Montoursville, Pa.--It's raining in Central Pennsylvania. Flood warnings are in effect. And the local high school football team is on the practice field for the middle segment of triple sessions.
The assistant coach in charge of the secondary reads a hole in the defense, shoots forward, grabs a safety by the waist, moves him four steps to his left, backpedals out of the play, and puts his whistle back in his mouth.
Nothing about this coach's gait distinguishes him from any other high school assistant.
Only a close inspection of his red-billed, blue cap sets him apart. The lettering that rims the cap's logo reads, "Major League Baseball Players." It is an official baseball players union cap.
American League Cy Young Award contender Mike Mussina was not supposed to be standing in the Central Pennsylvania rain on this day. The Orioles ace was supposed to be resting in his hotel room, sheltered from the Texas heat, hours away from making a start that might have resulted in win No. 18 of the 1994 season.
Thanks to baseball's eighth work stoppage in 23 years, Mussina is teaching football instead. He's missed two scheduled starts and counting.
Instead of preparing to face the Texas Rangers, he was helping to coach the Montoursville Warriors varsity football team. Notre Dame helmets. UCLA jerseys. Big-time look for a small-town high school football team.
The Montoursville boys locker room has little in common with the carpeted clubhouses of major-league baseball. The unending drone of a leaky shower head. An overpowering musty odor. Is it the booming "Smashing Pumpkins" song peeling paint from the walls, or just the years?
No place serves as a better haven for a celebrity than a small hometown. At home, there is no need to suspect anyone of wanting to befriend you because of who you are. Montoursville, population 5,000, located four miles north of Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series, has a rocking chairs on front porches charm to it.
Mussina never had any doubt where he would head for the strike. He is living with his father Mike, an attorney, his mother, Eleanor, a nurse, and his brother Mark, a graduate student and wide receiver at nearby Susquehanna College.
At the local high school, Mussina blends into the coaching staff he has assisted for parts of the past three seasons. Mussina takes his volunteer job seriously, except when he is doubling over at one of the many jokes rolling off the tongue of line coach John Mazzante.
Mussina neither seeks nor is granted star treatment. Only some of the players from visiting teams treat him any differently.
"In our next-to-last game of last season, at Milton, a bunch of players from the other team came into our locker room, half-dressed, looking for autographs from Mike," Montoursville head coach Jim Bergen says.
To the Warriors, Mussina is just another Warrior. "He's just sort of like a friend, someone we joke around with," says Ryan Tira, a senior slotback and safety. "He teases us and we tease him right back. He tells us to get to work and we tell him, 'Oh yeah, where's your job?' He's helped me a lot. He's showed me what I'm doing wrong and how to correct it."
Quarterback and defensive back Ryan Swailes isn't much of a baseball fan, so he isn't reading the endless strike stories.
Whose side is he on, the players or the owners?
"I don't know," says Swailes, a senior. "I don't know much about baseball. I guess I'd have to be on Mike's side because I know he wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't the right thing to do."
'One of the guys'
Swailes views Mussina as part of the local landscape, not as a monument on that landscape.
"I've followed what he's done, but you don't sit and stare," Swailes says. "He's just like one of the guys."
Just like the rest of the guys, Mussina calls one of the linemen "Uncle Fester" because of his likeness to the "Addams Family" character.
After practice, Mussina heads off to Cellini's Sub House, owned by Charlie DeSanto, an avid sports fan who coached Mussina in Pop Warner football.
Charlie's son, Brian, was Mussina's catcher for Johnny Z's, the local Little League team.
"Mike was 12 and Brian was 10," Charlie recalls with delight. "After two innings, the catcher's hand hurt so bad he couldn't take it any more. The coach says 'Any volunteers?' Brian says, 'Yeah, I'll catch him.' That's how he started being Mike's catcher."
Thirteen years later, Brian's hand is hurting . . . two days after catching all but three of the 90 or so pitches Mussina threw to him.
Then he rubs his right foot, the foot a Mussina pitch hit hard.
"Slider, broke late and hard," Mussina says. "Bam. Hit him right in the foot. Didn't even hit his glove."
That pitch could have come in handy with Juan Gonzalez at the plate. Oh well.
Brian's hardball-playing days were over by the time he hit the ninth grade, but he can still catch.
