Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  He sits down and returns his attention to the cheesesteak. Tomorrow, he’ll start against the White Sox in a three-inning stint. For now, though, he’s just a Phillies fan, the memorabilia and the food taking him back to another time. “Remember Big Bull Luzinski?” he says, referring to the Phillies team of his youth. “Now there was a tough out.”

  Luzinski was preceded in the lineup by the majestically talented Mike Schmidt, though for most of Moyer’s adolescence Schmidt was an underachiever who was a target of the Philly boo-birds. It wasn’t lost on Moyer that Schmidt turned an underachieving career into a Hall of Fame one through work ethic and by figuring out the game.

  “Very few in the game worked as hard as I did, and I never got credit for that,” Schmidt said in 1995, sounding as old-school as Moyer. “I’m talking about being consumed by the sport. Players today come to the park, watch some TV, read a newspaper, make a sandwich, have a few laughs, break out the cards, ease into their uniforms, and then it’s time for batting practice. When I got to the park, I started preparing immediately. I was all business.”

  It was long before Harvey and the era of the sports shrink, but Schmidt got better because—not in spite of—his cerebral nature. “I went from ducking every time they threw a breaking ball to being the best righthanded breaking ball hitter in the league, because I had the patience and the drive to learn the game,” Schmidt recalled. It’s true—it was arguably Schmidt’s analytical nature, not his natural talent, that turned him into a Hall of Famer. When his career started to wane in the mid-’80s, it was his studied approach to the craft of hitting that resurrected him. He changed his approach, started hitting down on the ball, and began using the whole field instead of trying to pull everything.

  “At this level,” Moyer says now, “everyone is talented, or they wouldn’t be here. What separates the best from the rest is this.” He taps his head.

  This waltz down memory lane concludes with Moyer’s last bite of his cheesesteak. “You can’t get good cheesesteaks outside of Philly,” he says, noting that a shop in, of all places, Bradenton, Florida, also makes a mean one. He wipes his mouth. “This is a very good one.”

  As their son completes his warm-up tosses, Jim and Joan Moyer are a study in contrasts. They have just arrived, along with daughter Jill, on a flight from Philly.

  “You didn’t think we’d miss his first start in nearly two years?” Joan says. Her legs bob nervously as she grabs scoopful after scoopful of popcorn. Jim, on the other hand, is placid, holding the game program open in his lap, pen poised to score each play as he’s done for decades. This was what it was like when Jamie pitched for the Phillies, and Jill would drive their parents an hour each way to every home game he pitched. Before that, during his time in Seattle, the Moyers would stay up late to watch on the satellite dish, Jim scoring silently, Joan fidgeting nervously.

  Karen and a bunch of the kids are here too. Fourteen-year-old Duffy helps watch “the littles,” Kati and Yeni, while eighteen-year-old Hutton and eight-year-old Mac look forward to going into the clubhouse after their dad pitches.

  They won’t have long to wait. On the field, Moyer looks sharp in the first. He retires the side on just seven pitches, all strikes. It’s more of the same in the second, when a two-seam fastball below the zone induces an inning-ending grounder to Tulowitzki at short for a double play. That’s thirteen pitches through two innings today, and four scoreless innings thus far. Karen looks relieved enough to chat with some of the other wives in the stands.

  In the third, Moyer gives up his first run of the spring on an RBI base hit by Eduardo Escobar. With a runner on and two outs, up comes White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski, a 6´3˝, 240-pound lefty who struck out all of 33 times last season and has never seen a fastball he didn’t want to crush. Moyer starts him with a 72-mile-per-hour changeup that breaks down and in, right over the inside part of the plate. Strike one.

  After getting something soft and in, most hitters will look for something hard and outside. Moyer toys with busting him inside again, but decides to mess with Pierzynski’s rhythm even more. He throws a 65-mile-per-hour looping curveball that starts out heading for Pierzynski’s right hip and quickly drops out of the zone and away from the hitter; Pierzynski lurches for it, swinging well in front and well over it. Strike two.

