by Jamie Moyer
“Wow,” he says, looking up at a wide-eyed Moyer. “Your body is reacting in ways I’m afraid we don’t really understand.”
There’s a pause. Ever stoic, Moyer is expressionless. “What do you mean?”
Now Altchek smiles, for he’s about to talk in a decidedly unclinical way. “I mean you’re some kind of mutant,” he says. “As players age, their cells need more time to recover. When I feel around here”—Altchek starts massaging the back of Moyer’s elbow, where the reconstruction took place—“it feels soft, elastic, and normal. It’s like we never did anything. It’s bizarre. You’re some kind of healing freak.”
Moyer is relieved to hear this, but he has questions, of course. Few athletes have been as in charge of their own rehab as Moyer. Even before this surgery, he had been the least passive athlete in the clubhouse trainer’s room. Through the years, he’d taken to half-jokingly telling his teams’ trainers, “I’ll decide,” when discussing his course of treatment, an attitude he picked up from his Seattle teammate Jay Buhner, a clubhouse leader who was a veteran of countless sports injuries. In the Mariners’ clubhouse, there was a diagram of a skeletal structure annotated with all of Buhner’s conditions; Jay had had no choice but to take charge of his care, lest he be a mere passenger in his own career.
Back home in San Diego, Moyer had been working out with a physical therapist recommended by his friend Trevor Hoffman, Yousef Ghandour. Ghandour had a way of making Moyer feel like he was a full partner in the rehab process. When Moyer threw recently in Dom Johnson’s backyard, Ghandour noticed something.
“He said, ‘At about pitch thirty-six or thirty-seven, I noticed that your hand speed slowed down,’” Moyer tells Altchek now.
“Does that surprise you?” Altchek says. “Being a freak of nature—which you are—doesn’t help you as much with endurance. The painful part of physical gifts is, you know, you still have to build up your endurance.”
“Well, my therapist said, at the end of my throwing session, it looked like I found it—”
“Ah, yes,” Altchek says. “That’s the phenomenon we don’t understand that well—the famous ‘second wind.’”
“Well, can I do strenuous elbow work now?”
“So now that you’re out of the year, you can do elbow work, you just have to listen to it,” Altchek says. “We have a lot of guys fail this. The flexor pronator is really slow to heal and what has screwed us is not the ligament, but the flexor pronator in the first year. So that’s why we take a very cautious approach. So if you start to get any tendonitis, you have to back off.”
“So pronations, supinations, manual resistance?”
“I’m totally good with that,” Altchek says. “We’re out of the danger zone.”
As Moyer has aged, he’s learned that recovery time is just as important as the time he’s spent working out. He won’t go hard every day, like he might have in his more macho (but, not coincidentally, less successful) youth. Now Altchek tells him the same principle applies in rehab. “Recovery is underestimated in our athletic world,” he says. “We’re always like, ‘More is better, more is better.’ Sometimes going slow or even doing nothing is best.”
Altchek remembers something he’s been meaning to ask. “You still using the steel balls?”
When last they met, Moyer told Altchek of his history with a couple of roughly one-inch steel bearing balls. Back in college, Moyer’s coach, George Bennett, took him on a pilgrimage to Veterans Stadium, where he met Gus Hoefling and—gulp—Steve Carlton. The meeting with Carlton was perfunctory, except for the fact that Moyer noticed the presence of a couple of steel balls that, Hoefling explained, could help with a pitcher’s dexterity. Ever since, Moyer has kept a pair in his locker. Every day, when opening mail or doing paperwork in the clubhouse, he’ll absentmindedly conduct his own improvised dexterity drill, first rolling the balls around his fingers with his palm up, trying to keep them together. Then he’ll flip his palm over, facing downward, and roll them without letting them drop. In the Philly clubhouse, Moyer turned young pitcher Cole Hamels on to the same drill.
When Moyer confirms that he’s still using the bearing balls, Altchek shakes his head. “Do you even realize how brilliant that is?” he says. “The muscles in your forearm control the fingers, so you’re really extending your workout of the forearm into the hand and fingers. I would have never thought of that. I’m telling all of my patients to do it—courtesy of Jamie Moyer.”
