Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  The 1993 version of Jamie Moyer was one of those mysteries. Who would have thought that after eight years of bouncing between the majors and minors, after being given up on by three teams, after countless shellings at the hands of overeager bats, Moyer would become a bona fide major league starter at age thirty-one, just as, only three years later, he’d take another startling leap and become an elite star? On one level, Moyer’s success in 1993—he’d end up going 12–9 with a 3.43 ERA for the third-place Orioles—defied rationality; it flew in the face of the game’s conventional wisdom, which holds that by the time a player has put in the years of service Moyer had, he is what he is.

  Why now? Why did Moyer break through, when so many others whom he played with had failed? Manager Johnny Oates had confidence in him, which helped. But Dorfman didn’t believe there was any single answer. He sure as hell didn’t think that Moyer’s 1993 season had anything to do with that damned garter belt. Or with the fact that he started eating the same meal before each start. (Karen, who had been putting together a celebrity cookbook for charity, one night cooked Joe Montana’s shrimp and pasta recipe before one of Jamie’s starts; after he won, Montana’s dish became their every-fifth-day meal. “You and your shrimp and pasta,” Harvey wailed when Jamie came clean.)

  No, it more likely had something to do with the same instinct that led Moyer to Dorfman in the first place, his sense of wide-eyed exploration. Like the game itself, Moyer’s career rewarded process. In his memoirs, Dorfman describes himself as a “seeker”; the same can be said about Moyer. No course of treatment—whether in the trainer’s room or in Harvey’s office, just as no new grip or pitch, is too out there for him. He is and has always been in an ongoing state of becoming.

  In his striving eagerness to learn, Moyer started to set himself apart. Just as in Toledo, when he started thinking about risk and rescue, in Baltimore he committed to digging deep in search of lessons in his losses. After the garter belt game, he’d have to wait a while. He was 4–0 in his next five starts, with a stellar 2.45 ERA. He was to start the Orioles’ final home game of the season’s first half against the White Sox—just before Camden Yards hosted the All-Star Game, which would be accompanied by an Old-Timers’ Game and a celebrity home run contest.

  Moyer came into the start riding high, with a 5–3 record and a 3.13 ERA, having just thrown a complete-game four-hit shutout against Kansas City. But something felt off in the clubhouse before the game. Far more media buzzed around, as the national baseball press had descended for the weekend festivities. Sitting at his locker, every time Moyer looked up, he’d see another recognizable face. He chatted with Reggie Jackson about Reggie’s dad, who had scouted Moyer out of high school for the California Angels, and about their upbringings in the exurbs of Philadelphia. Then Bob Gibson sauntered by—how could you not introduce yourself to Bob Gibson? And there was actor Tom Selleck—Magnum P.I.!—who would be playing in the celebrity home run contest.

  At one point, it occurred to Moyer that he’d better find Tim amid all the tumult so he could prepare. Tim was his old high school teammate, Tim Bishop, who was now the Orioles’ strength and conditioning coach. Upon reuniting, they had instantly fallen back into their friendship. Moyer was still skittish about broadcasting his pregame mental exercises—the visualization, the laminated concentration grid, the series of self-talk questions. So he’d taken to seeking out Tim, who would set him up in his office with the door shut, or in a utility closet, where he could narrow his focus by game time.

  Only on this day, Moyer never got to Tim. He tried running through the grid at his locker, but there was too much noise, too many cameras and conversations. He felt like his train of thought had been derailed. And then came his big mistake: I’ll find it when I get out there, he thought. Yet when he set foot on the mound, he sensed it wouldn’t be quite so easy. He’d so widely deviated from his pregame routine that he felt naked on the mound. “Warming up, it felt like I was out there without my glove on,” he’d recall some nineteen years later, having frozen the feeling in time.

  In the first inning, Frank Thomas turned on an inside pitch that didn’t get inside enough and smacked a three-run homer. What followed was more of the same. It didn’t help matters that in Moyer’s head, Harvey’s soothing voice was replaced by his own, berating himself for having been so weak-willed in his pregame preparation. He didn’t survive the fifth inning and the White Sox beat him handily.

