TOM GLAVINE WATCHED Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series on television. He had nothing better to do that night or that month because for the first time since 1990 (other than the strike year) he was not playing postseason baseball.
The Braves were in postseason, playing the Chicago Cubs in the National League Division Series. But Glavine, the man who had coauthored a book titled None but the Braves, was no longer a Brave. He was a New York Met.
The story of how Glavine came to be a Met is a convoluted one that still sparks controversy and anger in Atlanta to this day. The general assumption as the 2002 season wore down was that Glavine would sign a contract with the Braves that would allow him to finish his career in Atlanta. Glavine thought that’s what would happen. Everyone in Braves management thought that was what would happen. Everyone in an Atlanta uniform thought the same thing.
“I don’t think it ever seriously occurred to anyone that Tom would leave Atlanta,” said John Smoltz. “I mean Tom, not a Brave? There was no way. Or at least that’s what we all thought.”
Glavine had continued to be one of the best pitchers in baseball after signing the contract that kicked in beginning in 1998. During that season, he was 20–6 with a 2.47 ERA and won his second Cy Young Award. Over the four guaranteed seasons of the contract, he was 71–33 and never missed a start as the Braves continued to win Division titles every year — although they never could win a second World Series. The Braves were more than happy to exercise the $10 million fifth year in the contract at the start of 2002. It was then that the trouble began.
Once again, the collective-bargaining agreement was up at the end of the season. Once again, the owners were demanding changes. Specifically, they were insisting that they must have some kind of luxury tax, which the players again saw correctly as being a euphemism for a salary cap.
“Stan [Kasten] told me that the team didn’t want to negotiate any new deals until we knew if there was going to be another work stoppage,” Glavine said. “I understood that.”
But when the negotiations began, they were rancorous. Once again, Glavine and Kasten found themselves on opposite sides, and the two of them argued almost constantly with each other.
“It got to the point,” Kasten remembered, “where most of our conversations would end with one of us saying to the other, ‘You must be the single stupidest person on the face of the earth!’ And the other one saying, ‘Right back at ya, pal.’ ”
In July, the players set a strike date — August 30. Another blown-up postseason loomed. The players had actually agreed to some form of a luxury tax, meaning that any team that went over a certain figure in payroll would have to pay a “tax” to Major League Baseball. It was a “soft” salary cap — that is, an owner would have the option of going over it if he was willing to pay the tax — as opposed to a “hard” cap, which would have prohibited anyone from going over that number under any circumstances.
The question was how high the tax threshold should be. The owners wanted it lower, naturally. And just as naturally, the players wanted it higher.
As the deadline neared, tempers got short. Jim Bowden, then the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, went on a radio show and accused the players of “steering Major League Baseball right into the World Trade Center,” as if a threatened strike could somehow be akin to the events of September 11, 2001.
Kasten’s phone rang that day. “Who is the stupidest person on the face of the earth?” he heard Glavine’s voice say.
Kasten had to laugh. “Okay, Tommy, you win,” he said. “Today, you are no better than number two when it comes to stupidity.”
Just prior to the strike date, Glavine flew to Pittsburgh to meet with other members of the players’ negotiating committee and union leaders Don Fehr and Gene Orza. The players and owners were now $10 million apart on the luxury tax threshold, but neither side seemed ready to budge another inch. The players had already lowered the number they had initially demanded by a considerable margin.
Glavine knew that if the negotiating committee went back to the players and said the strike was on, it would be on. The votes had already been taken in all thirty clubhouses. He also remembered 1994 and how long it had taken baseball to recover from that strike. The owners had lost millions of dollars; the players had lost millions in salary, and their image had taken a pounding.
“Fellas, I just don’t think we can do this,” he finally said late on the eve of the strike date. “I don’t think we can go back to our guys and say we’re walking because of a $10 million difference in a luxury tax level that probably isn’t going to affect very many teams, regardless of where it’s set. I think, even if it means we have to give in to the owners a little bit, we can’t afford to stop playing again.”
The others in the room listened. They knew Glavine was as loyal to the union as anyone, that he had been one of the out-front guys the last time there had been a strike. Fehr and Orza never wanted to give in to the owners because history showed that the players were always proven right in the end, especially when arbitrators or the courts got involved. But Tom Glavine saying that a strike would be a bad thing — especially when they were so close to an agreement — was a voice worth listening to. Early the next morning, with several teams sitting in their clubhouses waiting for word on whether to leave on a team bus to the airport to a game that night or in a cab to the airport to go home, the players and owners reached an agreement. There would be no strike.
“From what I’ve been told by others — not by Tom — no one played a more important role in averting a strike than he did,” Kasten said. “He deserves a lot of credit for standing up and saying what he said. I don’t think he’s really gotten it.” He smiled. “Of course I would never tell him that to his face.”
The strike averted, teams began negotiating with their free agents to be. The Braves made an initial offer to Glavine: one year, $9 million.
