By John Klima
Staff Writer

Tom Glavine pitched on the devil’s day of the week. He gave up six runs, six earned, and couldn’t protect a six-run lead. He lasted two innings, his shortest outing this season, and gave up 10 hits. This torturous encounter Thursday was his 656th career start, and his ERA flipped from 4.15 to 4.51. He remained stalled at 298 career victories and looked nothing like the pitcher who entered the game with four wins in his previous five starts.

Thursday was not Glavine at his best, showing that when you’ve got four decades behind you, you had better be precise or the hitters will let you know.

This is the sort of season it has been for him. His final steps to 300 career victories have become a season-long slog, mounting with pressure to be more for the Mets than his left shoulder will really allow him to be. Balanced with that is Glavine’s own anticipation for a moment that he knows he must savor. Yet even he is apprehensive, seemingly cognizant that his deceptive abilities have at times become inconsistent, and that he has reached the stage of his career where time is dwindling.

“As a pitcher, having played for so long, you’re always in the mode of waiting for your next start,” Glavine said. “It’s easy for me to stay in that mode, but I think for people outside it’s a little bit harder and they assume things a little bit more. That’s the separation I’m trying to maintain. I know we have a long way to go. I plan on winning two more games, but I’m not taking it for granted. I think a lot of people who watch me and look at my career say it’s a forgone conclusion. Well, I don’t think that way and I can’t think that way.”

Born five months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Glavine, 41, had his highest strikeouts rate since 1998 last year. He had a 3.38 ERA in six September starts, each coming on six days rest. This season, he is 8-6. It took him six tries to get his sixth victory this season. He has had too many sixes in one place at one time, not enough wins for 300, and a burden on his back.

It can be said that a major league player’s career can be broken into three epochs. For a player in his 20’s, the game is about sticking. In his 30’s, it’s about earning. If he’s lucky enough to play into his 40’s, it’s about reflecting, and not letting baseball slip away while he is still here to savor it.

“I would agree with that,” Glavine said. “When you’re in you’re 20s, and even when I was having some good years, it was still about trying to feel like you had totally established yourself. You had gotten your feet on the ground. Once you did that, now you’re trying to hang on long enough to have a payday or maybe two paydays. If you’re fortunate to stick around longer after that, you’re at an area where you’re starting to accomplish some pretty good things, and if not, you’re still at a point in time where you have a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the length of your career and what you’ve been able to accomplish.”

Yet even two victories away from 300, Glavine reveals how insecurity can seep into the mind of a proven winner. Surrendering 10 hits in two innings can do that, as can the fact that he no longer has the stuff to be the kind of pitcher the Mets are asking him to be. That doesn’t mean Glavine can’t pull it off. It’s funny how the game’s perspectives change for older players. A young pitcher without stuff is considered inferior. An older pitcher without stuff is called savvy. Still, scouts whisper that he’s done. Glavine stands on the firing line and takes the ball.

“I want it to go away more so from the standpoint of the team so we can focus on what it is we’re supposed to do, which is get to the post-season again,” Glavine said. “It’s the kind of thing where you try to enjoy it the best you can and at the same time not get carried away and take things for granted. Sometimes it’s hard to do.”

The Mets need him more than ever, and that’s a perilous position to be in. They don’t know when they’re getting Pedro Martinez back. John Maine is a horse but not a number one starter. Oliver Perez, Jorge Sosa and Orlando Hernandez comprise a rotation of enigmas. They may win the National League East by default, and even though pitching-to-location plays in the regular season these days, a team still needs a catapult in October.

He’s got the same old Glavine 83-86 mph fastball, but Thursday did not have enough differentiation between his change-up and what was supposed to be his slider. In a season of round-number milestones, Glavine should add his name to a list that already includes Trevor Hoffman (500 saves), Craig Biggio (3,000 hits), Frank Thomas (500 home runs), Sammy Sosa (600 home runs) and Barry Bonds chasing down Hank Aaron. Glavine is the lone starting pitcher, a reminder of the craft of the pitchers he will soon join.

As he has aged, he has grasped the larger history of the game. Though he won’t be the first person to recite the lines on Warren Spahn’s Hall of Fame plaque, or recall how batters said hitting Steve Carlton’s slider felt like slamming a bat against a lead pipe, or how Lefty Grove was considered such a bad clubhouse personality that he had to win more than 25 games in three consecutive International League seasons before iron-fisted Connie Mack gave him a chance with the Philadelphia Athletics, he is aware of his place among such left-handers.

“Every time there’s a discussion about possibly winning 300 games or the things in my career, yeah, I would have never imaged being able to accomplish a lot of those things,” Glavine said. “When you look back at it, you say, ‘Oh my god, it went pretty well.’ When I see what I’ve accomplished on a personal level and see the company that it puts me in with, it’s humbling.”

So too is a season in which Glavine is fighting to be an ace he no longer is for a team that needs him to be, matching a mark that numerically categorizes him but does not define his mound persona, and surviving against time.