca — pinch-hitting for Orlando Hernandez, who had come in to pitch in the top of the inning — to tap back to the mound to end the inning.
The only hope left really was the Nationals. The Phillies had taken a 1–0 lead in the first when Jimmy Rollins, of course, singled, stole second, stole third, and scored on a Chase Utley sacrifice fly. They extended the lead to 3–0 in the third before the Nationals got one back in the fourth. In the sixth, Moyer tired. Ronnie Belliard singled and, with one out, Dmitri Young also singled.
Phillies manager Charlie Manuel — whose job was no longer in jeopardy — was taking no chances. He brought in Tom Gordon, normally his eighth-inning pitcher. In the press box at Shea, a feed of the Phillies game was on a TV in the back row. The two games were now both in the sixth inning, the Phillies and Nats having caught up, since the first inning in New York had taken forty-three minutes. The Marlins were leading 8–1, and people crowded around the TV to see if the Nats could rally.
They couldn’t. Gordon got Austin Kearns to hit a ground ball up the middle, which was scooped by Utley, who stepped on second and threw to first for a double play. The Phillies got two more in the sixth and another in the seventh on Ryan Howard’s forty-seventh home run of the year and took a 6–1 lead in the eighth.
The Mets could do nothing with the Marlins bullpen. The outs dwindled. In the clubhouse, Glavine had gone through several different emotions: He had been angry. “I blew it. I cost my team the season. I had the ball in my hands, and I dropped it.” Then he became analytical. “I sat there and went through every batter. If I get a call on Hernandez, if Uggla’s ball is hit a little harder, if Hermida’s grounder goes at someone.… The only really hard-hit ball was Cabrera. The one truly awful pitch had been the changeup to Dontrelle. The results were terrible, but I hadn’t been that bad. Put it this way: I’ve pitched worse, but I’ve never had a worse result at a worse time.”
He began preparing himself for what he knew was coming after the game. Billy Wagner would point out that twenty-five guys had blown the pennant, that it had taken a team effort to lose a seven-game lead in seventeen games. But it was Glavine who would now be the poster boy for the collapse. “I knew,” he said, “that I was going to have to wear it. I was going to have to answer the questions. The only thing comparable in my career had been in ’92 in Atlanta, when I got knocked out of Game Six of the playoffs in the second inning. That night I really got hit hard. But even that was different. We were still tied three-three. We had another game to play. After a while, watching what was going on in Philly, it was apparent we weren’t going to have another game to play.”
He thought about the day, about his family sitting in the stands, and, remarkably, began to feel a little better. “I knew how disappointing it was for them and for everyone,” he said. “But at moments like that, you almost find yourself rationalizing. It’s still just a baseball game. It was the most disappointing baseball game of my life. But I still had a wonderful life and a wonderful family. The world wasn’t ending. The day sucked, but my life didn’t.”
In the eighth inning, Horwitz came into the clubhouse to begin to prepare for the postgame. He asked Glavine how he wanted to meet the media. “I just thought I’d stand by my locker like I usually do and talk,” Glavine said.
Horwitz suggested he come into the interview room next door after Randolph had finished. The place was swarming with media, and this way he could get everything done at once.
“Whatever you say, Jay,” Glavine said.
He wasn’t going to argue. “Either way, it wasn’t going to be fun,” he said.
The Mets came up in the ninth needing seven runs to tie. The Nationals were coming up in the ninth in Philadelphia. Marlon Anderson, who had sparked so many rallies with pinch hits late in the season, led off, pinch-hitting for Aaron Heilman. He popped to Ramirez. Reyes, now hearing boos whenever he came to the plate, grounded meekly to second base.
The Mets were down to one last out. Luis Castillo came up to face Kevin Gregg, the Marlins’ sixth pitcher. Those who were left in the stadium tried bravely to conjure one last “Let’s Go, Mets” chant. It faded quickly. Castillo swung at a 1–2 fastball for strike three.
At 4:31 p.m. the Mets’ season was over: Marlins 8, Mets 1. Four minutes later, while the players were still shuffling silently into the clubhouse, Phillies closer Brett Myers froze Wily Mo Pena with a rising fastball for strike three in south Philadelphia.
Phillies 6, Nationals 1.
Phillies 89–73, Mets 88–74.
It was over. The 2007 Mets, like the once-mighty gods of Götterdämmerung, the final opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, had been destroyed.