Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

In the second inning, second baseman Wilton Guerrero came up. Guerrero had made some dubious news just two weeks before: in a game against the Cardinals, he had grounded out, shattering his bat. Rather than run out the play, he’d frantically scrambled to pick up the scattered pieces, raising the umpires’ suspicions. Indeed, Guerrero had been corking his bat, ultimately leading to a suspension and fine.

  Now Moyer started the young utility infielder with a 75-mile-per-hour changeup, low and away. Off his front foot, Guerrero flailed at the ball, swinging well in front of it. And then came the inexperienced hitter’s big mistake. He broke into a wide grin and shook his head.

  That’s what I like to see, Moyer thought to himself. In the never-ending poker game between hitter and pitcher, every reaction from a batter offers some piece of information to his opponent. When a hitter complains to the ump about a call, for example, he’s inadvertently providing the pitcher with data about his state of mind, pinpointing which location makes him most uncomfortable. Now Guerrero’s awkward, off-balance swing and his sheepish reaction said to Moyer, I can’t hit that pitch.

  Moyer expected Guerrero to make an adjustment, to look to protect against something soft and low again. Moyer toyed with going even farther out—trying to entice a chase—but decided instead to come back with another changeup, this one at 74 miles per hour, over the plate but well below the hitting zone. It turned out that Guerrero was guessing changeup, but the deviation in location still kept the fat part of the bat off the ball. Guerrero topped it routinely to third base for an out.

  And so it went. Moyer faced Piazza twice more, and got him both times on changeups. When rightfielder Raul Mondesi came up in the fourth, Moyer toyed with the dead-fastball power hitter. The first pitch: a changeup outside for a ball. Then Mondesi, expecting fastball, swung well in front of a 75-mile-per-hour changeup. Moyer then went to his slowest pitch—a 70-mile-per-hour curveball on the outside corner: 1–2. Now a high and tight fastball that was fouled off, followed by a high and tight cutter for a ball: 2–2. A 74-mile-per-hour changeup was low for a full count.

  Moyer peered in and shook off Wilson’s sign for a fastball. Hell if he’s getting a fastball for a strike. This was what Moyer would become known for over the ensuing ten years in Seattle: his utter unwillingness to give in. It’s what Piniella would mean when, a couple of years later, he’d say that the best way to hit against Moyer was to “think backwards.” Roughly three-quarters of the time throughout the major leagues, pitchers will throw fastballs on 3–0, 3–1, and 3–2 counts.

  Not Moyer. Against Mondesi, he pulled the string on a changeup, causing Mondesi to get out in front of it and pull it foul. Certainly a fastball would be next, right? Nope. The same pitch that got Guerrero, a 75-mile-per-hour changeup below the strike zone, induced a weak pop-up to third.

  Piniella took Moyer out after six innings. He gave up two runs for his sixth win. How aggressive was he? Of his 103 pitches, 36 were changeups. But more important than the raw number was the type of pitches he made. Of the 18 outs he recorded, an astonishing 11 came on the changeup.

  After the game, Piniella approached him in the clubhouse. There was no gloating, no reference to their conversation just days before. Just, “Way to go,” with the hint of a smile. At his locker Moyer smiled. That son of a gun knows this game, he thought.

  On July 30, 1996, when Moyer was traded by the Boston Red Sox to Seattle for light-hitting outfielder Darren Bragg, he was not optimistic. He was going to play for a manager who was not known to be pitcher-friendly, and nor was the Seattle Kingdome known as a pitcher’s ballpark. It was hard to see how this was going to be a good fit.

  In three years in Baltimore, Jamie had established himself as a legit major league pitcher, going a combined 25–22 with a 4.41 ERA. But he could never nail down a consistent spot in the starting rotation. In 1995 he was in his option year as an Oriole, earning $1.1 million. He started the season in the bullpen, clawing his way back to starter by midseason, and ended up starting 18 games and relieving in nine others.

  He signed with the Red Sox as a free agent that off-season, a one-year deal for $825,000 with a $225,000 signing bonus. Yet it was more of the same. Moyer started five games in April—going 2–1 with a 6.10 ERA—before manager Kevin Kennedy relegated him to the bullpen. In July, he got a chance to prove himself again, going 3–0 in four consecutive starts. After pitching seven innings to beat the Royals, Moyer’s record stood at 7–1, with a 4.50 ERA. Good numbers, but Moyer was still the sixth man in a five-man rotation.

