Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  Sure enough, early in 2012, Moyer, pitching for Colorado, faced Cabrera, who got a big hit and RBI against him. “Interesting,” Moyer mumbled to himself, staring at the screen. Ever competitive, Moyer is rankled by the possibility that the playing field wasn’t always level. Like other first-time offenders, Cabrera faced a fifty-game suspension..

  “Why not have a real zero tolerance policy?” Moyer asks. “If guys know that the first time they test positive for something, their careers will be over, they won’t cheat. It will take making an example of one or two people, but you’d end the madness. But baseball hasn’t shown the guts to do that.”

  Cabrera notwithstanding, the irony behind Moyer’s ire is that he feels more cheated as a fan than as a pitcher. It’s not lost on him that his career took off as the steroid era dawned. That wasn’t a coincidence. He feasted on a generation of juiced-up, overeager hitters who were all convinced they could take him deep. For a pitcher who took advantage of batters’ egos, it was a grand moment in the game: he was David, they were Goliaths, and the changeup was his slingshot.

  At the same time that pitchers like Moyer were having to adjust to a generation of hitters who were bigger, stronger, and quicker to recover than ever before, a new way of evaluating performance took hold. The sabermetric revolution had at its root an age-old schoolyard conflict: it grew out of a battle between jocks and nerds. (The name is derived from the acronym SABR: Society for American Baseball Research.)

  The nerds, led by Bill James, challenged much of the game’s conventional wisdom and introduced objective formulas for gauging player value. They said that metrics like batting average were overrated, because that statistic’s relation to run scoring—the ultimate purpose of the game, after all—was tenuous at best. On-base and slugging percentages, they found, were actually better yardsticks with which to measure a hitter’s worth.

  As for evaluating pitchers, a statistic like WHIP—walks plus hits per innings pitched—was seen as a better way to gauge effectiveness than, say, ERA, in that it quantifies a pitcher’s ability to prevent batters from reaching base, just as strikeout-to-walk ratio best revealed a pitcher’s control. And fielding-independent pitching (FIP) statistics were devised to measure a pitcher based on plays that don’t involve fielders: home runs allowed, strikeouts, walks, hit batsmen.

  The jocks scoffed at the nerds. What did these spreadsheet-bearing geeks know about playing baseball? A lot, it turns out. They may not have played the game, but there could be no doubt that the statheads were on to something in terms of how to evaluate it. When Michael Lewis published Moneyball in 2003, the story of Billy Beane’s sabermetric-informed running of the Oakland A’s, a long-simmering squabble was brought into the mainstream.

  “Moneyball told a neat story that made for good reading,” says legendary manager Tony La Russa, who retired in 2011 with the third most wins in major league history. In the latter stages of his career, he saw many teams create front-office positions for the generation of numbers-crunching geeks Lewis’s book gave rise to. “But it’s been exaggerated to take credit for things it can’t substantiate. It’s become a fraud. That Oakland A’s team had great starting pitching and its closer saved almost 50 games. Those players were all developed through the team’s farm system, the way we’ve always done it in baseball. Analytics have a place, yes. But there’s no replacement for judging things like leadership and competitiveness, which is what coaches have always done.”

  There can be no doubt that the new metrics have identified the right statistical categories to measure when judging baseball prowess. What it didn’t do is quantify how players attain their level of performance. The argument against sabermetrics too often conflates sabermetrics itself with Lewis’s book—with the story of Billy Beane himself, whose evangelizing for analytics bordered on ideology for the precise reason La Russa pinpoints: it was accompanied by a rejection of the importance of the mental game.

  There’s a backstory here. Beane was once a can’t-miss phenom who had all the physical skills but perhaps not the requisite mental ones. He’d shatter bats in frustration, destroy dugouts, get in fistfights. When he was in the Oakland A’s system in the late ’80s, such behavior brought him to the attention of none other than Harvey Dorfman. Dorfman worked with Beane, who was never able to grow into the player scouts thought he’d be.

