Living on the Black Read online

  By Mussina’s junior year he was being scouted by major league teams and could throw in the 90-mile-per-hour range, with good control. But the thought of signing a contract straight out of high school never crossed his mind.

  “It was just sort of a given in my family that you went to college,” he said. “Plus, for me, there was a lifestyle question. Did I want to spend three or four years riding buses around in the minor leagues, staying in little towns in lousy hotels, or did I want to have the chance to experience college while playing baseball at the same time. To me, it was a no-brainer.”

  His choice of college was also pretty much a no-brainer once he saw Stanford. It was a long way from home, but that didn’t bother him. It was a great school with a great baseball team — a perennial national contender. In fact, the Cardinal won the college World Series during Mussina’s senior year of high school.

  “One thing I wanted to do was go someplace where they played a lot of games,” Mussina said. “If I had stayed in the East, I would have been at a school where they played a forty- or forty-five-game schedule. In the South or in California, it was more like seventy games.”

  At the end of his senior year, even though he and his family had put out the word very clearly that he was going to Stanford and had no interest in signing with a major league team, he was drafted anyway — by the Baltimore Orioles, in the eleventh round. Frequently teams will take a flyer on a player they think has potential in the later rounds of the draft on the off-chance that a big bonus might change his mind.

  Doug Melvin, who is now the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, was the chief scout for the Orioles back then, and, even though he had been told Mussina had no interest in signing, he took a drive into central Pennsylvania to see him pitch that spring.

  “I can still remember watching Mike and thinking this was a kid who would be a big leaguer and probably get there faster than most kids coming out of high school,” Melvin said. “He had a very mature way about him on the mound. He threw hard, which you expect, but he also threw a lot of different pitches. He looked more like twenty-eight out there than eighteen because of his demeanor.”

  Melvin stuck all that in the back of his mind, knowing it would be at least three-years before the Orioles would have another chance to draft Mussina. The Orioles did make a phone call to see if Mussina had any interest in signing but were quickly told no, so they backed off and never made a formal offer.

  Unlike most kids leaving home, especially small-town kids, Mussina felt no sense of dread or any real homesickness when he arrived at Stanford. “When I got there, we had a team that was coming off a national championship and had a number of experienced pitchers coming back,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever lacked for self-confidence, but I do remember wondering if I would be good enough to pitch on a team that experienced and that deep. I can still remember riding my bicycle across campus one day and thinking to myself, ‘Okay, here you are; are you going to be good enough?’ ”

  He was good enough, fitting into the rotation right from the beginning. The only setback — and it was a major one — came early in his sophomore year. He was pitching against Stanford’s archrival, California, when he felt pain in his shoulder while throwing a pitch.

  “It was certainly scary,” he said. “I had never been injured before, and I had no idea if I’d pitch again or be the same pitcher I had been before. I guess there were a few moments when I wondered if I might be through, but not many, to tell the truth. My focus was really on getting healthy and getting back on the mound and pitching again. I think I always thought I would be okay. I was young enough to be an optimist, I suppose.

  “But the other thing I realized was that this was one of the reasons I’d come to college. People do get hurt; you hear about it all the time. If by some chance I couldn’t pitch again, well, a Stanford degree wasn’t a bad alternative. I didn’t want my baseball career to be over at the age of nineteen, but I knew if for some reason things turned out that way, I still had plenty of alternatives. My life wasn’t going to be over.”

  In a sense, Mussina was lucky to be injured when he was so young. The damage wasn’t serious enough to require surgery, and by the fall of his junior year he was pitching pain free. And not only was he pain free, he was emerging as a star. Under baseball’s draft rules, he was eligible for the June 1990 draft because he had been in college for three-years. Mussina had filled out while at Stanford, and, as Doug Melvin had expected, had become a much better pitcher — even with the time lost to injury — than he had been in high school. The scouts were back in droves that spring, and this time Mussina was happy to see them.