  Hadn’t he proven his worth as a starter? The pattern kept repeating: he’d get the odd start, but never felt secure. He was always looking over his shoulder to see if someone was up in the pen, always anticipating the manager’s hook. All he wanted was a job description. Instead, he got media reports that he was about to be traded to Texas.

  Karen pointed out that maybe a trade wouldn’t be the worst thing. They knew Texas and liked the Rangers as an organization. Moreover, Moyer didn’t like the ethos of the Red Sox clubhouse. The team was led by some big, famously undisciplined personalities, including Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens. They were great talents, but chaos seemed to reign around them. Cell phones and pagers were just finding their way into major league clubhouses, and phones were ringing—and being answered!—during team meetings.

  Weeks earlier, Moyer had decided to make his case. He made an appointment to meet with general manager Dan Duquette. You brought me here to contribute, he planned on saying, and I’ve done my share, winning seven of eight decisions. I’ve earned a regular starting job. Only he never got the chance. Duquette was a no-show. Then, after Moyer’s win over the Royals, he got word: he’d been traded. But not to Texas. To Seattle.

  Karen was shocked. Seattle? That was clear across the country. Moyer quickly caught a flight to meet up with his new team in Milwaukee. Though he was happy to escape the lax clubhouse atmosphere of the Red Sox, yet another move made him feel like a perennial journeyman, a player who might never truly find a home.

  And then he met Lou. When Moyer entered the Mariners clubhouse in Milwaukee, Piniella came waddling over, hand outstretched. “We brought you here to pitch,” the manager said. “We need pitching. We think you can help us. We didn’t bring you here to fail.”

  Piniella’s clipped words washed over him, bathing him in comfort, not unlike when he’d hear Harvey. But it wasn’t just the voice. Like Harvey, Piniella instantly made Moyer feel like someone was in his corner. For the first time, he felt like his manager was truly an ally, not an antagonist.

  “You’re in the rotation and starting the day after tomorrow,” Piniella said, walking away. On Thursday, August 1, 1996, Moyer went seven innings against the Brewers, giving up one earned run on four hits, raising his record to 8–1. Maybe he’d found a home after all.

  Lou Piniella was one of baseball’s old souls, a fiery leader who had little compunction when it came to getting in umpires’ or players’ faces. Regarding the former, he’d lumber out onto the field, face burning red, veins bulging from his neck, and…communicate. He may have been hot-tempered, but he was never misunderstood.

  For all his showmanship, though, his antics always had a purpose. When you saw him charge an umpire from the dugout, reversing his cap en route so he could literally get nose to nose with his combatant, there was a method behind the histrionics. Even when, in 2002, he yanked a base from the ground and tossed it into rightfield—only to chase it down and, apparently unhappy with his first effort, toss it farther—there was a calculation, an intention to fire up his guys. Once, he purposely threw his cap down on his way to the umpire, planning to pick it up after his tantrum and throw it to the crowd; when he was tossed from the game, however, the bat boy dutifully picked up his cap and delivered it to him as he started back to the dugout. “Gimme my damn prop!” he barked to the startled kid.

  “Lou was very smart and a lot of what you saw with him on the field was deliberate,” says Hall of Famer Pat Gillick, g
eneral manager in Seattle from 2000 through 2003. “He’d think his team needed to be awakened and he’d do something to stir it awake.”

  No wonder he and Moyer hit it off. Even in his playing days, Piniella was constantly looking for a mental edge. “I was no home run hitter, so if I came up with two outs in the early innings, I’d maybe get a slider and I’d roll over on it, bounce out, and let the pitcher and catcher think they could get me out that way,” Piniella, a .291 lifetime hitter, told the Seattle Times in 1995. “Then later in the game, maybe the score is close, maybe we need a runner, maybe with runners on, I’d be thinking they’d go slider when they had to make an out pitch. If I got a fastball up and in, I could tell for sure a slider was coming next, down and away.”

