As lonely as it might feel to be Mike Minor these days, in the midst of such a trying stretch in his young career with the Braves, there is somebody who knows exactly what he feels like.
Tom Glavine, a two-time Cy Young award pitcher, 305-game winner and future Hall of Famer, was about where Minor is entering this weekend series against Washington, 32 starts into his career.
Glavine’s ERA through his first 32 starts in 1987 and 1988 was 5.33. Minor’s ERA through 32 starts over the past three seasons (and 33 games overall) is 5.41.
Minor has allowed 204 hits in 176 1/3 innings; Glavine allowed 194 hits in his first 175 2/3 innings. Minor has a better record at 10-9 than Glavine’s 5-16 at the same point, and his 168 strikeouts and 60 walks top Glavine’s 78 strikeouts and 82 walks.
“There are very few guys that come into the league and are successful from the get-go and never have any bumps in the road,” said Glavine, who worked on the SportSouth broadcast of Minor’s previous start against the Marlins at Turner Field. “I don’t know if there are any.”
The Braves open a three-game weekend series with the Nationals on Friday, the team they’ve been playing tug-of-war with for first place in the National League East for the past few weeks. Maybe the most intriguing pitching matchup of the series pits Minor against the Nationals’ young stud Stephen Strasburg on Saturday afternoon.
But Minor will focus on his own issues. He has allowed four or more runs in each of his past five starts, while going 0-3 with a 10.46 ERA. This came after a three-game stretch in which Minor went 2-0 with a 1.69 ERA.
The ups and downs are baffling to Minor, just as they are to Glavine, who sees the nine strikeouts Minor had against the Pirates on April 30, but also the seven runs allowed in 6 1/3 innings. But Glavine also gets it.
“For every young player, the hardest thing to achieve is consistency,” Glavine said. “I know I felt it as a young player, whether it was from one start to the next or one year to the next. ...
“That’s the biggest dilemma for every player that comes into the big leagues. You’ve heard the saying ‘It’s harder to stay in the big leagues than it is to get there?’ Well, that’s the reason because once you get there, you’ve got to show that you can do it day in and day out. And if you can’t, they’re going to find somebody who can.”
Therein lies a big part of the problem, Glavine says, when doubts begin to creep in and players start looking over their shoulders. The vicious cycle ensues. You pitch not to lose, and often lose.
Glavine said he was caught up in that one day in 1988 when manager Russ Nixon called him into his office.
“He said ‘Look, I don’t have better options than you,’” Glavine recalled. “‘You’re getting the ball every five days. Figure something out.’ It was a thing like ‘Whew, OK.’ Now you’re more focused on trying to figure things out and less focused on trying to stay in the big leagues.”
In Minor’s case, Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez reiterated after each of his past few starts that he intends to keep starting Minor and let him use this time as a learning experience.
So what can Minor do about the “figuring it out” part.
Glavine said to help drive negative thoughts out of his mind, it’s important to usher in positive ones. He said if he were Minor, he would focus on something Gonzalez said to the media after Minor’s most-recent outing, in Cincinnati on Monday.
Minor gave up four home runs in that game — including three solo shots to consecutive batters in the fourth inning — but he also retired the last seven batters he faced to get through the sixth.
“If I’m Mike, that’s what I’m taking out of it,” Glavine said. “‘Hey my manager said he liked what he saw the last two innings out of me.’ That’s something to build on. So I’m looking at my last two innings and trying to figure out, ‘OK what changed in those last two innings. Did I change my frame of mind? Did I find something in my mechanics? What enabled me to make pitches over those last two innings?’ That’s what I’m bringing with me to my bullpen to work on to get ready for my next start.”
Glavine said he can also turn to others around him. The obvious choice is pitching coach Roger McDowell, but Glavine said Minor has others he can and should reach out to as well, such as veteran pitcher Tim Hudson, or catchers Brian McCann and David Ross.
Glavine said he was lucky to have teammates such as Greg Maddux and John Smoltz to turn to, but he also used to bounce ideas off his former bullpen catcher, Jim Guadagno.
“Sometimes they can see something,” Glavine said. “Sometimes it might be obvious to other people watching you and it’s not obvious to you because you can’t feel it and you can’t see it. And it helps. I know it always helped me.”
Sometimes Glavine just found reassurance, such as in a ride home from a workout the day before Game 6 of the 1995 World Series against the Cleveland Indians. Maddux said he didn’t think the Indians hitters had adjusted to him between Game 1 and Game 5; his pitches had just been off in the latter game. So Maddux didn’t think Glavine should change his own approach at all.
Glavine went out and pitched eight innings and allowed one hit in a 1-0 win that clinched the World Series.
Other times Glavine got a kick in the pants, as in 1999 when he was 7-8 with a 4.14 ERA heading into the All-Star break.
“I remember having a conversation with Smoltzie one day in the dugout,” Glavine said. “And his message was basically, ‘You look defeated before you ever get out there. Just go out there and compete.’”
Glavine went 7-3 with a 4.08 ERA in the second half and finished the year with a record of 14-11.
That conversation came when Glavine was 33 years old. Minor is still 24. There are still growing pains in what Glavine said pitchers face in a career of adjustments.
But for now, Minor needs to focus on the present.
“It’s almost like every game you’ve got to break it down to the most simplistic terms,” Glavine said. “It’s ‘I’m taking it a hitter at a time, an inning at a time, and when I get through one inning, then I’m going to do it again for the next inning.’ Just hope that the next thing you know you’ve put together five, six, seven good innings. You can do that a couple times in a row, and then you’re off and running.”
