by Jamie Moyer
In Louisville, he would slink away to do this work, embarrassed by his Dorfman-inspired efforts, fearful of being razzed. “Why hide?” Dorfman asked. “Are you committed to this or not?” Part of the reason Detroit took a flyer on Moyer was the hope that he could mentor a couple of young pitchers in Toledo, Scott Aldred and Greg Gohr, who had big league stuff but hadn’t put it all together yet. Aldred was a 6´4˝, 195-pound lefty with pop who had been up and down between the Tigers and Toledo. Gohr threw in the low to mid-90s, and hadn’t yet made it to the Show. How was Moyer going to teach them anything if he was afraid to be who he was in front of them, a crafty lefty seeking to figure this thing out?
The laminated cards were only part of the daily routine Dorfman had prescribed. Until now, Moyer had obsessed so hard on his next start—visualizing a host of outcomes, including the bad ones, for days—that he often felt exhausted come game time, as though he’d already thrown nine innings. Dorfman slowed him down. Everything between starts was scripted, building to the ultimate mental outlook by the time the umpire called, “Play ball.”
It wasn’t superstition; like many players, Moyer could be superstitious, but Harvey had no time for that. No, Dorfman believed that the best way to find the all-elusive zone was to train the mind’s muscle memory. “I’ll put my spandex pitching shorts on at the same time every day of every start,” Moyer explains. “That’s very purposeful. You’re trying to re-create the conditions that existed when you previously achieved mental focus. So when those shorts go on, it’s like a signal that I’m starting to raise my level of concentration. By the time I finish with the concentration cards, I should be dialed in.”
If Moyer’s trek to Toledo was a Hail Mary intended to resurrect his career, he was in the right place. Toledo had a romantic baseball past. Greats ranging from Jim Thorpe to Kirby Puckett to Kirk Gibson had all played for the Mud Hens, to whom the fan base was intensely loyal. Moyer was used to hearing criticism from fans and media alike. But in Toledo, he sensed support. More important, there was a simpler ethos in the air: it was all just about the game. All the distractions that had weighed on him at the major league level—the interviews with the media, the bottom-line machinations of the front office, the adult autograph seekers who would turn around and make money off his signature—all of it seemed to recede. It was easier to get to that comfortable place when you didn’t have a host of uncomfortable demands placed in your way.
It helped that upon his arrival in Toledo, Moyer met a young man who was also trying to find himself. Buddy Groom was a twenty-six-year-old lefthanded middle reliever from the one-stoplight Texas town of Red Oak, just south of Dallas. Moyer and Groom had both sensed a certain resigned attitude from their small towns back home: you’d given it your best shot, you’d made it this far; who ever really thought that Red Oak or Souderton would produce a baseball great? “We both had the same kind of mind-set,” Groom, who went on to have a fourteen-year career in the big leagues, remembers today. “We kind of bonded, because we both wanted to prove people wrong.”
Groom would go on to find himself as a bona fide big league pitcher in the mid-’90s after turning all his worries about his success—or lack thereof—over to the Lord. He’d post seven consecutive seasons of at least seventy relief appearances for the Oakland A’s and Baltimore Orioles. Moyer would find himself through his devotion to Harvey Ball, digging ever deeper into the mental side of the game. Two vastly dissimilar approaches—with the same result.
It was Groom’s example on the field that helped Moyer turn things around. Early in the season, Mud Hens pitching coach Ralph Treuel pulled Moyer aside. “You have a better fastball than you think, but you can’t just live away with it and your changeup, because hitters are going to lean away and sit on the outside pitch,” Treuel, now the minor league pitching coordinator for the Boston Red Sox, said.
Moyer knew Treuel was right, just as he knew Dick Pole had been. He was doing his best to be aggressive, but all the mental training in the world wouldn’t give him the tool he most desperately needed: a pitch that could run into the righthanded batter. To date, he’d effectively been granting to righties permission to cheat “middle-away”—meaning any pitch directed to the middle of the plate, the outside corner, or just off the outer corner—because they didn’t have to worry that he’d jam them inside. Groom, Moyer noticed, didn’t have these problems. His friend was keeping righthanded hitters off balance because his cutter was keeping them honest.