  As a manager over twenty-three seasons, Piniella and his will to win not only infected his teams, it imbued his charges with his personality—combative, cunning, intense. “Playing for Lou was like having another teammate, he wanted to win so badly,” Moyer recalls.

  But Piniella’s famous fire had a downside too, particularly for pitchers. He’d throw tirades when his pitchers walked batters. In the dugout, he’d berate pitching coaches in front of the team. “WHY ARE WE NIBBLING?” he’d roar. Moyer saw how some pitchers would allow Piniella to impede their focus, so put off were they by his second-guessing. Moyer, however, welcomed Piniella’s feedback, even if it was harsh. You always knew where you stood with Lou. Moyer was similarly candid with Piniella. In fact, when Lou visited the mound, Moyer would do something few pitchers ever do: tell the truth.

  “How you feeling?” Piniella asked one time.

  “Well, Skip, I’ve got half a tank,” Moyer replied.

  Piniella eyeballed him. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Moyer didn’t want to come out, but he felt obligated to level with his manager. “It means I’m half full and half empty,” he said. Piniella smirked and put his hand out for the ball.

  Moyer was receptive to Piniella’s coaching because, in his experiences with his father and Harvey, he had learned to tell the difference between criticism and coaching. He wanted to be challenged. And ever since his first day in a Seattle uniform, when Piniella signaled that he believed in him, Moyer didn’t want to let his manager down.

  Now, in his first full season with Seattle, he had taken Piniella’s advice and flummoxed the Dodgers with 36 changeups, 11 for outs. It would be the turning point of his career.

  Moyer would go 17–5 in 1997, with an ERA of 3.86. His combined winning percentage of .789 in 1996 and 1997 was among the league leaders. Until he reinvented himself yet again with a revamped cutter in Philadelphia, he’d never again throw the changeup less than 28 percent of the time. Thanks to Skipper Lou, he’d made himself into an elite pitcher.

  Unlike his relationship with, say, the curveball, Moyer’s courtship of the changeup was long and complicated, characterized by fits and starts and disappointments, before culminating in wedded bliss after Piniella’s 1997 intervention.

  In the early ’80s, Moyer was a dominant collegiate pitcher with essentially two pitches: a roughly 84-mile-per-hour fastball and the looping curve he could throw over the plate for strikes. At St. Joseph’s University, that was enough; he rewrote the school’s record book, setting a single-season mark for strikeouts (90), and winning 16 games (fourth all-time) with a 1.99 ERA. His ERA of 1.82 in 1984 was the twelfth best nationally.

  But he knew his limited repertoire of pitches wouldn’t be enough to get him drafted. Enter Kevin Quirk. Quirk had been a dominant St. Joe’s righthander who had graduated from the school in 1981, Moyer’s freshman year. Quirk was drafted by the Yankees, but never made it out of the minors. He returned to campus after two minor league seasons to help out the baseball team, his unique changeup in tow.

  Befitting the name, Quirk was a free spirit, a hard partier who as a student had doubled as the St. Joe’s Hawk, the mascot at basketball games who ceaselessly flaps his arms. (ESPN once applied a “flap-o-meter” to the Hawk during a telecast and concluded that the bird flapped its wings an average of 3,500 times per game.)

  Quirk showed Moyer his changeup. Even to this day, there’s no one way to throw a change. Some pitchers palm the ball, others throw a “circle change,” their fingers encircling the ball. Quirk’s grip was particularly unusual. With the open horseshoe facing first base, his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers would grip the top of the ball. The index finger and thumb would rest off the ball, underneath it. It was almost as if he were making an “OK” sign with his fingers and wrapping it around the ball. The removal of the dominant index finger creates a looser grip and more backspin, slowing the ball down in flight.

  Moyer must have thrown thousands of changeups before ever working up the courage to attempt it in a game. When he first tried it, the ball would either sail clear over the catcher’s head or bounce well in front of the plate. But gradually he came to see the pitch for what it was: the ultimate deception. To this day, he calls it the most important pitch in baseball, other than the fastball. The grip allows you to throw the changeup with the same arm speed, and from the same release point, as the fastball, but it’s far slower. Once he could master control of it, he knew he’d have something to counteract the lack of velocity on his fastball, something to regularly keep hitters off balance with.

