by Jamie Moyer
They spent a lot of time discussing outfielder Carl Crawford. Moyer had long said that if he were a general manager, he’d build a team around Crawford because of his versatility. He could change the game in so many ways. “Carl’s a down and away guy,” Moyer said. “If I don’t get it away, he’ll pull it. If it’s away and not down, he’ll hit it to leftfield. And if it’s outer third and slightly elevated, he’ll kill it.”
“You gotta get in on him,” Ruiz said.
“Either that or challenge him by making a good pitch down and away,” Moyer said, meaning make a pitch that led Crawford to think he was getting his pitch—only to find out after it was too late that the pitch was just slightly too down or just slightly too away.
Before they moved on to the next hitter, Moyer added an afterthought. “At some point, Carl may try to bunt,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because he’s got great speed and he thinks he can beat me down the first base line,” Moyer explained. “And he’s lefthanded. He can drag a bunt down the line and get it past me into that no-man’s-land. Let’s be sure to watch for that.”
“I’ll tell Ryan,” Ruiz said, referring to first baseman Ryan Howard.
Finally, after numerous rain delays, it was time to get in full uniform and make his way onto the rain-soaked field. Fans were starting to enter the ballpark and the night was already alive and buzzing. Walking to the outfield, Moyer kept his head down, watching puddles of water splash over his cleats with every step. As he had all season, he placed his glove on the warning track and ran sprints in the outfield. In the bullpen, he threw well. The Imodium had quelled his stomach, but the more he threw, the more he broke into a cold sweat, and the more he told himself to ignore it. This is just another game, just another game, just another game, he repeated to himself over and over.
By now the fans were in full force, bellowing, waving white rally towels. They’d reached a crescendo when country music star Tim McGraw approached the mound. McGraw, son of the late Phillie legend Tug, who was on the mound when the Phils last won a World Series twenty-eight years earlier, secretly took out a small box and sprinkled his father’s ashes precisely where Moyer would be pitching. Though baseball is full of gruff, chaw-chewing men, sentiment abounds. To Moyer, McGraw’s moving act was another in a series of emotional connections—his own presence at the 1980 parade, his lifelong fixation on Carlton—that made tonight feel like a night of destiny, diarrhea be damned.
In an uncharacteristic nod to the emotion of the evening, Moyer made a conscious decision to look up on his walk in from the bullpen. It would be the one singular break in his routine. He wanted to take it all in. The stadium he’d pitched in for more than the last two years seemed brighter than it ever had. The noise was deafening. But now, approaching the dugout, as the fans behind first base stood and cheered the old warrior, Moyer looked down, not wanting to risk being taken out of his zone. This game was too important.
As Moyer predicted, Crawford was proving to be Moyer’s biggest challenge. In the second inning, the outfielder doubled and stole third, scoring on a groundout. The Phils led 2–1 until sluggers Ryan Howard and Chase Utley gave Moyer a cushion with back-to-back home runs in the sixth.
Actually, pitching in the World Series turned out to be easy; sitting in the dugout, with a burbling stomach and the chills, was the real challenge. On the mound, Moyer was so focused that he forgot his stomach woes, and that he hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t hear the fans, so intent was he on the mesmerizing sounds of the game—the hiss of the ball off the bat, the thwack of it into a glove—and on his own thoughts, an amalgam of self-pep-talk and strategic thinking. In a career that stood as a testament to the proposition that mind really can overcome matter, Moyer’s valiant performance may have qualified as exhibit A.
Leading off the seventh with the Phils up 4–1, Crawford came to bat and made even more of a prophet out of Moyer. Just as the pitcher had predicted in his pregame meeting with Ruiz, Crawford dragged a bunt down the first base line, thinking he could beat the old man to the bag. But Moyer got a good jump off the mound and dove through the air for the ball as it nearly dribbled past him, fielding it and tossing it from his glove in one motion, ending up prone on the wet grass. First baseman Ryan Howard fielded it cleanly, and to all eyes both watching live and seeing the replays, Crawford was indisputably out by a fraction of a step. The crowd erupted with a roar, but first base umpire Tom Hallion was shielded by Howard’s big body and didn’t see the first baseman barehand the toss. He called Crawford safe. Even after the blown call, the fans wouldn’t quiet, standing and applauding Moyer’s all-out effort.
