An old hero young again

Sporting News, The, Oct 18, 1993 by Dave Kindred

He won the one they had to win, and he won the one that turned them toward another World Series. More than once during this 1993 pennant race for the ages, you saw Tom Glavine pitching for Atlanta and you thought: Whitey Ford.

You thought: little lefthanded pitchers who make a hard thing look easy.

You looked it up. Yes, his teammate Ralph Terry once said of Ford, "It's like watching a pitching textbook in the flesh."

Glavine, today's textbook, works fast, throws strikes and changes speeds. He has thrown a six-hitter on 79 pitches.

As Ford did, Glavine comes with a good curveball and a better changeup.

No real fastball from either man.

No fastball, that is, except when they needed a fastball.

Cocky little guys, Glavine and Ford.

Cocky for good reason.

They won.

Forty years ago, little Eddie Ford came off the streets of New York to pitch for the Yankees. In time they would call him Whitey and Slick and Chairman of the Board. As the 1950s turned into the |60s, the Yankees were lords of all they surveyed and Whitey Ford (in |74) became a Hall of Fame pitcher. In 61, when the Yankees may have been baseball's best team ever, Ford won 25 games and lost four. Roger Maris hit 61 home runs, Mickey Mantle hit 54 and four other Yankees hit 21 or more. The Yankees won 109 games and left the Reds for dead in a five-game World Series, Ford winning twice and breaking Babe Ruth's Series record for consecutive shutout innings (at 32).

Baseball's memory is long and rich. Will Clark might be Ted Williams who might have been Joe Jackson. Ozzie Guillen is Pee Wee Reese was Rabbit Maranville. If you knock around in baseball long enough, there'll come a time when you see your old heroes young again. Maybe there was some Carl Hubbell in Whitey Ford. And one day Leo Mazzone knew where he had seen Tom Glavine before. The Atlanta pitching coach had been a little lefthanded pitcher himself, a child of the 1950s, a dreamer only good enough for the bush leagues. Mazzone knew what he saw in Tom Glavine.

He saw: "Whitey Ford, my idol growing up."

Eighteen pitchers in the Hall of Fame never won 20 games three seasons in a row, among them Whitey Ford, Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver and Lefty Gomez. Nolan Ryan never did it, nor did Steve Carlton; both are Hall of Famers to be. Yet Tom Glavine has done it now, 20-20-22, and has made it look so easy that some witnesses say it's nothing special.

A Philadelphia newspaper even carried a headline during the National League playoffs suggesting the Phillies would test Glavine's "fragile ego." Someone had heard Glavine say iio one is awed by a guy's work when it's done without theatrics and without a 95 mph fastball.

Somehow that simple truth was interpreted as evidence of an ego so fragile that it calls Tom Glavine's worth into question.

Amazing how blind people can be. Glavine's ego is as fragile as Fort Knox's front door. And his value is unquestioned by anyone who understands craftsmanship.

Few circumstances in baseball are more comforting than having Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine on your side because they give you a chance to win every game they pitch. They do for Atlanta what Whitey Ford did for New York.

What Glavine has not done, and what Ford did with a record 10 World Series victories, is certify his worth when everyone is paying attention. In the 1991 and |92 playoffs, Glavine went 0-4. His World Series record: 2-2. So even after winning the regular-season finale against Colorado to ensure the N.L. West championship, Glavine came to the playoffs with something to prove.

Oddly, he proved it last Saturday even as the Phillies scored once in the fourth and once in the sixth for a 2-0 lead. Each run scored with nobody out, the first run coming on successive triples. Each time a big inning might have turned the game Philadelphia's way. Each time the next three hitters were men who this season combined for 66 home runs and 287 RBIs. Each time Glavine retired Dave Hollins, Darren Daulton and Pete Incaviglia in order.

Q: In the fourth, what'd you get Hollins with?

Glavine: "Changeup away."

Q: What'd you get Daulton with?

Glavine: "Slider."

Q: And Incaviglia?

Glavine: "Fastball."

In May of 1961, when no one knew the good times ahead, the New York Yankees were troubled. For reasons understood by almost no one, Casey Stengel had been fired the previous winter. Mantle couldn't hit, Maris had eye troubles and the Yankees, at 16-14, were five games behind Detroit.

The imperturbably secure Whitey Ford did this: He built a golf course. He dug out nine holes under the right-field bleachers by Yankee Stadium's bullpen. Bill Stafford, another Yankees pitcher, said, "While the game was going on, Whitey and I played golf for a dollar a hole by putting a baseball with a bat."

Today, in the Atlanta clubhouse, in order to play some golf, a plumbing drain has been removed and a plastic cup dropped into the hole. From one end of the room to the other, the imperturbably secure Glavine and his playmates conduct putting contests.

It was nice, then, that this spring in Fort Lauderdale the pitching coach Leo Mazzone called Tom Glavine over to meet a little blond lefthander now 66 years old.