Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  Johnson knew Moyer didn’t need his rudimentary philosophies; his role was to dissect the nuances of Moyer’s mechanics, to pay attention to the slightest of details, in order to, as he says, “make sure the ball is coming out good every time.”

  He was struck by Moyer’s openness to every critique, no matter how minor. Once, as the catcher, Johnson noted that he could see the ball through Moyer’s back window when Moyer threw from the windup, though not from the stretch.

  “That’s because I’m coiling more from the windup,” Moyer said.

  “Well, if you’re not coiling out of the stretch, why coil out of the windup?” Dom asked.

  Moyer paused. “That makes sense.” He smiled. “I’m not going to coil anymore.”

  Days in Dom’s backyard in late 2011 and early 2012 felt happily familiar to Moyer. They were like those lazy days at Camden Yards years ago, when he and Mussina and the others would toss a ball back and forth and talk pitching for hours. He’d spend hours at Dom’s, talking mechanics and mind-set with wide-eyed kids. He’d long ago dedicated himself to the cause of continual improvement, becoming something like baseball’s living embodiment of kaizen, the Japanese business philosophy that seeks to repeatedly upgrade all functions. Well into his thirties, famed Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh once explained his legendary work ethic by observing that one’s potential is endless. In the States, Moyer knew, potential was thought to come with an expiration date. Like Oh, Moyer saw self-improvement as a process, not a destination. That’s what Dom’s backyard represented to Moyer: it was the laboratory for his ongoing experiments.

  At times the scene verged on the comic. One of the first times he was about to throw, not three feet from the mound, up popped a gopher through the ground; pitcher and rodent froze, staring each other down, until the pitcher shrugged and assumed the varmint was a baseball fan. From then on, the minor league kids who were always in attendance would begin each session by asking, “Hey Jamie, is your gopher coming today?”

  Those same kids made Moyer’s twice-weekly bullpen sessions even more special. Each day would turn into impromptu teaching sessions; once, Dom had about forty kids over to hear the veteran. Moyer walked them through the ins and outs of the game, explaining, for example, the complicated “touch signs” he’d developed in Seattle with his catcher, Tom Lampkin. Instead of going through countless signs to indicate the next pitch’s location, Moyer would signal that he wanted to throw to the right side of the plate on the next pitch by catching the ball back from Lampkin with his right foot forward.

  “Now,” he said to the rapt youngsters, “what if, once I’m back on the mound and looking in for the sign, I want to change where the pitch is going? Tell me how I’m doing that now.” He peered in to Dom, who was crouching behind home plate, nodded yes to Dom’s call, and then entered his windup and threw before turning back to the kids. “How’d I just change the location of that pitch?”

  They had no clue. He did it again. Still nothing. Finally a hint: “Watch my pearly whites.” And there it was: after nodding yes to Dom’s call and while making the first move of his windup, Moyer briefly smiled, showing the whites of his teeth. That tells his catcher to change the location to its opposite side: if the call had been for a fastball away, this subtlest of grins would mean Moyer wants to come inside with it instead. It’s a way to speed up tempo on the mound and hide location from runners on base. It also requires a very observant batterymate.

  Of course, Moyer couldn’t help but impart to the youngsters some Harveyisms as well. He told them how he’ll go for a walk behind the mound and bend over to tie his shoe. “That’s when I lose it on myself,” he said. “’C’mon Moyer, get it together—execute!’ Then I stand and take a series of deep breaths”—Moyer, courtesy of Dorfman, believed that deep breathing in tense situations slowed down the body’s fight-or-flight responses and increased the chances that one can find that ever-elusive zone state—“and I put the last pitch behind me and return my focus to this pitch. Because that’s all you have, your next pitch.”

  Johnson chuckled, knowing that Moyer had just unleashed on the minors and Division I a group of kids who would all be tying their shoes behind the mound while cursing themselves sotto voce.