  Pierzynski is something of a hothead, with a reputation as an emotional—some say dirty—player. Now he steps outside of the batter’s box, clearly frustrated. This is the part of the game Moyer loves. Will he? Won’t he? At 0–2, having just seen two slow pitches, Pierzynski is likely looking off-speed again or expecting a waste pitch—something well out of the strike zone in the hope that he’ll chase a bad ball.

  Moyer doesn’t like the phrase “waste pitch,” because he considers every pitch to have a purpose. Besides, why give the hitter what he expects, even if it’s well outside of the zone? No, having caught Pierzynski off guard by a slow pitch followed by an even slower one, Moyer now has the batter out of sync. Uncomfortable. Better to keep attacking. He comes back with a two-seam fastball at 79 miles per hour—79 following 65 and 72 is really equivalent to a pitch in the 90s—and it freezes Pierzynski, who takes it on the inside black for a called third strike.

  Moyer comes off the field to loud applause, and manager Jim Tracy’s outstretched hand greets him at the top of the dugout steps. Within minutes, Karen’s cell phone rings. “Send Hutton and Mac down,” Moyer says, and they’re off like base runners given the double steal sign.

  After the game, Karen and the kids wait outside the clubhouse. Moyer comes out with a stat sheet, showing him credited with the win. Karen smiles. “It’s been a long time since one of those,” she says. Three innings, three hits, one run, two strikeouts. And that’s having thrown only two cutters; one for a ball and the other, up in the zone, for a base hit.

  “Today’s a good day,” Moyer says, Kati and Yeni both grabbing a leg. Moyer hasn’t seen the kids in a couple of weeks, and dinner with the brood awaits. As he leads the pack toward the parking lot, he wants to know something. “How was my velocity?” he asks. Seventy-nine, he’s told. He winces, partly because he wants to get a 10-mile-per-hour differential between his fastball and his changeup, instead of the six or seven miles he’s now averaging. But the pained facial expression may also be because he’s got some discomfort in his groin. Probably nothing, he thinks. It’s all good.

  Jamie Moyer has been in a conversation with his body as long as he can remember. He’d learned to trust it; trust, after all, is the cornerstone of any such intimate relationship. He’d listened to its aches, pains, tweaks and dings, and, most of all, its weariness. When his legs felt like logs, he knew that it was the midseason blahs—and he knew as sure as he knew anything that it was just something to “gut out.” He recognized “dead arm,” that tranquilized feeling in the dog days when his left arm seemed to have had the life drained from it, as something to slog through. Through it all, Moyer had taken comfort in the knowledge that, as he’d often explain, his body clock knew how to recover just enough to get him to his next start.

  Now, just days after his triumph over the White Sox, what he’d thought was a minor tweak of the groin has flared up into full-on pain every time he plants to throw. At first he thought it was something he could once again gut out. He’d come to camp with his own supply of anti-inflammatory pills; knowing how sensitive management would be to having a forty-nine-year-old trying to make the roster—rightfully so—he didn’t want to ask the trainers for anything and thereby reinforce any doubts the front office might have about his physical state.

  But now the pain hasn’t subsided, so Moyer makes his way to the trainer’s room. In 2009, his season in Philadelphia ended when he required surgery for a torn groin; the speculation is that this latest episode is the inflammation of some scar tissue from that procedure. The team announces that he’ll miss his next start and undergo treatment. He’ll get a cortisone shot, which will help quiet things. He also calls Liba, and she
e-mails him a series of stretching exercises.

  A couple of other pitchers are banged up as well. Pomeranz’s next start is postponed due to a strained glute, and Chacin has a blister on his right index finger that limited him to 44 pitches in his last outing. But they’re not forty-nine years old. Moyer worries that any malady, no matter how minor, will scare management off from making a commitment to him.

  He knows he has no control over that. So he decides to control what he can, to live in the training room and to do Liba’s exercises. Day by day, the tightness and soreness begin to dissipate.

  Finally, eight days after his win over the White Sox, Moyer is given the go-ahead to try it out and pitch a couple of innings against the Diamondbacks’ Triple A squad on a practice field. He gets banged around—four runs on six hits in less than two full innings—so the beat reporters can’t figure out why he’s positively joyous afterwards.

