Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

It’s a week into his twenty-fifth spring training with his eighth team, the Colorado Rockies. Everything he does, he senses coaches and trainers and media looking at this gray-haired guy with the wispy stubble of a beard, and they’re searching for signs. How’s his arm? Is he limping? He feels like he’s always being evaluated, whether it’s during pitchers’ fielding practice, or the distance run he opts to take with the rest of the staff, even though he gave up running outside years ago in favor of the HydroWorx 2000, an underwater treadmill.

  In the field, clubhouse, or bullpen, coaches approach and, with a concerned look and soothing tone, gently touch his arm. “How you feeling today?”

  Moyer issues his standard response: “I’m good, how are you?” as though he were misinterpreting the question for polite chitchat.

  They tell him not to push himself, to take it easy. Eat well. “I don’t know about this place,” he tells Karen in their nightly call. He’s staying in the guesthouse of Jeff Fassero, his Seattle teammate in the late ’90s, now a minor league pitching coach. His accommodations contain everything he needs: a bed, a washing machine, and a color TV set that gets the MLB Network. “Everyone is really nice. Almost too nice. The good teams I’ve been on, there’s an edge to them. You don’t want to say a meanness, but at least a hardness. They weren’t so concerned with how everybody is feeling.”

  He’s pitched two batting practice sessions. “I stunk,” he says. Nothing new there; Moyer’s never been a good batting practice pitcher. He tries to keep the ball off the fat part of the bat; the batting practice hitter expects all moon balls into the sweet spot. The more Moyer tried to comply, the more he had no idea where the ball was going. In the clubhouse, when asked about his batting practice stint, Moyer quipped, “I kind of look at my whole career as live batting practice.”

  Tomorrow, though, comes an intra-squad scrimmage. Teammates Jason Giambi and Todd Helton are managing the two respective squads. Jeremy Guthrie, a newcomer who went 9–17 for the Orioles last season but is an innings eater and is expected to be the staff ace, will be one starter, Moyer the other. He seems more nervous for this than he did for his 2008 World Series start.

  When it’s time to leave, Moyer slaps down some bills. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asks, getting up to go. “I can’t find the plate? I hit a couple of guys? Big deal. I can jump in the car and be home in five hours.”

  At first, you think: bravado. Then you realize: it’s just Jamie channeling Harvey, lowering the stakes, minimizing the pressure. It’s what Tug McGraw was getting at years ago when he said, “Ten million years from now, when the sun burns out and the earth is just a frozen iceball hurtling through space, nobody’s going to care whether or not I got this guy out.” If you’re okay not attaining your goal, you’re more likely to get it.

  Baseball aficionados fall into two groups: the craftsmen and the poets. Players tend to be the former; they’re often too busy trying to get better at the game—and too distracted by their frustrations in it—to spend a lot of time waxing sentimental about its bigger meaning. The hardest-core fans tend toward the latter; they’re the ones for whom the movie Field of Dreams is more spiritual road map than it is the story of a guy who built a baseball field in his backyard.

  But such is baseball’s allure that the two groups are seldom mutually exclusive. Moyer is the consummate craftsman, a pitcher who has thought about the act of throwing a baseball literally every day of his adult life—indeed, for most days of his entire life. Yet for all his professional stoicism, and for all the countless hours of working out, the mental preparations, the tweaks in the bullpen sessions, the sheer number of pitches thrown—58,485, fifth all-time—he is not just a baseball craftsman, especially at this time of year. Moyer, like so many of baseball’s lifers, quietly attends to his craft with the soul of a poet.

  How else to explain the rush of awe he felt when, after eighteen months away from the game, he first set foot on the baseball diamond at Salt River Fields, the Colorado Rockies’ state-of-the-art facility in Scottsdale? It was so green and so familiar; the sound of bat on ball filled the air—the true harbinger of spring, as Bill Veeck once said. Through the years, Moyer often felt this way on day one, humbled that he was but a tiny part of an epic history—the history of a game, but also, corny as it sounds, of a country. But it was particularly poignant now, because a part of him had wondered if he’d ever feel this way again. Day one of spring training 2012 found him meeting new teammates, being handed a uniform, running with his pitching brethren. In a larger sense, it found him feeling like a rookie again, breathlessly wondering what the future holds.