  “By then I felt I was ready,” he said. “I had taken some extra courses with the idea that if I got drafted high enough at the end of my junior year, I would only need one semester to graduate in the fall after I finished playing baseball that summer. I had a good junior season, and I was fairly certain I’d be a first-round pick, although you can never be sure. I’d heard everything from the top ten to somewhere in the second round.”

  It wasn’t the top ten and it wasn’t the second round. The Orioles were once again very interested but weren’t sure Mussina would still be there when they picked twentieth in the first round. “At one point we heard Texas was going to take him,” Melvin said. “They were a couple of spots in front of us. It was going to be Mike or Daniel Smith. When they picked Smith we were very happy because we were pretty certain at that point [Mike would] be there when we picked.”

  He was there, but it was a closer call than Melvin imagined. The Oakland Athletics, picking before Texas and Baltimore, also liked Mussina a lot. But they were fascinated by the potential of high school phenom Todd Van Poppel. The A’s were torn: take a chance that they could sign Van Poppel, who everyone was convinced was going to be a superstar, or go with Mussina, who most thought would be a very good major league pitcher.

  “I think the decision in the end was to roll the dice,” said Tony LaRussa, the A’s manager at the time. “I know everyone really liked Mike Mussina a lot. But the thought was we might be passing on the next great pitcher if we didn’t go after Van Poppel. Obviously, Mussina has turned out to be a great pitcher.”

  Mussina was extremely happy to be drafted by the Orioles, which appeared to be a team on the rise. They had bottomed out in 1988, losing twenty-one straight games to start the season, but had bounced back to go 87–75 in 1989. What’s more, Baltimore was less than two hundred miles from Montoursville.

  “I had grown up a Yankees fan, even though I was right between the Phillies and Pirates,” he said. “It was only a couple of hours to go into New York to see a game every once in a while, and I could watch their games on TV and listen to them on radio most of the time. But if I wasn’t going to the Yankees, I was perfectly happy to be taken by the Orioles.”

  Since he was twenty-one years old and had three-years of college-pitching experience, Mussina was sent straight to Hagerstown, the Orioles Double-A affiliate, meaning he was only two steps from the major leagues. It isn’t unusual at all for college players to start out in Double-A, especially since the top level of college baseball is usually considered to be about the equivalent of Double-A ball.

  “Except,” Mussina said, “when you get to the minors, guys aren’t using metal bats anymore. That makes the adjustment to the pro game considerably easier for a pitcher.”

  Mussina reported to Hagerstown on July 4, meeting the team just as it was returning from a long road trip. “They had played poorly on the road trip,” he remembered. “I walked into the clubhouse the first day, and the first thing that happened was we had a team meeting. Jerry Narron was the manager, and he was really angry. He just aired the whole team out. I sat there thinking, ‘Welcome to pro ball, kid.’ ”

  The rest of his welcome that first season went about as well as he might have hoped. Not wanting to rush a first-round draft pick, the team gave Mussina what amounted to two weeks of spring training to get ready to p
itch in his first game. When he made his debut, on July 19, he was lifted after four innings, even though he hadn’t given up a run.

  “It became apparent pretty quickly that Mike was ready for just about anything we threw at him,” Melvin said. “I remember talking to one of our minor league pitching scouts a little while after he got to Hagerstown. I asked him how Mike was adapting, and he said to me, ‘Adapting? Doug, he’s going to be adapting to the majors very soon. This kid isn’t going to spend much time in the minors.’ ”

  Mussina was already throwing a variety of pitches, including a knee-buckling knuckle-curveball that he had starting throwing in high school and had developed further at Stanford. “He was twenty-one but pitched like he was thirty-one,” Melvin said. “He had a presence on the mound; he had command of his pitches; and he had great control.”

  By mid-August, Mussina had started seven games and had a sporty 1.49 ERA. He had struck out forty batters in forty-two innings and had walked only seven, a mind-bending number for someone so young and inexperienced. “I really didn’t feel that inexperienced, though,” Mussina said. “I had faced a lot of good hitters in college.”