  The groin feels much better, that’s why. That is the real test. As for the results, Moyer felt too strong, having not pitched in over a week. When he’s not a little fatigued, his ball tends to elevate. By the second inning, he was rediscovering his rhythm and the lower part of the zone, and he punched out the last two batters he faced.

  “I think it was a step forward,” he says to the press.

  Manager Jim Tracy seems to agree. “What I’m looking for over the course of the next couple of weeks is the question, ‘How does he bounce back?’” Tracy says. “More important, as we get in a position of stretching him out, how does his body respond from one outing to the next?”

  Meantime, the other pitchers vying for a spot in the rotation haven’t used Moyer’s downtime to pull away. Chatwood has a start in which he records only 14 outs on 61 pitches. Pomeranz comes back from the glute injury and gives up three runs on six hits in four innings against the Angels’ Triple A team. Righthander Guillermo Moscoso gives up five runs on seven hits in three innings against the Padres. Moyer is scheduled to start against the Giants on Thursday night, March 23. Karen flies in. A good start will help to ease any fears about his body’s ability to recover and likely make him a frontrunner for the rotation. A bad start probably means retirement finally looms.

  He sees the text when he wakes up. I’ve been immersed in Harvey Dorfman research, and I’ve sent Moyer a Dorfman quote: “To aspire to great achievement is to risk failure.” He reads it over and over again. Karen walks into the bedroom; her husband, on the verge of tears, looks up at her.

  “What is it?”

  He holds out the phone. “It’s like I just heard from Harvey,” Moyer says wistfully, suddenly reminded of the impact Harvey had, and continues to have, on his life, even though Dorfman is gone.

  Later, at the ballpark, Moyer has a very comfortable bullpen session. His mechanics are free and easy, his mind strangely clear and calm. The first batter of the game, Angel Pagan, smokes a sinker to centerfield, where Dexter Fowler, retreating, snares it. It turns out it will be the one and only time a Giant will get solid wood on the ball.

  Four days ago, Moyer wondered if the pain in his groin would permit him to return to this spot. And he worried that even if it did, the setback would have spooked Rockies management. Now here he is, easily mowing down the Giants lineup. But that’s baseball. And that’s Moyer’s career. Every time onlookers think he’s done—every time he wonders if he’s done—there seems to be a surprise waiting. Part of the answer to the question “Why does he do it?” has to do with the game’s wonderfully unscripted nature. You just never know.

  Moyer pitches four perfect innings. Twelve up, twelve down, including four strikeouts. Only twice does he go to three-ball counts. Of 45 pitches, 30 are strikes. The Denver Post calls it a “mini-masterpiece.” He added the cutter tonight, and, true to Harvey’s quote, he was extra aggressive with the changeup.

  The media wants to know if his performance stakes his claim to a starting spot. “You’ll have to ask the guy down the hall [manager Tracy] about that,” he replies.

  The pack dutifully goes to Tracy, who is effusive. “As I have said many times this spring, he looks like Jamie Moyer,” he says. “It certainly doesn’t look like he missed any time last year.”

  Before meeting Karen outside the clubhouse, Moyer texts me: “I achieved & took the risk tonight. I love these quotes. Keep ’em coming. Ur motivating me even more.”

  It isn’t exactly Moyermania, but the story of his comeback has become national news. After the win over the Giants, The Today Show calls. Moyer gets to the ballpark at 5 a.m. so Matt Lauer can interview him via satellite. The New York Times comes in and MLB Tonight sends a camera crew for a feature.

  The White Sox are also back for one more shot at him. Moyer battles through four innings, after lobbying Tracy to send him out for the fourth. He accumulates his highest pitch count of the spring: 92, 53 for strikes. He gives up three runs, striking out four, and keeps his team in the ball game. He is 2–0 with a staff-leading 2.77 ERA through 13 innings.

  After the game, Moyer heads back to Fassero’s guesthouse. He is stretching out on the floor when the MLB Network feature on him airs. There’s footage of him running in the outfield, playing long toss, fielding bunts.

