by Jamie Moyer
“Now go to the opposite side, the lefthanded side of the plate,” Moyer explains. “I can sink the ball in on the lefty, or throw a two-seamer below the hitting zone, or back-door the hitter with a cutter so the ball is breaking from off the plate onto the plate. So now he’s either going to give up on it or he’s going to be messed up by the movement of it.”
And that doesn’t even get to his curveball, which Moyer calls a “depth pitch.” It ought to not quite reach his imaginary Xs. “You don’t want the curve breaking over the middle of the plate, you want it breaking short of the plate. Some guys who have good control with a firmer breaking ball throw it to the hitter’s back foot, if it’s a lefty versus a righty. But I throw it as a depth pitch, meaning I want guys swinging over the top of it.”
Of the seventeen-inch plate, Moyer considers the middle twelve inches the hitter’s property. Mistakes are made when you encroach on their turf. The remaining part of the plate—where the Xs are—are Moyer’s, as he sees it, which makes the umpire arguably more important for Moyer’s success or failure than when the pitcher is someone with a blazing fastball who can get away with more mistakes. The cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and hitter is all about establishing these lines of demarcation.
It’s commonly agreed that the hardest act in sports is hitting a baseball. That’s because the hitter has roughly 0.4 seconds to hit a round ball with a cylindrical piece of wood that has a mere three-inch sweet spot. As a result, even the best hitters have to guess where the ball is going and at what speed. This is known as “cutting off half the plate”; they look for a pitch either inside or outside. On top of that, they have to anticipate either a fast pitch or an off-speed one. It’s virtually impossible to be looking for something slow and outside and react quickly enough to squarely hit something fast and inside.
Moyer excels at messing with hitters guessing pitching patterns, both in terms of location and speed. When asked what advice he’d give to someone trying to hit off Moyer, Lou Piniella, his manager in Seattle, once said, “Think backwards.” He means that on the counts that are typically considered hitter’s counts, Moyer won’t give in and throw fastballs over the hitter’s part of the plate, even though, according to Baseball Prospectus, 93.8 percent of pitchers throw either a two-seam or four-seam fastball when behind in the count 3–0. Precisely because the hitter is looking for a fastball closer to his zone, Moyer won’t oblige. Ever since he and Dorfman first started talking in the early ’90s about using hitters’ egos against them, Moyer has actually gotten more aggressive—throwing softer and with more precision toward the corners, especially inside, when the conventional wisdom is to the contrary. The result has been that he keeps hitters off balance, or, as hitters like to say, “off the barrel of the bat.” It’s also why Moyer induces a particularly high number of infield pop-outs.
Moyer hasn’t thrived for twenty-five years in the big leagues because he’s like other pitchers, in other words. He’s thrived because he’s so different. Much is made of his velocity, or lack thereof, but it’s quite intentional: he flusters batters by going from slow to slower to slowest. (In 2010, Moyer’s fastball averaged 81 miles per hour. Early in his career he was clocked in the mid-80s, as reported in the scouting report that Chicago Cubs scout Billy Blitzer prepared prior to the Cubs’ selection of Moyer in the sixth round of the 1984 draft. Moyer still carries the report with him, in his shaving kit. Blitzer praised Moyer’s poise and baseball smarts, while noting that he topped out at 84 miles per hour.)
As he struggled in the majors, Moyer would try to throw harder, pushing off his back leg with more and more force. Occasionally, he’d add a mile or two or three, but the results never improved. “Me throwing at 86 or 87 miles per hour was still below average compared to the league, but to reach that velocity, my ball would be higher in the strike zone,” he realizes now. It wasn’t until Dorfman finally gave him permission to accept who he is—a smart, soft-tossing lefty who could still be aggressive without being fast—that the results started to come.
He learned, in other words, that on the mound, speed often kills. To one degree or another, depending on the quality of their stuff and their mind-set, this “pitch to contact” lesson is something all successful pitchers go through—even the hardest throwers. “I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it,” none other than Sandy Koufax (another late-blooming lefty) once observed.