  The next day, he, Karen, and the kids drove to Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, to spend the break with their friend Reverend Ray Deviney, who had officiated at their wedding. Moyer was pensive the whole trip; Karen knew he was beating himself up. You were not mentally strong or mature enough to handle the moment, he told himself over and over. How could you let your teammates down? he asked, more accusation than question.

  When Jamie next spoke to Harvey, there was no sympathy to be had. Harvey would often rail against “multitasking”; in his view, proper preparation could never be done half-assed. When Moyer made the mistake of trying to rationalize his misstep in an effort to get past it—“It’s one start, I’ll bounce back”—Harvey exploded. “What are you going to do to get this right?” he demanded to know. Moyer would later be teammates with certain pitchers—Randy Johnson among them—who were so locked in from the moment they arrived at the ballpark on their starting days that they would not speak and refused to be spoken to. Teammates were warned. You approach them at your peril.

  It didn’t occur to Moyer to go quite that far. But this was a lesson that he needed some of that kind of resoluteness in his approach. He swore he’d never, ever let anything interrupt his pregame routine again. Harvey told him to remember what it felt like to be so unprepared. Moyer never wanted to feel that naked on the mound again.

  Something happened in major league clubhouses in the new millennium: baseball entered a post-camaraderie era. To Moyer, it had always made sense that the game’s communal square was called a clubhouse, as opposed to locker room. Given the game’s meandering pace and marathon schedule, teams bonded, arguably more so than in other sports. That changed in the last ten to fifteen years. Now players clock out after games, like harried office workers looking to beat rush hour traffic.

  When Moyer broke in with the Cubs, the team still played all home games during the day. That allowed teammates to go out en masse after the game. In Seattle, a large group of players, led by pitcher Jeff Fassero, would dine out on the road together. Fassero was something of a wine connoisseur, which is how Moyer—ever the student—got into collecting wine.

  Used to be, after a game and the requisite interviews, players would gather around a keg in the middle of the clubhouse and dissect the night’s events—a game wasn’t truly complete until a group of guys analyzed it over a few cold ones. A few years ago, following the drunk-driving death of St. Louis Cardinal Josh Hancock, most teams banned alcohol from the clubhouse.

  That dovetailed with other changes in the game. In recent years, as the contracts got ever fatter, players took relatives and friends from back home on their major league ride with them. The posse was born. Teammates became more insulated from one another; late in his career, Moyer would look around the clubhouse in amazement, for the landscape in front of him was filled with guys wearing iPods or texting or talking to their agents on their cell phones. (In Philly, he suggested banning cell phones in the clubhouse, to no avail.) The definition of teammate had morphed from blood brother (think Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle) to office-place coworker.

  The Orioles of 1993 hadn’t yet fallen prey to such a breakdown of team community, though. There, Moyer was welcomed into a culture that made going to the ballpark feel like he was attending pitching camp. On so many teams, there had long been a dividing line between hitters and pitchers. But on the Orioles, Moyer would regularly pick the brains of stars like Cal Ripken Jr. and Brady Anderson about how to attack opposing hitters, and they’d gain insight into a pitcher’s mind-set by quizzing him.

  Eve
ry day, Moyer found himself in extended conversations about the craft of pitching. He and thirty-three-year-old reliever Mark Williamson, thirty-year-old reliever Todd Frohwirth, and twenty-four-year-old Mike Mussina would talk shop for hours: in the bullpen, in the clubhouse, loitering around the batting cage during batting practice. “We’d talk about setting up hitters, about mechanics, about how to have a good bullpen,” Moyer recalls. “I never tired of listening to those guys. I learned how to stay a step ahead of hitters from them. Pitchers don’t talk like that anymore.”

  Mussina, who led the staff in 1993 with a 14–6 record, was like Moyer’s mirror image. Both were from small Pennsylvania towns: Mussina was born in Williamsport, Moyer in Souderton. Both were high school prodigies: Mussina went 24–4 with a 0.87 ERA at Montoursville Area High School. And both were thinking man’s pitchers.

  Mussina had played three years at Stanford University before bursting into the majors in 1992 with an 18–5 record. “Mussina and Moyer were of the same mold,” recalls GM Hemond. “Very analytical. They were always having deep discussions. Mussina was the player rep, so I had to sit on the other side of the table from him. He was an economics major at Stanford. I have to say, there were times I felt quite overmatched.”

