ON DECEMBER 13, 2007, former U.S. senator George Mitchell finally made public his long-awaited report on steroid use in baseball, twenty-one months after MLB commissioner Bud Selig had asked him to undertake the project.
Neither Mussina nor Glavine was among the eighty-nine names that appeared in Mitchell’s report. Glavine had used the supplement creatine for a couple of years but had stopped using it when baseball began drug testing in 2003.
“It was cleared by everyone, but I didn’t want to take any chances at all,” Glavine said. “Every time someone tests positive, their excuse is that they were using a legal supplement and got a bad batch. I didn’t want to be the one guy who was taking a legal supplement, did get a bad batch, and had his name sullied forever. It just wasn’t worth the risk, no matter how small.”
Glavine said the creatine, which he took after starts in season and occasionally during his preseason training, definitely helped him. “I felt a noticeable difference,” he said. “I recovered much more quickly from physical stress when I was on it. I would drink it in the car on the way home after I had pitched, and I was far more able to do my off-day exercises than when I wasn’t taking it.”
In the end, though, he didn’t think even a 1 percent risk of blowing up his chances for the Hall of Fame was worth it.
Mussina still took creatine. “I was told categorically that it was legal and taking it would never lead to a positive test,” he said. “So far, that’s proven to be true. I still take it, and I’ve never tested positive.”
Like Glavine, Mussina could feel the difference when he took creatine, which he only did during the season.
Neither man was surprised by what was in the Mitchell Report or who was in the Mitchell Report. “The only real surprise to me were some of the names not in the report,” Glavine said. “I think we all know there are guys out there who took steroids who weren’t named. There wasn’t anyone in there who I went, ‘Oh my God, no way.’ ”
The most prominent Met named in the report was Paul Lo Duca, who signed a free-agent contract with the Washington Nationals when the Mets had no interest in re-signing him. Glavine considered Lo Duca a friend, but, like most baseball people, knew there were far more users than the public suspected.
Mussina felt the same way. The two most prominent Yankee names in the report were Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, both teammates of his in 2007. Clemens’s miraculous pitching in his midforties — considerably better than he had pitched in his late thirties — was viewed by many with skepticism, in spite of all the stories about his extraordinary workout regimen.
Earlier in the season, long before the Mitchell Report became public, Ron Darling, who had been on the Oakland Athletics “Bash Brothers” teams led by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire in the early 1990s, explained the fallacy of the “he works out like crazy; therefore, he doesn’t use steroids” theory.
“When I was with the Mets in the ’80s, we would come in at the end of a game, eat the postgame meal, and talk about where we were going that night,” he said. “When I got to the A’s in ’92, guys would come in after the game, change into a T-shirt and shorts, and go down to the weight room for an hour. Then they would come back the next day and do it again — sometimes twice — before the game.
“What people don’t understand is that steroids don’t just make you big, they allow you to work much harder in order to get big. It’s about recovery. There is no way you can work weights that hard two or three times a day and play baseball without help, without something inside you that allows your body to recover so you can keep up that workout regimen.”
Like many others, Mussina wasn’t that surprised to see Clemens named in the report. He was surprised to see Pettitte named but not stunned.
One thing the report made clear, in addition to the names, is that more and more players (in all sports, not just baseball) are using human growth hormone (HGH) as their drug of choice, in large part because it cannot be detected by urinalysis, the current method used to test players in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League. Only through a blood test is it possible to detect HGH, and even that is not infallible.
“I think there are too many questions about blood testing to start doing it,” Glavine said. “How long do you keep the blood? Who gets to see the test? How reliable is it? I just think they have to come up with some kind of reliable urinalysis test for it as soon as possible.”
Mussina disagreed. “If you really are serious about stopping guys, I don’t think there’s any choice,” he said. “I know there would be issues and questions, but you have to thrash that all out between the union and the owners. If they wait, then this thing is far from over.”
Clearly, it is far from over.
PLAYING BASEBALL will be over for Glavine and Mussina soon. Both went into 2008 thinking it would be their last season — Glavine in his twenty-second year in the majors, Mussina in his eighteenth.
