“PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT.” It is one of those sports phrases that true baseball fans understand has magical qualities. That is the day each year that baseball fans look forward to because it is so full of symbolic meaning. It signals the return of baseball and the approaching end of winter. Exhibition games will soon be played in Florida and in Arizona, and later real games will begin. There will be standings to peruse, box scores to examine, and that day’s probable pitchers to speculate about.
But why exactly do pitchers and catchers report before the rest of the team?
“It’s simple,” Mike Mussina explains. “Spring training is forty-five days long because of five guys — the starting pitchers on every team. We need the full forty-five days to get our arms to the point where we can pitch five, six, seven innings once the season starts. Everyone else needs three weeks, four weeks max. But we need that extra time.”
The pitchers need someone to throw to when they arrive. That’s why the catchers are also asked to show up early.
The first few days of spring training before — as the pitchers call them — “the players” arrive is little more than a bunch of guys playing catch. Fans will turn up to watch, partly because it is spring training, but also because, traditionally, they can get closer to the players during spring than during the regular season.
Sadly, this isn’t nearly as true as it once was. Players are more likely to stop and sign autographs during spring because they have more time, but the days when fans could surround players walking in and out of their training facilities are long gone. All the new spring-training ballparks were built with added security in mind. Players park inside a fence and have the option of not getting anywhere near the waiting fans if they don’t want to do so.
These days pitchers are expected to be ready to throw off a mound when they arrive in training camp. Mussina and Glavine are typical of most pitchers, especially veterans, in that they have spent anywhere from six to ten weeks getting their arms ready to throw regularly off a mound. What’s different in spring training is that every pitch thrown is monitored and recorded; time on the mound is noted; and there is a very specific schedule to be followed. There’s no pushing back the start of the day to take kids to school or to play a game of horse.
“In a lot of ways, the last few days before we go to Florida are bittersweet for me,” Glavine said a few days prior to his February 14 departure for the Mets camp in Port St. Lucie, Florida. “Part of me is excited about getting down there, seeing the guys, getting ready to start another season. But there’s another part of me that’s going to miss taking the kids to school, being there when they come home, and having free time to pretty much do whatever I want.
“The worst day of the year for me, without fail, every year is the first Monday of spring training: Chris and the kids always fly down with me, spend a long weekend, and then leave first thing Monday morning so the kids can get back to school. That morning really sucks because it hits me that I’m only going to see them on weekends for most of the next six weeks.”
Mussina’s feelings are similar. His boys are younger — Peyton was not yet in school in 2007, and Brycen, because he’s a smart kid, had flexibility to miss some school time — but they were still in and out during the spring. “The good news is they have a really good time when they’re here,” he said. “The bad news is I miss them when they have to go back north.”
There is no doubt about the best part of spring training: seeing the guys. Any retired athlete you talk to will instantly tell you that what he misses most about his playing days are the guys. It isn’t just the camaraderie of a clubhouse — baseball locker rooms are never called locker rooms, they are called clubhouses, which is instructive if you think about the meaning of the word club — it is the notion of having a place, of being a part of a very exclusive club that most boys grow up dreaming of being in at some stage of their lives.
“I’m pretty sure the thing I’ll miss most is having a locker,” Mussina said. “That’s your place, no one else’s, and having it isn’t just a practical thing — a place to put your stuff — it’s a symbolic thing. It means you belong inside that clubhouse. My boys love being able to walk in and hang out around my locker after a game. When I’m retired, I know I’ll be welcome to come in; I know there will be times I can bring the kids. But it won’t be the same. It can’t be. I’ll be an outsider; I won’t have a place anymore.”
Glavine feels the same way. “It’s very tough to explain to someone who has never been on the inside what that feels like,” he said. “The clubhouse is open to outsiders a lot. You’ve got media in there and other people who come through for different reasons. But there are times when it’s just the guys, when you say and do things that you wouldn’t say or do anyplace else. It’s nothing terrible or bad; it’s just being able to revert to being a kid, playing practical jokes, giving each other a hard time.” He smiled. “It’s a way to feel young, even when you aren’t young anymore.”
