Ode To Tom Glavine

By Shari Forst
Posted Saturday, April 7, 2007

I never thought I would be writing a piece honoring Tom Glavine.

Those of you who are regular readers of Take The 7 Train know that I hated this signing and, to be blunt, I hated Tom himself for his first two years with the team.

I think a lot of my hatred originated from the fact that he was an Atlanta Brave for so long. Then when the Mets acquired him I was incensed. The Mets had a habit of picking through other teams garbage bins for so long that I figured the Braves had a good reason for letting Glavine slip through their fingers.

Why would the Braves allow one of their top pitchers to leave and come to a division rival unless they knew something the Mets didn't?

Besides-his heart belongs to the Braves, he is only coming here because he knows the Mets will think they are getting the Tom Glavine of 15 years ago, not stopping to think about why the Braves didn't fight harder to keep him. The other part of this thing that puzzled me was at the time the Braves opted to keep right hander Greg Maddux. Now come on, we all know the value of left handers these days, no matter what their skill level.

They may have been right, originally.

When the Questec system popped up to assess balls and strikes Glavine had an awful time of it. He was older and accustomed to getting those close calls, living on the
edge of the plate. If they were nearby, the umpires called them strikes. That wasn't the case when the new Questec system monitoring umpires’ calls and Glavine started getting hit, and hit hard. He was issuing bases on balls due to his refusal to conform, and in turn I remember his Opening Day debut where he got pounded by a score of 15-2 back in 2003. YIKES! I thought to myself, now we know the reason the Braves didn't resign him.

In 2003 Glavine had a 9-14 record with an ERA approaching 5.00, at the end of this season I wondered to myself when are the Mets ever going to stop getting old broken down fossils? They love to get players ten years too late and here is yet another example. Glavine struggled mightily and I cringed along with him watching every agonizing pitch bite the outside corners of the plate, while Tom stubbornly stared out at the umpires because he was never getting those oh-so-sweet calls that made him the Tom Glavine; pitcher extraodinaire.

Watching him stand there in disbelief, start after start, was painful enough, but then when other teams started to really clobber his mid-80s fastballs right down the middle of the plate was, it was simply excruciating.

Then we come to 2004, where Tom posted an 11-14 record with a much better ERA of 3.60. He seemed to pitch a little better, but no matter how he did the team was in such disarray during that season with lame duck manager Art Howe on his way out, no one paid too much attention to what anyone on this team did.

I think it was during this season that Glavine decided he wasn't done, and that attaining 300 major league career wins was not out of the realm of possibility. I don't know how he came to that realization, looking at his team the last two seasons, but maybe he knew something we, as fans, or Mets management didn't even know.

Art Howe was given his walking papers with about 2 weeks left in the 2004 season in something that resembled a messy Hollywood divorce more than the dismissal of a major league manager. Willie Randolph's services were attained that winter by himself newly hired GM Omar Minaya for the upcoming 2005 season, and with that some major changes took place that put the Mets, and Glavine, back on the road to respectability.

Omar Minaya went out and paid big bucks for Pedro Martinez, meaning that all of the pressure would be taken off of Glavine, and I think that helped him turn his career back around. With the addition of Carlos Beltran and Martinez and a few other key players the Mets finished strong in 2005, and Glavine pitched to a .500 record going 13-13 with a 3.53 ERA. He pitched amazing baseball over the second half of 2005 and we started to hear things like "vintage Glavine" instead of the nickname I gave him of "Tom Ghastly".

Something else happened the last half of 2005; I started to like Tom Glavine. There were just some guys like Roberto Alomar and Bobby Bonilla that I never considered true Mets, but Tom Glavine was slowly shedding his Braves aura and shining in the orange and blue. Who would have thought that he would improve with age?

Glavine did not only improve with age, but he exceeded my expectations in 2006, going 15-7 with a 3.83 ERA and being that solid guy in the rotation that the Mets could depend on every fifth day. In fact, he has reached the 30 start plateau in each of his seasons in New York, be them good, bad or indifferent. Even with his health scare last season he barely missed a turn.

He was their one guarantee of a great game in the playoffs last year, in both the NLDS & NLCS, and you couldn't have asked for more. So far this season he has picked up right where he left off in 2006, having an great spring training, and an outstanding debut against the Cardinals on April 1st.

So there it is, my ode to Tom Glavine, something I never thought I would write. He has truly become the "Other Tom Terrific" in my eyes.

 

Shari Forst is a weekly contributor to F.U. and you can also catch her at Take The 7 Train.