  By the end of 2011, Moyer had gone through Ghandour’s strength training, he’d become a veteran of getting up and down Liba’s Puke Hill, and, with Dom’s help, he’d tweaked his mechanics to the point that he could put his mind on autopilot and trust them. In the months after his Tommy John surgery, he’d put on fifteen pounds, so he spent a weekend eating nothing but a concoction of maple syrup and lemon juice, cleaning out his body’s toxins, before switching over to a steady diet of salads and grains, getting down to his 185-pound playing weight in no time. It was time. Now, with spring training roughly three months away, Moyer’s agent, Jim Bronner, extended invitations to major league teams to make the trek to Johnson’s backyard to see Moyer throw.

  “My God, does this guy miss?”

  That’s what Dom Johnson hears one scout whisper to another while Moyer, time and again, hits Johnson’s targets. It’s a December 2011 weekday and some ten major league scouts—mostly pro scouts, with a couple who are more used to evaluating minor leaguers also in attendance—take notes while Moyer runs through his bullpen session for them, sixty throws to a variety of spots.

  Ghandour is standing nearby. He’s watching the mechanics closely, making sure that the stress of the moment and of multiple throws doesn’t tire Moyer and alter the delivery. Muscle compensation is the enemy—particularly over the course of a long big league season.

  After Moyer’s last pitch, he looks at his visitors. “Anything you guys want to see?”

  One scout—no doubt one of the minor league guys—speaks up: “Can you throw a two-seamer inside to a righthander?”

  Dom wants to blurt out, What do you think he’s been doing?

  But Moyer beats him to it: “I’ve only been doing that for twenty-six years.”

  He winds up and—thwack—the ball sizzles right over the inside corner, calf high. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” Moyer says, smiling.

  The scouts are effusive, as are the reports that major league general managers share with Bronner. “He’s Jamie Moyer,” one says incredulously. Another observes, echoing Rollie DeArmas from so many months ago, that watching him felt like “2008 all over again.” Another writes that Moyer can still “hit a gnat’s ass.”

  Yet there is no barrage of offers. Moyer had long been aware of baseball’s risk-averse culture, and to how GMs throughout the game found comfort in subscribing to the conventional wisdom. He’d even seen it in managers, in their groupthink rush to embrace pitch-count mania or the allegiance to the three-out save. (When Moyer was coming up, closers sometimes pitched two or three innings to preserve a win.) It made him miss managers like Don Zimmer, who was a gambler by habit and in nature, and would make moves on hunches.

  Getting a team to take a chance on a forty-nine-year-old starter is going to require someone willing to roll the dice. Plenty of teams are willing to have him come to spring training, but these are invitations born of polite formality. He doesn’t mind paying his own way, but he wants a real opportunity. Pittsburgh is interested, but Moyer had always hated the Pirates’ mound: it was harder than most, less forgiving, and the dirt was dry and choppy. The list of serious suitors quickly comes down to the Baltimore Orioles or Colorado Rockies; the Orioles say they’ll be making a big league offer, but a minor league one comes instead. Moyer thinks it’s no coincidence that their interest seems to cool after the Orioles hire Dan Duquette as general manager. Duquette, who had been out of baseball for a decade, had been Moyer’s general manager in Boston in the mid-’90s and had traded him to Seattle when Moyer had a 7–1 record.

  Meantime, Dan O’Dowd of the Colorado Rockies tells Bronner that Moyer would have the opportunity to compete for his team’s fifth starting spot. The Rockies don’t figure to be that good a team, and though Moye
r had pitched well there in the 2007 National League Division Series, he doesn’t know how he’ll do in the altitude over the course of a season. But someone is willing to give him a chance, which was all he ever wanted. He signs a contract for $1.1 million, provided he makes the team coming out of spring training.

  It’s two weeks before he packs up the Yukon SUV for spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Jamie Moyer has just made his farewell visit to Dom’s backyard, where he watches some high schoolers throw for some scouts, at one point stopping the proceedings to show an eighteen-year-old that the way he’s taking the ball out of his glove is tipping his pitches to the batter.

