IT'S A BOLD STATEMENT, saying a baseball player is the best a school has ever produced. But Mike Mussina has a reasonable claim to the title. There's Bob Boone, '69, a four-time All-Star catcher and, later, a major league manager. There's Jim Lonborg, '64, who won the 1967 American League Cy Young Award while pitching the Boston Red Sox into the World Series. And there's Jack McDowell, '88, a three-time All-Star who won the Cy Young in 1993.
Then there's Mussina, '91, a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. Five-time All-Star. Six-time Gold Glove winner. Six-time top-five finisher in Cy Young Award balloting. This season, at age 39, he had a 13-7 record at press time.
And yet, commentators fret about whether Mussina will make the Hall of Fame. He hasn't met either of the typical benchmarks: 300 career wins or a 20-win season. But he could be elected based on the sustained quality of his career, which includes two 19-win and three 18-win seasons.
The debate doesn't faze Mussina. “If I'm a Hall of Fame pitcher, then I've already done my Hall of Fame pitching,” he points out.
Growing up in Montoursville, Pa., Mussina threw so hard that his dad had to stop catching him when he was 13. When he helped his high school team win the state championship as a sophomore, major league scouts began following him “quite closely,” he remembers.
Stanford associate head coach Dean Stotz, '75, first saw Mussina pitch in Windsor, Ontario. “Five pitches into the first batter,” Stotz remembers, “I thought, 'Oh my, it is flying out of his hand.'” Later that evening, he told head coach Mark Marquess, '69, “I've just seen one of the best pitchers I've ever seen.”
For Mussina's part, “I knew if I was going to do something in baseball, I needed to go south or west for college.” He visited Stanford in December 1986, “and the team was outside playing ball in 70-degree weather.” He was sold, passing up an offer from the Baltimore Orioles, who chose him in the 11th round of the 1987 draft.
Mussina “made the jump from high school to Division I baseball as effortlessly as you could,” says Tom Dunton, his pitching coach at the time. “Working with him was like working on a Ferrari.” He took a regular spot in the rotation—a rarity for a freshman—and helped Stanford win the 1988 College World Series, the Cardinal's second NCAA title in a row.
The next time the Orioles came calling, at the end of Mussina's junior year, they drafted him in the first round. He gives much of the credit to Dunton. “He took a small-town kid who could throw a ball pretty hard and got the best out of me,” Mussina says. The two still talk regularly, Dunton says. “We argue about him pitching inside a little more.”
Mussina reached the majors in the summer of 1991 and quickly became a dominant pitcher, going 18-5 in 1992. During a 10-year span with the Orioles, he won 147 games, third best in club history, and was named an All-Star five times.
As a free agent in 2000, he signed with the Yankees, who had just completed a World Series three-peat. The move brought “greater expectations, more media, greater scrutiny, more media,” says Mussina. “Did I say that twice?”
Mussina has pitched in two World Series for the Yankees, in 2001 and 2003, but the team has not won the series since his arrival. There have been other near misses. In 1994, the players' strike shortened one of Mussina's best seasons, perhaps costing him the 20-win prize. Twice, he has pitched near-perfect games: in 1997 he gave up a single with one out in the ninth inning, and in 2001 he came within one strike of perfection. “I have a lot of 'almosts,'” Mussina says. “Most guys don't even have 'almosts.'”
He is similarly sanguine about not making the 2008 All-Star team despite his excellent start to the season. “It would have been great to make the team since it's at Yankee Stadium,” he says, “but there are more guys than just me that deserve to go and aren't.” Before the selection, he told the New York Times that if not chosen he'd “go to the county fair, and the kids [sons Brycen and Peyton, and stepdaughter Kyra] will enjoy that, too.”
Indeed, Mussina lives a quieter life than many major leaguers, especially those who play in New York, where teammates like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez provide material for gossip and sports columnists alike. Mussina has established a foundation to benefit children and is known as a crossword-puzzle aficionado. In 2006, he appeared in the documentary Wordplay, along with such celebrity crossword enthusiasts as The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and former president Bill Clinton. “Every time I go out on the mound, I want to finish the game,” Mussina told the camera. “It only happens occasionally, and those games are really special. Puzzles can be the same way.” Wordplay has been well received, and Mussina jokes that “maybe it's a career opportunity.”
Truth be told, however, Mussina says he has “no idea” what he'll do after baseball. “I have kids in youth sports; I'm sure I'll be busy with them,” he says. Meanwhile, he's playing “one season at a time.” Will he try to stick around long enough to reach 300 wins? “I doubt it,” Mussina says. “Forty-some wins is a long way away.” (Make that thirty-some, and counting.)
“My career,” Mussina says, “has been great.” He has pitched 18 years of professional baseball without needing surgery. “I have no secret to staying in shape and injury-free,” he says. “Maybe a combination of good genes and good mechanics. Some people are built to do this, and some are not.” We know which category he's in.
STEPHEN ESCHENBACH is a writer in New Jersey.
