Stardom Hasn’t Changed Mussina

When Mike Mussina walks into a downtown restaurant, there’s no buzz, no head-turning, often no recognition that one of baseball’s best pitchers is about to sit down.

Think that’s unusual?

The reaction isn’t much different when Mussina strolls through the Orioles’ clubhouse. He’ll nod at his teammates, chat with them, maybe joke around a little bit. But he’s hardly the center of attention, which suits him just fine.

All of Mussina’s teammates respect him, but few know him well. He’s one of them, and yet he’s apart. Todd Frohwirth, Jim Poole, Mark Williamson and Jamie Moyer were his closest friends on the team. Now, all of those pitchers are gone.

Mike Mystery doesn’t mean to be distant, it’s just sort of his nature. He always knew he was special, a three-sport star in high school and a top 10 student headed to Stanford.

All that could have made him insufferable.

Instead, it made him self-conscious.

His father, Malcolm, can remember him talking about his schoolwork, saying, “I don’t want to do any better than I’m doing. There’s no reason to try to do any better. I want to be accepted for being a regular guy. I’m different enough.”

He never minded solitude.

He was always best when he was alone.

“All the things he can work on by himself, he’s phenomenal,” said Mussina’s brother, Mark, 24, a radio sports talk host.

And yet, Mussina’s vision doesn’t always extend to others. He was a point guard who scored 24 points per game in high school, but, in Mark’s view, his game was flawed.

“In basketball, he wasn’t a great passer,” Mark said. “He didn’t see the floor real well.”

Pitching, then, is his true calling -- no other position in team sports offers as much opportunity for an individual who so relishes one-on-one competition.

If Mussina performs well, the Orioles usually will win. And, at a time when the state of pitching is in seemingly terminal decline, his . 698 lifetime winning percentage is the highest among active pitchers.

Basically, what we’re talking about is the Jim Palmer of his generation, but even in a baseball-crazed town, Mussina gets lost on a team that includes not only Cal Ripken, but also Roberto Alomar, Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla.

Part of it is his slight build. Mussina doesn’t look like a ballplayer. He’s 6 feet 1, 180 pounds.

“I can go pretty much anywhere, unless I’ve been to the place a few times,” Mussina said. “I really don’t think I stick out. Most of the city just associates me with No. 35 and pitching, that’s about it.”

To be sure, it’s not as though his face is plastered all over town. Mussina’s only endorsement is with a sporting goods company. He makes few public appearances. He never has pitched in the postseason. Even some minor-leaguers seem ignorant to the three-time All-Star’s accomplishments.

Frohwirth, Mussina’s road roommate for three years with the Orioles, is now pitching with the California Angels’ Triple-A affiliate in Vancouver.

“Down in the bullpen, we’ll play this game where we’re GMs, and we’ll draft five starting pitchers,” Frohwirth said. “I’ll draft Mussina first. All the young guys will say, ‘Come on, he’s not as good as Randy Johnson.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, he is.’ ”

Indeed, this could be the season in which Mussina becomes known as the Greg Maddux of the American League. He might never win four consecutive Cy Young Awards, but then, he never had a 6-14 season like Maddux did, either.

In the worst of his four full seasons (1993) he went 14-6 despite injuring his shoulder in a brawl -- a problem that hampered him for almost two years.

But the next Maddux?

Mussina doesn’t think so.

“I honestly think that he is the best pitcher in the game,” he said. “I’m still just Mike.”

At home in Montoursville, Pa.

Just Mike.

What did you expect Mussina to say, “I’m bigger and badder?”

Maddux is famously unassuming, but at least he’s from a glamorous place -- Las Vegas. Montoursville is the anti-Vegas, a town of 6,000 about 10 miles east of Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series.

“Until about five years ago, we had four street lights,” Mussina said. “It’s not large by any means. You can get from one side of town to the other in about five minutes by car -- maybe three minutes, if you don’t hit any lights.”

Mussina does not say that disparagingly -- quite the contrary. Montoursville is where he returns to coach high school football and basketball every winter. Montoursville is where his girlfriend is, where his parents are, where he plans to retire.

His salary this season is $4 million, but Mussina does not live extravagantly. His four-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home in Montoursville sits on 100 acres. He bought it in October 1993 for $500,000.

During the season, he rents a Cockeysville home owned by Jeff Ballard, a pitcher who preceded him at Stanford and in Baltimore. He drives a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It is his only car.

One recent off-day, Mussina was in Montoursville, and his father asked him, “Do you ever have any desire to have one of those real fancy $4 million homes?”

Mussina replied, in typical level-headed fashion, “If I ever went to sell it, who around here would I sell it to?”

Mussina talks about expanding his place a bit, possibly enlarging the garage, but his brother Mark joked that “he’s about as mechanically inclined as this,” pointing to a bottle of ketchup.

“He bought my dad a 100-acre playpen, is what it turned out to be,” said Mark, who is Mussina’s only sibling. “Our dad is a lawyer, but he should have been a carpenter.”

Call the house in Montoursville during the season, and, chances are, Malcolm will answer the phone.

“I get to baby-sit it once in a while,” he said. “It’s the closest I’ll come to having a house in the middle of 100 acres. It’s the kind of place anybody would like to have as their own.”

