I can never remember my buddy Mussina's place in the rotation, so I click into Yankees gamers every few days to have a shot at catching him.

As a fan of Tyler Kepner's, I enjoyed this lede last week.

Mike Mussina was 22 when he made his major league debut here in 1991. He learned right away a lesson that would define his career: sometimes, a pitcher can do only so much.

Mussina was brilliant that day, firing 124 pitches. One of them went for a homer, by Frank Thomas. It was the only run of the game. Mussina had pitched well and almost won, the first of many "almost" moments over the next 17 seasons.

Mussina has almost won a championship, almost won a Cy Young award, almost pitched a perfect game, almost won 20 games. But he has never done any of those things, and now that he is 39, the knee-jerk reflex is to pronounce him finished when he pitches poorly.

Yet Mussina showed on Wednesday that he has not pitched this long by accident. He silenced the Chicago White Sox for seven innings and led the Yankees to a 6-4 victory, the 252nd of his career, one more than the Hall of Famer Bob Gibson.

That win moved Moose past Bob Gibson on the all-time wins list, and yesterday's victory — giving up two runs in five innings, needing the bullpen's help but getting by enough — put him in a tie with Carl Hubbell and the 19th century's Al Spalding at 253. A blog called Strategic Failure has done a nice job at tracking the wins this year. Last night's roundup was on the money, "When you are trying to stave off the deleterious impact of advancing age and declining skills, you need wins like the one Mike Mussina earned tonight."

Hank Steinbrenner was probably right when he said he wanted Mike to pitch like Jamie Moyer, who's evolved his pitching in the ways Strategic Failure mentions amid its posts. But I sure liked Mike's response. "I don't have a lefty glove."

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