  The Colorado Rockies of 2012 are in need of Moyer’s experience. Last year’s version lost 89 games, but it was the way they lost that led general manager Dan O’Dowd to want to change the team’s culture. The 2011 Rockies were young, cocky, and complacent—a toxic combination. Now O’Dowd has stocked up on veterans, seeking to import the type of work ethic and pride that goes into winning baseball. The Rockies very well could open the Cactus League season starting six players born in the 1970s—and one, Moyer, from the ’60s. There’s Jason Giambi, forty-one; Todd Helton, thirty-eight; Casey Blake, thirty-eight; Marco Scutaro, thirty-six; Ramon Hernandez, thirty-five; Wil Nieves, thirty-four; Jeremy Guthrie, thirty-three; and Michael Cuddyer, also thirty-three.

  It’s no accident, then, that Moyer is assigned a locker in the clubhouse between pitching prospects Drew Pomeranz and Tyler Chatwood. Pomeranz is a 6´5˝, twenty-three-year-old lefty with a gun for an arm. Chatwood, twenty-two, is 5´11˝ but can hit the mid-90s with his fastball. Some scouts had likened him to a young Roy Oswalt. Manager Jim Tracy, only seven years older than Moyer, pairs Moyer and Pomeranz as long-toss partners. The movement on Moyer’s ball takes Pomeranz aback, but it’s the seriousness with which Moyer approaches his craft that Tracy and O’Dowd are hoping rubs off on the younger pitchers.

  But change isn’t coming to the Rockies solely in the form of new personnel. Tracy talks about a new attitude, one based on better team chemistry and “authentic relationships.” To that end, early in camp, each player is given an assignment: to research a teammate—without using the team’s media guide—and stand in the middle of the clubhouse and introduce him to the rest of the squad.

  Most of the players simply google the teammate they’ve randomly chosen from a hat, then get up and deliver the predictable: where the subject went to school, what his stats were in the minors, in a hesitant monotone that lasts all of a minute.

  Moyer picks Guthrie’s name from the hat. Rather than do a simple Internet search, that night he procures the phone number for Guthrie’s wife and mother and contacts both. The next day, when it’s his turn to speak about Guthrie, Moyer does a five-minute tour de force. “Jeremy was the state chess champion in Oregon,” he tells the Rockies. “But he wasn’t always so well behaved. When he was a little boy, he once strayed from his mother and the police had to find him. He also drove his Big Wheel very fast down hills. He also used to sell candy bars from his locker at school, until the authorities found out about it and shut him down. He was kind of an outlaw.”

  Not one of the Rockies put as much preparation into the exercise as Moyer, which was entirely purposeful. “If I’m given an assignment, I’m going to prepare to the fullest,” he says. “That’s something the young guys have to learn.”

  Moyer is right to fear becoming a sideshow. That’s what happened to Satchel Paige, who at fifty-nine started a game for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965. Paige, the legendary Negro League player, was signed for one day by A’s owner Charlie Finley as a marketing ploy. Paige pitched three innings; between them, he sat in the bullpen in a rocking chair being tended to by an attractive young woman dressed as a nurse. When he was taken out, the lights dimmed and the crowd serenaded him with the song “The Old Grey Mare.”

  Moyer doesn’t want the sentimental treatment. He wants a chance and he wants to be taken seriously. As spring training dawned, he was already
getting a sense of just how easily this quest could turn into punch line. When it was announced that the Rockies had invited him to camp, a blog headline blared, “Rockies Offer Jamie Moyer Chance for Career-Ending Injury.” Not a day goes by without someone—announcer, writer, coach, or fan—referencing his age. The media coverage seems intent on unearthing every conceivable factoid in order to underscore the same conclusion: the dude is old.

  To wit: He qualifies for his AARP card come November. He is older than eight of the game’s managers and sixteen general managers. His team’s best player, Troy Tulowitzki, was all of twenty months old when Moyer made his major league debut, and four of the pitchers he is competing against for a spot in the starting rotation weren’t even born yet.

  As for the rotation, Guthrie and twenty-four-year-old Jhoulys Chacin are locks for two of the Rockies’ five starting spots. Chatwood, Pomeranz, twenty-eight-year-old Guillermo Moscoso, twenty-three-year-old Alex White, twenty-seven-year-old Josh Outman, and twenty-five-year-old Juan Nicasio—making a major comeback himself, from a broken neck—are all competing with Moyer for the remaining three slots.

