Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  But what Barkowitz didn’t know was that Moyer was starting to feel a weird sensation in his elbow. He figured it was nothing, just some midseason dead-arm to work through. It felt like there was a rubber band in his arm, pulling and stretching. He took anti-inflammatories, but it continued to bother him through his next three starts, all losses. If anything, his elbow was getting worse.

  Then came that fateful July night in St. Louis when it felt like something had snapped. And the taut words to Cholly in the dugout: “I can’t throw.” And the trip to California to see Dr. Jobe, while Ruben was prematurely telling the media the Moyer career was over. And the trip to the Dominican, to pitch for Moises Alou, only to have the flexor pronator and ulnar collateral ligament come clean off the bone.

  Certainly, this was it. The end of a singular, improbable, thrilling career.

  Wasn’t it?

  April 2012

  Chapter Eleven

  Control is lost when a player’s feelings and thoughts focus on consequences.

  —Harvey Dorfman

  Well, that’s not how I would’ve scripted this, Jamie Moyer thinks to himself as his 78-mile-per-hour fastball rockets off the bat of Jordan Schafer, the Houston Astros’ centerfielder and leadoff hitter. Moyer doesn’t even need to turn and follow the flight of the ball into deep rightfield. He knows. Welcome back to the majors.

  First batter, 512th home run allowed, adding to the Moyer long ball record. Somehow appropriate. He gets the ball back from his catcher and walks behind the mound, bending down to squeeze the resin bag. He is wearing the stirrup socks that were all the rage when he was a fresh-faced rookie; now, with ash-colored stubble dotting his chin and wisps of gray peeking out from under his cap, the vision of Moyer on the mound in 2012 has a distinct Movietone feel to it.

  The next batter, Brian Bixler, walks on a full count. Uh-oh. Much had been made of Moyer’s pursuit of history tonight: he is trying to become the oldest pitcher in history to win a game, and he is doing it against the youngest team in the league. Karen, the kids, Mom, Dad, Jill, and Digger and his fiancée, Linda, are all in the stands. Getting roughed up in the first inning would make for a pretty anticlimactic first start.

  But three pitches later, Moyer is walking off the mound relatively unscathed, having once again avoided deep damage. He gets J. D. Martinez to hit into a double play, and then slugger Carlos Lee grounds back to him for an easy out. He then retires the next six Astros he faces, two of them strikeouts.

  In the fourth, in what would become a pattern, the Rockies’ defense falters. Bixler hits a ground ball to third baseman Chris Nelson, who had been given the starting job at third base because of his superior glove; he promptly throws the ball well wide of first, and second baseman Marco Scutaro, trying to overcompensate for his teammate’s gaffe, recovers the ball and mimics the play, throwing wildly to second. “They look like a damned Little League team!” Digger fumes in the stands.

  Martinez follows by clubbing a home run to leftfield on a 1–1 changeup that Moyer leaves up in the zone. The inning ends with the Astros ahead 3–0, but not before another Scutaro error.

  In the fifth, Houston manufactures a run after Marwin Gonzalez tags Moyer with a double in the left-center gap. Pitcher Lucas Harrell, trying to sacrifice, bunts his way on, and then Bixler legs out an infield grounder to Tulowitzki at short. Meantime, the Rockies can’t touch Harrell, who would stymie them over seven innings. Moyer, lifted for a pinch hitter with a line of five innings, five hits, and three earned runs, takes the loss.

  But he felt strong and had pitched competitively. After the game, manager Jim Tracy offers a ringing endorsement. “We’re going ahead with Jamie,” he says. “He gave us a competitive effort. Hopefully next time we’ll get him some run support.”

  After he talks to the media and showers, Moyer emerges from the visiting team’s clubhouse and his kids—the little ones—come running to him. They all pile into the Moyer-mobile, a van Karen rented to transport the crew from the hotel to the ballpark all weekend.

  It’s never quiet in the van—Hutton wants to talk about the game, Grady and Mac are bickering like an old married couple, and Duffy is making sure that Yeni and Kati don’t squirm out of their car seats. Nonetheless, Moyer has a moment of reflection. “It felt right to be out there,” he says. “Comfortable. Like it’s where I’m supposed to be.” History, though, would have to wait.