Moyer laughs. Altchek is a man of science, and there’s no clear scientific explanation for Moyer’s weird healing talents. But he can make some guesses. Moyer’s dedication to rehab is as good as Altchek has seen, but what sets Moyer apart is that, in effect, he’s been preparing for this challenge his whole professional career. While with the Texas Rangers in 1989, he suffered a lat strain—an injury to the latissimus dorsi muscle, which stretches from the upper back to underneath the armpit. That off-season, he rehabbed the injury with a physical therapist in a program that worked his arm, shoulder, and core with light weights. By the time spring training rolled around, he had never felt stronger. “Why not do this every off-season?” he asked himself. From then on, even though he was no longer injured, he’d embark upon a prophylactic rehab regimen every off-season, strengthening key body parts—including the all-important serratus muscles—and steeling his body for the trauma to come. Years of preventive rehab may not only have staved off his injury until after he’d pitched 4,000 innings, it may also be stimulating a faster-than-normal recovery.
But there is another, less scientific key to Moyer’s healing powers. In Dorfman’s The Mental Game of Baseball, his guru prescribes an imaginative cure to pain—literally. “Begin to imagine and experience your injured part mending and becoming whole,” Dorfman writes. “Experience it becoming stronger and healthier every day. Then imagine yourself performing exactly as you want to perform, well bodied and whole, without pain or weakness.”
At Karen’s prodding—“close your eyes and feel it healing,” she’d implore her husband after his workouts—Moyer would visualize himself healthy and feeling stronger every day.
“Whatever you’re doing, keep it up,” Altchek says now, still shaking his head in wonder. Before officially releasing his patient, Altchek has two parting thoughts. The first, with a sardonic smile: “You really ought to think about donating your body to science.” The second, shaking Moyer’s hand: “See ya on SportsCenter.”
Bounding out of the Hospital for Special Surgery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Jamie Moyer has been given the green light to defy all the smart money once again and make it back to a big league mound. For a year, all he’s wanted is the chance to write his own ending to his career, as opposed to having an injury close the door for him.
Tonight, on the West Side, the Moyer Foundation will throw a gala celebration and fund-raiser, hosted by NBC’s Stone Phillips. A few hundred well-heeled guests, including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who lost his father when he was fourteen, will see video footage from Camp Erin, the nation’s largest network of child bereavement camps, including one in each Major League Baseball city. They’ll see kids who have lost loved ones, comforted by and bonding with other kids who have suffered loss. They’ll hear from Karen and Jamie, whose throat will catch when he talks about how humbled he’s been by the impact Camp Erin has had.
That’s later. For now, as he’s walking down Fifth Avenue, a car passes by and the driver leans on his horn. “Good luck, Moyer!” he shouts, roaring by. Moyer laughs. It feels like this comeback is really about to happen. “What an amazing journey you’re on,” I say to him.
“Everyone’s journey is amazing,” Jamie Moyer says. The next step on his journey is to get back to the big leagues. Again.
June 1993
Chapter Six
Control your thoughts, or your thoughts will control you.
—Harvey Dorfman
It’s a rite of passage: every pupil rebels at some point against a men
tor. Moyer’s secret act of defiance against Harvey Dorfman came early in the 1993 season, when he surreptitiously wore a garter belt under his uniform.
Perhaps a bit of background is in order. After Moyer’s 1992 season in Toledo he was once again looking for a job. One day that off-season, he happened to be in his father-in-law’s office at Notre Dame when in walked former major league pitcher Ed Farmer, a huge Notre Dame booster. Farmer was now an advance scout for the Baltimore Orioles, and with him was his boss, general manager Roland Hemond. Farmer’s support for all things Fighting Irish led him to the building that day—he’d be addressing Notre Dame coach Pat Murphy’s baseball team—and Farmer invited Hemond to tag along because he thought it would be an added bonus for the college kids to hear from a big league executive. With time to kill, they stopped in to say hello to Digger, who wasted no time selling his visiting son-in-law.