It is worth noting that Glavine honestly believed that 2007 would be his final year as a pitcher. He never completely closed the door on coming back in 2008, but he said repeatedly, “Once I do what I’m trying to do [this was in the days of the Number That Could Not Be Named], I think I’ll probably want to hang it up.”
He did what he was trying to do — and more — but could not resist the urge to return to Atlanta for one more season. “Let’s face it,” he said. “I have the rest of my life to not pitch.”
Mussina’s future was perhaps a little more complicated, though he insisted it wasn’t. He had one year left on his contract for $11.5 million.
“I’m not going to be one of these players who announces his retirement five different times. But right now, I don’t see myself pitching after this year. I’m not going to be close enough to three hundred, even if I have a good year, that I’m going to want to come back for at least two more years and, realistically, three more years.
“In 2006, I pitched about as well as I could have hoped to pitch, and I won fifteen games. If I win fifteen games a year — stay healthy, pitch well, all of that — for the next three-years, I would still be five wins short of three hundred, and I’d be forty-two years old. What’s more, my older son will be a teenager by then, and my younger one is only a few years behind. I don’t want to come home just when they’re saying, ‘See ya, Dad.’
“I’ve had a good career. I’m lucky to be in a position that whenever I retire, I don’t have to do anything. I can pick and choose what I want to do or what I don’t want to do. If I have a great year, that might make it harder to walk away. But my plan right now is to walk away, and when the calls come the next spring from teams desperate for pitching, my answer — even if I’m tempted — will be no.”
Whenever Glavine finishes, he will no doubt remain in baseball. He can have a job in TV the day he retires, and with TBS located in Atlanta he could work for them and never leave home. Or he might do one game a week on the road for ESPN or Fox. “Just nothing that means I travel all the time,” he said. “I don’t see myself back in uniform because of the travel.”
But a front-office job would not be out of the question somewhere down the line. In any event, Glavine will remain around baseball.
Not Mussina. “The hardest part will be that there’s no gradual pulling away,” he said. “You just cut the cord, and it’s over. You aren’t a player anymore. That will be hard; I know that. But I don’t think I’ll have any problem just hanging out at home, at least for a while. Could I be a pretty good pitching coach or a manager? I’d like to think so. But it isn’t what I want to do.”
He smiled. “The Little League World Series is right here in town [Williamsport] every August. I’ll go do TV for that for ten days and sleep in my own bed every night. That will be enough.”
Time will tell for both men. If 2008 is their last season as pitchers, each can walk away from the game — as difficult as that will be — knowing that he got everything he could possibly get from the talent he was given. Neither ever came up short on effort.
“I think all of us are the same in one sense,” Mussina said. “When we’re kids and we’re playing the game strictly for fun, we never seriously think we’ll pitch in the major leagues. We dream it, but we don’t really think it will happen. I grew up in a small town; I know Tom did too. We both loved the game and wanted to play it for as long as we could, as well as we could.
“Neither one of us ever imagined we would pitch as long as we have, get paid anywhere close to what we’ve been paid, or pitch as well as we’ve both pitched.”
In fact, when Glavine wrote his autobiography in 1995 at the age of twenty-nine after the Braves won the World Series, he wrote, “I can see myself pitching until I’m thirty-five but not beyond that.”
When Mussina signed his six-year contract with the Yankees that would keep him in the majors until he was thirty-seven, a friend he had grown up with in Montoursville pointed out to him that he had said he wouldn’t pitch much past thirty and certainly not past thirty-five.
“I know that,” Mussina joked. “But I never thought I’d be this good.”
Glavine and Mussina are still out there, grinding through another off-season, and another spring training, and another marathon season because they love what they do and they can still do it well.
They are pitchers. Even when they stop pitching, they will still be pitchers. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, just under eight thousand men had pitched in the major leagues through the end of the 2007 season.
Among them, Glavine ranks twenty-first in all-time victories. Mussina is forty-fifth.
Put simply, they are two of the best pitchers of all time. And they aren’t quite done yet.