  He hasn’t even broken the record yet, but already Jamie Moyer is tired of answering questions about his age. It seems like every possible cliché has been exhausted. How many ways can you find to write that someone is old?

  Behind the superficial story of Moyer’s quest, though, is a fascinating one—but it’s not solely about Moyer. It’s more about the ghost that he’s chasing.

  On September 13, 1932, at forty-nine years and seventy days old, Jack Quinn pitched five innings and beat the St. Louis Cardinals, making him 3–6 with a 3.16 ERA and the oldest pitcher in history to win a game. Quinn was the last of the spitballers; when the trick pitch was banned in 1920, he and a handful of other pitchers were grandfathered in and allowed to keep throwing it.

  To the Moyers, who would often comment on the role the mystical hand of fate has played in their unlikely journey, that Moyer was chasing Quinn had to be more than mere coincidence. Though salient facts about Quinn are still shrouded in mystery, like his real age and ethnicity, what is known is that he was the Jamie Moyer of his time.

  Like Moyer, Quinn had played for eight teams. Like Moyer, he flummoxed batters with deft touch, movement, and trickery. Like Moyer, Quinn hailed from working-class Pennsylvania, having been born in Hazelton, just seventy miles from Moyer’s Souderton.

  Most of all, like Moyer, Quinn succeeded early because of physical gifts, and later thanks to mental ones. His career was launched, in storybook fashion, while he was watching a semipro game. A foul ball came his way in the stands and he threw it back to the catcher, the ball hitting squarely in the catcher’s glove with a thud. The manager signed him to a contract on the spot, or so the story goes.

  But, like Moyer, Quinn learned that early success offered no guarantee for the future, and that how he approached the game could be the tool that would set him apart from other pitchers.

  “Nothing bothers me,” Quinn once said. “Why should it? The undertaker will get us all soon enough. There’s no need to meet him more than halfway. A lot of pitchers worry themselves out of the game. They cut their span of successful work by whole seasons. What a foolish thing to do! Pitching, with me, is a serious profession. I realize its importance and I like to pitch. Above all, I want to feel I can do good work.”

  Sound familiar? When he hears Quinn’s long-ago quote, Moyer’s eyes widen. “That’s pretty cool,” he says. Only the San Francisco Giants stand in the way of Moyer’s rendezvous with Mr. Quinn and the record book.

  As he takes his warm-up pitches in the top of the sixth inning, Moyer is reminded of something he felt just a few hours earlier: winded. It was his first experience with the thin Colorado air. Prior to game time, he had placed his glove on the warning track and proceeded to do his customary ten wind sprints. Only this time, afterward, he couldn’t catch his breath. Even in the bullpen, minutes later, he was emitting small gasps, trying to get his equilibrium back.

  Now it is 93 pitches later and he is starting to tire. He has kept the Giants off balance all night. The Rockies trail 2–0, but neither run came by way of hard-hit balls. One came with two outs in the fourth, a soft, seeing-eye grounder up the middle by Melky Cabrera. The other was a third inning pop fly to short center that dropped in for a single.

  Otherwise, Moyer had battled Giants starter Madison Bumgarner in a pitching duel that—here’s that age thing again—had the press box buzzing, given that the difference between the starters was the third largest since 1900: twenty-six years, 256 days.

  On a 1–1 fastball to open the sixth, Ryan Theriot hits a routine fly ball to centerfielder Dexter Fowler, so routine
that Moyer doesn’t even follow its path. He’s on to the next task at hand. Moyer has his back turned to the play when he hears the collective groan rise up from the crowd. He looks up to see Fowler chasing the ball, which had bounded clean out of his glove—the type of error you rarely see a major league outfielder commit.

  Fowler, like so many of the game’s new breed, had sought to make a one-handed catch of the ball. Through the years, still unable to shed Jim Moyer’s teachings, Moyer had taken to calling out, “Two hands!” on routine pop-ups and fly balls. His teammates would rib him; didn’t he know they were professionals? If only he’d thought to yell out his dad’s catchphrase tonight.