“Which was a joke,” Glavine said. “They weren’t offering me a raise of any kind, and if I wanted to sign for one year I could go to arbitration and get a good deal more than that based on my past performance.”
Glavine had pitched well again in 2002, going 18–11, and he was still as durable as any pitcher in baseball. Since he didn’t rely on throwing hard, there was no reason to think he didn’t have several more good years left in his arm.
But the Braves didn’t want to commit to three-years for a thirty-seven-year-old pitcher. Period. They had just signed Smoltz to a three-year, $30 million contract and didn’t want to make a similar commitment to a pitcher who was a year older — even if his medical history was far superior. That was where the parting of the ways began: To Glavine, asking for the same contract Smoltz had gotten was fair. To Kasten, it was fair but it wasn’t practical.
Just before the free-agency period began, the Braves offered Glavine $18 million for two years.
“By then I was going to file anyway,” Glavine said. “I had told Stan I wanted three-years and $30 million. I thought that was reasonable. He told me he didn’t think I could get that from anyone. I thought he was wrong.”
Glavine and Kasten ran into each other at a hockey game in early November. By then, Kasten was also running Atlanta’s hockey team, the Thrashers. As part of Glavine’s previous contract, Kasten had sold the old hockey player a suite to use at Thrashers games.
“You go do your ‘Tommy over America Tour’ and call when you get back,” Kasten said.
Glavine said fine. Except in the crowded room they were in, he thought Kasten had said, “We’ll call you when you get back.”
Glavine was still convinced he was going to end up with the Braves, even after he filed for free agency. Smoltz, who had signed his new contract a year earlier, told him this was all part of the game, that he had to go “on tour” to other cities to find out what people would pay him, and then sit down with the Braves and hammer out a deal.
Within days of filing for free agency, Glavine had visited with the Mets and the Phillies. There had also been a phone call from the Yankees. The Mets’ first offer was three-years for $28 million. The Phillies’ offer was almost identical, three-years and $29 million. “Which meant I could now go back to Stan and say, ‘You see, there are teams who will give me three-years, and you know they’ll go to at least $30 million if I pursue a deal. So now can we please get serious and talk?’ ”
Glavine came home and waited for the Braves to call. The Braves were waiting for him to call. Finally, a reporter called Glavine. Frustrated, Glavine said, “The Braves were supposed to call me and didn’t. I think it’s unprofessional.”
The next day Kasten called. There was some shouting about who was supposed to call whom, but a meeting was set up. The phone conversation was not filled with pleasantries. “It was,” Glavine said, “typical Stan.”
“I guess it was,” Kasten said. “I called him and said, ‘Congratulations! I read in the papers that you have now officially discovered that New York and Philadelphia both have nice restaurants. Who would have thought it? Now, are you ready to talk?’ ”
Glavine was ready. He figured this was playing out just as Smoltz had told him it would. He and Gregg Clifton went to Kasten’s office and met with Kasten and general manager John Schuerholz. The meeting lasted well into the night.
“Their first offer was exactly the same as before,” he said. “Two years, $18 million. I think I said something like, ‘Are you guys fucking kidding me?’ ”
Round and round they went. Kasten screamed. Glavine screamed. This wasn’t a philosophical union argument; this was genuine anger, on both sides. Kasten’s description of the meeting is simple and direct: “Gregg and John didn’t say very much. Tom and I just sat there and motherfucked each other for most of six hours.”
After those six hours, with the building completely empty except for the four men in Kasten’s office, Kasten and Schuerholz made their best offer: three-years at $30 million, with $9 million from the last year deferred.
“You guys already owe me $4 million in deferred money from the last contract,” Glavine said. “I don’t want you to owe me $13 million interest free.”
“That’s the last, best offer,” Kasten said. “It’s the best we can do.”
It wasn’t good enough. Stunned and saddened, Glavine went home. He told Clifton to tell the Mets and Phillies that the Braves were out of the picture. The Mets immediately responded by upping their offer and raising the possibility of adding a fourth year to the contract.
The fourth year was important to Glavine for reasons that had nothing to do with money. He had finished 2002 with 242 career victories. He had won a total of sixty-nine games over the previous four seasons and believed if he stayed healthy — he had never been on the disabled list — there was a good chance he could win fifty-eight during the next four and get to three hundred wins.
“I hadn’t really thought about it until that point,” he said. “When I was younger, I never thought I’d pitch past thirty-five, just because guys didn’t do that. But the game had changed a lot in the time that I had gone from a twenty-one-year-old rookie to a thirty-six-year-old veteran. I was thirty-six, and I felt great, and I was still pitching well. There was no reason for me to think I couldn’t pitch another four years and get to three hundred.”
Even as he got older, Glavine had never given any thought to steroids. For one thing, his style of pitching wasn’t built on strength. Like any pitcher, his legs were an important part of his delivery, but he wasn’t a power pitcher by any stretch of the imagination. “Soft-tossing lefty” he likes to call himself.