"You know something," Brian says. "Mike's changeup is the hardest pitch to catch. He's throwing you fastball, fastball, fastball, then he throws you a changeup. You're waiting, waiting, waiting. . ."
That quality makes Mussina's changeup the toughest of his seven pitches to hit. Not that his others -- a four-seam fastball, a sinking fastball, a cut fastball, a slider, a curveball and a knuckle curve -- rest on a tee. If they did, he wouldn't be 16-5 with a 3.06 ERA in this year of the hitter.
Mussina, the AL's answer to Greg Maddux in many ways, is known as much for his smarts on the mound as anything else. But it is his athletic ability that inspires the most talk in the friendly neighborhood sub shop, where Mussina often hops behind the counter and makes sandwiches for the customers.
'What an athlete'
A slotback on the football team, a high-scoring point guard on the basketball team and a pitcher who drew flocks of scouts to Montoursville High, Mussina is from the same hometown as former Orioles third baseman Tom O'Malley, who plays in Japan.
Last winter, Mussina and classmates played O'Malley and classmates in an alumni basketball game.
"Sold out the gym and raised enough money to buy new uniforms and new warm-ups for the basketball team," Charlie DeSanto says. "About the middle of the fourth quarter Mike just took over the game, had two breakaway stuffs. It was unbelievable. What an athlete."
Charlie can't wait to get his hands on the latest Mussina poster, the one with a black-and-white backdrop of Cy Young. Charlie will put it on the wall at the sub shop that features photos of Mickey Mantle, Willie Stargell, Joe Namath, Reggie Jackson, Cal Ripken and Michael Jordan, among others.
The most powerful framed picture in the place is of a late 1920s semi-pro boxer, Charlie DeSanto Sr. His hands used to hurt like his grandson's left hand hurts now.
But Brian DeSanto will be back out there catching Mussina on the days Mark Mussina can't.
"That reminds me, I have to buy a cup," Brian says.
"And a mask," his father adds.
"I don't need a mask, just a cup," Brian says.
And his father shakes his head.
Mussina has thrown every non-rainy day during the strike.
"Go to practice, find somebody to catch me, go get something to eat," Mussina says. "That's about it."
Why coach?
"Because it's fun," he says. "Because I want to get into coaching when I'm done playing and it's a good place to start. And it's a lot easier than sitting around watching TV, waiting for the phone to ring."
Ironically, baseball is the only sport Mussina has not coached. He also is an assistant basketball coach. He prefers coaching football to basketball.
"I enjoy the fact there is action for about five or 10 seconds, then you get to coach again," he says. "In basketball, you coach all day in practice, then when the game comes, it's pretty much out of your hands. Basketball coaching is all preparation."
If he ever coaches baseball, it will not be on the professional level, he insists.
"I want to go somewhere where there's a lot of teaching involved," he says. "Most of the teaching has already been done when you are dealing with players at the professional level."
Accepts strike fate
If the strike ends the 1994 season, Mussina has as much to lose as anyone, at least in a non-financial way.
Had the strike started one day later, Mussina would have had a chance to go for his 17th win against the Boston Red Sox, a win that could have tied him for the league lead with New York Yankees left-hander Jimmy Key (17-4, 3.27). Kansas City's David Cone (16-5, 2.94), Key and Mussina are locked in a tight race for the Cy Young Award.
Plus, the Orioles stand 2 1/2 games behind Cleveland in the wild-card race, which could provide Mussina with his first postseason experience.
The strike must be killing him, right? "Honestly, no," he says. "Being the player rep, I think I had a better sense of the inevitable. I'm not worried about how long I'm going to be out. I know it's the right thing to do. If I didn't believe [that], I would probably let it get to me."
The pitcher is coaching earlier than usual.
"If we don't get to play any more this year, it'll be a long off-season," Mussina says. "We may not play out of the chute next year, either."
He expresses no false optimism, even in light of yesterday's developments. "It's a positive obviously," he says of the owners coming to the bargaining table. "We've been hearing a lot of negatives. At least this is a positive but I'm cautious not to get my expectations up too high."
Meanwhile, the service stations along Route 15 will have to do without Charlie DeSanto's money.
"How many times have I been to Camden Yards?" Charlie says. "You mean how many times a homestand? Not now. This is terrible. Just terrible."