I love this picture. I also love Mike Mussina. Like most Orioles fans my age, I absolutely loved him, then I hated him, and now I've pretty much grown to love him again.
I feel particularly connected to Mussina in that he was the first ballplayer that I can remember actually tracking as he came through the minors. I saw him pitch at Municipal Stadium when he played for the Hagerstown Suns. I tried to get his autograph, but I missed the chance. I remember very distinctly watching his major league debut on TV. I'm told by Baseball-Reference.com that he won 7-3 in 8 innings of work over Scott Erikson and the Twins. In my mind, he threw a no-hitter against the AL All-Stars, but whatever.
So I felt as though I had a justifyable claim on Mike. He was pitching for me. He was young, cool, he kicked ass, he played for the Orioles, my team, and I felt like I was the only one who knew or cared about him. Which was entirely possible, at least in my general vicinity, as I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that really didn't give a crap about the Orioles at all.
I watched Mike pitch along side Gregg Olsen, Fernando Venezuela, Alan Mills, Ben McDonald, Todd Frowirth, Curt Schilling, and play along side Cal, Mike Deveroux, Brady Anderson, Harold Baines, Rafael Palmeiro, and all the rest of the Orioles throughout the heyday of my baseball-watching and playing youth. He was absolutely my favorite pitcher, and probably my second-favorite player in all of baseball.
So when he was picked up by the Yankees, I was obviously disappointed. And saddened. And a little bit hurt. But at that time, I had kinda grown away from baseball anyway. I kept track of the O's by seeing their record in the paper or whatever, but I really had grown pretty disillusioned with the sport, and I didn't really care about it any more. Cal was almost done, Brady had his steroid year and fell off the table, Jose Canseco was playing for Tampa Bay, there was a team in Tampa Bay, the Yankees won everything every year, and now my favorite player, the one guy I still actually gave a shit about, had done the unthinkable - he had become a traitor and forsaken his ties to the good people of Baltimore and gone where the money was. Fucking New York.
I remember officially dismissing baseball as soon as I found out that he had left. That was the final straw. I was going to college, my life was changing, and I didn't need that kind of bullshit anymore. Baseball was kid's stuff, anyway.
So life and baseball went on. Moose kept on pitching in his inimitable silent and crossword puzzle-completing fashion, I ironically moved to Baltimore to go to school, and I didn't think twice about baseball. For a while.
I'm not sure what it was in me that clicked, exactly, but in 2004, all of the sudden I was absolutely unapologetically head-over-heels back in love with baseball. I read every single book I could get my hands on, I played fantasy baseball, I played baseball simulations, I thought about statistics and new analysis techniques that I never knew existed in my younger days, and pretty much just immersed myself back into baseball. It helped that the first half of the summer of 2005, the Orioles had a great start and were actually looking like a real team...that didn't last long, but I was back in the fold. I'm so glad that I did - it gives me something to do when I'm at work, and something to look forward to when spring rolls around.
And so I think that its fitting that as my love for baseball has been renewed, my admiration for Mike Mussina as he is retiring has also been renewed. He is the first baseball player that I can remember fully tracking the entire arc of his career - from minors to retirement. He has been a class-act all of the way, and has held his own in an era that saw both the highest offensive output in the history of baseball and at least 5 for-sure hall-of-fame pitchers (Clemens, Johnson, Maddux, Glavine, Pedro). In another era, he may have been seen as one of the best in baseball. He stood tall amongst giants of ability and ego. He does crossword puzzles. He's a pretty cool guy.
So thanks, Mike, for hanging in there even when I didn't give a shit about baseball. Thanks for not (probably) taking steroids. Thanks for having a cool signature pitch. Thanks for hanging with Baltimore for as long as you could and not complaining, even though Albert Belle was probably a total jackass. Thanks for learning command and control after you had lost your velocity. I'm sorry I hated you for pitching for the Yankees. Secretly, I'm pretty glad you never won a World Series with them.
And good luck with that whole Hall of Fame thing. You've got my vote.