Of course that place in the clubhouse has to be earned. On the first day that an entire team reports to spring training — usually about five days after pitchers and catchers — the clubhouse feels overrun. Most teams invite between sixty and seventy players to spring training. Usually, no more than thirty — sometimes fewer — have a realistic chance to make the big league roster.
“You walk in there on the first day, and you see faces you absolutely don’t recognize, people you don’t know, and, in many cases, people you’ll never know,” Mussina said. “If someone walks up and introduces himself, that’s certainly fine with me, but I’m not going to go around introducing myself to people I’m pretty sure I’ll never play with except maybe in a spring-training game.”
On the first day that the entire team is in camp, the manager will hold a meeting before the first workout. Many of the players in the room are new: youngsters in their first big league camp; players acquired by trade or free agency; older players who have signed a minor league contract hoping to make a team. As a result, the manager will introduce the entire staff: coaches, minor league instructors working in camp, doctors, training staff, public relations staff. There will be warnings about staying out of trouble, and a curfew — usually 1 a.m. — will be announced though it is never enforced.
“It’s there more in case someone gets in trouble,” Glavine said. “If a guy gets stopped by a cop at three o’clock in the morning, well, he’s violated curfew, so the manager can suspend him or fine him regardless of what happens with the police. It’s just a way of reminding guys that they’re public figures, and they should try to stay out of trouble.”
One thing that takes up some time is the introduction of the public relations staff. Playing baseball in New York isn’t like playing baseball anyplace else. There is more media in New York than in any other city in the country, and the pressure on players to perform and to make themselves available to the media there is higher than elsewhere.
Jay Horwitz has been the Mets’ public relations director for twenty-eight years. He has outlasted eight managers and seven general managers and has survived dealing with charmers like Vince Coleman, Jeff Kent, and Eddie Murray, among others. When he talks to the players, his warnings to be careful about what they say are infused with humor, but at the same time he reminds them that part of their job is dealing with the media.
If there’s a tougher job in baseball than Horwitz’s, it is that of the Yankees’ public relations director. In 2007, that job fell to Jason Zillo, who succeeded Rick Cerrone during the winter. Zillo had been with the team for eleven years, but this was his first year in charge. As much coverage as the Mets get, the Yankees get more. In addition to all those who cover the team for local and national media outlets, the Yankees have a regular coterie of Japanese media who follow Hideki Matsui. The signing of Kei Igawa only increased the Japanese media presence.
Zillo’s job is challenging because of the number of people he deals with, but also because the Yankees are a powder keg. Any four-game losing streak can lead to speculation about the immediate future of the manager, the general manager, and the high-priced stars. In addition to giving the usual talk about dealing with the media, Zillo shows the players a film that is best described as “how to deal with the media, and, more important, how not to deal with the media.” It shows a number of instances when athletes have made themselves look foolish by blowing up on camera. Example one in 2007 was Randy Johnson’s first encounter with the New York media in 2005.
Once the first meeting is over, the rituals begin. Players are expected on the field at a specific time to begin their stretching, and then at appointed times they move on to drills. Pitchers report to specified locations to play catch (usually with another pitcher during spring) or to throw off a mound or to work on pitcher’s fielding practice, or PFP.
On the morning that Yankee pitchers and catchers first reported, Mussina went through his drills, threw off a mound for eight minutes, iced his arm, and got something to eat. It then took him about another ten minutes to become embroiled in the Yankees’ first controversy of the spring.
Mussina was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only Yankee who had become extremely skeptical about Carl Pavano. In fact, manager Joe Torre, who rarely said anything even a little bit negative about a player in public, had made the comment during the winter that Pavano was going to have to “earn back the confidence of the clubhouse.” In other words, Pavano hadn’t performed for two years; there had been serious questions raised about how he had handled his injury problems; and until he got himself healthy and performed, the other players would continue to have doubts about him.
