Former Brave of the Fortnight: Tom Glavine

A glory years mainstay, Tom Glavine was a left-handed rock at the heart of the Braves’ 90’s success.  He was the original ace on the Cy Young-hogging Atlanta staff and the penultimate catalyst to the team’s lone true success.  Though his late career was de-romanticized by the harsh business side of baseball, Glavine’s Atlanta tenure will be among the most fondly remembered of any player.

            Glavine grew up in northeastern Massachusetts, excelling athletically and academically in high school.  As his early-career mullet intimated, Glavine was also a hockey player; as a senior at Billerica Memorial High School, he was MVP of Merrimack Valley hockey division.  Glavine was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in the fourth round of the NHL Entry Draft, but elected to sign with the Atlanta Braves, who took him in the second round of that year’s MLB amateur draft. 

            Glavine progressed rapidly through the minors; in less than three full seasons, a late-1987 call-up put him in the major leagues for good.  Though his ascent was nascent, Glavine’s first full season, the 1988 campaign was hardly inspiring.  The 22-year-old went 7-17 with a 4.56 ERA and 1.35 WHIP for the 54-win Braves.  He struck out just 84 batters in 195.1 innings, compared to 70 walks.  While those numbers did not accurately foreshadow the bright things to come for young Tom Glavine, the horrible state of the Braves during this era allowed him the freedom to develop at the big league level while the club tolerated pedestrian numbers.  He showed signs of improvement in the following season, posting a 3.68 ERA with an anomalous 1.14 WHIP, but regressed a bit in’90.

            After a last place 1990 season, the Braves made some relatively dramatic tweaks to their lineup.  Terry Pendleton became the everyday third baseman.  David Justice moved to right field, replacing the aging Dale Murphy, while Sid Bream came in to play first.  Speedsters Otis Nixon and Deion Sanders began splitting time in centerfield, while Ron Gant and Lonnie Smith shared left.  Light-hitting defensive whizzes Mark Lemke and Rafael Belliard began seeing more time at second and short, platooning with the slower, better hitting double-Jeff double-play combo of Treadway and Blauser.  These moves greatly upgraded the team defense, reflecting a new organizational focus on run prevention.

            The Braves were early adopters when it came to micromanaging defensive alignments, and Glavine was an ideal beneficiary of the strategy.  A crafty lefty even at a young age, Glavine’s go-to pitch was his change-up, an off-speed offering he placed on the outside corner; when located perfectly, it induced ground-balls or called strikes at superb rates.  When the Brave put plus defenders in the likeliest routes of those groundballs, Glavine’s paintbrush-stroke changeups limned masterful tableaus.

            Glavine won his first Cy Young in 1991, as the Braves’ and Twins’ dual worst-to-first transformations became baseball lore.  The Series itself aided the dramatic nature, as a seven games and an extra inning were needed to separate them, with Minnesota eventually crushing Atlanta’s hopes behind Jack Morris’s arm.

            When the dust settled, Glavine went back to work, winning 20 games each of the next two seasons and, save a sub-par 1994 (which was wiped off the books by a devastating player’s strike anyway), did not have another off year until he was 33 (a 4.12 ERA and 1.46 WHIP in 1999).  Glavine responded by winning 21 games in 2000.  He had two more stellar seasons after that, eventually whittling his ’02 ERA to 2.96 in his walk year, at age 36.

            During the team’s unprecedented divisional dominance, Braves fans willfully blinded themselves to the future.  We ignored the certainty in the law of averages, the inevitability of the Phillies, Fish, Mets or Expos taking over, and the creeping visage of age on our vaunted frontline.  Though the process took Steve Avery’s fire-balling left shoulder before his time, Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz were indestructible icons at the forefront of our consciousness.  They bounced back from diminished performance, always finding a Neagle, Burkett or Millwood to fill in the cracks.  When injury came for John Smoltz, he moved to the bullpen and set the world ablaze.