  In a sport that sometimes seemed to shun deep thinking, both Mussina and Moyer were unabashed in the cerebral way they approached the game. Mussina essentially threw five pitches—fastball, sinker, knuckle-curve, changeup, and cutter—but, like Moyer, he didn’t have a classic “out” pitch. Some might consider such an absence a weakness, but Mussina and Moyer saw it as an advantage. The hitter couldn’t sit on one pitch at any given time; instead, location and speed change made all the difference. They’d compare notes on hitters and play long toss in the outfield, trying to outdo each other testing out new grips and delivery tweaks.

  Between them, they won 26 games for the third-place Orioles, despite a long turn Mussina took on the disabled list with shoulder soreness. Not bad for a couple of small-town Pennsylvania boys.

  Moyer had never been speechless during a hospital visit before, but this…this was different. The first image Jamie Moyer had of two-year-old Gregory Chaya, who was almost the exact same age as his eldest son, would stay in his mind’s eye forever: a frail, sallow boy with no hair, tubes and wires crisscrossing his tiny body, sleeping yet shifting uneasily, clearly in discomfort. Oh my God, he thought, a lump instantly burning in his throat. He looks just like Dillon, his own two-year-old.

  Luckily, Karen was by his side, because Jamie couldn’t speak. It was just after Moyer had spent all of All-Star weekend flagellating himself over his last start. That weekend, his friend Father Deviney told him about this little boy from his congregation who was struggling for his life at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. A visit could lift his spirits, not to mention those of his parents, Margie and Rob, who greeted the baseball player and his wife and walked them through their story.

  Margie and Rob ran a family cement-mixing business back home in Blakeslee. In April, Gregory, the youngest of their three children, was diagnosed with leukemia AML, a form of cancer that usually targets adults. Now they were renting a Baltimore apartment to be near Gregory, who had just received a bone marrow transplant from Christopher, their eldest. Gregory’s chances of survival were estimated to be 45 percent.

  Karen, as emotive as her husband is cool, embraced Margie. This was supposed to be a one-off visit, something Moyer was a veteran of: you show up, bring some memorabilia, hopefully help comfort parents who are facing unimaginable challenges, and then you go home to your healthy, happy family. As they talked, Moyer said little, but he didn’t want to leave. It wouldn’t be right to leave. It’s so not fair, he thought every time he looked over at Gregory, who, awake now, was shy and fragile and seemed so helpless.

  That night, Moyer couldn’t stop thinking about Gregory, and about Margie and Rob’s dedication. Talking to them, he was struck by their determination and will. He’d visited sick kids before. As he moped around their Baltimore apartment, he and Karen wondered why he couldn’t shake this one. Was it because Gregory looked so much like Dillon?

  Or was it something deeper? Karen had never seen him so shaken. “It’s an unfair comparison to make, but do you think it has hit home because he’s fighting for his life and you’re fighting for your career?” Karen asked over dinner, while Dillon squirmed on his dad’s lap.

  Moyer thought about it for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “He’s fighting for his life every second of every day. My job means nothing compared to that.”

  The next day was Moyer’s first start since the loss to the White Sox before All-Star weekend. When he got to the ballpark, he called Gregory from a clubhouse phone. Gregory was in better spirits and he chattered on, mentioning something about Gummi Bears. Moyer made a mental note to bring him some. He told Margie he’d like to come around again. When he hung up, his eyes were glistening and the lump in his throat was back. He sat at his locker and wrote the initials “G.C.” on the back of his cap and on his pair of spikes.

  That night on the mound, Moyer was in easygoing command from pitch one. The Kansas City Royals managed just two hits and one run against him, en route to his sixth win of the season, lowering his ERA to 3.42. In the clubhouse after the game, the beat reporters wanted to know what “G.C.” stood for. Uh-oh. Moyer hadn’t wanted to talk about Gregory; he hadn’t told anyone, not even Karen, about his little tribute. And he really couldn’t talk about Gregory, not without getting visibly emotional. He hadn’t thought this initial thing through, he realized. The media pack squeezed in around him and he announced he was dedicating his season to the young boy. “I really feel it’s the least I can do,” he was able to say through quivering lips. “He’s fighting every day, whether he knows it or not.”