Asking Pavano how he felt about having to prove himself to his teammates seemed a logical first-day-of-camp story to a lot of media members. When Pavano finished his drills and came inside to his locker, a number of people asked him how he felt about it all.
“That’s just the media saying those things,” Pavano answered, taking the age-old, “it’s the media’s fault” route. “I’m not worried about it. I don’t think I have to prove anything to my teammates.”
Actually, the media hadn’t said those things; his manager had. Among others.
Pavano’s locker inside the clubhouse at Legends Field in Tampa is no more than ten feet from Mussina’s, which is in a corner — giving him a little extra room in a crowded place — to the left of the front door. As soon as Pavano was finished blaming the media for his troubles, several writers made a beeline for Mussina.
This made sense for several reasons: Mussina is now considered a go-to guy by the Yankees media. He’s smart and honest and isn’t likely to duck a question. What’s more, many of the reporters knew how Mussina felt about Pavano. When they repeated Pavano’s comments, Mussina was genuinely stunned.
“He said that? Really? He really said that?” was his opening response. He then went on to say in blunt terms that Pavano was in for a big surprise if he thought he did not have a problem with his teammates. “What Joe said is completely true,” he said. “The guy has a lot to prove. This has nothing to do with you guys.”
It is worth remembering that this was mid-February. The Super Bowl was over; college basketball had not yet reached March Madness, and this was day one of spring training. Mike Mussina blasting a fellow Yankee pitcher would be news any time of year, but in mid-February it was big news.
“I really didn’t think it would make the back pages,” he said later with a wry smile. “Guess I was wrong.”
He found out he was wrong when he walked into the clubhouse the next day and was shown several newspaper headlines. He hadn’t just made the tabloid back pages, he had been the lead story in the sports section of the New York Times. Mussina wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t upset either. He’d known he was going to be quoted, and he knew Pavano would see what he said and that was fine with him.
Shortly after he returned to the clubhouse from his morning drills, Mussina was approached by Jason Zillo. “Pav wants to know if you’re willing to talk to him about this,” Zillo said.
“Sure, why not?” Mussina said, looking over at Pavano’s locker, which was empty at the moment. “Why doesn’t he just ask me himself.”
“He’s nervous about it,” Zillo said. “He’s afraid you won’t talk to him.”
“Of course I’ll talk to him,” Mussina said. “Where is he right now?”
“He’s waiting for you in Rob Cucuzza’s office,” Zillo said. Cucuzza is the Yankees’ equipment manager.
Mussina walked out of the locker area of the clubhouse, down a short hallway, and found Pavano waiting for him.
“Were you quoted accurately in the papers today?” Pavano asked.
“Absolutely,” Mussina said.
Pavano was upset, not so much with Mussina, but with the situation. He told Mussina how much he respected him and how much it bothered him that Mussina felt the way he did. Mussina said he appreciated that and that he would try to help Pavano in any way possible.
“Do you think I need to address the team about this?” he asked Mussina.
Mussina shook his head. “No. There’s nothing for you to say to anyone. You just have to get on the mound and pitch. Talking isn’t the answer now; going out and pitching is.”
Pavano nodded, and the two men shook hands. They then told the media, who had first seen Pavano and then Mussina walk down the hallway and were awaiting their return, that all was well.
“We had a good talk,” Mussina said.
What he didn’t say was what he had said to Pavano: talking at this point was meaningless.
THE FIRST REAL TEST for a pitcher in spring training comes when he throws batting practice. Starting pitchers will throw off a mound every other day when they first get to camp. In Port St. Lucie, Glavine threw thirty pitches his first day on the mound, forty-five his second day, and forty-five his third. That got him to Thursday, February 21, when he would throw batting practice for the first time. The Yankees’ sessions are done strictly on time: Mussina threw for eight minutes the first day, ten the second, and twelve the third. His new catch partner for the spring was Andy Pettitte, the veteran lefty who had come back to the team after three-years in Houston.