  In Moneyball, Dorfman tells Lewis that Beane was typical: a precocious talent who lacked a coping mechanism when he confronted failure for the first time. Lewis recounts Beane’s response: “He thought it was [B.S.] to say that his character—or more exactly, his emotional predisposition—might be changed.…All these attempts to manipulate his psyche he regarded as so much crap.”

  Beane tells Lewis, “Sports psychologists are a crutch. An excuse for why you are doing it rather than a solution. If somebody needs them, there is a weakness in them that will prevent them from succeeding. It’s not a character flaw; it’s just a character flaw when it comes to baseball. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I just didn’t have it in me.”

  In his final memoir, Each Branch, Each Needle, Dorfman—never one to back down from a fight—throws high and tight at Beane in response. “‘A crutch’?” he asks. “Billy employed what is called in semantic circles a dysphemism, which suggested the most disagreeable aspect of a point he wished to establish, rather than using the word itself. That word is ‘dependency’—and Billy knew damn well, or should have, that a healthy independence is what I ask each athlete to strive for as a goal.…The courage of honest introspection is a required first step toward changing of negative, ingrained habits.…Awareness is the first step to change.”

  When slighted, Dorfman tended to respond with the same sort of aggressiveness he urged his pitchers to demonstrate on the mound. This was a man, after all, who, when Barry Bonds showed up to his hotel room for a 2 p.m. appointment at 4 p.m. with his posse in tow, told the slugger to “lose my number and never contact me again.” Now, dissed by Beane, Harvey was in full-throated Harvey mode: “As for his comments about ‘weak guys’?…The strongest people I know face up to their issues; the weakest I know run away from them—or deny them.…Not ever addressed is that the mental game is intellectual, as well as psychological. Much of my work has little, if anything, to do with the ‘psyche.’ How to think, what to think, and when to think—rationality—is about mental preparation, strategies and approaches to the game. And, oh, yes, responses. Such as throwing equipment. Still unacceptable, after all these years.”

  According to Lewis, Beane saw “no point in trying to get inside players’ heads, for instance, to reshape their approach to the game.” He quotes Beane, perhaps thinking of his own career: “You don’t change guys; they are who they are.” Presumably this means that if a hitter is an overeager free-swinging collegian who rarely walks, he’ll never quiet his approach and learn to be more selective.

  It is, of course, an ahistorical argument masked as a rational one. Countless players grew into All-Stars by tweaking their mental modus operandi. In the ’70s, Mike Schmidt made himself into the best third baseman ever by overcoming the paralyzing effects of pressure. In the late ’80s, Dave Stewart, pushing thirty, finally put it all together. In the early ’90s, Randy Johnson, a mediocre pitcher at age twenty-eight, got out of his own way and joined the game’s elite. The entire 2001 Seattle Mariners team, as Pat Gillick learned, stands as a testament to the difference attitude and approach can make.

  And then, of course, there’s Moyer, who—through years of study—managed to turn himself into an aggressive, inside-pitching master of deception. Had Beane been right, wouldn’t Moyer have been run out of the league in the early ’90s?

  Meantime, Moyer had become the face of the Seattle franchise. After his 20–6 season in 2001, he went 13–8 in 2002. Despite the drop-off in wins, he arguably pitched better than the previous year. His ERA was 3.32, he logged 230 innings, and his WHIP was a career-best 1.075, among the league leaders.

  The following year, with a
12–5 record and 3.02 ERA at midseason, Moyer was an All-Star for the first time, at all of forty years old. The game was held at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, the city where his professional career began. Karen was pregnant with Mac and couldn’t travel, so Moyer took his boys with him. Twelve-year-old Dillon and ten-year-old Hutton were about to have the weekend of their dreams. Because he had no one to watch the boys in the stands, Dillon and Hutton were with their dad in the clubhouse and dugout.