  This process, which began a little less than a year ago with some backyard soft-tossing with his sons Dillon and Hutton, has now come to this: like a rookie, he’ll be going to spring training to make a team. Unlike a rookie, though, his excitement is tinged with bittersweetness. For the last year, for the first time in his adult life, he has been able to be present in the daily life of his family. He’s gone to Dillon’s games at the University of California at Irvine, and he’s been in the stands for Hutton’s baseball, Duffy’s soccer, Grady’s tennis, Mac’s golf, and Timoney’s basketball games. Every day, he has cuddled up with Yeni and Kati—the two “littles” who were adopted from Guatemala—and worked with them on their Kumon, an at-home math and reading program.

  Karen has made sure the kids share her enthusiasm for this latest project of their dad’s, referring to it often in grandiose, historic terms. She sees her husband’s quest as a lesson for them, an eloquent example for them to follow. But Moyer knows it means their father won’t be around, that he’ll be away playing a child’s game.

  “Believe me, there have been times I’ve asked myself, ‘Am I putting myself before my family?’” he says now, cruising down State Route 56, otherwise known, appropriately enough, as the Ted Williams Freeway, named for San Diego’s favorite baseball son. “Or have I my whole career? Maybe I have. Maybe it’s wrong.”

  There’s a pause. “But, you know, this is what I know, this is what I do, and this is what I’m good at,” he says. Moyer looks into his rearview mirror and then, double-taking, looks again. “Did you see that?” he asks, perking up. “Did you see that granny back there?”

  He slows down. Coming up on our right is a beat-up pickup, windows down, with a woman who has to be in her late seventies, blaring the song “Holiday” by Madonna. Her left arm is flapping out the window to the beat as she sings along full throttle, almost drowning out her truck’s belches as well as Madonna’s lyrics:

  If we took a holiday / Took some time to celebrate

  Moyer waits until she’s alongside him in the right-hand lane, and then his passenger window is down and he’s laughing and honking and screaming:

  “Yeah!!! Sing it, sister!”

  She gives a thumbs-up and then they’re singing together, the SUV and pickup side by side at low speed on the Ted Williams Freeway, Moyer at the top of his lungs: “Holiday!”

  After the song, the elderly woman shouts, “I always do this! People should be more joyous! You only live once!” before she peels off onto an exit ramp and is gone.

  “What a great spirit,” he says. His mood has brightened considerably; the doubts about putting himself ahead of his family have been tabled. It’s a beautiful February day in Southern California. He’s heading back to spring training, he’s just spent ninety minutes talking about the nuances of pitching with Dom and his kids, and he’s just received an impromptu object lesson in how to embrace aging with a never-dying sense of passion—the same example his wife is convinced he is providing for his kids. As Jamie Moyer often says, “It’s all good.”

  June 1997

  Chapter Eight

  Good learners risk doing things badly in order to find out how to do things well.

  —Harvey Dorfman

  On June 15, 1997, Jamie Moyer stood on the mound of the Seattle Kingdome and told himself to summon a voice. Only this time it wasn’t the raspy sound of Harvey Dorfman he was yearning to hear. It was the next best thing: the gruff growl of skipper Lou Piniella.

  It was Moyer’s first full season with the Mariners, having been traded by the Red Sox to Seattle the previous July. He’d been 7–1 in Boston, and finished the 1996 season 6–2 for Seattle. That made him 13–3, the best winning percentage in the majors, with a 3.98 ERA.

  This season, however, had been another story; he was 5–2 with a 4.53 ERA. But something wasn’t right. In the month of May, he’d given up seven home runs, including two in consecutive losses to the Royals and Rangers. That’s what led him into his manager’s office just days before. Piniella wasn’t all that popular among his pitchers—he’d been a hitter himself and didn’t have a lot of patience for them. His reputation was well known: his intolerance for what he thought of as mental mistakes on the mound—particularly walks—chipped away at pitchers’ confidence. But Moyer had felt a developing bond with his manager, whose palpable will to win matched Moyer’s own.

  “I’m not feeling comfortable, Skip,” Moyer said. “Are you seeing anything?”

  Piniella, head buried in scouting reports on his desk, looked up. “You’re not throwing your change enough,” he said. And then he looked back down.

