by Jamie Moyer
In the clubhouse, Rockies’ PR man Jay Alves tells Moyer the Hall of Fame has called—would he donate his cap and glove? Moyer smiles. “The cap is no problem,” he says. But asking a ballplayer to part with his glove—that could be heresy. Moyer doesn’t use just any glove; his is oversized, the better to disguise his pitches. But he relents: “I’ll give them the glove, but not tonight,” he says. “It’ll take me a couple of weeks to break in a new one.”
When the glove does make it to Cooperstown, it will join a ball from 1929 signed by Jack Quinn, then a forty-six-year-old pitcher for the world champion Philadelphia Athletics. But before that can happen, the press is waiting. After Tracy declares the evening “a historic night for one tremendous human being,” Moyer is asked for the secret to his longevity. “I don’t have any secrets,” he says. “I try to work hard. I try to dedicate myself to what I’m doing. Be responsible for what I’m doing. Be accountable for who I am and what I do and what I bring to the ballpark. And I try to have some fun with it.”
He’s asked about Quinn, whom he admits he’d never heard of until this chase began. “I kind of wish I was a baseball historian, and I am a little embarrassed that I don’t know more about it,” he says. “To have my name mentioned with the greats of the past is special.” Upon hearing this, the Hall of Fame announces that it is inviting Moyer to be part of its ten-week internship program, in which students from across the country trek to Cooperstown to study the game. “Maybe in the off-season,” Moyer jokes.
While he’s holding court in the postgame interview room, Moyer can feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. There are hundreds of congratulatory texts coming in. “Congrats old man,” writes Roy Halladay. “Pretty special accomplishment and I’m sure a special night! Keep it going, look forward to seeing you soon.”
Raul Ibanez, his teammate in both Seattle and Philly: “Congratulations! You continue to be an inspiration to everyone, especially me. I am proud and honored to know you and be able to call you my friend. You are and always will be the man.”
Unnoticed in all the hype surrounding Moyer’s record-breaking win are a couple of equally stunning facts. The victory, his 268th, moves him into a tie for thirty-fourth on the all-time list with Jim Palmer. And though his record is 1–2, his 2.55 ERA leads his team.
But once the writers have gone upstairs to file their stories, Moyer doesn’t have time to think about all that. It’s time to party. It is, after all, Kati’s sixth birthday, so the whole crew heads back to the airy house the Moyers are renting in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood for ice cream and cake. Kati blows out her candles and then the Moyer kids watch SportsCenter, the lead story of which is their father’s win for the ages.
“Thanks for giving me an ending to the book,” I say, after the little ones have gone to bed.
“What do you mean, an ending?” Moyer asks.
“Well, I figure making history like this, it’s pretty climactic,” I explain.
Moyer shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says with a wry smile. “I plan on winning a lot more games.”
By the end of April, despite the defensive breakdowns and inconsistent hitting, the Rockies are flirting with .500 and Moyer has been the team’s best pitcher. He follows his record-setting win over the Padres with a six-inning no-decision against the Pirates, in which he allows just one earned run. That is followed by a five inning no-decision against the Mets, in which he is hit harder than in his previous starts, but he works out of trouble time and again and keeps his team in the game.
Meantime, some in the Denver media start referring to Moyer as the team’s ace—as much a commentary on the Rockies’ subpar starting pitching as on Moyer’s surprising results. The sabermetricians weigh in, seeming to second the notion. Rob Neyer, who apprenticed under Bill James, writes, “I didn’t think he could still pitch. Not well enough, anyway. But yes, he (arguably) has been the Rockies’ best starting pitcher this season.”