  Come gametime, Moyer sat in the dugout, taking in the sheer firepower around him. How cool would it be to play on a team with all this talent? he wondered. When he got the call in the bullpen to start warming up—he’d pitch the fourth inning, replacing Roger Clemens—his heart started pounding. As he threw, he couldn’t find the plate. Everything was up, up, up. You’re too keyed up, he told himself. He knew he had to stop and collect his thoughts. He stepped off the rubber and had a private Harvey moment with himself.

  Throw as slow as you can, he told himself—the first and only time he’d ever have to offer such self-advice. Focus on down, down, down. Once on the mound, he settled down quickly and made short work of the National League’s two, three, and four hitters: he struck out the Cardinals’ Jim Edmonds and induced Pujols and Bonds into flyouts.

  But the best part of All-Star weekend came next. Walking into the dugout, his teammates lined up to high-five him; among them were the beaming faces and outstretched hands of Dillon and Hutton, who were more excited than anyone. “What a privilege to have my boys with me,” he’d remember later.

  After the break, Moyer picked right up where he left off. He ended up a 20-game winner for the second time, going 21–7 with a 3.27 ERA and a WHIP of 1.233 for a Mariners team that won 93 games but barely missed the playoffs.

  But that year would mark the end of Seattle’s winning ways for some time, and the end of a stellar run for Moyer. He went 7–13 in 2004, giving up a career-high 44 home runs. The Mariners finished 63–99 in what Moyer called a “disastrous” season. Late in it, Moyer phoned Harvey.

  “I just can’t get comfortable,” Moyer said.

  “Can’t? Why can’t you?” Harvey barked through his perpetual cough, calling attention to Moyer’s negative self-talk. Moyer had held off on calling him, figuring that by now in his career, he could right his own ship. But he was now zero for July, August, and part of September: 0–8 in his last 15 starts.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he told Harvey.

  “Are you doing anything different? Are you paying attention to your routine?”

  “I am, but it feels like I’m just going through the motions,” Moyer said. Dorfman considered the bigger picture: after all his struggle, after all the years of being cut and disrespected, of being shuttled back and forth between the minors and majors, of being ridiculed for his soft-tossing ways, Moyer had finally broken through and become an elite pitcher. He’d won 20 games in two of the last three seasons and could have easily won 20 in 2002 had his team scored runs for him. He had, in other words, made it. Harvey had seen it before: players expend so much psychic energy to succeed that they misplace the mental edge that got them ahead. “I think you need to put something on the line,” Dorfman said.

  “Put something on the line?”

  “You’ve always needed something to prove, something to fight for,” Dorfman said. “You’ve made it. So what’s left to fight for? You need to come up with something to put on the line. Any ideas?”

  Moyer was at a loss.

  “What about your kids? What about telling yourself that you’re doing this for them, that if you fail, they’ll feel it?”

  After talking with Dorfman, Moyer told himself he was pitching for his kids’ future, and he then went out and beat the Angels, giving up three runs in six innings, his first win in two months. He carried Dorfman’s advice into the following season, the final one of his three-year, $15.5 million deal, and reversed his record: 13–7 with a 4.28 ERA and a solid WHIP of 1.385. But the Mariners finished 69–93; the glory days were long gone and Moyer was now about to turn forty-three.

  At the close of the 2005 season, Moyer got his own taste of how sabermetrics were being used—some might say abused—by tepid front offices. The Mariners had just hired Bart Waldman, a Harvard- and Georgetown-educated lawyer, as their new vice president, baseball counsel, and associate general counsel. He’d be taking over the handling of the team’s free agent player contracts, which included Moyer, from general manager Bill Bavasi, who had replaced Gillick in 2003.

  Moyer had represented himself ever since Jim Bronner and his partner Bob Gilhooley had sold their agency to SFX Entertainment in 2000. Bronner had been in Moyer’s corner since the early journeyman years. He’d been more than an agent; he’d become a close friend and trusted confidant. For the first time, Moyer faced a contract negotiation without him. It was tricky terrain. In sports contract negotiations, teams, in trying to make the best deal for themselves, have to argue that their asset—the player—is not as valuable as he thinks he is. That’s particularly awkward when the team’s representative is talking directly to the player.

