Glavine Outduels Weaver as Mets Take Game 1

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The New York Sun

Who expected to see a baseball game break out last night in Queens?

Baseball is a game of failure, and as many opportunities for redemption as it offers, the player who fails once will usually fail again, and for the same reasons. So no Mets fan who saw Jeff Weaver take the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals could have been happier. Weaver’s playoff failures with the Yankees during his brief stint with the team were legendary. Having come to the team in a midseason trade in 2002 as one of the most lauded young pitchers in the game, he was reduced quickly, because he wasn’t really needed for the playoffs, to the status of a middle and then garbage-time reliever.

It wasn’t his bad pitching that made him special, but his demeanor — sulking, grimacing, scowling at his fielders, and marching around the mound with slack shoulders, kicking at the dirt. He visibly resented his station. In 2003 he gave up the winning run in the fourth game of the World Series, and with that run the Yankees lost any chance of coming back against the Marlins; that offseason Weaver was traded, disgraced, and he settled in as a mediocre starter, first with the Dodgers, then with the Angels (who released him in favor of his own brother this summer), and then with the Cardinals.

Anyone who’d seen him pitch in October would have been able to tell two things about him — one, that he would come into Queens enraged and wanting above all things to do what Kenny Rogers did last week in Detroit, and avenge himself on New York; two, that he would find a way to fail and to be failed, because it’s in his nature as a ballplayer. Last night, in the sixth inning, with Paul Lo Duca on second base, Carlos Beltran proved the point — it took nothing more than a quick, bracing uppercut swing on an inside fastball not more than a few inches from where it was meant to go, and the Mets were up 2-0.

All night, Weaver had done what every Yankees fan had always wanted him to do. He worked quickly, threw to all points of the strike zone, and eased up on the ball enough to let it move on its own, creating a natural sink that left Mets hitters pounding the ball into the dirt. In the end, he did everything he could possibly have done, but like everyone else he has his vulnerabilities, and his — an inability to come in on the hands of left-handed hitters, and a proneness to throwing flat fastballs that leave the yard in a hurry — left him disarmed against a great player who’s establishing a reputation as one of the better postseason hitters we’ve seen in New York in many years.

Weaver’s opposite number was the other half of the story. As impressive as it was to see the impetuous and easily frustrated Weaver focus for once and show why the Yankees once traded for him in the expectation that he’d anchor their rotation for the rest of the decade, it was still more impressive to see Tom Glavine pitch the same way he always does — calmly, deliberatively, and with utter confidence. He relied almost entirely on a fastball that’s probably bested by those of a few hundred other pros for natural movement and velocity, the equivalent of playing piano one-handed.

For him, there were two key at-bats, both against the great Albert Pujols, exactly the kind of disciplined hitter with no holes in his plate coverage or mental approach who stands the best chance against Glavine’s trickery and craftsmanship. In the first inning, Glavine struck him out swinging, on a ball low and in. In the sixth, with the game scoreless and a man on first, he came inside and kept the ball just low enough that when Pujols put his perfect line-drive swing on the ball, it went straight to Jose Reyes for the out.

Glavine didn’t do it alone — his teammates turned three double plays behind him in his seven innings, two of them exceptional plays as Beltran and David Wright snared hot liners and caught Cardinals runners off the bag. And it took Beltran’s blast, the big hit Weaver never got behind him, to mark the difference in the game.

That’s really just bad fortune as things go, but that’s how small the margins are in baseball, the difference between a reputation as a champion and one as a journeyman. A great ballgame is almost by definition one where the difference is made by an inch here and there, and everything turns on the slightest mistakes. Jeff Weaver showed something last night, but Tom Glavine showed more — 40 years old, weeks removed from a health scare that had the baseball world thinking his career was over, he made no mistakes whatever. Here’s hoping the four games to be played over the next four nights are as tense, and as exhilarating.


The New York Sun

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