“Until the games start, we’re pretty much on the same schedule, so it makes sense for us to be catch partners,” Mussina said. “Once the games start, I’ll probably have to find someone else since we’ll be on different schedules.”
Pitchers hate throwing batting practice. Years ago pitchers actually threw batting practice on their off-days during the season. Now, teams have batting-practice pitchers — frequently they are coaches — and pitchers never throw BP during the season.
“I remember guys did it on their throw days,” Joe Torre said. “It was a way of getting in your bullpen session while also having someone who could throw BP for you. But no one really liked it. The hitters didn’t like it if pitchers wanted to throw breaking pitches, and the pitchers always hated the screen.”
The “screen” is, quite simply, a screen set up in front of the mound during BP so whomever is pitching doesn’t have to worry about getting hit by a screaming line drive hit back through the box off an 80-mile-an-hour batting-practice fastball. Pitchers despise throwing from behind the screen.
“Part of it is just vision,” Glavine said. “You really can’t see the corners of the plate from behind it, particularly for me the outside corner against a right-handed hitter. You have to remind yourself that it’s okay to follow through, that the screen isn’t going to impede you because it looks like it will. It’s just one of those spring-training things you have to get through.”
The biggest difference for a pitcher throwing BP — other than the screen — as opposed to a bullpen session is obvious: there’s a hitter in the batter’s box. Hitters aren’t crazy about taking BP from pitchers trying to find their spring form. It isn’t like in-season batting practice when the pitcher is lobbing the ball up there to be hit.
“The hitter is trying to do his job; you’re trying to do yours — so it’s different,” Mussina said. “But that’s not a bad thing. It gives both of you an idea of how well you’re doing.”
Before their batting-practice sessions, the pitchers will warm up in the bullpen, almost the way they would before a game. “You don’t go as long,” Glavine said. “Probably no more than five or six minutes. As soon as you feel loose, you stop. You have to remember that it’s still early, and there’s no need to push yourself.”
When a pitcher steps onto the mound to throw his first spring BP session, it is the first time he has faced a hitter since October. There is always an adrenaline rush, even though there is no umpire, no count, no scoreboard, and no reason to be concerned if the hitter takes a ball deep.
“It’s interesting because, on the one hand, especially after doing it for so many years, it really doesn’t mean a thing,” Glavine said. “In truth, you don’t want to throw all that well because it’s February, and there isn’t much point in wasting any nasty pitches in February. But there are people watching, and whenever that’s the case, you don’t want to embarrass yourself by throwing the ball all over the place or getting the ball hit five hundred feet by someone.”
The top Yankee pitchers — all those on the forty-man major league roster — throw their batting-practice sessions from the mound inside Legends Stadium. There are always several hundred fans watching, and the media gawks as if the Yankees and Red Sox are playing in September.
The Mets’ camp is more casual. The Mets do all of their pre–exhibition season work on the back fields around the facility at Port St. Lucie, allowing fans to wander from one field to another to watch different players do different drills. Still, there is a little bit of a buzz when one of the big names trots out to begin a BP session.
Most veteran pitchers will throw BP twice — no more than three times — before their first exhibition-game start. Mussina isn’t as bothered by throwing BP as Glavine, and, since he wasn’t pitching until the Yankees’ third exhibition game, he and pitching coach Ron Guidry decided he would throw BP three times. Glavine, who was starting the second exhibition game for the Mets, two days earlier than Mussina’s start, would only throw BP twice.
“Thank God,” he said. “When I retire, I want to take one of those BP screens home with me and do a ritual burning.”
Glavine was scheduled to throw thirty pitches in his first session, forty-five in his second. He wasn’t all that pleased with either of his BP sessions, but that was par for the course. During his second session, when he was trying to throw his breaking pitches, he kept stopping to ask the hitter and the catcher where the pitch had been.
“Was that okay?” he kept repeating. “Where was that?”