“I’m telling you, Moyer is a helluva pitcher, if only someone would just give him the ball,” Digger, who always refers to his son-in-law by his last name, breathlessly lobbied Hemond. Digger, whose boisterous personality fills any room he’s in, was in rare form: with his son-in-law sitting there, the coach was in full recruiting mode, as though Hemond was an on-the-fence parent of one of the high school seven-footers he was trying to lure to his program.
“What are you doing now, Jamie?” Hemond asked, put on the spot by Phelps’s relentlessness.
“Looking for a job,” Moyer replied.
“Let me see what I can do,” Hemond said.
Within days, Hemond received a report on Moyer from his top scout, Gordon Goldsberry. “He’s a bright guy,” Goldsberry said. “His biggest problem is tempo. He’s not going to blow the ball by anyone. He has to outthink hitters. But he takes too much time between pitches, which gives hitters too much time to think.” That said, Goldsberry concluded that bad tempo was a correctable problem. “He’s probably worth taking a chance on.”
That March, Hemond invited Moyer to the Orioles’ minor league spring training camp, where Moyer pitched well. He was signed to a $200,000 contract and assigned to the Orioles’ Triple A affiliate in Rochester, New York. Karen, expecting the couple’s second child, packed boxes once again, and the family rented an apartment in dreary Rochester, where Jamie and Karen promptly witnessed a mugging at gunpoint on the street.
Whatever was happening outside the stadium, it soon became clear that for Moyer, something on the mound had clicked: he was no longer a minor league pitcher. In eight starts, he compiled a 6–0 record, with a 1.67 ERA and a terrific WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched) of 1.019. Hemond attended a game in Rochester one frigid night, where he watched Moyer carve up the Richmond Braves and its can’t-miss prospects Chipper Jones and Javier Lopez. In late May, the call finally came. Jamie was going back to the Show.
But there’s a big gulf between Triple A and the majors. The Orioles, a team recently emerged from bankruptcy, were in their second year at their much-hyped new downtown stadium, Camden Yards. Moyer was bursting with confidence in Rochester, but, confronted by the pressure of yet one more last chance and surrounded by superstars like Cal Ripken Jr. and pitchers Mike Mussina and Ben McDonald, he quickly found the mound at Camden Yards an uncomfortable place. In his first ten days back in the majors, he lost all three of his starts, culminating in a shellacking at the hands of the California Angels on May 30, in which Moyer gave up seven earned runs and couldn’t get out of the second inning.
Here we go again, he thought. With an 0–3 record and 5.74 ERA, how long would it be before manager Johnny Oates gave him a one-way ticket back to Rochester?
Yet Hemond, a three-time winner of baseball’s Executive of the Year award, knew the degree to which conventional wisdom conspired against someone like Moyer. He knew that crafty pitchers had to overcome a stereotype—that their fortunes were dictated more by luck than skill, that it was only a matter of time until major league bats caught up with their junk. But Hemond had seen enough to know that cerebral pitchers possessed a skill themselves, albeit one that was a challenge to discern compared to fireballers. They used misdirection and trickery to get batters out. Moyer, Hemond thought, could be one of the those guys, like Eddie Lopat, who got by on guile and smarts. Lopat, nicknamed “Junk Man,” pitched for the Yankees in the ’40s and ’50s, and Hemond remembered how he used to frustrate hitters. Like Lopat, Moyer wasn’t embarrassed by his lack of speed. Like Lopat, he worked with the tools he had and held his own.
Or so Hemond hoped. He’d seen how nerve-racking it could be to watch Moyer. Hemond remembers that he and his wife met another Orioles executive and his wife for dinner and a game that season. At dinner, the executive’s wife asked who was pitching. “Moyer,” Hemond said. The other couple frowned. “We’re leaving,” they said, explaining that they couldn’t stomach watching Moyer: he just looked too damn easy to hit. Today, Hemond laughs at the memory. “I always relished that,” he says.
But Moyer didn’t know of Hemond’s patience. He felt he had to turn his fortunes around quickly, and he’d try anything to get a win. Enter the garter belt.