After giving up a double, Moyer got Gabe Gross to ground out, scoring Crawford. That was it for Moyer, who received a standing ovation on his way to the dugout. Relievers Chad Durbin and Ryan Madson, however, couldn’t protect the lead, and by inning’s end the game was tied at 4.
It would have been nice to have been the winning pitcher of record, and had it not been for Hallion’s blown call, chances are that would have been the case. (To his credit, Hallion said after the game, “We’re human beings and sometimes we get them wrong.”) But Moyer was uttering his favorite phrase throughout the clubhouse after the game—“It’s all good”—because Ruiz delivered the game winner in the ninth and Moyer had done what had seemed vastly improbable earlier in the day: he’d produced a quality start, especially after having been smoked in the National League Championship Series by the Dodgers. As had happened so many other times throughout his career, Moyer had proven something to his doubters. From all those talking heads who’d been clamoring for a change in the pitching rotation after the Dodgers had clobbered him, to even his own wife, who’d earlier thought he should be in a hospital room instead of on a pitching mound, he’d again embodied the sheer power of belief.
Two nights later, Jamie Moyer was a world champion. After reliever Brad Lidge struck out Eric Hinske to end the 2008 baseball season, after the champagne corks popped, after Moyer’s dad and his two eldest boys—Dillon and Hutton, both in the clubhouse and in uniform for the game—came charging into the postgame celebration, Moyer embraced the man who had given him the dual gift of baseball and work ethic.
Seventy-seven-year-old Jim Moyer ambled into the clubhouse and his son’s embrace. “This makes all those pepper games in our yard worthwhile,” Jamie told his dad. Under his arm, Jim clutched the game program—like every other one he’d ever attended, he’d scored the game in real time.
While his teammates donned goggles and giddily doused each other with champagne, Moyer stood in the corner, surveying the scene. He joined in the celebration—shooting some champagne, taking some incoming—but as he watched his teammates, he saw a bunch of young kids celebrating without stopping to wonder just how fleeting this exhilaration would be.
That was as it should be. They were young and invincible, and to them this moment of triumph would now become the norm—for a time, at least. Moyer knew, however, that as moments go, it would need to be documented. Baseball is a game that has alternately broken his heart and sustained his spirits—sometimes at almost the exact same time—and he’s learned that he needs tangible proof in front of him to accurately revisit its old emotions.
So, wading through a pack of jumping, screaming, soaked teammates, Moyer gathered his whole family and led them out to the Citizens Bank Park field, where they posed for photos near first base. The ballpark was still packed, the crowd still frenzied, when Moyer, eyeing the mound, got an idea. He grabbed a member of the grounds crew.
“Can I get a shovel or a pick to get the rubber?” he asked, motioning toward the pitching rubber.
“Let me ask my boss.” Moments later, the worker returned, shaking his head.
“Major League Baseball wants it,” he said.
“Awww, c’mon. Forget that,” Moyer said. “I want it. I’ve got your back with the league. Please?”
The worker smiled. “Ah, what the hell,” he said, before
jogging off. He came back with a pick and shovel and started digging. “That’s okay, let me do it,” Moyer said, taking over. Now the crowd noticed—and the cheers started to pick up, gradually sweeping the stadium, as more and more fans noticed the spectacle in front of them. Moyer, grunting, head down, just went about his excavation. He started to run out of gas, and the grounds crew stepped in to help. When they’d dug enough and Moyer could wrangle the pitching rubber free, he flung it over his shoulder—it was nearly thirty pounds, owing to the cement-filled interior—and the crowd erupted as he jogged back into the clubhouse to chants of Jamie! Jamie! ringing through the air. He’d gotten the ultimate keepsake—something he’d place on the mantel in his bedroom in Bradenton, and in San Diego, after the Moyers would move there in 2011. Upon rising every morning, the first thing he’d look at would be his World Series pitching rubber.