Several years before Major League Baseball finally got around to drug testing (2003), Glavine did take creatine, a vitamin supplement that allows people to recover more quickly after a rigorous workout. “It really worked,” he said. “I felt great. It made my work between starts a lot easier for me.”
Creatine is not a banned substance, but as soon as MLB started drug testing, Glavine stopped using it. “It just wasn’t worth the risk,” he said. “What if, somehow, there was something in what I took that was banned, even a tiny bit. I just didn’t think it was worth the risk. I know anytime someone tests positive and says ‘I was using a legal supplement; there must have been something wrong with it,’ no one believes him. I didn’t want to somehow be the guy who was using a legal supplement and tested positive for some crazy reason.”
Glavine was still a very good pitcher at the end of 2002, and the Mets certainly thought he could help them. They were coming off an awful season, and adding someone like Glavine to their pitching rotation would give the team an immediate credibility boost.
The deal was finalized on the first Thursday in December: four years, $42.5 million. If nothing else, Glavine had proven Kasten wrong. But from the moment Clifton told Glavine the deal had been made, Glavine began to have buyer’s remorse.
“It had nothing to do with the Mets or with New York, and certainly it had nothing to do with the deal,” he said. “My family lived in Atlanta. I had a daughter I shared custody on whose mother lived in Atlanta, and Chris had a son in the same situation. We had two boys who, at that point, were four and two. It just hit me that they were going to be on airplanes all the time between New York and Atlanta during the season. I wasn’t sure I could go through with everything that was going to be involved for them. Chris was the one who would be doing most of the work, and she said she was fine with it. I wasn’t so sure if I was fine with it.”
After the announcement that he was coming to New York, Glavine spoke to the New York media. He said he was disappointed with the way the Braves had handled the negotiations. They had failed to call when they said they were going to call. He didn’t think they had negotiated in good faith. He didn’t really believe they had wanted him back.
Kasten picked up the Friday papers and went ballistic. He called a press conference of his own and blasted Glavine. It was Glavine, he said, who had failed to call (both men now agree they had an honest misunderstanding about who was to call whom). The Braves had negotiated in good faith; they had wanted Glavine back, but he wanted every last dollar he could make.
Glavine woke up on Saturday morning, read Kasten’s comments, and went into a state of anger and semipanic. Since his contract would not be formally filed with the union until Monday morning (at 12:01 a.m.), he was not yet officially a Met. He called Bobby Cox. He wasn’t sure he could leave the Braves. Was the door still open? Cox called Kasten and Schuerholz. They agreed that Schuerholz should be Glavine’s contact at that point.
Schuerholz called Glavine. Did he still want to talk? Yes. Schuerholz drove to the house, and Chris went down to the wine cellar and opened a good bottle of wine.
“Right now the best we can do for you is two years, $10 million,” Schuerholz said.
“Is that per year or total?” Glavine asked, in such a daze he honestly wasn’t sure what Schuerholz was offering.
“Per year,” Schuerholz said.
“I think I want to do it,” Glavine said. “I don’t want to leave Atlanta.”
Schuerholz told Glavine he needed to call Clifton and Jeff Wilpon immediately. He left to call Kasten and Cox. They decided to call a 1:30 p.m. press conference for the next day.
“If Tommy had ended up staying, he would have been the fair-haired boy in Atlanta all over again,” Kasten said. “But I wasn’t convinced the deal would hold once he talked to Clifton.”
It didn’t. Clifton told Glavine he understood why he felt the way he did, but he had given his word to the Mets. Even if the contract wasn’t signed, it would be wrong for him to back out for numerous reasons. Glavine knew Clifton was right. He also knew he wanted to stay in Atlanta. He spent the next day in a complete fog, talking to no one.
“Even when his parents called, I told them he just couldn’t talk,” Chris Glavine said. “He was really tormented.”
So tormented that at one point he sat down and wrote a letter announcing that he was retiring. At that moment, it seemed like the only way out. “I was a mess,” he said. “I didn’t want to renege on the Mets deal, and I didn’t want to leave Atlanta. For a few hours, I thought if I just retired that would be the best thing to do.”
That was when Chris made the decision to call Jeff Wilpon. “You’ve got to get us out of here,” she said. “If Tom sits around and thinks and rethinks, I don’t know how it will come out.”
Jeff Wilpon sent a plane to pick up Tom and Chris. They went through all the details of the deal the next day: where the family would live; the private airport Chris and the kids would fly into; Tom being able to fly home to Atlanta while the kids were in school when the team had an off-day. Glavine calmed down. He decided he could go through with it. The next day — finally — he was formally introduced as a Met.