Added responsibilities

During the off-season, Mussina gets together with his parents about twice a week, but they’re not the only people he’s close with in Montoursville.

His girlfriend, Jana, lives at his house, along with Kyra, her 6-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

Mussina met Jana at Montoursville High, but did not date her. In fact, they hardly knew each other, even though she was a student manager for the baseball team.

She was a junior, he was a freshman.

“He sort of intimidated me,” she said. “He was a good ballplayer. He was attractive. He was very smart. I just kind of stayed away.”

They became reacquainted when Mussina returned to Montoursville after the 1992 season, after he had gone 18-5 in his first full year in the majors.

They saw each other frequently that winter, in a group of about a half-dozen friends. Mussina didn’t actually ask Jana out until two weeks before he had to leave for spring training.

“I don’t jump into anything,” he said. “I’m not the kind of person who meets somebody the first time and says, ‘Hey, you want to go out?’ ”

Jana couldn’t believe he even asked.

“It shocked the heck out of me,” she said. “I didn’t expect him to want someone who was married, divorced and had a child.”

Mussina had just turned 24.

Still, the added responsibility didn’t faze him.

“It was something different for me, but it worked out fine,” he said. “From the beginning, I didn’t have any problems with it.”

Jana and Kyra visit him on weekends until school is out, then come down to Baltimore for the summer.

Mussina said he “pretty much” acts as Kyra’s father.

“Oh yeah, definitely,” Jana said. “They’re real close. Her dad doesn’t bother with her, so ...”

Looking back, Jana recognizes that perhaps she could have anticipated this side of Mussina.

When they were just friends, she once asked him, “What’s it like to travel to all those different cities?”

Mussina responded with a question of his own.

“What’s it like to be a single parent?”

“He thinks a lot,” Jana said. “There are a lot of things going on in there.”

Things he shares with only a very few.

Quiet -- to a point

Ask Mussina to name the people he hangs out with in Baltimore, and he replies, “Besides my brother?”

Yes, Mike, besides your brother.

“This year is a little different,” he said. “Everyone that I hung out with the first four years of my career has moved on. You have to make new friends, find new things to do.”

Lately, he has been spending time with reliever Alan Mills, but Mussina is not exactly the second coming of Nuke Laloosh, the party-hearty pitcher from “Bull Durham.” He goes home, watches CNN, reads books.

When Frohwirth, Poole and Williamson were with the Orioles, they often could be seen lounging with Mussina on the black leather sofas in the Camden Yards clubhouse, doing crossword puzzles.

“He mixes very well with everyone in here,” catcher Chris Hoiles said. “Then again, you don’t hear much of him. You don’t see much of him. He’s not in the middle of a lot of stuff.”

Is that because he’s quiet?

“That’s probably 99 percent of it,” Hoiles said. “Plus, the guys roughhousing are usually bigger than him. He’s a smart man.”

Poole, now with Cleveland, offered a different view.

“To say he’s quiet is not quite accurate,” Poole said. “He picks his moments to state his opinions. When people do that, it tends to carry more weight.”

Whatever, the perception of Mussina -- both inside and outside the clubhouse -- is different from what it was earlier in his career.

“The best way to describe him is that he’s all business,” Mills said.

He wasn’t always regarded that way.

In 1993, Mussina attained notoriety for triggering two memorable uproars within five weeks -- a bench-clearing brawl with Seattle and an All-Star dispute with Toronto manager Cito Gaston.

He now make headlines only when he pitches, and might go the rest of his career without sparking another controversy.

“That would be fine with me,” he said. “Anyone who has ever covered me knows I’d rather play in the game and go home than have to deal with anything else.”

So, back to the original question:

Who does he hang with?

Well, he has Mark, who lives in his basement during the season and serves as his alter-ego. Whereas Mike is introverted, Mark is a talk-show gabber who once said he would trade his brother for Barry Bonds.

“He leaves it at the park for the most part,” Mark said. “He has a few good friends from high school and home, but there’s not much in the middle. It’s amazing, but it never fazes him.”

Your typical baseball player does not earn an economics degree from Stanford in 3 1/2 years. Your typical baseball player is more familiar with Don King than Stephen King, one of Mussina’s favorite authors.

“The fellas from the past, we had some pretty common interests,” Mussina said. “I assume there will be people I have common interests with again. I’m not going to go the rest of my career without having more friends in baseball.”

Advance planning

Mussina said he wants to play until he is 35.

Then what?

“Then I would probably go home, probably coach something and who knows what else?”

Poole said he wants his former teammate to pitch as long as he’s healthy -- “I think he has a chance to do some great things” -- but added that he wouldn’t be surprised if Mussina retired on his own schedule.

“When he says it’s time, he’ll be perfectly happy to go to the next step,” he said. “It’s part of his not having a desire for the spotlight.”

So is Mussina’s intention to remain an Oriole the rest of his career. He plans to offer the club “a discount rate” in negotiations for a long-term contract. His current deal expires after this season, but he is not eligible for free agency until after next season.

Can he imagine himself playing in a big media market such as New York or Los Angeles?

“I felt Baltimore was a big media market when I got here,” Mussina said. “It would probably be a difficult adjustment.”