  Now, with Theriot on second, Moyer rests his hands on his knees. He knows he’s starting to tire and he knows that getting out of the inning was just made more difficult by Fowler’s miscue. This is his eleventh inning so far this season and his team has scored zero runs and just committed its fifth error behind him, but he doesn’t think of that. He thinks of Brandon Crawford, whom he fools with a 67-mile-per-hour curveball for a weak ground ball back to the mound. He follows that with a strikeout of Bumgarner.

  With a 2–2 count on Angel Pagan, Moyer is one pitch away from getting out of the sixth and erasing Fowler’s mistake. But this is why baseball can be so tantalizingly heartbreaking. He’s now thrown 110 pitches. A two-seamer gets too much of the plate. Pagan lines it to leftfield for an RBI. Cabrera follows with a double to right, the RBI Moyer would later be reminded of when it comes to light that Cabrera has tested positive for testosterone. Moyer’s night is over. Five and two-thirds innings, four runs, only two earned.

  After the game, Tracy fixates on the errors. “Jamie did a tremendous job,” he says. “Unfortunately, we had a bad miss in the sixth inning that would have been a clean inning. Cost us two runs and ends up being the difference in the game.…Asking Jamie Moyer to get four outs in an inning, or any of our starting pitching, it’s going to cost you. It always does.”

  In the clubhouse, Fowler, an always smiling, easygoing presence, tentatively walks up to Moyer. Moyer knows stuff happens. After all, how many times had he given up walk-off homers, after all? The question is what you do with it. Does failure make you tougher, meaner, and more determined?

  “I’m really sorry,” Fowler says. “You pitched a great game—”

  Moyer cuts him off. “Forget it,” he says. “You’ll catch the next one.”

  There are many reasons why Jamie Moyer has carried on a lifetime love affair with baseball, but the game’s essential mystery may be chief among them. For over forty years, this most cerebral man has tried to master the game—sometimes succeeding—only to find more unanswerable questions following every answer. “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life,” Mickey Mantle wrote in The Quality of Courage. For Moyer, baseball was like a lifelong puzzle that you could come close to finishing, but never quite.

  In baseball, Moyer knows, there are answers he’ll never know—no matter how hard sabermetricians and coaches and talking heads look for clues. Why does the Rockies’ defense, in the words of Denver Post beat writer Troy Renck, seem “spooked” playing behind Moyer, committing five errors in his 11 innings? Why has normally sure-handed shortstop Troy Tulowitzki suddenly turned into an error machine?

  Then there are the game’s maddening matchups. Why did Moyer for so many years own the Yankees’ Scott Brosius? When Brosius was at bat, Moyer had the feeling he could do anything he wanted. He could jam him inside at will, and when he needed to get him out, he’d throw soft away and watch Brosius slog his way back to the dugout. And why, in turn, did Brosius’s teammate, Bernie Williams, drive every pitch Moyer threw at him off the fat part of the bat, no matter its speed or location?

  Sometimes the answers are plain to see. Barry Bonds hit all five of his career homers off Moyer by 1991. Once Moyer started pitching Bonds inside, he let each at-bat play off against Bonds’s jam point. He’d establish the jam point and attack it, pitch after pitch, making Bonds a tad bit slower in getting his arms fully extended once Moyer came back with something across the plate.

  But often the reasons behind what happened on the field were more elusive. No matter what he tried against Manny Ramirez or Carlos Delgado—the players who had hit the most home runs off him with ten and eight respectively—it didn’t seem to work: they had his number. He’d prepare as usual—going over the notes from their past battles, searching for a pattern that held the key to success. He’d pay attention to each at-bat, to what their body language was saying to him. But they’d still get their cuts. They just saw the ball out of his hand better than most. Sometimes you just had to throw the ball and hope your defense could make a play behind you.

  Moyer was reminded of just how often the laws of mystery applied to baseball when he was preparing for his April 17 start against San Diego, in what would be his third attempt to overtake Jack Quinn. He noticed that Mark Kotsay would be in leftfield and batting second.

  In their pregame meeting, Moyer told catcher Wilin Rosario to not even bother discussing Kotsay. “Let’s throw out how I’ve always approached him,” he said, “’cause nothing’s ever worked.”

