Just Tell Me I Can't

by Jamie Moyer

  He’s joking, but the ambivalence is real. It’s been nearly two weeks since the baseball know-it-alls yet again pronounced his career DOA, two weeks in which he’d carried on an internal wrestling match: Should I pull this plug? Yet here he is, boarding that connecting flight for Buffalo, where he’ll pitch for the Norfolk Tides, the Baltimore Orioles’ Triple A team.

  Back in Rancho Sante Fe after his release by the Rockies, Moyer had once again comfortably slid into his Mr. Mom role: golfing with Mac, picking up Grady at gymnastics and Duffy at soccer, helping Kati and Yeni with their Kumon. Meantime, the Orioles called, who were surprisingly in first place in the AL East and looking to add a pitcher to eat some innings in anticipation of the Yankees making one of their inevitable runs. The Blue Jays also expressed interest after a handful of starters went down to injury. Both were intrigued enough by Moyer’s early results for Colorado to want to see which was the outlier: April or May.

  Part of Moyer wondered just what the hell he was doing. Being there for Hutton’s graduation reminded him of all that he’d missed through the years, plays and games and birthdays he’d have to listen to over the phone or through the filter of Karen’s texts and jpegs. As his agent, Jim Bronner, called with the details behind what would be a brief minor league showcase—two or three starts, $5,000—he wondered, Why would you get on a plane and leave these kids, when you just got back to them? Why?

  He wished Harvey were still around. But he knew what his mentor would say. Harvey’s response would no doubt be identical to the advice Dorfman once gave to Jim Abbott, when Abbott was contemplating stepping away from the game after a disastrous 2–18 1996 season. “Using your family as a way out,” Dorfman told the pitcher, as recounted in Abbott’s memoir, Imperfect, is “a cop-out…we invent motives for our behavior. You use the separation from family in one context but not the other? Does that make sense? If you were pitching well, you’d still live for your family. To what extent will you regret this? What about in five years? Can you live with it appropriately? Use all the info, then you’ll have no regret.”

  Ah, yes, the absence of regret. Two months ago, Moyer was baseball’s feel-good story. Now, the media narrative had ever so slightly turned. “Jamie Moyer embodies the sort of player who has competed for too many years,” one blogger opined. Another concurred: “It’s getting hard to watch as the 49-year-old desperately tries to prolong an amazing and historic career.”

  But for Moyer, desperation didn’t enter into it. He knew that had he listened to the press, he would have retired long ago and that those who chronicle the game seem somehow threatened by the example of aging in it. Moyer had heard the pundits’ clichéd calls to “go out on top” at least since 2006. It had always sparked a defiant streak in him. Besides, for him, this wasn’t about “going out on top”; it was about going out on his terms.

  Harvey used to say, “If you want to know who a person is, watch how he responds to adversity.” Moyer had gotten clocked at the end of May; did that mean he was done showing who he is, someone who gets up time and again after being knocked down?

  Harvey would also say, “Good learners risk doing things badly in order to learn how to do things well.” Moyer asked himself, Do I still have room to learn? As for his family, Karen and Dillon and Hutton were pushing him to give it one last shot. So he made his way across the Ted Williams Highway to the tiny hamlet of Poway, where he found Dom Johnson in his backyard, as if the pitching whisperer had been visited by a vision of an aging seeker’s impending arrival. There was no gopher this time, just Moyer on the mound and Johnson eyeing the mechanics. Johnson noticed some of the same things Moyer had been working on: the hand coming too slow, too passively out of the glove on the windup, leading to a lessening in arm speed through the motion. Similarly, when his left hand reared all the way back, Moyer would stop for a nanosecond, instead of continuing in one uninterrupted flow; again, deceleration. Finally, when stopping at the back of the delivery, the left arm was swinging too far toward third base, giving batters a clean “back window” look at the grip on the pitch about to come.

  “I had a feeling Joey Votto picked up the grip on that homer in Cincinnati,” Moyer said.

  “That’s how, no doubt,” Johnson said.

  So they went to work. Keeping the arm in, shielded by the body, while refraining from any stop-motion. After two bullpens together, it felt crisper, cleaner—and maybe even faster.