“Hardest four or five days of my life,” he said, looking back. “I felt guilty about my family, guilty about the Mets, guilty about the fans in Atlanta — just guilty. I remember going downstairs in an elevator at Shea Stadium to meet the media, and it hit me, ‘I’m not a Brave anymore; I’m a Met. We’re really doing this.’ Chris said to me on the way home, ‘You just went through a divorce after eighteen years of being married to the Braves. Don’t feel bad about feeling bad.’ She was right. I felt hurt and confused about it all. In the end, though, I felt like I’d made the right decision.”
There would be times over the next two years — many times — when he wouldn’t be so sure.
GLAVINE MADE HIS DEBUT as a Met on Opening Day 2003, March 31 — a cold, blustery day in New York — pitching against the Chicago Cubs.
He wasn’t out in the cold for long. He lasted only three and two-thirds innings and was pummeled for eight runs en route to a 15–2 loss. Less than an hour into his Mets career, he heard boos from the hometown fans. That game turned out to be a harbinger. For the first time, he had to deal with injuries: he left a game in Milwaukee in early June with inflammation in his elbow and missed his next start. It was the first time in his big league career that he had missed a start. Later in the month, a Derek Jeter line drive smacked him in the chest, and he was forced to leave the game.
Even healthy, he didn’t pitch terribly well — especially against the Braves, who looked like they were taking batting practice whenever they faced him. “We just told our guys to look for the ball outside and take it to the opposite field,” Bobby Cox said. “We had an advantage because we knew how he had been pitching for sixteen years. If there was one guy in baseball who could think along with Tommy it was Leo [Mazzone].”
Glavine missed Mazzone. The Mets’ pitching coach, Vern Ruhle, let him continue his regimen of throwing twice between starts (most pitchers throw only once), but it wasn’t the same for Glavine without Mazzone. The team was bad again. The Mets had hired Art Howe as their manager. Howe had been very successful in Oakland, but his quiet see-no-evil approach just wasn’t going to work in New York. Mike Piazza was aging and balking at moving from catcher to first base. The team was a wreck, finishing 66–95.
Glavine was no better. He went 9–14 — the first time since his rookie year he hadn’t won at least ten games. His ERA was 4.52, and he was 0–4 against the Braves, which really stung.
That was also the year that Major League Baseball first began using Questech, a videotaping system that judged umpires on balls and strikes in ten major league parks. As luck would have it, Shea Stadium was a Questech park. Glavine, who had spent most of his career getting pitches on or just off the outside corner called in his favor, found that he wasn’t getting those pitches anymore. Umpires didn’t want Questech showing that a Glavine pitch just outside was a strike while someone else’s pitch in the same spot was a ball.
“Whether that was actually happening or not doesn’t matter,” Glavine said. “I believed it was happening, and it affected my confidence and the way I pitched. I think I could go back and show you pitches that had been strikes that weren’t strikes anymore. But even if I couldn’t, I thought that was what was happening.”
The only good news was off the field — his family loved New York. The Glavines had found a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that was a relatively easy commute to the ballpark. The kids loved the area and so did Chris, especially the fact that they were away from Atlanta’s brutal summer heat for almost three months.
Still, it was a long year. Glavine wondered if perhaps his decision to leave Atlanta might end up costing him his chance to win three hundred games. He was now forty-nine wins away, meaning he would have to average a little more than sixteen victories per year if he was to reach that milestone by the end of his contract.
The 2004 season started far better than that of 2003. The Mets had hired a new pitching coach, Rick Peterson, who had worked wonders with a young Oakland staff when Howe had been the manager there, helping make Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito into twenty-game winners. Peterson was the polar opposite of Mazzone in just about every way possible. He was a college-educated, literature-quoting, vegetable-eating, Zen master. Or, at the very least, a Zen pitching coach.
“To say that Leo and Rick are different is one of the great understatements of all time,” Glavine said, laughing. “If you put the two of them in a room and they talked to each other for an hour, I’m not sure either one would understand a word the other was saying.”
Peterson grew up in a baseball family — his dad was the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates when he was a kid — and was a pitcher with some promise until he blew out his arm in college when his coach left him in a game to throw 164 pitches. “I was never the same after that,” he says now, without rancor. “I’m not saying I would have been a big leaguer if that hadn’t happened, but after that there wasn’t any doubt.”
He graduated from Jacksonville University in 1976 with a degree in psychology and was drafted in the twenty-first round by the Pirates. He spent the next four years pitching at the A-ball level in the Pirates’ system before deciding it was time — at age twenty-five — to move on. He had already decided what he was going to do when he was finished playing, so moving from playing to coaching seemed like a natural step at the time.
“I always loved the game; I grew up with it,” he said. “After I got hurt in college, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it very far in pro ball, but I wanted to take the shot and see how far I got. I was into a lot of other things by then — art, reading. I loved to paint — still do.
“Not long after I graduated, I was in San Diego visiting some friends, and I went on a seven-day fast. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a kid, and I just felt like this was something good to do — cleanse my body entirely for a little while.