Because of his lack of speed and his cerebral nature, Moyer is commonly, and erroneously, thought of as a “nibbler,” a pitcher who fears the hitter, and as a result “nibbles cautiously” around the strike zone. Early in his career, Moyer nibbled; he’d rarely throw his changeup for strikes, even though it had been his best pitch in college and the minors, and he’d rarely come inside. When Dorfman started pointing out that the pitcher is the only player on the defensive field who is actually an offensive player—“You act,” his guru would say. “The batter reacts. You’re in control”—it liberated Moyer to assert his will, to make the batter hit his pitch. It meant taking control of the pitcher/hitter relationship, which begins to happen before even taking the mound.
Inspired by Dorfman’s aphorism, “Failure is wanting without work,” Moyer began keeping copious notes on every batter he’d face, so he’d always have at the ready his own scouting report to review prior to every game. He first got the idea after seeing his Cubs teammate Vance Law, an infielder, scribbling in a notebook in the dugout during games. Law was logging the pitchers and pitches he faced, what fooled him, what he had solidly struck. Eventually, Moyer started doing the same as a pitcher, first in a series of notebooks and then on the clubhouse lineup card itself. Before every game, he goes over the notes with his catcher and pitching coach. So if they’re facing the Yankees, there is his scribbled strategy scrawled next to Derek Jeter’s name: “First ball fastball swinger. Climb the ladder. Start low.” Translation: Moyer would start him with a fastball below the strike zone, hoping he chases. Then, because Jeter doesn’t adjust well to having to change his eye level, he’d “climb the ladder,” throwing something at mid-thigh, though not over the white. He’d follow that with something above the letters.
On another page, there are notes for facing pinch hitter extraordinaire Matt Stairs, a lefty. If an opposing team has sent a lefty to pinch-hit against him, Moyer knows it’s because they think he can hit his breaking ball. Stairs will be looking for something soft, away. So he’s written, “Pound in, pound in, cutter away, backdoor change.”
A couple of pages later, there’s the secret to success against White Sox leadoff hitter Ray Durham: “Pitch backwards, start him with soft, wants ball up and out over plate. After establishing away, will chase breaking balls down with two strikes.”
Then there’s slugger David Justice: “If you go in, he will look away next pitch. May take a lot of first pitches. Cutters away, breaking balls down and away. Hard on hands. Likes ball down and in. Change away, sinker away. Occasional front door cutter, off his body. Throw it to his hip.”
On the mound, Moyer juggles the information from his own notes with, as he puts it, what the batter is (unwittingly) telling him. If, for example, Moyer knows that the batter likes to slap first-pitch fastballs on the outer part of the plate to the opposite field for base hits, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll shy away from a first-pitch fastball away—as a true nibbler, guided by fear and caution, might. Instead, Moyer will throw a fastball outside—but rather than being on the outside third of the plate, maybe it will be an inch or two off the plate, or an inch below the hitter’s preferred zone. This is why Moyer says pitching takes place from the neck up: “You’re trying to keep him from getting what he wants, at the same time that you’re trying to lull him into thinking that he is getting what he wants,” he says.
Moyer’s aggression, then, lies in his ability—in a Zen-like fashion—to turn hitters’ aggression against them. It’s not just about hitting his spots; it’s abou
t hitting his spots and thereby seizing on hitters’ frustration. “If a guy takes a swing at an outside fastball and hits off his front foot and fouls it off, I know I have the advantage,” Moyer says. “If he couldn’t get around on that, it means he was looking for the change. If he couldn’t get around on something away, he won’t get around on something in, so I’ll jam him with a cutter, get him to hit the ball above the label, foul it off. Now he’s pissed off, thinking, ‘I should’ve hit that ball.’ Now, in hitting my spots, the game within the game has begun. I can bust him inside again or get him to swing over something soft or come back and back-door him on the outside corner. Now I’ve got him second-guessing himself. I’ve gotten inside his head.”