  Those bullpen workouts led Moyer to determine that there was indeed a project to be finished. Ever since coming under Dorfman’s spell, Moyer had been a testament to the notion that process matters—even more than results. Forget about what the media said: did he really think his process was over? Standing on Dom’s mound, it didn’t feel that way. He might not get back to the majors, but he could get better.

  Karen was ecstatic, seeing her husband’s quest not as some abandonment of their kids, but as a teachable moment for them. Their father would be modeling a whole range of character traits, from persistence to preparation to self-confidence to, perhaps most important of all, seeing something through to the end, even in the face of potential ridicule.

  So now he’s about to meet his new team, the Norfolk Tides, in Buffalo. He gets picked up at the airport and is taken to the team’s hotel. The wire services are reporting that he ain’t done yet. Jamie is now forty-nine years old—and he’s back in the minors. There’s something appropriate about that, he thinks, smiling to himself as he walks over to a local steakhouse, where he’ll sit at the bar, have a beer, and watch SportsCenter.

  It’s Star Wars night at Coca-Cola Field in downtown Buffalo, which means it’s a stadium packed full of relics. Not only Darth Vader and Jamie Moyer; the Tides also have on the roster veteran Miguel Tejada and Moyer’s former teammate in Philly, J. C. Romero, not to mention Bill Hall, who was one of the few Red Sox not to hit Moyer in that 2010 shellacking administered by Boston in Moyer’s last season in Philly.

  It’s the biggest crowd of Buffalo’s season. Families are drawn to see the Star Wars promotion, but baseball aficionados are here to see this forty-nine-year-old pitching curiosity. Most of Moyer’s teammates weren’t even born when Star Wars debuted. Moyer was in high school.

  On this June night, Moyer is masterful. The bullpen sessions with Dom appear to have paid off: his fastball in the first inning is clocked at 82 miles per hour—the hardest he’s thrown since 2010. He pairs the fastball with 72-mile-per-hour changeups and 76-mile-per-hour cutters. As Harvey would have it, Moyer is basking in the moment on the mound. At one point, he doesn’t hear the home plate umpire’s call.

  “Ball or strike?” Moyer asks.

  The ump comes out from behind home plate, removes his mask. “Ball,” he says.

  Moyer smiles. “You lose your hearing when you get to be my age,” he says.

  The Bisons, who are managed by fifty-three-year-old Wally Backman, seem helpless, hitting only one ball hard, a single back through the middle, the only hit Moyer surrenders. Fifty-two of Moyer’s 84 pitches are strikes over five shutout innings, with five strikeouts and no walks. He gets the win.

  After the fifth, Moyer sits on the bench in the dugout as his teammates—all of whom seem to have Dillon’s fresh, ruddy cheeks—parade by to offer high fives. He runs a towel through his soaked hair. Pitching coach Mike Griffin sits next to him.

  “How’d it feel?”

  Moyer takes a deep breath, looking off into the expanse of outfield green. “I’ve got to tell you, this feeling is just…” He trails off, searching. “Priceless. It’s just priceless. I’m in a minor league ballpark, with a bunch of kids not much older than my son, and it’s just you and the game, you know what I mean? There’s nothing here between you and the game.”

  Griffin is fifty-five, a lifer who pitched six years in the majors. The two are silent for a moment, looking out at the outfield lawn. Finally, Griffin speaks. “Helluva job tonight,” he says, getting up to go.

  Afterwards, in the clubhouse, four l
ocal reporters crowd around Moyer. They ask what keeps him going. “This,” he says. “Playing for a team, taking on another challenge.”

  But he doesn’t want to talk about tonight’s game. Instead, he turns the tables on his interlocutors and Bison PR man Brad Bisbing. The return to the minors has kick-started his memory. “Hey, the Earl of Bud isn’t here anymore?” Moyer asks the group, referring to the legendary Bisons beer vendor back in the old War Memorial Stadium. Moyer, who visited Buffalo as a minor leaguer in the 1980s, remembers how the Earl’s dancing antics would bring the crowd to its feet.

  “We’re having an Earl of Bud bobblehead night in August,” Bisbing says. “He’s coming back for it.”