Over at FanGraphs.com, Bradley Woodrum writes, “Not only has the near-half-century man earned a spot on the Rockies rotation, he is pitching like their ace.” Woodrum points out that Moyer’s ERA is beating both his FIP and SIERA (skill-interactive earned run average) numbers—the two stats that take fielding and luck out of the pitcher performance equation by focusing on those things a pitcher controls: strikeout, walk, ground-ball, and fly-ball rates, for example. “The last time Moyer had an ERA above his FIP, people could still greet their family at the airport gate,” writes Woodrum. “So whether it’s good fielding on his part or just some other-worldly, quasi-voodoo trick, Moyer beats his FIP, his xFIP, and his SIERA. He beats them so consistently, in fact, that we can probably estimate his ERA this year by just subtracting his standard margin from the more stable predictors like SIERA. In other words, if we subtract 0.40 from his 4.56 SIERA, we get a 4.16 ERA, which absolutely boggles the soul and mind when we consider not only Moyer’s age, but his role as a starter (no one his age has ever been an MLB starter), and his home park.”
With all this talk of his astounding month—Moyer ends April with a record of 1–2 with a 3.14 ERA—there is one person unconvinced of the hype: Jamie Moyer himself. He appreciates statistics like FIP and SIERA because they account for some of the variables that are not in his control, but in general he subscribes to what Harvey used to say about baseball’s overreliance on complicated formulas: statistics can be used “in the same manner a drunken man uses lampposts: for support, rather than illumination.”
Even as the sabermetricians marvel at the numbers he is putting up, Moyer senses that something is not quite right. There is the small matter of his groin, which has never fully recovered since spring training. It doesn’t affect him on the mound, but it is an ongoing, nagging irritant. There is the bigger matter of his velocity, or lack thereof. His fastball is averaging just shy of 77 miles per hour, four miles slower than in 2010 and six miles slower than in 2002. The combination of pinpoint location at alternating speeds is Moyer’s whole game. If the speed differential between his fastball and changeup is now going to be five—instead of ten—miles per hour, it means there is less margin for error in terms of his location.
And that, so far, is the biggest trouble spot. Even when struggling early in his career, Moyer had always been able to hit his spots with stunning repeatability, as Dom Johnson would say. He still has better control and command than most, but now when he misses with a pitch, he misses bigger than usual. There are times when a pitch called for low and inside ends up high and out.
Moyer knows that one of the last things to return after Tommy John surgery is full command. But he feels this isn’t a physical issue so much as a mechanical one. It doesn’t feel like he has yet consistently found his arm slot, that same release point for every pitch, over and over again. While he works on finding it in his bullpen sessions, he wonders how long he will have to find it. Clearly, this Rockies team, with its horrid defense, irregular hitting, and batting-practice pitching, is not going to compete for anything this season. The question is—how long will they stick with a forty-nine-year-old starter?
In early May, the Atlanta Braves come to Coors Field, and Moyer is seeming to continue his early-season mastery. Moyer cruises through five with an 8–3 lead.
But trouble awaits in the sixth. Atlanta’s Matt Diaz and Jason Heyward crush back-to-back home runs off Moyer, and when Tyler Pastornicky follows with a single to right, Tracy slowly walks to the mound and pulls his starter. Moyer leaves with an 8–5 lead, but reliever Esmil Rogers can’t hold it. Moyer gets another no-decision and the Rockies lose, 13–9.
Five nights later, Moyer is in Los Angeles, where the lineup contains stark reminders of his longevity. After all, he faced Dodgers manager Don Mattingly two decades ago, not to mention the fathers of current Dodgers Tony Gwynn Jr. and Scott Van Slyke.
Through three innings, Moyer has given up two hits and one run on a Mark Ellis homer. He seems to have better stuff tonight—which may be a function of venue. At
Coors Field, he’s finding, his two-seamer doesn’t sink and his cutter doesn’t move quite as much as on the road. Tonight he gets ahead of five of the first seven hitters he faces.
Sitting behind home plate is super-agent Scott Boras, Harvey’s old friend and boss. “Remarkable, just remarkable,” Boras comments, watching Moyer. “I used to tell Harvey, when Jamie was representing himself, to tell him I could make him a lot more money. He should have done a lot better than he did through the years.” (Of course, Harvey never said anything to Jamie. “He wouldn’t,” Moyer says. “Harvey would have never put business into our relationship.”)