Scooter Myers was the old childhood friend in Souderton who, growing up, had been like a little brother to Moyer. Through the years, they’d remained close. When he was still in high school, Scooter would trek down to St. Joseph’s University in Philly to visit Moyer, where he was first introduced to beer and college girls. When Jamie got drafted, the two kept in touch by writing letters.
So when Scooter saw that his man was in a slump, he knew he had to act. He got inspiration from an unlikely church of psychic salvation: his favorite movie, Bull Durham, the Kevin Costner send-up of minor league baseball. Scooter had seen the movie so often that he’d work lines from it into casual conversation. When Jamie would answer his phone, he’d hear Scooter’s voice on the other end with his usual greeting, the one he still hears to this day every time Scooter calls—“What’s up, Meat?”—echoing Crash Davis’s moniker for Nuke LaLoosh in the film.
For the six people in America who haven’t seen the movie: in Bull Durham, the Susan Sarandon character, Annie, has LaLoosh wear a garter belt underneath his uniform in order to reorient his head and get him pitching out of the proper “hemisphere” of his brain. Scooter thought Jamie needed some of the same medicine. So he sent a pinkish garter belt to Moyer. “You gotta wear it,” Scooter said, daring his conservative friend. “Try something different!”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Moyer thought to himself as he deviated from his pregame routine in order to stealthily put the garter belt on under his uniform in a clubhouse bathroom stall. Harvey, if he’d known, would have been livid. He disdained the degree to which superstition ruled the game. Like Moyer, he’d seen slumping players empty the contents of their locker onto the field and set them aflame, and he’d had players who insisted on wearing the same ratty T-shirt when on a winning streak. In their phone conversations, Harvey railed against such magical thinking. He was trying to get players to take honest looks at themselves, to examine the root causes of their struggles—and to learn how to fix things themselves. “Attributing success or failure to powers outside of you is another way of denying responsibility,” he told Moyer. “Don’t be absurd. Trust your talent and preparation.”
But trusting his talent and preparation didn’t appear to be working. At this point, Moyer was willing to try anything. And besides, was the message from Harvey that dissimilar from Annie’s? When she tells Nuke to “breathe through your eyelids like the Lava Lizards of the Galapagos Islands,” was it all that different from Harvey’s emphasis on focusing on your breathing as a relaxation technique on the mound? As for the garter, Annie is trying to get Nuke into the right frame of mind, and maybe by wearing the lacy underthing—by running the risk of making an ass out of himself before taking the mound—she is reducing the pressure and eradicating his fear. Same goal, different tactic.
And so it was that on June 10, 1993, Jamie Moyer, dressed in a tasteful pink garter belt�
�nothing too provocative—beat the Boston Red Sox, giving up one run on a solo shot to Mo Vaughn, in five and two-thirds innings. It was his first major league victory in three years. After the game, he called Scooter, who howled into the phone when his friend told him he’d worn the garter.
“Meat, you’re full of it!” Scooter cried. To this day, he doesn’t believe Moyer really went through with it. To this day, Moyer still carries the garter belt with him, in his shaving kit.
From the beginning of their relationship, there were many similarities between Jamie Moyer and Harvey Dorfman. Both were products of their respective fathers, both were staunch family men, both believed, on some level, that baseball was more than a game, that it provided object life lessons and guiding principles. Both also hated the Yankees; in Harvey’s case, it was because his father—who always pulled for the underdog—would reply “whoever is playing the Yankees today” when asked for his favorite team. “I adopted his disdain for them,” Harvey would later write in Persuasion of My Days. In Jamie’s case, it was because, when he got to the big leagues, he felt like Steinbrenner’s crew had too much power, that the team dictated league policy. Like Harvey, Moyer was contemptuous of bullies.
But perhaps their most salient similarity was their mutual enchantment with baseball’s abiding mysteries. Both men decided early on to try and figure out the game, to ask questions and question answers, to somehow understand the strange turns baseball provided. By the time their paths had crossed, both had been humbled by the ever-surprising, unscripted nature of the game. “I’ve been doing it my whole life, and pitching is still a mystery to me,” Moyer says. “Which is why I love it.”