  “Is that what I look like?” he mutters to himself, a surprised lilt to his voice. “Holy crap. That guy looks pretty stiff.”

  Moyer laughs when, on air, MLB Network analyst Mitch Williams, who is two years younger than Moyer but has been out of baseball since 1997, marvels at Moyer’s comeback. “I like Mitch,” Moyer says. “We have a history.” It’s a dubious history from Williams’s perspective: in 1988, Moyer and Rafael Palmeiro were traded by the Cubs to Texas for Williams, thereby giving up 544 future home runs and 239 future wins from Moyer in exchange for 52 saves and five wins from Williams.

  Meantime, the phone won’t stop ringing. Rockies PR reminds him of an ESPN radio call-in tomorrow morning, where they’ll play audio of his father-in-law’s maniacal laugh for him.

  Dillon calls to talk over his at-bats at Cal-Irvine. “Just concentrate on hitting the fastball,” his father says. “Don’t worry about anything but making solid contact with the fastball.”

  Jill returns her brother’s earlier call. Jim and Joan are visiting with Karen in San Diego, and Jim got dehydrated and was taken to the hospital for fluids. “At some point, we’re going to have to talk about Mom and Dad coming out and living with us,” Moyer says.

  As he absentmindedly flicks channels while on the phone, Moyer’s eyes widen when he sees that one of his favorite movies is on. When he’s done talking to Jill, he turns up the volume. “I must have seen this twelve times,” he says.

  It’s called Despicable Me, and it’s animated. “Wait till I tell Yeni, Kati, Mac, and Grady I watched this,” he says.

  It’s a safe bet that few other major leaguers are spending this evening talking to a college-aged son about hitting, a sibling about how to handle the aging of their parents, and watching—and loving—an animated children’s film on cable.

  “I’ve never been in this position before, Jamie,” general manager Dan O’Dowd begins. Moyer has called him to find out where his head is at—if the Rockies aren’t going to make him part of the rotation, he wants to be released in time to hook on with another team.

  “I’ve never had to make a decision on a forty-nine-year-old before,” O’Dowd says. “This is totally new territory.”

  “Well, I was forty-nine when you brought me here,” Moyer says.

  “You’ve done great, which is why I’m really struggling with this,” O’Dowd says. “We’re thinking of signing you to a forty-five-day contract, to see how this goes, how your body holds up.”

  “That wasn’t the deal,” Moyer says. The deal was a one-year contract for $1.1 million if he makes the team.

  They agree to meet in person the next morning. A flurry of phone calls ensues, Moyer to Karen, Moyer to his agent, Jim Bronner. It’s going to be a stressful night. Meantime, Tracy is telling the media horde that Moyer in t
he rotation “feels like the right thing to do,” but that the front office was still deliberating over the pitcher’s ability to recover every five days. Tracy goes so far as to speculate that Moyer would start the second game of the season, at Houston. That way, he’d be sandwiched between Guthrie and Nicasio in the rotation, two hard throwers and two innings eaters.

  The next morning, prepared to ask for his outright release rather than accept a provisional forty-five-day contract, Moyer finds a contrite O’Dowd. “I prayed on this all night,” O’Dowd, a spiritual man, says. “You’ve done everything we’ve asked. You made this team. It’s the right thing to do. If for some reason it doesn’t work out, I want you to know that we’ll find something for you in the organization.”

  They shake hands. Moyer is a big leaguer again, though it’s something of a bittersweet feeling. O’Dowd means well, but hearing him talk about it not working out is like a dagger, an announcement of the team’s lack of confidence in him. It reminds him of when Don Zimmer came out to the mound that time in the ’80s. “Get this guy out or you’re going back to the minors,” he said. Zimmer may have been aiming for tough love, but the message Moyer took from him was, I’m not on your side. Now, over two decades later, Moyer has made the team, but he hears a similar—even if unintended—vote of no confidence.

  In the clubhouse, Moyer approaches Tracy.

  “I want to thank you for this opportunity,” he says.