TOM GLAVINE will get to No. 300. Surely with help from Scott Schoeneweis, with a home-run barrage by Carlos Delgado, maybe even with Carlos Beltran’s next big hit, Glavine will become the 23rd pitcher in major league history to reach 300 wins.
By the use of Willie Randolph’s short hook, by the time the government finally decides to prove Barry Bonds is a crook, Glavine will win at least five more games before he calls it a day and the baseball writers call it a Hall of Fame career.
So suck it up, Mets fans. It’s going to take greater patience than Joe McDonald had for Nolan Ryan, even more pain tolerance than ever was exhibited by Kaz Matsui. But sometime before Anna and Kris Benson are welcomed back to Shea Stadium, Glavine will win No. 300.
Yesterday, in his fifth start since beating the Yankees on May 19, Glavine not only failed to achieve a victory, but also for a second straight time, he did not get a clue as to what suddenly has gone terribly wrong.
Glavine, bombed for nine runs in Detroit on Sunday, this time coughed up three leads, gave up homers to Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter and didn’t strike out a single batter before Randolph came to get the left-hander one batter (a Jorge Posada double) into the fifth.
Bruce Froemming’s strike zone (44 strikes in 84 Glavine pitches) was tight, but not as tight as Glavine’s face when he admitted to being totally puzzled by his sudden, abject, ineffectiveness.
“If you feel you have to throw a perfect pitch, the odds of making one every time are not good,” he said after the 11-8 loss. “But I can’t say [the strike zone] was my problem, I just didn’t get pitches where I wanted.
“Nothing was clicking from one to the next. You might feel it one pitch, then not the next and that makes the next one that much more difficult to execute. You can’t set hitters up behind in the count.
“Sometimes it’s a physical thing, you don’t feel good. Or, feel too good, which is probably my problem, feeling better than I have all year. There are times I’m muscling up a little, something I have to get away from.
“I’ve never gone though a season where I didn’t go through something like this. The unusual thing is I didn’t feel this coming. Usually you first had a game where you were getting away with stuff. But the three [non-wins] previous I felt comfortable and all of a sudden I’m not making pitches.”
Not so suddenly, the Mets have lost 10 of 13, and could use Glavine, whose ERA has gone from 2.90 to 4.67, to not be pitching like he suddenly is 41 years old.
‘I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “I’ve got people watching me and nobody sees me doing anything different.”
He mostly meant Rick Peterson, but the closer Glavine gets, the more eyes are coming, the harder this gets. Randy Johnson has a shot at 300, and after him maybe nobody ever will again, which makes this a very big deal.
“He’s five away, it’s not like it’s two,” Randolph said of Glavine.
Though the manager insists Glavine has larger immediate concerns, Randolph also isn’t denying his pitcher won’t hear about 300 at least 300 times a day as it gets closer. If it’s going to be six or seven starts between wins, this will turn painful before it turns excruciating.
Roger Clemens took five tries to get to 300 from 299. After going 7-15 in 26 starts at age 42, Early Wynn needed five more starts at age 43 to finish up exactly at 300.
The really big ones usually are achieved with more relief than celebration. Of course, it’s supposed to be hard to win 300 games, otherwise everybody would do it. But we would hate to see it turn into Tom Glavine’s torture.