  The Orioles decided there was no sense keeping Mussina at Double-A and moved him to Triple-A Rochester to finish the season. He was even better there, pitching to an ERA of 1.35 and then pitching well in two playoff games. He was so good, there was talk during the off-season that he might be ready to make the big league team the next spring, even though he had only pitched half a season of minor league ball.

  Before spring training, though, there was the matter of returning to Stanford to complete his degree requirements. He did that in the fall, helped by the fact that Stanford didn’t start classes until mid-September, which dovetailed perfectly with the end of the minor league season. He graduated in December, with a degree in economics. To this day when people talk about all of Mussina’s accomplishments, one of the first things that comes up is the fact that he graduated from Stanford in three and a half years while playing baseball.

  “Graduating from college doesn’t mean you’re smart,” Mussina likes to say. “But it does mean you were smart enough to know that having a degree is a good thing.”

  A college grad, Mussina reported to spring training in 1991, figuring he would be headed for Triple-A Rochester in April. He was given number 42 — a low number for a nonroster player — but he harbored no illusions about where he fit in at that moment.

  “I knew I’d start the season in Rochester, and if I pitched well, depending on how the big league team was doing, there was a chance I’d get called up. I figured at worst, unless I really screwed up, I’d get called up in September.

  “I didn’t give up a hit the first nine innings I pitched that spring. All of a sudden, I looked up and we were only about a week away from breaking camp, and I was still with the team. But I also knew there were still nine starting pitchers in camp, and I was a nonroster player. So, when they told me I was going down, I wasn’t that surprised.”

  The Orioles were playing their final season in Memorial Stadium and were hoping to contend for the American League East title. They never came close, playing so poorly that team legend Frank Robinson was replaced as manager by Johnny Oates midway through the season. With the team out of contention, there was no reason not to start bringing up prospects from the minor leagues. By midsummer, there was no brighter prospect in the system than Mussina.

  Mussina had been more than okay at Triple-A in 1991, winning ten games with a league-leading ERA of 2.87. He also led the league in strikeouts. On July 30, he pitched in Columbus against the Clippers, the Yankees farm club, and threw a shutout.

  “I was pitching as well as anyone in the league and better than anyone on the team. The Orioles were going nowhere. I knew there were business considerations involved: if they called me up during the first half of the season, I would be arbitration-eligible a year earlier, and teams think about things like that. But now it was late July, and all of that was past. I kept wondering, when was the call going to come?

  On July 31, Mussina was in his hotel room in Columbus when the call came. Only it wasn’t for him. It was for his roommate, Jim Poole. “Someone from the Orioles called; I don’t even remember who it was,” Mussina said. “They asked for Pooley, who was out. They said, ‘Please have him call us right away; we’re bringing him up.’ I went and found him and told him. Then I went to the weight room to work out because I was so frustrated. I mean, I was happy for Pooley, but I was thinking, ‘What about me? What do I have to do to get called up? I was angry.’ ”

  He went back to his room after about an hour and found Poole packing. The Orioles were in Seattle, and Poole had been told to fly there to meet the team. “Where’ve you been?” Poole asked. (Very few people had cell phones in 1991.) “The team called a little while ago. You’re going up too.”

  Mussina was baffled. “I just talked to them an hour ago when they called for you; why wouldn’t they have told me then?” he asked.

  Poole laughed. “They didn’t know it was you. They just asked for my room. They didn’t realize we were roommates. They called back asking for you right after I hung up with them.”

  Mussina called Baltimore and was told that yes, he was being called up. He was not to fly to Seattle, though, because his first start would be in Chicago in four days. That gave him time to throw his bullpen session that day in Columbus, fly to Rochester, pack up his car, and drive to Baltimore. Then he flew to Chicago to meet the team.

