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On a day headlined by two Yankees, Mike Mussina didn’t enter the Baseball Hall of Fame with the sizzle that comes with playing in pinstripes. Perhaps that’s fitting for someone who can't decide which team owns his heart.
Mussina's career was a montage of conflicting events. He seemed to show up late to every party, landing in the Big Apple just after the '90s dynasty decayed from champions to challengers. He would be the only Yankee to reach the Hall of Fame without having won a World Series. Or is he a Yankee? To gaze upon his career, and the blank cap on his plaque, suggests a pitcher stuck in historical limbo.
Mussina reached two World Series, and lost both. He labored toward 300 wins, yet finished with 270. He finished in the top-five in the AL Cy Young vote six times, yet never won one. He enters the portal of immortality on his second ballot, then gets lost among his more glittering colleagues. It's hard to make it about Mussina when Roy "Doc" Halladay's widow is making the masses cry. Then Mussina has the biggest day of his baseball career, like so many nights of his career, closed by Mariano Rivera. The relief pitcher nonpareil became the first to be paraded to Cooperstown as a unanimous choice. Moose may have won, but Mo got the save, and keeps the lingering image as the last man on the mound.
Even The New York Post ran a piece questioning Mussina's qualifications. While 300 wins is the watermark for a laminated ticket to the Hall of Fame, plenty of pitchers fell short, including Halladay (203). Plenty of pitchers without a World Series ring have been inducted. And few pitchers had a better swan song than Mussina, who won 20 games for the first time in his career in his final season, as well as a Gold Glove, while finishing sixth in the AL Cy Young voting.
Perhaps the most animated Mussina ever got on the mound was during his final game. As Joe Torre started his stroll to the mound to chat with his pitcher, perhaps even replace him in the ninth inning, Mussina barked at his old skipper to park it back in the dugout. Stunned by the sudden flash of emotion from his low-key hurler, Torre complied, turned around, and walked right back to his seat. Mussina finished the game, and the season, in Hall-of-Fame fashion.
Though he was a starter, Mussina's singular Yankees moment came from a relief outing. During Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS against the Red Sox, Mussina took his team-first ethic to the bump, to plug the leak after Roger Clemens got clubbed for six hits and four runs over three innings. The pitcher who started 536 of his 537 games was as responsible for that win as anyone, allowing zero runs on two hits over three innings. Yet even with his ad-hoc brilliance, Mussina's night was eclipsed by Mariano Rivera's three sparkling innings and Aaron Boone's walk-off homer.
Had he pitched for any other team, perhaps Mussina would be hoisted upon our symbolic shoulders and celebrated for the great pitcher he was. Instead, he is the quintessential, borderline case, a man sandwiched between truly great and really good. (Even the Post posts, "Good, not great.")
Surely it didn't help that Moose - the perfect handle for a potent pitcher who comes in peace - spent his last eight seasons in the Bronx, not Baltimore. Had he pitched exclusively for the Orioles, he'd be compared to Jim Palmer and the smaller group of icons who made their name and game 200 miles south of NYC. Instead, Mussina chose a blank cap in Cooperstown because he pitched for two teams for similar swaths of time and feels undying loyalty to neither.
Maybe it's perfect that Mike Mussina, understated to the core, is part of a great team, not leading it. He shared the Sunday stage with Doc, Mo, Lee Smith, Edgar Martinez and Harold Baines. Many wondered if Martinez - a career DH - belonged in the HOF. Then we have Smith and Baines, who were voted in by the “Today's Game Era” committee vote. Unlike his two colleagues who had to toil under an outsider's whims, Mussina muscled in through the front door.
"What am I doing here?" Mussina asked the crowd. More than enough people think you belong, Moose, which is good enough, even great enough.