“I was walking on the beach during the fast — and I’m not really sure how to describe this — but I was looking up at the sky, and the sun came slanting down in a certain way, and something inside me said, ‘You’re supposed to teach.’ I know how that sounds, but that’s how it happened. The thing I knew best was baseball; the thing I know best in baseball is pitching. So, here I am.”
Peterson almost never raises his voice to a pitcher. He is constantly looking for analogies they can relate to and always talks about the process of pitching — constantly telling his pitchers not to worry too much about results. If they focus on the process, the results will be there.
After all those years with Mazzone, Glavine went through a little bit of culture shock working with Peterson. Even four years into their relationship, he would still occasionally roll his eyes when Peterson would point out a butterfly in the bullpen.
“Do you realize what a miracle that is?” Peterson was likely to say. “Not that long ago that beautiful creature was a caterpillar. Think about that, Tom — a caterpillar! Now look at it. Seeing it has to be a good omen.”
“That’s great, Rick,” Glavine would likely reply. “Now would you mind taking a look at my changeup?”
Glavine and the other pitchers may occasionally mock what Glavine calls “all the Zen stuff,” but they respect Peterson.
“He may go on for a while, but he’s smart, and he understands people as well as he understands baseball,” Glavine said. “When we first talked, he asked me a lot of questions about golf, which I wondered about. But after a while, he began using golf analogies that really made sense to me, especially when I was struggling.”
Glavine was superb for the first half of the 2004 season. He was 3–1 with a 1.64 ERA in April, and he pitched a one-hitter against Colorado — taking a no-hitter into the eighth inning — in May. The Mets were bad again (71–91), but Glavine made his ninth All-Star team in July.
Then disaster struck — again. The Mets had wrapped up an early-August road trip in St. Louis, and Glavine had flown home on Sunday night to spend an off-day with his family. Chris and the kids had just returned to Atlanta to get ready for the start of school. He caught a late-morning flight to New York on Tuesday, landed at LaGuardia Airport, and got into a cab to make the one-mile trip to Shea Stadium. The cab pulled out into traffic while Glavine called Chris to let her know he had landed safely.
“I was getting ready to hang up with her, and I remember thinking, ‘Short trip, but I probably should put my seat belt on,” he said. “Just as I thought that, I heard the cabbie say something loudly — I think I was looking down at that moment for my seat belt — and the next thing I knew, I got slammed headfirst into the partition between the front seat and the backseat.”
The cab had been cut off by a car trying to weave through traffic on the ramp leading onto the Grand Central Parkway. Glavine’s face went directly into the partition and shattered it.
“I remember kind of going down and wondering if I was going to pass out,” he said. “I didn’t, and I thought, ‘Okay, that’s good,’ and then I felt this pain in my mouth. I looked down, and I saw blood all over my hands. Then I saw a tooth in my hands too.”
Glavine actually managed to call Chris back while he was spitting up blood and teeth (two were knocked out) to tell her he’d been in an accident but he was okay. Then he called Mets public relations director Jay Horwitz to tell him what had happened and that he suspected he wouldn’t make it to the ballpark as planned. Horwitz immediately called Jeff Wilpon, who made arrangements to have Glavine taken to the Manhattan hospital where the Mets send their players.
When the police arrived, they put Glavine in a squad car and waited for the ambulance.
“How do I look?” Glavine asked the first cop on the scene.
“I’ve seen worse,” the cop said. “But not a lot worse.”
Once he got to the hospital, they began giving him one novocaine shot after another because of all the work they needed to do on his gums and his teeth. “After about the tenth one, I said, ‘Enough; do what you have to do. I’ll deal with the pain.’ ”
Before they dug in to do the major work, Glavine asked if he could go to the bathroom. “When I finished, I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror,” he said. “That was it. I went down.”
He was in the hospital until late that night and ended up having to go through several rounds of dental surgery — the final one done in January of 2007. He missed a total of thirteen days — just two starts — and came back on August 21 to pitch against the Giants.
“It was probably a mistake,” he said. “I couldn’t throw at all while I was out because they were afraid I might rip open the stitches in my mouth on my follow-through. I came back too quickly, and I was probably a little bit afraid of hurting myself when I went back. I was pretty bad the rest of the season.”
He finished 11–14 with a respectable 3.60 ERA, but nine of the wins came before the accident. He could easily have had a dozen wins before the All-Star break if the Mets had been better, but he didn’t. He was now at 262 victories, and it was clear that he wasn’t getting to three hundred by the end of 2006 when his contract was up. People in New York were calling his signing yet another Mets mistake in a parade of them during that period.
The 2005 season began much the way the 2004 season had ended. Glavine was still struggling. He had almost grown accustomed to not getting the outside pitches called in his favor anymore, but he hadn’t come up with a way to consistently get hitters out without his bread-and-butter pitch — the one just off the outside corner — working for him.