He and Garner are continuing to play catch and talk pitching every day. Moyer has always felt that this is what a pitching coach should do; start out each spring with a couple weeks of playing catch and holding classroom-like staff tutorials. Instead, the pitching coach position at the major league level has often become an administrative, as opposed to a teaching, post. Spring training is when an organization’s veterans mingle with its minor leaguers; why not make it a learning experience for both groups? In his last year with the Phillies, he addressed the pitchers in this very clubhouse and urged the young ones to take advantage of the moment. “Ask me questions,” he implored them. “Pick the brain of Roy Halladay. Or Brad Lidge.”
Only one young pitcher—Mike Zagurski—felt comfortable enough to take the advice, asking Moyer to show him the grip on his cutter. If Moyer had his way, teams would create an atmosphere for staff growth. “You get the pitchers to come down ten days early and you condition the heck out of them, you play catch and long toss, and then you bring them into a classroom environment and you talk about pitching,” he says. “Kind of like what Perci and I are doing here every day.”
Now, as a result of their daily sessions, it’s starting to dawn on Garner just how much work he has in front of him. One day in the clubhouse he asks Moyer how many pitches he throws.
“Eight,” Moyer responds, barely withholding a smile. He knows what’s coming next. Garner’s whole body seems to freeze, his mouth opens but no words come out. He’s just gotten a lesson in the difference between Class A ball and the Bigs: Garner effectively throws only two pitches.
“Four pitches on either side of the plate,” Moyer explains. “That’s eight.”
Garner thinks for a minute. “I never thought of it that way,” he says, finally.
Again and again, because he needs to hear himself say it, Moyer tells the young pitcher that you can only control what you can control. It’s another Harveyism, of course: “You can control your approach, and you can control your response, but you can’t control the result.” Long ago, Moyer took that to heart, and ever since, he’s done all he can to ensure that he’ll never regret not going all-out after what he wants. Maybe that’s why he’s here, coming back—and now that the pitches have been rediscovered, it is a comeback. “If I didn’t try, I’d always wonder if I could have done it,” he says.
Moyer’s getting in shape, losing the extra few pounds put on during his months of recovery. With each passing day, the thought that he’s not yet a former pitcher becomes more real; the exhortations he offers to Garner on the field and in the clubhouse—“How many coats of paint are you ready to apply today, Perci?”—double as positive self-talk too.
One day the two men are throwing, hitting each other’s gloves with ease. Garner has improved and is seeming more confident.
Moyer is quick to smile this morning, and why not? It’s a beautiful Florida day and the only sound to be heard is the soundtrack of his youth, the hum of a ball and its crack into their leather gloves. Moyer breaks the silence. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“I wish I had your body at twenty-three,” Moyer says.
Garner, hearing this from someone who has won 267 big league games, breaks into that smile. “Really?”
There’s a pause. “Yeah,” Moyer says. “But I’ll stick with my mind at forty-eight.”
Souderton, Pennsylvania, 1972
Chapter Three
No one can make you feel like a failure without your consent.
—Harvey Dorfman
At 6 p.m., the Moyer Dry Cleaning van would turn onto North Fourth Street from Reliance Road, and there he’d be. Little Jamie, ball and glove in hand, parked on the front step of the modest two-story house the Moyers had built in the late ’60s. He’d already have played a couple of hours of wiffle ball after school with Scooter Myers, from a block away, on Summit Street. Scooter was four years younger than Jamie, but the two were like brothers: Moyer and Myers.
Sometimes Scooter would stay for dinner, but most times he’d go home when that van would make that turn. Because that’s when Jim Moyer, after a day of picking up and delivering dry cleaning, would go inside and fetch his beat-up old catcher’s mitt and crouch down against his garage door, while Jamie took to his pretend mound at the driveway’s end, some forty feet away. And son would commence to throw to father. Jim’s glove was small, with no webbing and no thumb. But it had a loud sweet spot, and Jim knew how to catch his son’s ball right on it, so that a loud thwack would ring out.