  “The funny thing was there was some kind of Orioles fan-club trip to Chicago for the weekend,” he said. “They were all on my flight. So was Chuck Thompson [the Orioles Hall of Fame radio announcer]. He was traveling with the fan-club group for some reason. He recognized me from spring training and said, ‘Hey, come on and ride the bus with us to the hotel.’ So, I threw my stuff underneath the bus and rode to the Hyatt with the fan club and Chuck.”

  The Orioles had been convinced for a while that Mussina was ready for the call-up. But they were a team that had traditionally treated young pitchers with care, and this was no different.

  “One thing you don’t do with young pitchers is rush them,” Oates said after Mussina was pitching for him. “Mike walked into the clubhouse and looked like he had been there for years. He probably needed less input from me and Boz than almost anyone on our staff.”

  “Boz” was Orioles pitching coach Dick Bosman, who had been Rochester’s pitching coach when Mussina first arrived there. There wasn’t all that much Bosman had wanted to change in the young pitcher, except for helping him do a better job of holding runners on first. Because a right-handed pitcher has his back to a runner on first, he often has trouble knowing just how big the runner’s lead might be. Bosman suggested to Mussina that he bend way down, almost to his knees, while getting into the stretch position, so he could sneak a look at the runner through his legs before standing up to his set position. Years later, even after he had become adept at holding runners, Mussina still used the Bosman dip on his way to getting set.

  “It worked, and it became habit,” he said. “There’s really been no reason to change.”

  Mussina’s big league debut on August 4 was mostly an auspicious one. He pitched seven and two-thirds innings and made one mistake — giving up a home run to Frank Thomas — that cost him the game. Charlie Hough, the White Sox veteran knuckleballer, pitched a shutout, and Mussina, in spite of giving up just four hits and the one run, lost the game 1–0. Ten days later, in his third start, he got his first win, beating the Texas Rangers 10–2 in Memorial Stadium. At that point he was only a little more than a year removed from the campus at Stanford.

  He had clearly arrived in the Major Leagues. And almost everyone expected him to stay for quite a while.

  3

  Cy Young… Cy Almost

  BY THE TIME MIKE MUSSINA made his major league debut, Tom Glavine was in his fourth full season with the Braves.

  He remembered his debut on Augus
t 17, 1987, more for his first major league at bat than for anything he did on the mound. As would become part of a pattern throughout his career, he had struggled in the first inning, giving up two runs before getting Dale Berra — son of Yogi — to fly out to center with the bases loaded. In the top of the second, he had come up against Mike Scott, who had won the Cy Young Award the year before, amid constant complaints that his sudden emergence as a star had as much to do with his ability to scuff balls as to throw them.

  “What he threw at me didn’t need to be scuffed,” Glavine said, laughing. “First pitch came out of his hand and was by me before I could start to move the bat. I remember it made this whooshing sound that I had never heard before in my life. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so this is what the big leagues is like.’ My lasting impression of that night was trying to hit against Scott as much as anything else.”

  Glavine lasted less than four innings, giving up five runs, and took the loss. It hardly mattered. He would have liked to have pitched better, but the thrill of making it to the majors, of having all his family and friends there, took a lot of the sting out of the loss. That and the fact that he had lost to Mike Scott, who he could now testify firsthand was unhittable.

  Five nights later, he made his first start in Atlanta, with half of Billerica again in attendance. Mike Scott was nowhere in sight. The Pirates’ starting pitcher was Bob Walk, and Glavine, feeling much more relaxed both on the mound and at the plate, pitched seven and a third innings, gave up three runs, and left with a 10–3 lead. The bullpen held the Pirates right there, and Glavine was 1–1 as a big leaguer.

  “I honestly can’t remember the last couple innings of that game,” he said. “I remember that I stayed in the dugout, and I remember I was a wreck in the ninth inning and thought the game would never end.”

  He and the family celebrated at length following the victory, taking pictures on the field, making sure all the appropriate souvenirs were collected. In addition to his first win, Glavine had his first brush with big league practical jokes.