            The day came that the sad realities of sports-as-business reached even Tom Glavine.  Going into a his age-37 season, Glavine had ironically pitched himself out of the Braves plans (he didn’t help matters by imploding against the Giants in the playoffs, getting dinked and dunked out of the stadium in two disastrous starts.  Around baseball, short-sighted executives were too hung-up on his pedigree and previous season to notice his gradual decline and climbing age.  With the added allure of inflicting indignity on a hated division rival, the New York Mets made a Godfather offer, guaranteeing Glavine $35 million over three years, with an incentive (which Glavine reached) for a fourth year at just under $10 million.

            As the Mets were wooing one of our franchise lynchpins, the Braves brass watched with a calculated coldness.  Though Glavine repeatedly expressed his desire to finish his career in Atlanta, the Braves knew even during his wonderful ’00 campaign that Glavine would be gone the following season.  With each gem he pitched, Glavine inflated a price tag already expected to exceed the limit Atlanta was willing to pay for a pitcher barely cracking 88 on the radar gun.  Sure enough, the Braves were hardly a suitor as Glavine inched away, turning to look back one last time the door slowly closed.  Glavine was immediately replaced by obscenely wealthy hypochondriac Mike Hampton in the rotation.

            The moves looked great initially; Glavine’s first year in New York was sub-mediocrity at eight figures.  A 4.52 ERA and 1.48 WHIP earned Glavine nine wins and John Schuerholz some level of exoneration; no one wanted Glavine to go, but it was a much easier pill to swallow if the logic was sound. 

            The logic was sound, but Glavine continued to defy expectations.  Always a nibbler who lived on the outer edges of the plate, Glavine’s diminished velocity was far less problematic for him than it would be to most pitchers.  Glavine was able to refine his approach even further and live off an outside changeup.  He never approached his 2002 numbers, but had respectable showings in 2004 (3.60, 1.29) and 2005 (3.53, 1.36).  He made his final All-Star team in 2006, winning 15 games with a 3.82 ERA, as his sterling first half (11-2, 3.48 ERA) helped propel the Mets to first place in the East, ending the Braves marathon run of division titles.  It was troubling to watch our former son win Game 1 of the NLCS as the Braves sat at home, but hard not to respect the dignified longevity of a living legend.

            In 2007, Glavine’s finally reached the next tier of aging.  His wearying arm was spot-lit this season, not for his rising peripherals, but for his rising win total.  Glavine was closing in on one of baseball’s hallowed benchmarks, opening the season at 290 career wins.  On August 5, Glavine started at Wrigley field against the Chicago Cubs, on ESPN’s showcase Sunday Night Baseball.  He gave up two runs on six hits, with a walk and strikeout, to become the 23^rd pitcher to win 300 games in Major League history.  Glavine was also just the 5^th lefty to do so.

            Glavine also picked up a hit and a walk in the start, fitting, considering Glavine’s legacy as one of the stronger-hitting pitchers of the modern era.  Though “Chicks Dig the Longball” was a farce, Glavine did retire with a .244 OBP, not shabby for a pitcher.  He hit .289 with a .333 OBP in 1996, and had several seasons in the low- to mid-.200 range, again excellent for a pitcher.  He was also adept at sacrifice bunts, a useful attribute for a starter trying to help his cause.  Along with John Smoltz and, at times Steve Avery and Denny Neagle, Glavine helped form one of the routinely stronger armaments of nine-hole hitters in the National League. 

Glavine’s 300 milestone was especially bittersweet.  He had re-upped for one year with the Mets after the 2006 season, amid speculation that he might return to Atlanta for the chance to join the 300 Club with his hallmark franchise.  The game was nationally broadcast, and Glavine took his moment in the spotlight humbly, exactly as expected from the soft-spoken superstar.

             A year later, Glavine finally did return to Atlanta.  Though four wins too late, Glavine rejoined the Braves for what was expected to be a year-long swansong as the fifth starter on a competitive team.  Glavine joined a veteran rotation with old running mate John Smoltz, Tim Hudson, Mike Hampton and fresh import Jair Jurrjens.  Unfortunately, the veterans succumbed to age; Smoltz made just 5 starts before his arm went out for good.  Hampton made just 13, and Hudson made it to 22 before Tommy John came a-calling.  Glavine injured himself during his 13^th start, necessitating a DL trip and three minor-league rehab starts.  Glavine had just completed the third of these when the Braves cut him, essentially ending the career of the then-winningest active pitcher in the game. 