  There was a pause. Moyer was tempted to argue. Not throwing the change enough? The change was what got me to the big leagues in the first place.

  “Really?” he said.

  “You’re not throwing enough of them,” Piniella said. “And the ones you are throwing, you’re not committed to. Don’t just show it. The changeup is who you are, for Chrissakes.”

  Moyer was stunned. The conversation lasted all of a couple of minutes; back at his locker, Moyer realized the exchange had prompted a familiar feeling. Moyer’s two great mentors—Jim Moyer and Harvey Dorfman—were both, like Piniella, straight shooters. They wouldn’t seek to comfort him; they’d challenge him. No matter how critical they were, he always knew they just wanted him to push himself and get better.

  Moyer had grown accustomed to his big league managers conveying all types of no-confidence votes in him. When he was struggling, they’d avoid eye contact in the clubhouse or get someone up in the bullpen at the earliest hint of trouble during a game. Yet ever since he arrived in Seattle, he’d sensed that Piniella was different: he could be critical and demanding and in-your-face, but it all came with a sense of belief, as though he were saying, I don’t think you’re a piece of crap, so why do you?

  On the question of the changeup, moreover, Piniella took a page from Harvey and made their brief interaction about something bigger than that one pitch: he suggested it was really about Moyer’s self-identity. It’s like he was saying what Harvey always said: You’re different. Don’t be afraid to be who you are.

  Still, Piniella was a hitter—what did he know about pitch selection? Moyer left Piniella’s office with some lingering doubts about his manager’s prescription. But then he caught himself: Are you really going to ask him a question and then dismiss the answer? That led Moyer to check the pitching charts. So far this season, he’d thrown the changeup roughly 15 percent of the time. And maybe only half of those were being thrown for strikes or near-strikes. What do you know? he thought. Maybe Skipper Lou was on to something.

  Now here he was on the mound, L.A. slugger Mike Piazza approaching the plate, conjuring Lou’s voice: be committed to the change. He knew what that word meant: you’ve got to be committed to the location, committed to the pitch. Hitters sense doubt. Harvey used to quote pitcher Frank Viola. “When you doubt your pitch selection, you don’t have anything,” Viola said. “You end up throwing the ‘other’ pitch, and you don’t give your all because you’re not really committed to it.”

  It was time to recommit to the changeup. Pitching is about deception, and the changeup is the ultimate trick pitch. It requires that you sell it with the same arm speed and arm path with which you present the fastball. If you just throw it for show—simply to let the
hitter know you have it—you’re actually eliminating it as a weapon.

  In their pregame meeting, Moyer told catcher Dan Wilson he was going to be more aggressive with the change. With one down in the first, Todd Zeile grounded out weakly on an away change, after fouling off the exact same pitch. Now, with two outs, here was Piazza, hitting .367, coming off a 4-for-4 day that included his 12th home run. Moyer started him with three high and tight fastballs—two at 84 miles per hour, one actually hitting 86. Piazza fouled the first two off and looked at the third for a ball.

  Mouse meet cat. Moyer had busted Piazza inside three straight times. Now he followed with a 76-mile-per-hour changeup away, on the outside corner. Piazza lunged forward and barely nubbed it foul. An uncomfortable swing. What next? Another change, also at 76, only this time it was over the middle of the plate—but dipping below the zone. With two strikes, Piazza was looking to protect the outside part of the plate, so this pitch—even though it was white on white—had the effect of jamming him. Again, Piazza barely made contact. Another uncomfortable swing.

  He’ll be looking inside and hard, Moyer thought to himself. In other words: Piazza would assume the two straight changeups were simply meant to set up something similar to the pitches that started the at-bat. But Moyer was actually doing the precise opposite. He considered the first three pitches as the setup to this series of arrhythmic changes in speed. He dropped a 75-mile-per-hour changeup an inch or two off the outside corner, too close for Piazza to take; the hitter lurched forward off his front foot and whiffed wildly to end the inning. The last two batters: two outs on five changeups.