“I just couldn’t see,” he said later. “That’s the screen. At this point in my career, I have a pretty good feel for whether or not I’ve thrown a strike when I release the ball. This time of year, though, you aren’t so sure, so if you can’t see you ask.”
Glavine threw forty-eight pitches in his second session, wanting to throw a few extra pitches from the stretch. He worked first with a runner on first base, then with a runner on second, working on his pickoff move — not actually throwing over but spinning as if to do so — between pitches. After he left the mound, his spot was taken by Philip Humber, a twenty-four-year-old right-hander who had been the third overall pick in the 2004 draft. Humber was six-foot-four and 225 pounds, and, even though he’d undergone elbow surgery in 2005, his fastball was at least ten miles an hour faster than Glavine’s.
“You don’t need a radar gun to see he’s throwing a little harder than I did,” Glavine said, laughing. “Fortunately for me, there’s more to this game than throwing hard.”
He was clearly relieved to have both his BP sessions behind him. He would throw in the bullpen once, perhaps twice, before starting against the St. Louis Cardinals in five days.
As he went through the spring rituals, it occurred to Glavine every so often that he might be doing things he had been doing all his adult life for the last time.
“I thought about it this morning, getting dressed,” he said. “If that was my last BP session, all I can say is good riddance.”
He went off to do his running. Chris and the boys were down for the weekend, and the rest of the day was his. It was 10:30 in the morning.
“THAT’S THE IRONY OF SPRING TRAINING,” Mike Mussina said, sitting in his house shortly after noon on the day he threw his second BP session. “It’s forty-five days long, basically to accommodate five guys — maybe six or seven if you aren’t certain about your rotation — and we spend less time at the ballpark than anyone.”
Pitchers do three things on a typical spring-training day: stretch, throw — either catch, in the bullpen, or BP — and run. Then they’re done for the day. Occasionally on a day when they aren’t scheduled to throw, they will take PFP, something that Glavine and Mussina take very seriously. They are both good athletes and two of the best fielding pitchers in the game. Mussina has won six Gold Glove Awards as the best fielding pitcher in the American League during his career. Glavine has won none, but that’s only because he’s pitched in the National League at the same time as Greg Maddux, who many consider the best fielding pitcher of all time. In 2007, Maddux would win his seventeenth Gold Glove.
“To be honest, I think I deserved to win it at least once,” Glavine says, when the subject of Gold Gloves comes up. “Don’t get me wrong, Greg’s a great fielder, and he always has more assists than I do because he’s more of a ground-ball pitcher than I am. But I think what happens with that award is that once a guy wins it more than once, it’s almost automatic that he keeps winning it. It’s a little bit frustrating to me that I never did win one.”
Glavine has won the Silver Slugger Award as the best hitting pitcher in the National League four times, something he is almost as proud of as his two Cy Young’s. He has never been an automatic out at the plate and works hard on both his hitting and his bunting. When he was in Atlanta he, Smoltz, and Maddux were always extremely competitive about their hitting.
“Especially Smoltzie,” he remembered. “That was always the nature of the relationship. That’s not to say Doggy [Maddux] wasn’t competitive. Among the three of us, he was the one most likely to take a bat up the tunnel and bash it all over the place if he thought he’d screwed up on the mound.”
Glavine believes that being proficient at the plate can be worth a minimum of two wins a year to a National League pitcher. What’s more, he enjoys hitting. He always hit third when he was in high school and has hit as high as .274 for an entire season in the majors. Four times in his career he has been used as a pinch hitter. In 1995 he hit his first and only career home run off of Pittsburgh’s John Smiley, who at the time was one of the better pitchers in baseball.
“I remember that I hit to the opposite field, which is pretty amazing in itself,” he said. “And I remember running around the bases pretty fast. The last thing I wanted to do was show Smiley up by cruising because I know just how I would have felt if I had been him in that situation.”
Beyond that, Glavine has more sacrifice bunts — 216 — than any other pitcher in major league history. In an era when bunting has become a lost art, when some pitchers look as if they don’t know which end of the bat to hold when asked to bunt, he almost never fails to get a bunt down when asked.