Eventually, as he got bigger, Jamie would be throwing from the middle of the street and the nonplussed drivers of passing cars would make sure to swerve in order to avoid the pitching prodigy; they knew it was just the Moyer kid, throwing again. Such was life in Souderton, the small, working-class town just an hour outside of Philadelphia.
Jamie was always throwing. And when he wasn’t throwing, he always seemed to be about to throw. He’d carry a ball with him wherever he went, tossing it to himself, or just holding it, getting a feel for it in his left hand. A baseball, after all, is an amalgam of cowhide, rubber, and hand-stitching; even today, Moyer likes to spend hours holding baseballs, because each one has a distinct feel. One may feel bigger in his hand, the next smaller. Another might seem to have bulging seams, the next hardly any at all.
Jim Moyer coached Jamie in Little League through American Legion ball, and he would catch his son in that driveway every night, calling out balls and strikes. He knew that—especially at the Little League level—the game was about getting the ball over the plate. So he’d call every pitch as if there were live hitters at bat; after twenty-seven punch-outs, the two would go around back to play the fielding drill pepper, with the elder Moyer hitting brisk grounders for his son to scoop up until inevitably one would crash off Jamie’s shin and he’d run crying into the house, where Joan would be preparing supper. After dinner, especially on nights that Jamie’s idol, Steve Carlton, pitched, the Moyer family—including older sister Jill, who was a musical prodigy—would sit before the big color TV in the living room and Jamie would be transfixed by the lefty on the screen.
In 1972, Steve Carlton was having arguably the most dominant pitching season of the modern era. He’d win a miraculous 46 percent of his team’s games that year, going 27–10 for a horrible team that would win only 59 times. Carlton’s ERA was 1.97; in games he didn’t pitch, the team gave up nearly twice as many earned runs.
But it was less about the results than the aura of Carlton that captivated Moyer so deeply. To the nine-year-old Moyer, the big number 32 on his TV screen represented everything that intrigued him about throwing a baseball; here was a larger-than-life mystery, an enigma who didn’t speak to the press and had a mercenary sense of purpose on the mound. And just like Jamie, Carlton was a lefty.
Dissecting his hero every fifth night, Moyer started to get a sense of just how complicated pitching was. He’d watch and try and solve the puzzle: What made a pitch move like that? Why throw a slider there, on that count? His apprenticeship had begun. Studying Carlton, Moyer saw a fierce competitor who was always looking for an edge. Carlton, in fact, was well ahead of the times in his mental approach to the game. His guru—his Harvey, if you will—was Gus Hoefling, the Phillies’ strength and flexibil
ity coach, who was a lifelong student of the martial arts. Hoefling introduced Carlton to kung fu—and to meditation. In the dank basement of Veterans Stadium, where the Phillies played, Hoefling set up a soundproofed, softly lit “mood room,” where Carlton would recline, rest, and listen to relaxation tapes prior to his starts.
Moyer would pore over the articles in the Philadelphia newspapers that touched on Carlton’s unique preparations. He’d go to bed filled with baseball dreams and wake up to the giant Carlton poster on the back of his bedroom door. One time, a teacher told the Moyers that their son had refused to do a homework assignment. Jamie had decided he’d never need to know the material. “I’m going to play professional baseball,” he declared.
Baseball is the sport that fathers hand down to their sons, to be handed down to theirs. And in Jim Moyer, Jamie had the ultimate mentor. The elder Moyer was a fast-pitch softball pitcher until he turned fifty, and then spent weekends umpiring semipro games. He also coached his son and the neighborhood kids up through American Legion ball. The dry cleaning business may have been Jim’s job, but baseball was his passion. And always by his side was little Jamie. After a game, there he’d be, begging his dad to let him bang the mud off his cleats. When the elder Moyer didn’t have a game, he’d take the whole family down to the field off Reliance Road, back behind Moyer Oil and Storage—no relation—and neighbors would laugh as Joan, Jill, and Jamie shagged fly balls. Those Moyers.