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EDITOR'S NOTE: The is the first story in a 17-part series looking at Mike Mussina's journey from Montoursville to the National Baseball Hall of Fame
Mike Mussina started climbing the baseball mountain as a young child. He has now reached the summit and will be immortalized Sunday in Cooperstown when he is inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Ironically, that upward journey began by taking a few steps down.
Mussina spent countless hours in his parents basement, throwing a rubber ball against a cinder-block wall. He was just a young boy who loved playing baseball and other sports. But Mussina also was planting the seeds for a career that would flourish from Little League through Montoursville, Stanford, Baltimore and New York. Mussina dazzled hitters for 18 seasons in the Majors, playing for the Orioles and Yankees and that basement grew into a laboratory where a masterful pitcher started honing his craft.
"The television was at the other end of the basement and there was no real furniture in between, so you could watch the game at one end of the room and throw off the other wall. When you're 7, 8, 9 years old you're just doing what you see on television and pretending you're playing. That's all I really did," Mussina said. "Because I threw off the wall like that, I got to throw a lot more than everyone else. I didn't just throw at practice or just during the season. When you were that young the season ends in June at the end of the school, so I could keep throwing as long as I wanted to throw. It wasn't like the weather was a factor. It was an opportunity to do something whenever I wanted to do it. I did a ton of throwing down there and it really helped."
Mussina used tape and made a strikezone on the wall and started mastering that zone. But he also utilized it in other ways, fielding grounders and thinking up various games. He was blessed with immense talent, but Mussina started moving ahead through hard work that started when no one else was watching when he was surrounded by four walls.
"The work ethic was ridiculous," Ed Rogers, Mussina's high school teammate and Muncy girls basketball coach, said. "That's probably what makes him who he is."
Soon after starting Little League, Mussina was excelling. All that time spent throwing in the basement and taking grounders sure helped. The wall paid a price as did the beaten down balls, but the dividends would be felt long after Mussina grew taller and could no longer throw much downstairs.
Mussina stood out whenever he pitched, helping his teams win nearly every time. Montoursville captured the junior division state championship and Mussina immediately became a starter for a Montoursville High School program that already was an elite one.
But Mussina was not just a pitcher. He also was one of the state's premier shortstops and an excellent hitter. The basement helped spark that development but as Mussina grew older it was his and his friends' yard that became the next training ground. wiffle ball was a summer-long passion and the games were big deals. This is where Mussina and his buddies lived out their Big League dreams and impersonated their favorite players.
And if Mussina was going to impersonate his favorite teams, he had to be authentic. Mussina is right-handed, but so he could accurately portray his baseball heroes, he taught himself how to switch hit. That became another way to refine the skills that would one day make him a legend.
"If you're going to play wiffle ball and if I'm going to be the Yankees, I can't be all right-handed because they don't have all righties. They have lefties too. You have to use your imagination. We all taught ourselves to hit both ways, it's just a matter of whether you get good enough at it that you can use it as you get older," Mussina said. "That's how wiffle ball was. It's not Reggie Jackson if you're hitting right-handed. You're a kid and if you're out there playing as often as we played, even if you started out terribly when you started hitting left-handed, you're going to figure it out. If they make me hit left-handed and I'm not a lefty eventually you're going to figure out how to hit left-handed. Maybe you never use it again, but just do use it there helps."
Mussina did use it beyond wiffle ball. In fact, he hit left-handed a lot more in high school than he did right-handed simply because there were not many left-handed pitchers back then.
"He stood out as a switch hitter. It's amazing that he taught himself how to be a switch hitter," former Montoursville baseball coach Carter Giles said. "He was a once-in-a-lifetime player to coach. I coached so many great players and, with him going to the Hall of Fame, he stands out above everyone else."
What started in the basement and while playing wiffle ball was paying dividends for both Mussina and his teams. The power of all that work and experimentation was about to pay off in a historic manner as the Montoursville baseball team chased history in 1985.