“It amazes me during spring to watch young guys in bunting drills clearly not trying and not paying attention,” he said. “Every once in a while I’ll say something to one of them because it’s pretty clear to me they don’t understand how helpful it can be to you to be a good bunter.
“If we’re late in a game and I have to come out for a pinch hitter, fine, I can live with that. But if we were ever in a situation where I’m coming up and a bunt was called for and they didn’t think I could get it down, I would be furious with myself. I still get angry with myself if I don’t get one down. Through my career, being able to bunt has probably been worth at least one extra win a year to me.”
That’s why, unlike a lot of young pitchers, he takes PFP and pitchers’ BP seriously. When the subject of young pitchers and hitting comes up, Glavine sighs and shakes his head before saying anything.
“My guess is if you go back a hundred years in baseball and ask any veteran then about younger players, he’ll shake his head and say, ‘These young guys just don’t get it.’ That’s the nature of the game; it’s the nature of life. But the game has changed a lot since I first came up, and a lot of it has not been for the good.
“Some of it is money — that’s always changing things. When I first got called up to the Braves in 1987, I got a huge raise because I was making a [prorated] salary of $62,000. Back then, that was a lot of money, especially for a twenty-one-year-old. The next year, my first full year, I got bumped to $65,000. Still good money. But now, even if you put aside the huge bonuses kids sign for — well into the millions — the minimum salary they make in the big leagues is $320,000. I’m all for that; I fought for it all those years with the union. But having that kind of money does change your attitude, especially when you’re young, and, in a lot of cases, immature.
“Sometimes when pitchers take BP, there’s a lot of joking around and giving each other a hard time. I’m all for that; I enjoy it as much as anyone. But it’s like with anything else — there comes a time when you have to go to work. When I get in the cage, that’s work time. It isn’t as if you’re being asked to carry cement around; you’re being asked to swing a bat or put down a few bunts for five or ten minutes. That’s not exactly heavy lifting. But there are guys who just won’t concentrate. They think their job is to just throw the ball. It’s not, especially in our league.”
It is different in the American League. Because of the designated-hitter rule, American League pitchers hit only during interleague play — fifteen games — and during the World Series. In spring training, those games are so far away that there is no pitchers’ BP, even though a pitcher might get up once or twice when playing in a National League park.
Early in spring training 2007, the Yankees made the trip down I-4 to play the Braves in Orlando. Mussina, making his second start of the spring, came up in the third inning against the Braves’ Tim Hudson and hit a fly ball fairly deep to right field. As he trotted off the field, he went past Hudson and said thanks. Hudson had thrown him an 85-mile-an-hour fastball right down the middle to make sure he didn’t make Mussina look bad. An inning later, Mussina returned the favor.
“We’ll take some BP a week or so before we play interleague,” Mussina said. “Tom’s right. A lot of guys don’t take it seriously. Obviously, it isn’t nearly as big a deal for us. I mean for me, I might get to hit ten or twelve times during a season, maximum. But if two of those times are crucial — if I need to get a bunt down or if I come up with two outs and the bases loaded — I like to feel I have a chance to be competitive at the plate.”
Mussina bats lefty and was a decent hitter in high school, though not as good as Glavine. He learned to hit lefty at the age of eleven because he thought it gave him an edge since most pitchers are right-handed. “Just gives me a better shot to hit someone’s breaking ball,” he said. “In a real game, a guy isn’t likely to just throw you a batting-practice fastball. They need to get you out.”
Both men take spring training seriously. “One of the things you don’t want to fall into during spring is the idea that you’re down here on vacation,” Mussina continued. “It can happen. It isn’t like football where guys are pounding on each other in practice every day during preseason. It is more relaxed than that. But you are here to work. There are certain things you need to get done every day so that when April comes, you’re ready to go. It isn’t like we have to be at the ballpark all that long every day. You’re up early, and you’re done early.”
