Both Sides Now

Seeming to operate outside the purview of time, Tom Glavine still wears number 47 for the Atlanta Braves; still marches to the mound, head down, with that purposeful, splay-footed walk; still appears youthful and undersized; and still throws with an exquisite economy of motion that keeps virtually all of his pitches within a narrow and unspectacular band of seven miles per hour. (This is how composer Philip Glass would pitch if he had a changeup from hell.) The familiar minimalism of Glavine dares you to find any difference in him between 1991, when he won 20 games and the Cy Young Award at age 25, and 2002, when last Thursday he reached 10 wins earlier than in any of his previous 15 big league seasons.

"You'd find almost no difference at all," Atlanta general manager John Schuerholz says of the 6-foot, 185-pound lefthander, "except for maybe a few gray hairs."

Should you assume, however, that the Glavine you see today is the same Glavine you've seen for all these years, consider yourself his latest victim. You've just been caught looking. Glavine is winning as he never has before. No longer just a fastball-changeup savant who lives on the outside part of the plate (give or take a few inches granted by generous umpires), Glavine has broadened his repertoire to include backdoor sliders, cut fastballs and—gasp!—regular visitations to the inside corner.

"I don't know if I've ever seen him this good for this long," says Bobby Cox, the Braves manager since 1990, of his five-time 20-game winner. "He's been locked in all year. He's probably better now than he's ever been."

Says four-time Cy Young winner Greg Maddux, Glavine's running mate in the Atlanta rotation for 10 seasons, "He is better than he's ever been, and it's not even close. He's throwing the ball on both sides of the plate now, and he's doing it with all of his pitches. He's tying up hitters inside, which opens up the outside corner for him. He's going to win 20 games again, and he's doing it with an ERA about two runs lower than he's had in the past."

At week's end Glavine (10-2) led the majors with a 1.64 ERA, well ahead of his career ERA entering this season (3.40) as well as his personal best (2.47 in 1998). He had not allowed a home run with a man on base, had not walked a No. 8 or 9 hitter and had yielded only nine hits in 74 at bats with runners in scoring position.

When he stifled the New York Mets over seven dogged innings of the 3-2 victory on Thursday, Glavine became only the sixth pitcher since the expansion era began in 1961 with a career record 100 games better than .500 (chart, page 70). Glavine and Maddux (263-148) are the first teammates to be at least 100 games above .500 since 1908, when Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity were in the New York Giants' rotation. A true throwback, Glavine is the only pitcher of the free-agent era to amass 234 wins with his original team—and only the 16th in the history of the game to do so.

What may be even more startling is that Glavine won most of those games without throwing a breaking ball. Oh, he has a curveball, but that's like saying Eminem has a suit and tie in his closet. His curve is so poor that Glavine rarely breaks it out. "It's a good curveball for 58 feet," he says, "but it's lousy for 60 feet."

Glavine has been fooling batters for years, mostly because of a changeup he serendipitously discovered in 1990. One day he was shagging baseballs in the outfield during batting practice when he happened to pick up a ball awkwardly—his left index finger off the ball and resting outside of his thumb—and flung the ball to a teammate. Glavine noticed the ball came out of his hand more softly than it should have, given how hard he'd thrown it, so he experimented with the grip the next time he threw off a mound in the bullpen. The changeup immediately felt comfortable.

Glavine typically throws the changeup about 81 mph. His fastball mostly resides in the 88 mph neighborhood. He has thrown those pitches so often and to the same spot—the lower lefthand corner of the strike zone to a righthanded batter—that he could probably hit his mark with either pitch blindfolded. "Yeah, after a pitch or two to get adjusted, I could do it," he says.