Moyer retires both Ellis and Matt Kemp to open the fourth inning. Andre Ethier hits a two-out double to right center, bringing up Bobby Abreu. Moyer starts the veteran lefty with two perfect cutters on the outside corner: 0–2. A fastball follows, high and tight. That sets up another cutter, again on the outside corner. But home plate umpire Ed Rapuano doesn’t ring up the batter. Moyer comes back with the same pitch—again, he doesn’t get the call. Now, with the count full, he has a decision: in tight or stay away? He opts to stay away—if Abreu takes again, in a battle between veterans, he’s bound to get the third borderline call—but Abreu is sitting on the location. He sticks his bat out for an RBI single the opposite way, over Tulowitzki’s outstretched glove. After Juan Uribe flies out to end the inning, Moyer berates himself on the walk back to the dugout for letting Abreu outthink him. A good hitting veteran like Abreu is going to make an adjustment if all you do is stay away, he thinks. Why not keep him honest?
In the fifth, trailing 2–0, Moyer gives up three runs, all with two outs, the big blow a two-run double by Ellis. Moyer is done after five, having struck out seven Dodgers but giving up five runs. The loss drops his record to 1–3 and raises his ERA to 4.66.
Still, Moyer senses some progress has been made. His arm slot felt better, which might also explain the better movement on the ball, as evidenced by the high number of strikeouts. “But again it was the flippin’ fifth inning,” he says two mornings later in a San Francisco diner. (On the street, a passerby does a double take and mutters, “I love you, Jamie!” Moyer thanks him before observing, “You gotta love San Francisco.”)
On the plane from Los Angeles, Moyer listened to the book-on-tape version of Dorfman’s The Mental ABC’s of Pitching. Given his troubles in the fifth inning of late, he listened to the chapter entitled “The Big Inning.” Dorfman captures the sinking feeling of helplessness a pitcher gets when everything starts to slide downhill. “The first order of business for ‘stopping the big inning’ is for the pitcher to stop himself,” Dorfman writes. “To gather himself—get off the mound, collect his thoughts, recognize the situation and have a plan before toeing the rubber again.…Pitchers do not ‘stop the bleeding’ if they do not stop themselves. The tendency of pitchers in trouble is to speed up. They want to get out of the inning quickly, to get off the mound, to get into the dugout—now! The greater a pitcher’s sense of urgency, the more he rushes his mind and muscles. Self-control leaves him. The inning ‘wins’; the pitcher loses.…We get outs by paying attention to the task in front of us, not the runners behind us.”
Moyer asked twenty-four-year-old pitcher Alex White to join him in listening to the Dorfman chapter. White faced the Dodgers the night after Moyer and, like him, was knocked out of the game in the fifth inning. The two dissected White’s thinking on the mound.
“I was kind of pitching around Tony Gwynn,” White said.
“Why pitch around Gwynn? He’s the leadoff hitter. He’s not going to hurt you with a home run, but he might hurt you with his legs. If you walk him, there’s no defense for a walk.”
“I thought I could get Ellis out,” White said. “I thought I could get a double-play ball.”
“See, to me, you didn’t give yourself enough credit and you gave the hitter too much credit,” Moyer said. “Instead of letting the situation dictate to you—‘Oh my gosh, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, I gotta get that double play ball’—what Harvey is saying is you dictate to the situation. Take a step back and analyze what’s going on.”
The two talked pitching into the night. White might just as well have been speaking for Moyer when he observed that there always seems to be one moment in every game that will determine how your outing is going to go. It’s the tipping point: get past it, and you’re likely to cruise on your way to a good night. If, for example, Moyer had gotten that called third strike against Abreu in the fourth against the Dodgers, he might have had a vastly different result.
Five nights later, back in Colorado, Moyer notches his second win of the young season. He goes six and a third innings, giving up just one run in a 6–1 win. But it’s not his pitching that makes headlines. In the fourth, leading 3–0, Moyer bats with two outs and runners on second and third against twenty-two-year-old lefty Patrick Corbin. He squibs a 2–2 fastball off the end of his bat on the ground between Corbin and first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt fields the ball and lunges for the hustling Moyer—who would later call his sojourn down the first base line a “slow crawl”—to no avail. Fowler, on second, never hesitates; the infield hit drives in two runs and Moyer has set a new record: the oldest player ever to drive in a run.