He opened the season by getting bombed in Cincinnati — five runs in three and two-thirds innings, and it just kept getting worse. The bottom came in June when the Mets made an interleague road trip to Oakland and Seattle. Glavine was merely mediocre in Oakland — four runs and ten hits in six innings. But then he was awful in Seattle, giving up six runs while getting just seven outs before new manager Willie Randolph mercifully came to get him.
Glavine was just about at the end of his rope. He was 4–7 for the season, and his ERA was 5.06. The notion that he might stick around long enough to win thirty-four more games was laughable. He was, as you might expect, getting hammered in New York. One radio talk show host wondered on the air if the driver who had slammed into Glavine’s cab the previous August could be found for a reprise.
On the long flight home from Seattle, Rick Peterson sat in the front of the plane trying to decide what to do next. He had tried just about everything he could think of to get Glavine out of his funk. Because Peterson had so much respect for Glavine as a pitcher and liked him so much as a person, Glavine’s pitching was tearing him up almost as much as it was tearing up Glavine. Finally, he made a decision. Peterson got out of his seat, walked back to where Glavine was, and slid into the empty spot next to him. He knew Glavine wasn’t in the mood for any Zen soothing, and he had none to give. He asked the flight attendant if they could have a couple of beers.
“I was really nervous going back there,” he said. “I’m very aware of who Tom Glavine is and how much he’s accomplished in baseball. I never got close to the major leagues as a pitcher. But I had decided I had to tell him that he had to blow up the way he had pitched for eighteen years and try something completely new.”
Once the beers arrived, Peterson started out with a golf question.
“How many clubs are you allowed to have in your bag?” he asked Glavine.
Glavine wasn’t really in the mood for a golf analogy at that moment, but he isn’t the kind of guy to tell someone to leave him alone, and he liked Peterson enough to play along.
“Fourteen,” he answered.
“Well, as a pitcher right now, you’re using about seven clubs. Does it make any sense to use only half the clubs you’re allowed to use?”
Glavine looked at him quizzically.
“You have to start pitching inside,” Peterson said. “Not once in a while to get a guy off the plate — all the time.”
Glavine had never pitched inside because his game had always been to get batters to chase pitches outside. When his changeup is working and his location is good, he likes to say he has batters “playing the chase game.” Pitching inside for a nonpower pitcher was high risk because if a batter is ready for an inside pitch and it isn’t located perfectly, he is apt to crush it.
“Pitch inside?” Glavine said. “Me?”
Peterson nodded. “Every team in the league has the same scouting report on you: lay off on the pitch off the plate; wait for him to come over the plate, and then take the ball to the opposite field or up the middle. They’re sitting on your pitches, Tom. Your game is keeping guys off balance. No one is off balance right now.”
Glavine couldn’t argue with that. It had been a while since he had felt as if he had hitters off balance. They talked for a while longer about when to throw inside and what pitches to throw inside and when to go back outside. Glavine’s thinking was simple: I can’t pitch any worse. Why not try it?
He unveiled his new self in Yankee Stadium a few nights later. He was inside, and he was outside. The Yankee hitters were surprised. “He was a different guy completely,” Joe Torre remembered. “A couple of times, I was tempted to check his uniform number to make sure it was Tom.”
He pitched six innings that night and gave up two earned runs and got the win. Each time out, he got a little more confident with his new style, and even after word got around the league that he was pitching differently it didn’t seem to matter.
“They knew I was willing to come inside,” he said. “But they didn’t know when I was going to come inside. It was like the old days; I had them chasing again.”
The turnaround was remarkable. In his first 15 starts through Seattle, Glavine had given up 48 earned runs in 85 innings. In his last 19 starts of the season, he gave up 35 earned runs in 126 innings, pitching to an ERA of 2.50. He finished with a flourish, winning his last three starts, including a masterful two-hit, eleven-strikeout shutout of the Colorado Rockies in his final start of the season. He was 9–6 after the late-night talk on the plane with Peterson and could have been considerably better if the bullpen hadn’t blown several leads for him.
“I felt like a new man, a new pitcher,” he said. “Rick deserves a lot of credit because he convinced me I had to change the way I was pitching. It isn’t easy to get someone who has been pitching as long as I have to start all over again, but he did it.”
The new Glavine was just about as good in 2006 as he had been late in 2005. He went 15–7, and except for a stretch in July where he struggled with his control, he was outstanding all year. The Mets had finally turned around after Randolph had been hired as the manager, Omar Minaya had taken over as general manager, and Pedro Martinez had joined Glavine in the rotation, with Billy Wagner as the closer. After going 83–79 in 2005, the Mets dominated the National League East throughout 2006, taking complete control of the pennant race by the All-Star break. They cruised home with a 97–65 record and won the division by twelve games, finally ending the Braves’ run of fourteen consecutive division titles.