  But Moyer doesn’t consider the kids—to Moyer, the father of a twenty-one-year-old, they’re all kids—his competitors. No, his yardstick is his health—can his body hold up? And his true competition is time itself.

  He’d been told he’d have a chance to make the rotation, but what did that mean? At forty-nine and not having thrown a big league pitch in nearly eighteen months, how long would the Rockies give him? As he made his way to the mound on a practice field for the intra-squad game, Moyer wondered, Will I be cleaning out my locker in a couple of hours?

  Likely part of his anxiety stemmed from the fact that he was going to war short on ammo. He’d decided to not throw the cutter early in spring, because it was coming out flat from his hand. He was convinced he didn’t yet have the arm strength necessary to give the ball its bite, that sudden dipping motion down toward the righthanded hitter’s back ankle. So the pitch he’d come to rely on so heavily late in his career was on the shelf.

  Rather than feel ill-prepared, though, Moyer completed his warm-up tosses and felt his inner Harvey kicking in, just like old times. Task. At. Hand. The first hitter was outfielder Eric Young Jr. Moyer held back a smile, for he remembered that nearly two decades ago, Eric Young Sr. had been 0 for 12 against him. Like his father, Junior hit a Moyer changeup lazily into the outfield for an easy out.

  In two innings, Moyer threw 42 pitches, 27 for strikes. Not his usual command, but he thought, I’ll take it. Between the nerves and the absence of the cutter, he felt relieved to give up only three hits, one run, and no walks while striking out one. Late in his second inning of work, utility infielder Jordan Pacheco, on the bubble to make the team, fielded a ground ball on the foul side of third base and was about to toss it to some kids in the bleachers.

  “Hey!” Moyer barked. “That’s my ball!”

  Pacheco froze as his pitcher came off the mound toward him.

  “I don’t take your bat away after you foul one off, do I?” Moyer asked, holding his glove up.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Pacheco stammered, while both dugouts exploded in nervous laughter.

  Afterwards, Moyer apologized to the kid, who had no idea this kindly old gentleman in the clubhouse could be such a hardass between the lines. Manager Tracy and pitching coach Bob Apodaca both congratulated Moyer, remarking that he’d shown a little rust, but the test would be how his body would feel tomorrow. That night, he felt relieved. The next morning, he felt ecstatic, because his arm felt like it could go another few innings already.

  On the night before his first start of the spring, Jamie Moyer has a hankering for a cheesesteak, that artery-clogging Philadelphia delicacy. When it comes to gustatory cravings, he is as stubborn as he is on the mound. In some ways, though, finding a credible cheesesteak in the Arizona desert is a taller order than facing Pujols with runners on.

  Jeff Fassero comes to the rescue, however. He alerts his boarder to Corleone’s in Scottsdale. “It’s a little place in a strip mall,” Fassero says. “But the guy is from Philly.”

  That’s all Moyer needs to hear. We’re off in search of Moyer’s “cheese wit,” Philly shorthand for a steak sandwich with cheese (provolone, in Moyer’s case) and fried onions.

  When he walks into Corleone’s, Moyer is transported back to his roots. On the wall is a framed copy of the Philadelphia Daily News front page when the Phillies—his Phillies—won the World Series in 1980. “We Win!” it reads in big bold black letters. It’s the front page Moyer saw Tug McGraw hold aloft during his remarks in the parade celebration, giving voice to years of baseball frustration. “All through baseball history, Philadelphia has had to take a backseat to New York City,” McGraw said. “Well, New York City can take this world championship and stick it, ’cause we’re number one!”

  Next to the Daily News cover is a framed Pat Burrell number 5 Phillies jersey, signed by Pat the Bat himself. Moyer is standing at the counter, taking in the memorabilia that line the walls and looking at the menu board, when rushing out of the open kitchen comes a wild-eyed, well-built young man.

  “I gotta thank you! I just gotta thank you!” Giovanni Caranci is saying, coming out from behind the counter, arm extended for what turns out to be part handshake, part South Philly hug. “I gotta thank you for the World Series!”

  Caranci, who relocated to Arizona a few years ago and opened a chain of Philly-themed sandwich and pizza shops, had season tickets to the magical 2008 season. “I think I remember you,” Moyer says. “Didn’t I get you and your son some stuff?”