Before exhibition games begin, spring training is very much a rite of morning. Mussina is usually out of his house by no later than 7:45, and on weekdays he will take back roads to get from his house to Legends Field. “If I go straight down Dale Mabry [the main road near his house] with lights and traffic on a weekday, it will take me at least forty-five minutes and some days more than that. So I go back roads, and it’s twenty-five minutes. On a weekend, I can go straight down Dale Mabry, and it’s about twenty minutes.”
Both the Yankees and the Mets have chefs who will prepare just about anything the players want to eat. Mussina is a Froot Loops and juice guy most mornings — he’s not a coffee drinker — and then will spend some time in the weight room before going into the clubhouse to deal with any media types who want to talk to him before workouts begin.
Glavine is a coffee drinker. He will usually have a cup at home and may make a Starbucks stop en route to Tradition Field, the new name of the Mets’ ballpark in Port St. Lucie. His commute from the house he rents is a little shorter than Mussina’s, although he is just as apt to hit traffic on weekdays. He also eats when he arrives, sometimes cereal, sometimes — “when I’m in a mood to try to be healthy” — egg whites.
Until the games start, a pitcher’s day is always over before noon, even with a leisurely shower, getting another bite to eat, and dealing with postworkout media. Glavine, the avid golfer, will often have a tee time to get to when his day is done at the ballpark. Mussina rarely plays golf, and when his family isn’t down he is often content to go back to the cool air-conditioning of his house to read or watch TV.
The longest hours during spring training are put in by the manager and the coaches. They arrive earlier in the morning than the players in order to be sure they have their assignments straight for the day and to go over points of emphasis and review how they think players are progressing. The managers also have to deal with the media, which for New York teams is no small task.
For all intents and purposes, Joe Torre wrote the book on how to handle the media. During the spring he actually does two sessions each day because his office simply isn’t big enough to accommodate all the print and radio and TV people who want to talk to him at the same time. As a result, he will do one session with print and radio and then a separate one with TV.
Additionally, there are always people who need extra time once the formal session is over — a question here, five minutes there, do you have any time early tomorrow? Torre almost never says no. If he does say no on a given day, it is always with the promise that he will do it the next day or the day after. If someone insists they are fighting a deadline, he’ll figure out a way to answer a question or two. No question seems to bother him, even when he’s asked about his job security, which during 2007 was an almost-constant topic.
“I guess at this point in my life [Torre turned sixty-seven in July of ’07], the good news is I can stop mid-anecdote and pick up again where I left off without any trouble,” he said one morning, sitting in the empty dugout while his players stretched. “Everyone talks about pressure here. Pressure to me is having a team you don’t think can compete. We always have a team that can compete. I get paid very well [$7 million a year] to do something I really enjoy doing. I really don’t have a lot to complain about.”
Torre has the luxury of having won four World Series and six pennants as the manager of the Yankees. He knows that whenever he stops managing, his place in the Hall of Fame is now assured. As a player he was a borderline Hall of Famer. In eighteen big league seasons, he hit .297, with 2,342 hits, 252 home runs, and 1,185 RBI — numbers that aren’t quite worthy of the Hall of Fame but aren’t that far off. If you add his managerial record, there’s no doubt he belongs in the Hall.
Willie Randolph, Torre’s Mets counterpart, has a total of six World Series rings — two he won as a player with the Yankees in 1977 and 1978, and four he won as one of Torre’s coaches between 1994 and 2004. Randolph was also an excellent player — he had 2,210 career hits in his eighteen big league seasons and was a very good second baseman. It took him a while to get a shot to manage. For a number of years he was interviewed frequently, never hired. Often he felt as if he were being interviewed so that a team could claim it had at least considered an African American for the job.
“It did get frustrating after a while,” he said. “I thought I was ready to manage and that I would do well, given a chance. It took a long time for me to get a chance.”