There were really only two down moments for Glavine all season, although one of them was potentially serious.
The first came in July, when he was struggling. On June 23, he had raised his record for the season to 11–2 with a victory over Toronto. Over his next six starts, nothing went right. He gave up twenty-one runs in thirty-four innings and was fortunate to lose only twice, getting off the hook with no decisions in the other four games.
“Every year you go through a period where you just can’t get anyone out,” he said. “This lasted a little longer and was a little more worrisome, if only because I was forty years old. I mean, I wasn’t panicking or anything, but I was definitely frustrated.”
On a hot Sunday in Atlanta, Glavine went out for his sixth start of July. The Mets promptly staked him to a 3–0 lead. Still struggling against his old team, Glavine let the Braves close to 7–3 by the end of the second, but then the Mets scored again to make it 8–3 in the third.
“At that point, given the heat and my pitch count, I’m just thinking about getting through five so I can get the bullpen to finish it off for me and get a win,” he said.
He almost didn’t make it through the fourth. The Braves scored three runs, with two out, the score now 8–6. Glavine steadied and got the final hitter out to maintain the lead. He walked into the dugout, put a towel on his neck, and saw Randolph approaching.
“You’re done, Tommy,” Randolph said. “The bullpen will take it from here.”
Glavine was stunned. He knew he wasn’t pitching well, but he thought at worst either Randolph or Peterson would ask him if he thought he had another inning in him. “I’ve never been a guy who always says I’m okay no matter what,” he said. “After the eighth inning in Game Six [of the ’95 World Series], I told Bobby [Cox] and Leo [Mazzone] that I thought I was done, and I was pitching a one-hitter.
“If Willie had come and gotten me during the fourth, I would have understood. But I got out of the inning. At the very least, especially given how I was scuffling and needing a win to get some confidence back, I thought he’d let me start the fifth. If I put someone on, fine, come get me. But at least give me a shot.”
If Randolph had it to do all over again, he probably would do just that. But he was thinking he had an older pitcher who was struggling in the heat. Peterson was worried about Glavine’s pitch count. The Mets had a comfortable lead in the pennant race — eleven games — but it was still Atlanta and it was still the Braves. So, Randolph made the move.
“When Tommy and I sat down and talked about it, I understood why he was upset,” Randolph said later. “I respected his point of view, and I think he respected mine. I think it’s fair to say that was a learning experience for me as a manager.”
Once he knew he was out of the game, Glavine went back to the clubhouse and, by his own description, proceeded to go ballistic. “I was hot,” he said. “About as angry as I can ever remember being. I don’t throw things around very much, but that day I did.”
When Randolph heard what had happened in the clubhouse, he asked Glavine to come to his office the next day to talk. Both men explained their thinking. There was an agreement to disagree. “And then it was over,” Glavine said. “I was still a little upset, but you get over it. I think Willie knew where I was coming from and that was all I could ask.”
It helped that Glavine ended his seven-game no-victory skein with seven solid innings against the Phillies six days later. Eleven days later, Glavine pitched against the Phillies, this time in Philadelphia. He pitched seven innings and left for a pinch hitter in the eighth, with the Mets trailing 3–0.
Sitting in the dugout in the top of the eighth — Glavine always waits until the end of an inning to go to the clubhouse after he comes out of a game — he felt some coldness in the ring finger on his pitching hand. It was a comfortable night, so the coldness wasn’t caused by the weather. After he had gone back to the clubhouse and gone through his twenty-minute postgame routine with an ice pack on his shoulder, the finger still felt cold.
“Very early in my career [1990], I’d had a problem with my index finger and my middle finger where they got cold that way,” he said. “I had it checked out, and the doctors decided it was something called Raynaud’s disease, which means, basically, that when your hand gets cold, the blood doesn’t flow properly through your fingers sometimes. They put me on some Procardia — a pill I took once a day — and I never had a real problem with it again.
“This was a little different because it was my ring finger, but my first thought was that maybe the Raynaud’s was flaring up a little. I decided I probably shouldn’t take any chances and should tell someone about it.”
The first person he found was assistant trainer Mike Herbst, who agreed the finger was abnormally cold and suggested he pack it in heat that night and see how it felt the next day. When the finger was still cold and the knuckle on it was sore (something that hadn’t happened with the Raynaud’s in the past), the Mets decided to send Glavine to see a hand specialist in New York.
He showed up at the hospital on the east side of Manhattan the next day, thinking he would be at the ballpark at four o’clock, just a little later than he normally arrived for a seven o’clock home game. He left the hospital nine hours later.
First, the specialist looked at his hand and performed an MRI. Nothing unusual showed up. Then he asked Glavine to stick his hand into a bucket of ice and hold it there for two minutes. “I remembered doing that in ’90 and how much it hurt,” he said. “It hurt just as much this time.”