  Caranci is stunned—one day, Moyer tossed some T-shirts from the bullpen to him. They reconnect like old war vets; Caranci wishes Moyer were back with the Phils this season. They talk about this year’s Phillies team. “A lot is going to depend on Roy,” Moyer says of ace pitcher Roy Halladay. “He didn’t look good the other night.”

  In fact, Moyer watched Halladay, his friend and fellow Dorfman pupil, and immediately texted him: “Looks like you’re drifting to the plate.”

  On this night, though, he can waste little time worrying about Halladay’s mechanics; he spent today looking at his. Tomorrow will be his first start, but four days ago he made his first appearance of the season (not counting the intra-squad exhibition), and he spent this morning looking at video from the outing.

  Moyer pitched two innings in relief against San Francisco at Scottsdale Stadium. The Rockies had shelled starter Tim Lincecum for five runs in two innings by the time Moyer came in. His command was much improved; in the fourth inning, his mix of fastball and changeup led to three straight soft groundouts to second base. In the fifth, he gave up a single, the only one he’d surrender. He stepped off the mound and turned to second base umpire Dana DeMuth.

  “I was absent last year,” Moyer said. “Can I still bring my hand to my mouth on the mound?”

  DeMuth laughed. “Yes, you can.”

  “Okay. Just checking.”

  In two scoreless innings, he threw only 22 pitches; Giants catcher Chris Stewart was seen muttering to himself on his way back to the dugout after flailing at a two-strike changeup.

  “I was terrible,” Giants ace Lincecum said after the game, before being asked to comment on Moyer. “Wow! He’s forty-nine. He’s going back out there.”

  While Moyer was happy with his command, something felt off. The cutter still isn’t ready. More importantly, every pitch should ideally come from the same release point, lest the pitcher tip the batter off to the forthcoming pitch, and Moyer was not in the same arm slot on every throw.

  In the last decade, watching video had become all the rage in the major leagues. Every team has a video coordinator, and players and coaches spend countless hours “breaking down tape,” deconstructing at-bats and pitching sequences into intricate frame-by-frame parts. During games, hitters will leave the dugout to view their last at-bat, and pitchers will sneak looks between innings.

&
nbsp; Moyer is not a video devotee. Part of that is generational—he’s more comfortable with his own hand-scrawled notes from his decades of confrontations on the mound; beyond those, he relies on what, as he puts it, each at-bat is telling him in real time, what he’s gleaning from a hitter’s body language or expression, not unlike a poker player looking to identify and exploit the opposition’s tell.

  Which isn’t to say he never watches video—Moyer is too open-minded to dismiss it out of hand. He just doesn’t rely on it as much as other players. He doesn’t trust the centerfield camera angle, so he can never be sure where a pitch actually is, and for Moyer, where the pitch is, its exact placement, is the whole ball game.

  He watches himself on video when he’s trying to solve a particular mechanical mystery, but even to his keen eye, the nuanced differences in pitch-by-pitch arm slot positioning evade him. He’s searching for a feeling when he throws, the familiar sensation of muscle memory at work, and he’s found that watching tape of himself in pursuit of that can actually distract him from finding it.

  Moyer does watch hitters’ at-bats. He subscribes to a major league service that makes available on his iPad every at-bat in the league. He’ll watch and search for what he calls hitters’ “jam spots,” the farthest location inside that a hitter will offer at and be unable to keep in fair play. Once he has the jam spot, he’ll work it time and again, until the batter proves he can get around on it.

  This morning he looked at tape to see if he could discern his arm slot, but instead he noticed something else. “My right hip was leaning too far to the plate on my leg kick,” he says now, taking a bite of his cheesesteak and waving a thumbs-up in the air to the nervous proprietor keeping an eye on him from the kitchen.

  Now he puts the sandwich down and rises in the middle of Corleone’s, starting his pitching motion from the stretch right next to the condiments stand while other customers look on. He shows what he’s been doing—the right hip is out front, leaning toward home perhaps an inch and a nanosecond ahead of where it should be—compared to the motion he practiced this morning. “So, okay, now this is something I have to work on,” he says. A lefty leading too much with the right hip runs the risk of opening up too soon. That’s when balls get up in the zone and when pitches targeted inside to righthanded batters can catch too much of the plate.