As he would years later, when he first saw his idol Steve Carlton’s slider up close, Moyer asked his new friend if he could teach him the pitch. This version differed greatly from the one that Moyer would throw in his forties. Groom’s cutter was gripped on the side of the ball, with the middle finger hooking over the left seam and the index finger and thumb on the outside of the ball instead of underneath it. That made the middle finger dominant and created a cutting action that made a seeming fastball suddenly break into a righthander. (The Carlton pitch Moyer would throw nearly two decades later would have a more dominant grip, causing it to simultaneously break down and in to the righthanded batter.)
Moyer made his Mud Hens debut with an inning of scoreless relief in a game that wasn’t close. A few days later, shorthanded, manager Joe Sparks needed a spot starter against the Richmond Braves. Moyer got the call, and the win, giving up one run on four hits in five innings. From then on, he was the team’s most consistent starter. He’d end up going 10–8 with a 2.86 ERA.
Developing the new pitch was critical to Moyer’s success, but so was exorcising the constant fear that came with pitching inside. The conventional wisdom is that for non–power pitchers, pitching inside carries a high amount of risk, because a hitter will see the pitch coming toward him more clearly and get a better rip at it. If a batter is looking for something middle-in, and if the pitch isn’t located just right, the ball stands a good chance of being catapulted into the outfield seats. Toledo was where Moyer first started to question this conventional wisdom, and where he first started considering the notion of acceptable risk on the mound.
As Moyer started to jam more and more righties, he started to notice their frustration: How come I can’t get around on such a slow pitch? He’d see them shaking their heads or tossing their bats away in disgust after yet one more pop-up. This was what Harvey was talking about when he first broached the idea of using their aggression against them. The more he thought about it, the more Jamie began to think it didn’t make sense to consider pitching inside as particularly dangerous; on the contrary, conceding the inside of the plate seemed to be the true danger. He and Groom would watch ESPN nightly, where the parade of home run clips usually consisted of batters with their arms fully extended, crushing balls that were either out over the plate or on the outside part of the plate. Batters were being allowed to cheat owing to the fear and conservatism of pitchers.
“If I told you to chop a piece of wood, but you’d be bringing the ax down right by your foot, you’d be anxious about hitting your leg,” Moyer explains. “As opposed to chopping the same piece of wood out in front of your body, with your arms extended. That’s a much more comfortable way to chop wood.”
This was one of Moyer’s Eureka moments: pitching wasn’t just about him getting comfortable, it was also about making the batter uncomfortable. Many years later, he’d sit in the dugout with another teammate, Phillies ace-in-training Cole Hamels, and pass along the message it took him so long to find. “C’mon, let’s count the number of uncomfortable at-bats,” he’d say, and they’d catalog the number of times an opposing batter was forced to do something he didn’t want to do—barely foul off an inside cutter, hit the deck to avoid high and tight heat, lunge at something off-speed away. More often than not, they’d see comfortable swings instead of the frustration Moyer learned to bring out in batters in Toledo.
That said, coming inside with 80-mile-per hour stuff is hardly risk-free. Make a mistake and you are more likely to pay a heavier price inside than
out. “So change your thinking,” Harvey would say: accept your mistakes. Baseball, Moyer was finally starting to realize, is a sport that’s all about failure. The best hitters come up short 70 percent of the time, and it’s the only game that, as part of its official statistics, actually recognizes and categorizes errors. So why not own your mistakes? Why not learn to risk, but risk smartly?
Moyer started accepting his mistakes, and moving on. Against Tidewater on July 9, he gave up early solo homers to Terry Hansen and Mitch Lyden, but rather than start pressing, he settled down and pitched a complete game, scattering six other hits. None other than his own father-in-law noticed it. He saw how Moyer would get tagged with a long ball early, but then shrug it off and end up pitching five or six scoreless innings after being on the ropes. “The kid’s a survivor,” Phelps told his friend George Steinbrenner, trying to—once again—get his son-in-law a big league job.