  From then on, Moyer would call or visit Gregory every day. Karen says she saw a spiritual bond develop. Gregory, who started referring to Moyer as “the guy on TV,” would blow kisses to the TV screen when Moyer pitched. During visits, they’d throw a Nerf ball at one another, and Gregory would howl with laughter when Moyer would softly ricochet the ball off the wall and into the child’s face.

  Gregory was recovering; by August, he and his parents were down to two visits per week to the doctors at Johns Hopkins. By September, the cancer was in remission and the Chayas were able to return to Blakeslee. Then, around Christmastime, Gregory relapsed. He was taken to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for chemotherapy, where the Chayas were greeted by a telegram from Moyer: WE ARE HERE FOR YOU. Soon, the doctors at Children’s Hospital told the Chayas there was nothing else to be done. They recommended making Gregory as comfortable as possible for the next two or three months so they could all enjoy the time he had left.

  That’s when something remarkable happened. Margie Chaya simply said no: “This is not how it’s going to be.” Moyer called often, and found himself in awe of the Chayas’ defiance. All those years of talking to Harvey about the power of will, and now here was this family telling their doctors that their belief was stronger than anything blood tests might show. The Chayas signed Gregory up for some experimental treatments at the Hutchinson Cancer Institute in Seattle; the family moved there, while Rob shuttled back and forth to Blakeslee to run the family business.

  The Chayas had no transportation in Seattle, so the Moyers arranged for a van for the family, and Jamie called Mariners ace Randy Johnson and told him about his sick friend. Johnson befriended Gregory as well, presenting him with the ball from his first strikeout of the 1994 season. When the Orioles played Seattle, Gregory was doing well enough to make the game, where Johnson and Moyer posed for photos with him.

  Three years later, Moyer was traded to Seattle—a move Gregory called an act of “fate.” Soon, his cancer would be gone. Today, he’s back in Blakeslee, working for the family business. “The doctors can’t tell you why he’s alive,” Moyer says, still welling up, all these years later. “Watching Gregory and his parents, you learn that a lot o
f this is belief. Here’s a family with a little boy who was very sick and they believed they were going to find a cure for him. Well, I mean, he’s a miracle. That’s what I call him, my miracle friend.”

  Harvey Dorfman had long lectured his clients on the power of widening their lens. When they first met, he held a sheet of loose-leaf paper directly in front of Moyer’s eyes.

  “Describe for me what’s in the room beyond this piece of paper,” he demanded.

  “I really can’t,” he said. “There’s a desk and a chair. But I can’t see the room.”

  “The piece of paper is your baseball career,” Dorfman said. “Any large object held too close to you will block out everything around it. There’s a world out beyond this paper. There’s a world out there beyond baseball.”

  Dorfman would later contend it was no mere coincidence that Moyer started putting things together on the mound after he met Gregory. The high stakes of Gregory’s struggle lowered those of his own. Suddenly, the game wasn’t life-or-death anymore. Harvey, always trying to broaden his pupil’s perspective, would say, “You’ve got a great life, a great wife, and great kids. If your career ended tomorrow, you wouldn’t kill yourself. So what’s the worst thing that can happen to you?”

  Moyer always understood his point intellectually. But when he met Gregory, he finally felt it. For years, he would look upon 1993 as the year his career turned around. But it had nothing to do with superstition, and everything to do with inspiration. Turns out, Gregory Chaya was really his garter belt.

  December 2011

  Chapter Seven

  Think and talk the solution—not the problem.

  —Harvey Dorfman

  This is the part they don’t see. The sportswriters and talking heads on ESPN often report in passing that an athlete has had “successful” surgery or has started rehab, and then—fast-forward two, three, six, or twelve months later—the fans see the finished product on the field. But in the months or years between injury and comeback lies this, the lonely hours of work in gyms and on obstacle courses and on treadmills immersed in tubs of water. It’s tedious, repetitive, and all-consuming, and it’s why so many older athletes ultimately hang it up: it’s not that they no longer love the game, it’s that they can no longer find the drive to push themselves back to their former level.