His chance finally came when the Mets fired Art Howe in October 2004 after two disastrous seasons in New York. Randolph, the kid who had grown up in Brooklyn, had played most of his career with the Yankees but had played for the Mets in 1992, his last big league season. The Mets couldn’t help thinking that Randolph’s New York background, combined with his experience in the Yankee organization, would be a good thing.
They were right. Like Torre, Randolph doesn’t often show a lot of emotion during games — one of the complaints about him among fans during his first season was that he hadn’t been thrown out of a game — but he is extremely intense. He was also well organized and ran a training camp that had little wasted motion and produced a team that played much more fundamentally sound baseball than Howe’s teams had. The Mets were 83–79 in 2005 and then ran away with the National League East title in 2006, with ninety-seven victories.
Although Randolph, who was fifty-two at the start of the 2007 season, still referred to himself as a “young manager,” he was also an established manager, having put his imprint on what was now a winning team that began the season with high expectations.
“I think after last year, it’s not unreasonable for us to say that our goal is to be in the World Series this year,” Glavine said one afternoon in early March. “A lot of things can happen, especially with injuries, but we know we’re good enough to do big things if we stay healthy and play up to our potential.”
The biggest question mark in the Mets’ camp was the starting pitching. Pedro Martinez had undergone shoulder surgery in the fall and was not expected to be back before August. Orlando Hernandez (“El Duque”) listed October 11, 1969, as his birth date, but there wasn’t a soul in the clubhouse who believed he was under forty. Oliver Perez and John Maine had both shown potential down the stretch the previous season, but whether they could be consistent, every-fifth-day starters was a question mark. The fifth starter? It could be Mike Pelfrey, who had pitched a total of twenty-one innings in the major leagues; it could be Humber, who was probably a year away; or it could be any one of several reclamation projects in camp, including Jorge Sosa, Aaron Sele, and Chan Ho Park, who had once signed a five-year $65 million contract with the Texas Rangers. He had won a total of twenty-two games during the duration of that contract, which might explain why teams are reluctant to give pitchers five-year contracts for big money.
The only sure thing was Glavine. He would turn forty-one a week before the season began, but no one doubted that he would take the ball every fifth day and start at least thirty times and pitch at least two hundred innings before the season was over. In eighteen full seasons in the majors, he had started fewer than thirty times just twice — and in those two years he started twenty-nine times — and he had never pitched fewer than 183 innings, pitching more than two hundred innings thirteen times.
Glavine was Mr. Reliable. “If there’s one thing that Tom and I have done well through the years, it’s take the ball every fifth day,” said Greg Maddux, who in twenty-two years has been on the disabled list once — one more time than Glavine. “You can shrug at that, but it’s a bigger deal than people think, especially when pitchers get older. Look at the staff Tom’s on now: who can they absolutely count on every fifth day — one guy. That tells you it isn’t as easy as it looks.”
Mussina has had a few more physical problems than Glavine, but his record for consistency and reliability is close to Glavine’s. Through 2006 he had made five trips to the disabled list — two of them in 1998 — and had started at least thirty times in eleven of forteen complete seasons. In nine consecutive seasons, he pitched at least 200 innings — including years of 243 and 238 innings — and pitched 197 innings in 2006, even though he had a stint on the DL because of a groin injury. He had also won at least eleven games in every year of his fifteen-year big league career, an all-time record.
“You’re talking about two guys who figured out how to pitch at an early age,” said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland. “As they’ve gotten older, they’ve adjusted with time, learned what works and what doesn’t work, and adapted. The great ones are always a step ahead.”
Or, as Ron Darling, who pitched for the Mets, Expos, and Athletics during an eleven-year big league career put it: “When they were young, you knew they’d have long careers because even when they had great stuff, they pitched as if they didn’t. They always used their minds. When you get older, the mind stays even if the stuff doesn’t.”
And so, as the full squads reported and the calendar turned to March and the first exhibition games, the Mets and the Yankees were full of questions about their pitching staffs. But both knew they could rely on Glavine and Mussina to take the ball whenever asked. Because, as Maddux put it, that was what they had always done.