According to the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, research in the medical field shows that complication rates after surgery are not that disparate from hospital to hospital. What sets surgeons and hospitals apart is their ability to “rescue after failure”—to prevent a failure from morphing into a catastrophe. The best surgeons, Gawande wrote in the New Yorker, “didn’t fail less. They rescued more.”
The stakes were higher in the operating room than on the baseball diamond, of course, but the same principle applies: beginning in Toledo, Moyer was learning how to rescue.
It started when he began mulling over the notion of risk on the mound. Used to be, surrendering an early homer would send Moyer’s confidence level on a torturous descent. You never want to give up a home run, but Moyer was now finding that sometimes it wasn’t the worst thing. It was preferable to the big inning, where the opposing team litters the field with line drives, the lineup bats around and puts four or five runs on the board. Moyer was heeding Dorfman and changing his thinking when he realized that sometimes “a home run can be a rally killer.”
After a homer, the man who would go on to give up more dingers than any pitcher in history would walk toward the catcher and ump, glove extended, urgently wanting that next ball in his grip. Instead of thinking, I hope I don’t give up another home run, he’d silently say to his opposition, Okay. That’s it. You’re done. The slate was wiped clean and he was free, as Harvey would say, to “pay attention to the task in front of you, not to the runners behind you.” Besides, giving up a home run but avoiding a big inning, he was finding, can give a pitcher as much momentum as striking out the side. The feeling that you’ve dodged a bullet, with its implication that this just might be your day, became a confidence booster.
Instead of being something to dread, adversity on the mound was an opportunity: something to overcome. On July 25, Moyer was stricken with a bad stomach flu. “When I went to bed, I wasn’t feeling good,” he told the Toledo Blade. “When I woke up I was throwing up and had diarrhea.” He allowed at least one runner in every inning but one, winning a hard-fought seven-inning outing. He pitched out of four jams with runners in scoring position, thanks to 12 ground-ball outs and six strikeouts. He was starting to think deeply about the game. “I’d like to be able to get ground balls more consistently,” he said after the gutty performance. “I’d rather have the ground balls, because then you can get the double plays. A strikeout is only one out.”
Instead of cowering at its prospect, Moyer started to welcome moments of potential calamity. When on June 29 his team booted three balls behind him against Pawtucket, he realized he could do the natural thing and fall back on the gift of a ready-made excuse—my teammates threw the game away!—or he could embrace the challenge of overcoming the deficit his defense had put him in. He went seven innings, striking out six and spreading out seven hits—all dinky singles—for the win.
With the onset of fall came the certainty of a September call-up to the Tigers. But the phone call from manager Sparky Anderson never came. Instead, the parent club, in another display of baseball conventional wisdom run amok, called up the hard-throwing twenty-two-year-old Scott Aldred, who was 4–6 with a 5.13 ERA. Moyer’s season ended. He was a free agent yet again. But more important was that he was finally thinking for himself, instead of blindly buying into the shibboleths of the game. He was once again without a team, but this time he felt like a major league pitcher. Now, this time, would any major league teams have interest in him?
November 2011
Chapter Five
Physical pain is no match for us if our mental discipline is strong.
—Harvey Dorfman
In 1974, actor Lee Majors appeared on America’s TV screens, running in slow motion while a dramatic voice-over intoned, “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.” It was the debut of the prime-time drama The Six Million Dollar Man, which quickly achieved pop culture icon status. The same year, life started imitating cheesy TV show when, not far from where Majors’s slow-motion acrobatics were being filmed, Dr. Frank Jobe performed a radical new procedure on the marred left elbow of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tommy John. It was a medical development that would change professional sports.
