Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember (review)

On November 21, 2008, New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina retired after eighteen seasons in Major League Baseball, finishing with a record of 270 wins and 153 losses and an ERA of 3.68, with 2,813 strikeouts. In his final game, at the age of thirty-nine, the right-hander won number 20 for the season, the first time he reached this mark in his career; he was able "to go out on my own terms," as he said in the press conference to announce his retirement. Although he never won a Cy Young Award and his teams never won a World Series, he was selected to be an All-Star five times and won seven Gold Glove awards, including 2008; it was "the end of a real special career, a Hall of Fame-type career," according to the Yankees general manager Brian Cashman.

Lefty Tom Glavine, aged forty-two, had a disappointing season in 2008. The two-time Cy Young winner, ten-time All-Star, and World Series champion in 1995, returned to Atlanta, his first major-league team, after five seasons with the New York Mets, but he finished the season on the sixty-day Disabled List, for the first time in his long career, with a torn flexor tendon in his pitching elbow. He pitched only 63.1 innings, with a 2-4 record and a 5.54 ERA—uncharacteristic statistics for a 305-game winner with an ERA of 3.54 over a twenty-two-year career. He became a free agent at the end of the season.

I include this information because it was not available when Washington Post sports journalist John Feinstein completed Living on the Black before the 2008 season began. Feinstein is an excellent writer, and his books on golf, tennis, and basketball have been well-received. But this book was disappointing, not because it wasn't a good read but because of the premature choice of seasons to examine. He originally planned to write about a pitcher in 2000, but David Cone, his choice, was the subject of a book by Roger Angell; he didn't return to the topic until the 2007 season. The approach in Living on the Black is familiar to Feinstein's readers. He follows Glavine and Mussina, both pitching near the end of their careers for New York teams, through the 2007 season, although he outlines their history quite well.

Mussina began his career with a ninety-five mph four-seam fastball among his pitches, and emerged as one of the best control pitchers in baseball, giving up few walks; he was also an outstanding fielder. He had a good slider, one of the best change-ups, and added a splitter to replace his curveball; he worked both sides of the plate, changed arm angles and speeds, and became a ground-ball pitcher towards the end of his career. He won 10 or more games for seventeen consecutive seasons. He was a dominant pitcher, and in a September 2001 game against Boston, he retired the first twenty-six batters before the perfect game was broken up by a single; but the performance he best remembers was during Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. With the Yankees trailing the Red Sox, 4–0, Mussina entered the game with runners on first and third with nobody out; he struck out Jason Varitek and then Johnny Damon hit into a double play. He pitched three scoreless innings and New York came back to win. These events are noted in the book but take a backseat to developments in the 2007 season.

Glavine had excellent control as well, with a lot of movement on his pitches, relying on an effective circle-change to set up his cut fastball. He was a good-hitting pitcher, winning four Silver Slugger awards and ending with a career average of .188; he also took...