The next day, Philadelphia came to a standstill as some two million fans came out to honor the world champions. The whole Moyer clan was on the float that slowly made its way down Broad Street, the city streets a sea of red Phillies jerseys and caps. On the floor of the flatbed truck, Yeni, just two years old, laid on her back, covered in confetti. Among the throng, one youngster held aloft a sign: “Jamie Moyer, I Skipped School To See YOUR Parade!”
Of the players who spoke to the crowd at Citizens Bank Park, second baseman Chase Utley would make headlines by exclaiming, “World F’ing Champions!” But it was Moyer’s thoughtful comments that struck the most moving chord. He spoke at the end of the parade, referencing his own local childhood and the day twenty-eight years prior when he’d skipped school to attend the last Phillies World Series parade. “Twenty-eight years ago, I sat where you’re sitting,” he said to thunderous applause. “I was you. And I feel so fortunate to share this with you, my hometown.”
As he spoke, and as the crowd cheered—here was one of their own, a fan, with a fan’s work ethic—he looked at the man who had given him the game. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Jim Moyer was tearing up, as were his own sons, Dillon and Hutton. Like so many men in America, sports had long been an emotional proxy for the Moyer men, who rarely told each other “I love you.” They never had to: baseball, which they shared so lovingly through the years, had said it all for them.
If the Seattle teams of the late ’90s and early 2000s represented the last gasp of the game’s era of camaraderie, then the Phillies of the late 2000s reflected something entirely new in Moyer’s experience. While the team wasn’t particularly close-knit in the way Seattle, or even Baltimore in the early ’90s, had been—there were no group dinners out, for example—it nonetheless bonded over one common ethic: work.
Moyer had never been on a team that was more serious about its preparation. He’d get to the ballpark early to do his work and find twenty others there, doing the same. There was no Kangaroo Court, and there were hardly any clubhouse hijinks (save the comedy stylings of reliever Ryan Madson, who took it upon himself to try and keep things light). It was a deadly serious team of hard-edged competitors.
Despite what Billy Beane and some sabermetricians have held—that a player is what he is, early on—Moyer saw teammates push and prod and, yes, intimidate one another to get better. He saw players improve in all facets, and it all flowed from a group mind-set. “If you didn’t work, you didn’t fit in,” he recalls today.
Home run hitter Ryan Howard was a subpar first baseman who made himself into a good one through countless extra hours of fielding practice. Chase Utley was a suspect second baseman who morphed into one of the game’s best, and grew to become perhaps the greatest leader by example Moyer had ever seen. Utley was immensely quiet, but eventually his personality took over the team. He wasn’t shy so much as silent in the placid, icy way of an assassin. He’d do whatever it took to win: lean his shoulder in front of 95-mile-per-hour fastballs to get on base, break up double plays either with cleats up or going for the body.
To Moyer, the ultimate gentleman away from the game, winning teams had to have an edge. As Harvey used to say, you have to be a bit of an asshole to succeed. The Phillies were just that—in the best sense of the word.
Unlike in Seattle, it was the players who dictated the team’s personality, not necessarily the manager. Charlie Manuel was a good ol’ country boy in his sixties, someone who upon his arrival in Philadelphia encountered ridicule for his malapropisms and his butchering of the King’s English. But he was also a hitting savant—he’d once compared notes on the science of hitting with Ted Williams—and had a keen sense about people. Behind his amiable, duncelike demeanor, there lay a type of baseball psychologist in his own right. Cholly, as he was called, knew that a manager’s first job is to create a culture where every player would, as the common sports parlance went, “run through brick walls” for his manager. He created a grandfatherly persona, someone players didn’t want to disappoint. It was a stark contrast to the in-your-face intensity of Piniella, but it was the right demeanor for this group. Cold-blooded types like Chase Utley didn’t need anyone in their face; they needed someone to have their back.
Moyer consistently took it upon himself to mentor the young pitchers on staff. Hamels was an early pupil; Moyer recommended Dorfman’s The Mental ABC’s of Pitching to him, which Hamels would page through before starts. When Hamels followed his breakout 2008 season with a lackluster one in 2009, it sent him seeking. He had learned the importance of the mental game by watching Moyer, and he set out on his own path, picking the brain of pitching coach Tom House and ultimately hooking up with a mental coach in his hometown of San Diego, Jim Brogan, who tutored Hamels in concentration exercises and visualization.