  By the time he was in the minors in the Cubs system, the changeup had become Jamie’s best pitch. It was utterly emasculating to hitters; their eyes would widen as it approached the plate, so slow, so hittable, and yet they’d swing at it well in front of their bodies. And as more and more hitters trudged back to the dugout, unable to make contact with such a seemingly powder-puff pitch, Moyer began to understand for the first time what it was like to use the hitter’s ego to his advantage.

  But then something happened once he made it to the major leagues. He started to lose confidence in the pitch that had gotten him to that level. He started nibbling and being cautious with it, which led him to get behind in counts, which led him to throw fastballs when they were most expected. All of which eventually led him to Harvey Dorfman.

  But it wasn’t until, of all people, a consummate hitter—Piniella—gave him permission to have confidence in the changeup, to throw it with aggression, that he fully turned things around. Seattle GM Pat Gillick saw the transformation in real time.

  “Nowadays, you watch a game, and all the announcers talk about is this guy throws 94, this guy touches 96,” Gillick says. “You never hear the word ‘deception.’ But that’s what pitching is. As video got more and more popular, hitters started to pretty much know what pitchers will throw on certain counts. But Jamie and guys like Jimmy Key, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine always had a knack for throwing the unexpected pitch in an unexpected location when the hitter least expected it.”

  In baseball, there’s a difference between throwers and pitchers, a distinction that is often predicated on mastery of the changeup. In the late ’90s, Moyer became one of the best changeup pitchers in the game, right up there with his friend Trevor Hoffman. There are still great changeup pitchers today—Johan Santana and Cole Hamels come to mind—but not as many. And the ones who do remain tend to be guys who also have the option of rearing back and blowing the ball by hitters, like Justin Verlander.

  Moyer and contemporaries like Key, Maddux, and Glavine had to rely on their guile and craft. And Moyer ended up outlasting them all. “You could almost say Jamie was the last pitcher,” Gillick says, laughing. “I know this: if he were coming out of college today throwing 83 or 84, he wouldn’t get much of a look. Best case, he’d be a guy who you keep in the minors a long time, see if he can develop.”

  As Moyer developed, so did the Mariners. For the next six years, he found himself on an immensely talented team, one that shared his work ethic and hunger to get better. There was no longer any reason to be shy about his Dorfman-prescribed pregame mental rituals; turned out that every Mariner had some form of idiosyncratic routine.

  Randy Johnson, who
went 20–4 in Moyer’s first full year in Seattle, was a perfectly pleasantly fellow four days a week. But on the day of a start he wore a scowl and no one spoke to him. Designated hitter Edgar Martinez would spend hours every day in the batting cage—but not hitting baseballs. Instead, he’d fill the hitting machine with tennis balls, on which he would have written numbers with a black felt-tip pen. He’d hit each ball while simultaneously yelling out the number on it—a daily exercise in concentration and focus.

  Then there was Ken Griffey Jr., probably the most talented player Moyer had ever seen. Moyer marveled at Junior’s raw ability. In 1997, Griffey was the American League MVP, with 56 home runs, 147 runs batted in, a .304 average, and a league-high .646 slugging percentage. Yet Moyer never once saw him so much as stretch before a game. His sole form of preparation was to take batting practice early, sending balls rocketing into the seats to the delight of the legions of fans who would arrive in time to see Junior’s pregame show.

  As talented as Griffey was, he was also one of the guys. The Mariners in the late ’90s and early 2000s often socialized off the field, and, unlike many superstars, Griffey was part of the mix. Not so a young Alex Rodriguez, whose talents rivaled Junior’s. He led the AL in hitting with a .358 average in 1996, hit 23 home runs in 1997, and then hit over 40 per season for his remaining three years in Seattle. His teammates always sensed that he was destined for a bigger-market club, somewhere like New York or Los Angeles. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Moyer says, thinking back. “Someone’s gotta play in those places.”

  Moyer came to learn that, as important as superstars like Griffey and Rodriguez were to the team’s success, just as important were teammates like Jay Buhner and John Marzano, guys who were hardly destined for Cooperstown but whose leadership qualities and fun-loving personalities contributed mightily to the “we’re all in this together” mind-set that characterized the Mariners for Moyer’s first six years in Seattle.