Glavine’s Night to Remember Becomes Another to Forget

He was once a fourth-round draft choice of the Kings and has long maintained a hockey mentality.

This is the way it is with Tom Glavine: He pitched the last six weeks of the 1992 season despite a broken rib and had not missed a start in 12 years before he was scratched as the Game 1 starter of this World Series because of flu.

“I can be stubborn,” Glavine had said as the Atlanta Braves worked out at Yankee Stadium on Monday and the veteran left-hander, having lost seven pounds in the battle with flu, tried to conserve his energy in preparation for his start in Game 3 on Tuesday night.

“At times,” Glavine said, “I can honestly say I pitched when I shouldn’t have.”

No one was questioning whether he should have pitched Tuesday night.

There may be no pitcher in a renowned rotation in whom the Braves have more postseason faith.

“He’s our Whitey Ford,” Atlanta pitching coach Leo Mazzone said, referring to the former big-game pitcher of the New York Yankees, who had the Braves on the ropes, threatening a sweep, leading the best-of-seven series, 2-0.

“This,” Glavine said, going in, having regained some of the seven pounds and having retained an afternoon plate of ravioli, his first solid food in four days, “is a situation and opportunity I relish. I want the ball.”

That mentality has served Glavine well. He is the winningest left-hander of the last 11 years and only teammate Greg Maddux has won more games in that span.

No, the question wasn’t whether he should have been pitching at what he said was about 85% on the physical scale.

It was whether he should have been sent out to pitch the eighth inning after having seemingly given the Braves all they could have hoped for from a pitcher coming off an illness and still not 100%. Glavine led the Yankees, 5- 3, having scattered six hits. In Game 3 of the National League championship series, he gave up one run on seven hits in seven innings of a 1-0 victory and was removed at that point.

This time, after a discussion with Manager Bobby Cox, Glavine was allowed to go out for the eighth and promptly yielded a single to Joe Girardi and a game-tying homer to Chuck Knoblauch, setting the stage for extra innings and a 6-5 Yankee victory in the 11th that left Atlanta buried, 0-3, in the series.

Glavine, Cox and Mazzone all defended the decision to send the starter back out, which was to be expected.

“Bobby and I had our normal discussion and I told him that I felt fine,” Glavine said. “What happened in that inning wasn’t the result of my being tired or making bad pitches. It was a matter of bad luck. What else do you call it when a guy hits a pop-fly homer 315 feet. I don’t know all of the American League parks, but Knoblauch’s ball wouldn’t have gone out of even one National League park.”

The opposite-field fly ticked off the glove of a leaping Brian Jordan and barely cleared the fence.

“I know that everybody is going to ask why I left him in,” said Cox, “but Tommy was throwing great and didn’t want to come out. We got beat by a popup to right field, a Yankee home run. I mean, they hit three of them tonight.”

He referred to home runs by Chad Curtis against Glavine in the fifth and by Tino Martinez in the seventh, although that was a towering shot that didn’t seem to fall into the pop-fly category and may have been a warning that his starter was losing it. Glavine, however, did shake it off to get the final two outs of the inning before meeting with Cox and Mazzone in the dugout regarding the eighth.

“Nothing had dropped off,” Mazzone said. “His stuff was the same, his mechanics were the same. I thought he was going to go nine.”

Glavine had thrown only 72 pitches when he started the eighth, a few less than in his seven shutout innings against the Mets, but what had been a 5-1 lead after four innings was slowly shrinking, and Cox had John Rocker and Mike Remlinger throwing in the bullpen in the seventh.

“I felt fine,” Glavine said. “I felt better than I anticipated feeling [because of his illness] and was sharper than I anticipated. Any time you blow a lead it’s distressing, particularly this time of the year, but it would be easier to take if I could say I pitched terribly. I mean, there’s not many times I’ll give up five runs and be able to say later that I feel I made only one mistake [the Martinez home run]. That’s the way it goes. The guy hits a 315-foot homer and we end up losing. Of course, that fence is there for both teams.”

There was certainly nothing cheap about the home run the improbable Curtis slugged on a Remlinger changeup in the 11th to win it.

Remlinger had thrown two fastballs--one of which Curtis fouled and the other he took for a ball--and felt the “changeup was the right pitch at the right time. It just had too much of the plate, but I’d throw it again in that situation.”

The situation is now on the dark side of grim for the Braves. No team has come back from 0-3 to win a Series.

“It’s going to happen sometime,” Glavine said, “and we have to convince ourselves that we can be that team. We just have to figure out how to get the first win. We’ve lost in every way possible in this Series.”

Said Remlinger: “The question is, do we want to go home tomorrow or do we want to make a fight of it. Each of us has to look in the mirror and have an answer by game time.”

Team of the decade? That’s no longer the issue, Chipper Jones said.

“We pitched well, defended well and hit well,” he said, “and we still lost. That’s pretty demoralizing. Now we have to find a way to save some face any way we can.”

It would not have cost anyone any face if Cox had removed Glavine after seven. Did that stubborn hockey mentality get in the way or is that a reach measured against a 315-foot home run?