[blog] An Appreciation of Mike Mussina

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An Appreciation of Mike Mussina
By Tyler Kepner


Mike Mussina had a charmed season in 2008, and he knew it. Mussina’s stuff
was diminished, but he had the guile to win more games than he ever had in
a season. He was healthy –- remarkably lucky to be so, he thought -– and
observers noticed him pitching down and in more effectively, changing speeds
like a master.

Most pitchers would have wanted to come back for more. But Mussina’s head
guides his heart, not the other way around. He was always able to put his
success in perspective, to understand and savor the final moments of a fine
career. It could never get any better, and Mussina knew it.

In August at the Metrodome, I asked him about his future. He had a
well-reasoned answer.

“If I’m physically OK, then I can keep pitching,” he said. “It’s a
question of physically can I do it and mentally, do I want to keep going
through this? When you’re 15-7, it’s always fun. The question you’ve
got to ask yourself is, ‘Can you deal with it when it’s not fun, when
it’s hard?’ And sometimes the reason to stop is because you just don’t
want to deal with it anymore. You know it’s going to happen. You know
it’s not going to be great all the time. You know there are going to be
down times. Do you want to deal with that anymore, after 17 or 18 seasons?”

Today we found out for certain what we’d pretty much known already:
that Mussina will retire, with a formal announcement coming soon. He
would rather spend his time at home in Montoursville, Pa., and it’s
hard to blame him.

As a beat writer, I’ll miss him a lot. Mussina was one of my all-time
favorite players to cover. He could be amused by his surroundings or
curmudgeonly about any inconvenience. He did crossword puzzles, of course,
and read novels and issues of Old Car Trader magazine. He wore funny
T-shirts from 80stees.com – the Flux Capacitor, Abe Froman: Sausage
King of Chicago, and many more. And he guzzled Mountain Dew all day long.

When you needed a big-picture, insightful quote about the state of the
team — and you wanted unvarnished honesty — Mussina was the go-to guy
among the pitchers. When you had a question about a labor or rules issue,
Mussina was the man to ask. And when you wanted to learn about pitching
 -– this was my favorite thing about him -– Mussina was willing to share.

No pitcher could break down a start the way Mussina could, in common-sense
language that made it easy for newspaper readers to understand. He offered
insights I’d never heard before, like the sound a curveball makes as it
slices the air, or the feeling a pitcher gets when he’s really on his
game: he said it feels as if you can throw a pitch straight through the
catcher, the umpire, all the way to the backstop, with crispness and
action the whole journey.

He was a tougher pitcher than people give him credit for. He never liked
to throw at hitters, but when he took a line drive off his skull, in 1998,
he came back and learned a better way to field his position. He won seven
Gold Gloves and had a delivery that the Hall of Famer Jim Palmer tells
aspiring pitchers to imitate.

“You try to give kids a Mike Mussina wind-up,” Palmer said when we spoke
the other night, “so they never get hurt, they throw the ball over the
plate, everybody likes them and they like what they’re doing.”

Palmer said Mussina made in-game adjustments better than any pitcher he
ever played with -– and the Orioles in Palmer’s day were a pitching
factory. It was often said that Mussina was his own pitching coach, and
that is how it had to be.

“You’re pitching on feel, you’re out there on your own,” Mussina said
in 2007. “There’s no coach, there’s no video. When something’s going
wrong or it doesn’t feel right, you have to be able to solve the problem
right there.”

Much more often than not, Mussina solved the problem. He never had one
shining season, like Orel Hershiser in 1988, but he was relentlessly
consistent, winning half his starts, making the playoffs a bunch of
times and taking his chances in October.

Mussina never won a championship ring, but he always believed that Game 7
of the 2003 A.L.C.S., when he thwarted the Red Sox in his first career
relief appearance, was as satisfying as any World Series could be.

You got the feeling, knowing Mussina, that he got exactly the kind of
career he wanted. Maybe it’s good enough for the Hall of Fame, maybe
it’s not. But I’ll bet he is leaving with no regrets, except that he
never got to pitch to his dream strike zone:

“Knees to arm pits,” he said once, his voice rising, “and about 30 inches
wide!”

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/an-appreciation-of-mike-mussina/

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◆ From: 140.109.23.212
推 akainorei:看完更加不希望他退休了
推 fizeau:請問那句when he took a line drive off his skull, in 199
→ fizeau:是啥意思
推 pikachu123:應該是指他被Sandy Alomar, Jr.打得line drive打到頭
推 findme:這篇寫得好....但也希望有辭藻優美的翻譯可以看
推 Aldousphyx:^_^跟偶像一樣是mountain dew lover~