  Kotsay was 19 for 33 lifetime against Moyer, a .576 average. The two hadn’t faced each other since 2006, when Kotsay was in Oakland and Moyer Seattle. But they’d seen each other through the years—Karen is friendly with Mark’s wife, also named Jamie—and when they’d all get together, Moyer would never hesitate to joke about Kotsay’s success against him; maybe if he got him thinking about it, the magic would wear off.

  But on this night, it didn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the first inning against the 3–9 Padres, Kotsay singled to right on a 2–1 two-seamer that stayed low in the zone. Credit to Kotsay: he just went down and got it. He was shortly thereafter erased on the base paths, as Moyer cruised through the first two innings.

  Now, in the third, Moyer decides he’s got to do something—anything—to disrupt Kotsay’s mental rhythm against him. His nemesis comes up with a man on first and one out. Moyer looks in for the sign from Rosario, but steps off the rubber.

  “Hey!” he calls out to Kotsay. “Today’s tax day. You declaring me on your taxes?”

  Kotsay throws his head back in laughter, and even umpire Joe West chuckles. Moyer has again broken down the fourth wall, much like he did years ago with Justice and—as depicted in Moneyball—with Hatteberg, asking both batters to name their pitch. As Harvey used to say, “Self-consciousness will screw you up.” By speaking directly to the batter, Moyer hopes to jolt awake Kotsay’s sense of self-consciousness, by imposing his voice and presence into the comfortable zone Kotsay has established against him.

  After two foul balls on cutters down and away, Moyer throws a two-seamer below the strike zone. Kotsay takes the bait and chops down on it, a routine grounder to Scutaro at second, who promptly turns the double play. Walking off the mound, Moyer throws his hands into the air in mock celebration—he’s gotten him out!—and Kotsay laughs his way back to the Padres dugout.

  In the bottom of the third, as if to make up for his miscue in Moyer’s last start, Fowler crushes a two-run home run to right off Padres starter Anthony Bass, the first runs the Rockies have scored for Moyer all season. They add one more in the fourth on an RBI double by Rosario.

  Meantime, Moyer has found his groove. After getting Kotsay to ground into the double play in the third, he retires seven of the next eight hitters—until Kotsay (of course) beats out an infield single in the sixth. But a low changeup at 73 miles per hour results in an inning-ending groundout by Chase Headley.

  In the seventh, trouble. Moyer walks Jesus Guzman on four pitches. “That’s my responsibility there,” he’ll say later. “There’s no excuse for that.”

  After Nick Hundley flies out, Chris Denorfia hits a bloop single. They’re still off balance and not getting good wood on the ball, Moyer tells himself. But then back-to-back Gold Glove winner T
ulowitzki boots yet another easy ball, scoring Guzman. It’s Tulowitzki’s sixth error of the season, which is all of eleven games old. After the game, he’ll have tears in his eyes and manager Tracy will give him the following night off to collect himself. Somewhere, Harvey is smiling at this latest example of just how much mind matters, for good or ill.

  In the stands, Karen Moyer’s phone lights up. It’s an apoplectic Digger, watching via satellite in Indiana. “This Little League team is blowing it for him again!” he shouts.

  After a sacrifice fly by Jason Bartlett to make the score 3–2, Moyer avoids further damage when pinch hitter Jeremy Hermida grounds out to Scutaro. Rockies fans stand en masse when Moyer walks off the field after seven, leaving with the lead, his fastest pitch having topped out at all of 79 miles per hour.

  Now it’s up to the bullpen. Karen is still fielding calls from Digger while watching nervously. Flamethrower Rex Brothers hurls a scoreless eighth for Colorado and then the Rockies’ bats come alive in the bottom of the inning, with Michael Cuddyer scoring Tulowitzki and Rosario adding a sacrifice fly. The Rockies have a 5–2 cushion.

  As the ninth unfolds, Karen is on her feet, cheering, and the TV cameras follow her every move between pitches. “No one knows how hard he’s worked for this,” she says, still nervous. Reliever Rafael Betancourt gives up a run, but with two down, Yonder Alonso swings and misses for strike three and Karen and Jill and the kids catapult out of their seats. The scoreboard screen blares the fact that Moyer—at forty-nine years, 150 days—is now the oldest pitcher ever to win a major league game and the fans are on their feet, cheering and chanting for the old man.