As pitchers age, the stress on the elbow accumulates. Tendons get inflamed, scar tissue develops. Tommy John was a thirty-one-year-old starting pitcher with a 13–3 record when all the strain culminated in the tearing of his ulnar collateral ligament—a career-ending injury. Or was it? Dr. Jobe was the Dodgers’ team physician at the time, and he decided to take a gamble: he’d detach a tendon from John’s right forearm (tendons in the hamstring or calf will also do) and implant it in place of the torn ligament. It was a long shot: the graft required removing muscle in order to drill holes into the arm’s ulna and humerus bones, running the risk of infection or fracture. There was less than a 10 percent chance of success. John was likely looking at a future that would have him returning to his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he’d sell cars at his friend’s dealership and regale customers with tales of a major league career cut short due to injury. Instead, John pitched fourteen more seasons, winning 164 games after the groundbreaking surgery. Today, some 11 percent of major league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery.
The same year that Lee Majors’s character and Tommy John’s arm were being rebuilt, a sports medicine prodigy graduated from Middletown High School in New York’s Hudson River valley. Just as Jamie Moyer grew up on the baseball tutelage of his father, the man who would ultimately repair his arm came of age at his own father’s knee. From the age of ten, David Altchek would follow his orthopedic surgeon father, Martin, on his rounds at Horton Hospital. He spent his high school years removing patients’ casts.
After college at Columbia (where he played tennis) and medical school at Cornell, Altchek became an orthopedic surgeon in his own right at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery. That’s where he invented something called the “Docking Procedure” for use in Tommy John surgeries—a less invasive way of getting to the bone. Altchek’s method didn’t require drilling as many holes or detaching any muscle. Suddenly the success rate of Tommy John surgery vastly improved.
But Altchek wasn’t done yet. In recent years, he had noticed that more and more pitchers, particularly the older ones, were tearing their muscle tendon, known as the flexor pronator, in addition to the ulnar ligament. Typical Tommy John surgery had focused too much on reconstructing the ligament and hadn’t devoted enough attention to repairing the torn tendon.
Outside of Dr. Jobe, a holy trinity of sports surgeons had gained notoriety in the last decade, their names appearing in sports pages almost as often as those of the athletes themselves. There was Dr. Lewis Yocum in Los Angeles, Dr. James Andrews in Alabama, and Altchek. Cases like Moyer’s, where both the ligament and tendon had torn cleanly off the elbow’s bone, were quickly becoming the province of Altchek. After that first injury while pitching for the Phillies in St. Louis in July 2010, Moyer went to Los Angeles for a consultation with Yocum
, whom he already knew. When Yocum saw the extent of both tears, he referred the case to Altchek.
Now it has been a year since Altchek performed Moyer’s surgery, and a mere two months since Moyer’s return to the mound in Florida. Spring training starts in three months; within weeks, scouts from major league clubs will be coming to the tiny town of Poway, California, where they will approach an unassuming ranch house belonging to Dom Johnson, a kind of pitching whisperer, who has a mound and backstop in his backyard, and they’ll determine if Jamie Moyer is ready to be a major league pitcher again. That is, if Altchek doesn’t issue a verdict today that beats them to it.
Uh-oh. Is that a frown? David Altchek doesn’t typically frown. The fiftysomething sports medicine all-star is known for his ebullient bedside manner. When Moyer first came to see him a year ago, not only did Altchek not laugh his new patient out of the examining room when the then forty-eight-year-old Moyer broached the subject of pitching in the major leagues again, but he encouraged Moyer’s comeback dream. “Any other respectable, normal doctor might have had second thoughts, but I’m always overly optimistic,” Altchek would later recall. “I had a strong feeling we could fix it. What I didn’t know is how he’d heal.”
Now, with his neatly coiffed coal-black hair that calls to mind a GQ model—he appeared in a Ralph Lauren ad campaign a decade ago—Altchek is turning Moyer’s arm every which way and looking uncharacteristically grim. Or at least perplexed. He feels Moyer’s other arm, the right one. Back now to the left. He has Moyer flex and stretch. He pokes around some more.