  Most such negotiations are conducted by phone, but Moyer wanted a face-to-face meeting. “I’m ten minutes away,” he explained. He eventually got his meeting, but it was anything but satisfactory. Moyer was the Mariners’ all-time winningest pitcher. Perhaps naively, he thought that, given what he’d accomplished for the organization, it would be a pretty simple deal.

  Waldman thought so too—but their definition of “simple” differed. Waldman referenced sabermetric calculations as an argument for his take-it-or-leave-it $5.5 million offer for one year. Moyer wasn’t complaining about the money. He still felt fortunate to make millions playing the game of his youth. But there was something about being treated as just another free agent that left a bad taste in his mouth; the whole transaction felt cold and antiseptic. And, he suspected, it was not unrelated to the game’s newfound idolatry of data.

  Rather than engage on whatever data Waldman had come up with, Moyer pointed out what his career had always shown: you can’t gauge heart or professionalism or being a good teammate or performing under pressure by running a computer program. There isn’t a software program able to discern baseball smarts.

  “The computer doesn’t judge personality or heart, and any good organization is going to take that into consideration—what kind of person do we have?” Moyer said, subtly identifying a problem in the Seattle clubhouse the last two years, in stark contrast to the close-knit, winning teams of the Gillick era. “If that’s overlooked, all it takes is having a couple of bad players personality-wise who are destructive or distracting to remind you how important it is to have good people.”

  In the end, he took the contract, but Jamie wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be in Seattle, where there no longer seemed to be as much of a desire to excel.

  By 2006, Moyer knew the end was near for him in Seattle. He had grown tired of the me-first mind-set of the Mariners’ clubhouse. He was now forty-three years old and he found himself thinking often about that 2001 team, its work ethic and camaraderie. This team, a much younger one, didn’t exude a passion to win, and it was wearing on him. In mid-August, the Mariners had lost seven in a row and were already well out of postseason contention. Before his start against the Angels in Anaheim, Moyer had had enough. He sensed that some teammates were just going through the motions. When things didn’t go well, they’d hide from the media in the trainer’s room. If you’re eager to stand before the beat reporters and the TV cameras when you’ve done something good, he felt, you have to take the heat when you’ve done something bad. He decided to call a team meeting, something rarely done by pitchers.

  “Think back to when you were eight, nine, ten years old,” Moyer told his teammates. “You weren’t playing to get paid then. You were playing for the fun of the game. You enjoyed it. We need to recapture that spirit. We need to go out and play as a team. Instead of having twenty-five players and twen
ty-five cabs, let’s have twenty-five players and one bus, with everyone on it, going in one direction. Let’s try and make something of this season. Let’s be a spoiler.”

  Only Raul Ibanez spoke up in agreement. Most looked back at Moyer, expressionless. One teammate didn’t even turn to face Moyer while he spoke. That night, Jamie called Karen. They spoke for an hour and a half. Moyer explained that too many in the clubhouse seemed to be comfortable with losing. “I can’t do this anymore,” Moyer told his wife. “It’s too draining. I’m going to retire at the end of the year.” The decision was made. His mind was made up.

  Until the next day, that is, when general manager Bavasi asked if, in keeping with the provisions of his contract, he’d sign off on being traded to the Phillies.

  March 2012

  Chapter Nine

  Hoping you will do something means you don’t believe you can.

  —Harvey Dorfman

  He’s been on a steady diet of salads and electrolytes, so on this, the eve of his return to a big league mound for something other than tossing some pain-in-the-ass batting practice, Jamie Moyer is treating himself: a burger and a beer, on a deck overlooking a serene lake in Scottsdale, Arizona.

  He takes a gulp and looks both ways before speaking. He’s got to talk softly, because he doesn’t want to broadcast a hint of vulnerability. He leans forward to make his admission: “I’m terrified.”

  Of what? His eyes widen at the thought. “That I just can’t do it anymore, after all this.” He sighs. “That this is it. Or that I’m going to be seen as some type of damned novelty act. I am so outta here if I think that’s happening.”