Moyer’s influence on his teammates was borne out by Fowler’s hustle on the play. “I was shocked that Moyer beat it out,” Fowler would say after the game. “The guy was hustling.…He’s a bulldog. The guy never quits.”
The Rockies are 15–21, and Moyer is now 2–3 and his ERA 4.20, still tops among his team’s starters.
They say that no matter how experienced the fighter, the knockout in a boxing match comes as a sudden, shocking surprise. Even if you see it and you’re bracing for that ultimate punch, you never fully expect the end to come when it does.
Jamie Moyer is more pugilistic than most major league pitchers, having taken more than his share of punches through the years, always to rise again. After the Arizona win, right when he’s thinking he may have turned some kind of corner, he feels the sting of a powerful one-two combination.
First comes an outing in Miami, where Giancarlo Stanton hits a mammoth grand slam against him in the fourth inning, after Moyer had carried a 4–0 lead through three. He ends up giving up six runs and taking the loss. Five days later, in Cincinnati, as at Miami, every pitch seems to be up in the zone. The Reds tee off, crushing four home runs in his five innings. The two losses are part of an epic Colorado slide. After beating Arizona, the Rockies win only two of their next ten games.
Moyer has a feeling about what’s coming. It’s only ten days since the encouraging signs in Los Angeles and at home against Arizona, but in the high-stakes realm of professional baseball, whole fates can be determined in such a short time span. Particularly if you’re a forty-nine-year-old pitcher on a bad team that shows no signs of getting better.
When Moyer is called into general manager Dan O’Dowd’s office, Jim Tracy is there, choked up. They say the most complimentary things about his work ethic, his class, his effort. But they’re a bad team that won’t contend and they have young arms to develop. Moyer thanks them from the bottom of his heart for the opportunity.
He cleans out his locker while Tracy makes the announcement. “He was up against the odds of late,” the manager says. “There is no difference in the man, there’s no difference in his will to compete. There is a difference in that the 82- or 83-mile-per-hour that he had as a fastball had started to come back and get closer to where some of his off-speed pitches were. There’s very little variance between his pitches.”
When Moyer takes the podium, he’s smiling. He thanks O’Dowd, says that Tracy “stuck his neck out for me,” and—as Harvey would have had him do—he takes responsibility. “Unfortunately, I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain,” he says. “That’s what happens in this business.”
Ever the glass-half-full type, Moyer drinks a beer on his way to the airport and focuses on the positive. “I get to sleep in my
own bed tonight,” he says. “And I get to go to Hutton’s high school graduation. That’ll be pretty cool.” After that, Hutton’s high school—Cathedral Catholic in suburban San Diego—will play in a playoff game that, were he still employed, Jamie would have kept tabs on via text messages from Karen. Instead, he’ll be able to see his second-born play playoff baseball.
Within minutes, many of the stories that start to move on the wire include the words “Career Likely Over” in their headlines. Of course, that’s what they wrote when the Rangers released him in 1990. That’s what the smart money thought when Joe Torre sent him packing in 1991. That’s what even his closest friends and relatives thought when the Cubs cut him out of spring training in 1992. That’s what the Seattle media assumed when he was traded to Philly in 2006 for two no-name minor leaguers. That’s what Ruben Amaro Jr. said when he blew out the elbow in 2010. But surely, now that he had made history, and now that his comeback was history, surely this would be it. Jamie Moyer would finally be a former professional baseball player. Right?
As he approaches the airport, one other positive of this latest roundhouse suddenly dawns on him. “This could give me some time to get with Dom, have a few bullpens, and work on some things,” he says.
June 2012
Chapter Twelve
The player who can retain his joy for baseball is the one who has not let others’ needs intrude upon his own.
—Harvey Dorfman
On Tuesday, June 8, at 12:13 p.m., Jamie Moyer texts a friend: “In Atlanta, should I continue to Buffalo or go on to Grand Cayman?” He answers himself thirty-three minutes later: “Decided on boarding to Buffalo. I’m in my seat.”