Moyer introduced Kyle Kendrick, a young up-and-down sinkerballer, to Dorfman, recognizing in Kyle something quite familiar: the need to accept who he was. Once, he and Kendrick were seated next to one another in the dugout as the Phillies took on Atlanta. Braves pitcher Tim Hudson, who has won nearly 200 games over 14 seasons, was on the mound.
“You know, you can have the same results as Hudson,” Moyer leaned over and said.
Kendrick, at the time not a particular favorite of the hometown Philly less-than-faithful, looked dubious. “You’re a sinker/slider pitcher, like him, I don’t care what ballpark you pitch in,” Moyer explained. “Now look at your walk to strikeout ratio. It’s about two to one. What happens if you cut out fifteen or twenty walks a year? That’s something you can control.”
Kendrick thought for a moment. “Yeah, I walked two guys Friday night and both of them scored,” he said.
“A sinker/slider guy has to force contact by working the bottom of the zone, like Hudson does,” Moyer said. “Yeah, you’re going to get hit, but they’re going to have to hit four singles to score a run. Unless you make a mistake and get the ball up in the zone.”
Kendrick, who had given up 80 home runs in his first five seasons, nodded. Then, as if on cue, Hudson did just that—hanging a breaking pitch to their teammate John Mayberry Jr., who hit it out of the park. Kendrick smiled. “Nice to see Hudson make the same mistake I make,” he said.
After the World Series win in 2008, the Phillies rewarded the forty-six-year-old Moyer with a two-year, $13.5 million deal. On the call-in shows, there was some scratching of heads: why wouldn’t Moyer now retire and go “out on top”? To Moyer, the media call for aging athletes to hang ’em up prematurely always seemed to have more to do with the media mavens making the argument than with anything having to do with baseball. It wasn’t lost on him that many of those wondering if, at age forty-six, he ought to retire a World Series champ were themselves aging columnists and talking heads who wouldn’t for a moment consider giving up their livelihoods—their passion—until they were damn good and ready. But Jamie wasn’t ready yet. He’d just had a stellar season. If the batters weren’t telling him to pack it in, why should anyone else?
Besides, everywhere he went in Philly, men and women his own age approached to thank him for getting them to join a gym, or start goin
g for walks, or start watching what they eat. He’d inspired many of his generation-mates, it seemed, and in truth, he felt good about that.
Meantime, the Phils had some front-office change of their own. General manager Pat Gillick, who had brought Moyer to Philly from Seattle, retired, staying on in a consultant’s role. The new general manager would either be Gillick’s assistant, Ruben Amaro Jr., a former Phil who was young, good-looking, and charismatic, or Mike Arbuckle, the baseball lifer who was responsible for drafting many of the players who had ultimately led the Phillies to the World Series title, including Utley, Howard, and Rollins.
It was a tough call, but the Phillies went with Amaro Jr., with whom Moyer had a long history. Moyer had roomed with Ruben’s older brother, David, on the Geneva Cubs in the New York Penn League in the mid-’80s. Ruben was the skinny Stanford freshman who would visit and sleep on their floor.
Just after signing his new deal, the Moyers celebrated like only the Moyers can. Karen and Jamie gathered the brood, chartered a plane, and, instead of exchanging gifts themselves, spent a week in Guatemala. The plane was packed with presents for the kids at the orphanage where Karen had found Yeni. As a group, they went back to Yeni’s old orphanage in a van stuffed with gifts for youngsters who had never experienced a real Christmas, who were living in total squalor, some of whom were stricken with AIDS. Ever aware of his own psychology now, Moyer found it the perfect cap to the year. “I was totally humbled,” he recalls. “And just felt so fortunate and proud of my kids. It was out best Christmas ever.”
Moyer, now forty-seven, got off to a terrible start in 2009. His command was shaky as was his control: balls that once were down were suddenly up in the zone. In April and May, he was 4–5 with a 6.75 ERA. But as was so often the case, he gradually started to figure it out. After six and two-thirds innings of shutout ball against the Diamondbacks in late July, he’d gone 6–2 with a 4.05 ERA in his next ten starts.