And the results were similar: his thumb and pinky returned to normal circulation in less than five minutes. The three middle fingers were still cold. “They said, ‘Probably the Raynaud’s, but, since you’re here, let’s do an ultrasound.’ I was sitting there while they were doing the ultrasound when I heard the doctor say, ‘Uh-oh.’ When a doctor says ‘uh-oh,’ that gets your attention.”
The doctor showed him what he had seen. On the screen there was clearly something that was darker in his blood flow in one area than in the others. “Not sure what it is,” the doctor said. “But I think we better get a full MRI-” — An MRI from Glavine’s shoulder down to the hand would show what was causing the darker color on the screen, what might be cutting off the circulation to his hand. Since an MRI can only be done for small portions of a person’s body, Glavine had to spend four hours going in and out of the MRI machine. “They would set it on my shoulder, leave me in there for forty-five minutes, and then move it down my arm a little,” he said. “A couple of places they couldn’t get the camera positioned exactly right, so I had to go in and out like four times. It was absolutely brutal.”
When the MRI was finally over, the doctors told him they still couldn’t be sure what was wrong with him. “Could be something minor,” they said. “We want to do an angiogram on you on Monday.”
Great, Glavine thought. I have to wait until Monday, and the closest thing I have to a diagnosis is a doctor saying “uh-oh.” He drove home exhausted and a little bit frightened.
“I went from thinking it was no big deal and I probably wouldn’t miss a turn to thinking maybe my season was over. I didn’t even want to think my career was over. But the thought sneaked into my head briefly.”
As luck would have it, his parents and his sister and brother-in-law were in for the weekend, so it was a full house. Glavine told them and Chris what was going on. “No one panicked or anything,” he said. “But the uncertainty was kind of tough.”
He went to the ballpark briefly the next day, avoiding the media only because there was nothing he could tell them. When his teammates asked what was going on, his answer was honest: “I don’t know. Could be nothing. Or my season could be over.”
Not surprisingly, when he arrived at the ballpark on Sunday, several writers were waiting for him. They had heard his season might be over. True? Glavine talked to everyone that day, saying he would know more after the angiogram, and, yes, he was nervous about what was going on.
The next day he and Chris drove back to the hospital. The angiogram took close to two hours. When he came out of the fog from the light anesthesia he’d been given, he found Dr. Anne Winchester, who had performed the angiogram, looking at him, concern on her face. The angiogram showed a small blood clot, not one that was life-threatening, but one that might make it risky to pitch again.
“I was sort of freaking out at that point,” Glavine said. “Then Dr. [David] Altchek and the other doctors who work with the Mets came in. I was still a little groggy, but at one point I heard someone say something about when I started pitching again. I kind of sat up and said, ‘Pitching again? You guys think I can pitch?’ Dr. Altchek kind of nodded and said, ‘Sure, in a little while; why not?’ ”
Glavine was less groggy but more confused. Chris was concerned. Why, she wanted to know, did the baseball doctors think it was okay to pitch but the nonbaseball doctor didn’t? Glavine was wondering the same thing when, as if on cue, Dr. Winchester came into the room.
She told him that she had been discussing the angiogram results with Altchek and the other doctors. She was in agreement that there was no reason why he shouldn’t pitch. The clot had probably been developing for years and years — in fact, it might have been the cause of his problems in 1990, not Raynaud’s — as a result of the way he twisted his body when he released the ball. It had probably started in his chest, traveled to his hand, and was creating a circulation blockage there.
“The only way you would really be at risk by pitching is if you have a bunch of symptoms that you choose to ignore,” she said. “If the finger feels cold again, you tell someone right away.”
Glavine was relieved. He and Chris both asked if there was any chance he could have a heart attack or a stroke. Dr. Winchester said almost none, unless he ignored symptoms. And over the next several days, his finger began to feel normal again.
Eleven days later, he was back on the mound in Houston, feeling nervous, wondering what would happen. “It was almost like the first game in spring training,” he said. “I’d done my work, gotten back on the mound, but I had no idea where the ball would go when I got out there. Would the finger get cold again? I didn’t know.”
He pitched three good innings, a bad fourth inning, and left after five. He was almost as happy as he would have been if he had pitched a shutout. “The finger was fine; I felt fine,” he said. “The problems I had in the fourth were normal pitching problems — I put a couple guys on and tried to make perfect pitches instead of good ones. That had nothing to do with the finger. I was fine.”
He pitched well throughout September and October and had no further issues with the finger. His only complaint during the last nine weeks of the season was that the Mets came up one victory short of reaching the World Series.
“After it was over, I realized how lucky I was,” he said. “If I had needed surgery, the rehab would have been six to eight months. At my age, that could have been the end. To get back on the mound so quickly and to do it pain free and be pretty effective was a blessing. I felt very lucky.”
And, when he beat the Washington Nationals 13–0 in his final regular season start, he had won his 290th game.