            To say Glavine’s departure was divisive would be a misnomer.  Divisive entails strong opinions on either; Glavine’s exit created uniformly strong opinions right down the middle.  Unlike in good debates, differing ideologies did not interpret the decision with antonymically.  Fans hated to see Glavine go and hated how it was done, but they understood that Glavine was a man past the twilight of his career.  It was what it was, for better or worse, though it felt definitively worse.

Glavine retired with 303 wins, a 3.54 ERA and 1.34 WHIP in 22 seasons.  He was on the frontlines as the Braves transformed from Dale Murphy’s one-man show to cellar-dweller to perennial contender. 

Glavine’s finest moment as a Brave is undeniable.  The team’s lone World Series win came in 1995, against an explosive Cleveland Indians team.  Glavine took the win against Dennis Martinez in Game 2 with a solid six-inning, two-run performance.  Glavine’s next turn came as the Series returned to Atlanta, the Braves up 3-2.and Martinez again starting for the Tribe.  What followed was nothing short of magical; for eight mesmerizing innings, Glavine baited a lineup of .300 hitters into out after out.  Glavine struck out eight, walked three and allowed just one single in a performance so dominant that David Justice’s sixth-inning solo shot felt like a grand slam.  Mark Wohlers entered in the ninth and shut the door on the Indians.  A Carlos Baerga flyout to Marquis Grissom clinched the win for Atlanta, and gave Glavine the World Series MVP.

Glavine’s legacy stretched far beyond this pinnacle.  In 17 seasons with Atlanta Glavine won two Cy Young Awards (he finished second twice and third twice), made eight All-Star teams, won 244 games and entrenched himself as an icon in Georgia and across baseball.  He never had the otherworldly highs of Greg Maddux or the role-shifting resurgences of John Smoltz.  Though his numbers were not remarkably consistent, Glavine’s constant success and atypical durability were more than enough to earn him folkloric praise as the first name in the big three – Glavine, Maddux and Smoltz.  The rhetorical order was part convenient meter usage and part an acknowledgement.  At their apex, Maddux was the Game 1 starter and Cy Young recipient, but Glavine was the original ace; the franchise identified more firmly with its farm-raised product than the free-agent import or trade acquisition.  And in the glare of Maddux’s hardware, it was easy to overlook Glavine’s runs of 20-win seasons and sub-3.00 ERAs as league-wide offense exploded in the steroid era.

Glavine was unfortunately faced with two unceremonious exits from the team he helped define.  Baseball business trumped sentimentality in 2003 and 2008, incidents that could have become black smudges on a storied alliance.  It is a testament to Glavine’s character that, both times, he humbled himself to return to Atlanta, first as a cheap retread and then, following a forced early retirement as a company man and broadcaster.  Glavine expressed frustration both times he was jettisoned, but he didn’t held grudges, and emerged as the bigger man in retrospect.

Fittingly, each decision ultimately backfired.  Mike Hampton had one healthy season with the team; even at the steep discount the Braves received via Florida and Colorado, he was hardly worth the money.  Meanwhile, the young guys Atlanta used in Glavine’s stead – Chuck James, Charlie Morton, Jo Jo Reyes, Jorge Campillo and James Parr – all washed out of Atlanta on a non-playoff team; none has found sustained major league success.  Glavine could have easily become an exiled icon, bitter and resentful of his treatment.  Off the field, he was known as a soft-spoken humanitarian; a devoutly Catholic philanthropist and family man.  In keeping with his exceedingly decent personality, Glavine quietly let bygones be bygones. 

By bearing the business side of the game with thick skin, Glavine further endeared himself to the hearts of Braves nation.  His exit is no longer a talking point, instead we remember what he meant to the franchise when he was on mound.  He gave us the Young Guns.  He gave us Cy Youngs.  He gave us a time-stamped mullet, a steady lefty technician, Cabarnet Glavignon, and an historic pitching staff.  And on one crisp autumn night in late October, he gave us all we ever wanted.  Don’t stop the Chop.