  “I remember once our manager Mark DeJohn got up and danced with him,” Moyer says. “And what about the Butcher?”

  The Butcher was another icon, a 425-pound bat boy who would eat ten or twelve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the clubhouse before each game—egged on by the players—but would nonetheless delight the crowd with his athleticism. He’d sprint behind home plate to catch foul balls rolling down the backstop net, but he’d do so behind his back, or in his cap. When he’d miss, the PA announcer would intone, “The Butcher—no range!”

  “He’s fallen on hard times,” one of the writers says. “They had a fund-raiser for him not that long ago.”

  Meantime, in his office, fifty-five-year-old manager Ron Johnson has googled Moyer’s career stats. “Wow,” he says, eyeing them. Johnson had a three-year stint in the majors in the early ’80s, and was once the first base coach for the Red Sox. “This guy makes me want to start working out again,“ he tells the local reporters.

  Outside the stadium, a handful of fans wait for autographs. Moyer signs each one before hailing a cab over to Gabriel’s Gate—he has a hankering for what he hears are the best wings in wingtown. When they come, they don’t disappoint. Neither does the beer, which is cold and thirst-quenching. After a couple, for the first time since he blew out his arm nearly two years ago, this most present-tense of thinkers—a man who has trained himself to focus only on the task at hand—pivots to the future. He starts talking about what could be next. About maybe teaching pitching to kids from Little League to the pros. About rounding up guys like his buddy Trevor Hoffman and starting an academy that teaches mechanics, the mental game, and arm maintenance. Videos. Classroom instruction. Bullpen sessions.

  Moyer takes a long pull on his beer. A host of practical concerns invade. “Of course, I’d have to find a facility somewhere,” he says. “And I bet a lot of major league pitching coaches wouldn’t want someone like me in their pitchers’ ears. Teams can be territorial about that.” He takes another swig. Those challenges are far off. Tonight was a good night. Because he was back on a baseball field.

  “It’s crazy to say, and I know I can’t do it,” he says. “I doubt Karen would want me to. And I have responsibilities. So I can’t do it. But if I could, you know what? I’d play the rest of the season in Triple A. It’s just so…pure. It’s just…baseball. It’s what baseball always was to me.”

  In two days, the Tides will board a bus for the eleven-hour ride back to Norfolk. “I can’t wait,” Moyer says, and there is not a hint of sarcasm in his voice; he knows his baseball days are waning, and he’s going to embrace every detail of this twilight, even if it leaves him tired and his legs stiff and sore.

  There are two outs in the seventh inning of Moyer’s second start. This time, he has befuddled one of his many former teams, the Toledo Mud Hens. He has given up two earned runs and seven hits, and has struck out seven while walking none.

  He takes a deep breath on the mound. Behind home plate, just to the right of Karen and the kids, are a group of college-age kids chanting, “JA-MIE! JA-MIE! JA-MIE!” He makes eye contact with Toledo coach Leon “Bull” Durham, his teammate on the Cubs in the ’80s. Earlier, when Durham was tossing batting practice, Moyer had teased him: “Throw strikes, Bull!”

  Now, with the Mud Hens flustered and the kids in the stands making a ruckus, Moyer looks at his old friend and slightly shrugs, as if to say, You believe this? He throws a two-seamer and the ball is smoked right back to him on a line, but the old reflexes aren’t shot yet; he snares it and theatrically flips the ball back toward home plate while sprinting off the mound to the dugout, the chant of “JA-MIE! JA-MIE!” now catching on among the eight thousand fans in attendance.

  Five days later, Moyer pitches four innings, giving up one run on three hits and striking out four without issuing a walk. In 16 innings, he now has a 1.69 ERA with 16 strikeouts and not a single walk. Most important, his velocity is back to 82, and he feels he’s found his arm slot again.

  In the press box, the speculation is that Moyer has been removed from the game after four innings because a call-up to the Orioles is imminent. That’s what Moyer’s agent, Jim Bronner, has been led to believe too. Over the next few days, however, the call doesn’t come. Orioles general manager Dan Duquette is unavailable to speak to Bronner and doesn’t return his messages. Finally, Duquette tells Bronner they’d like Moyer to make one more start.

  “That wasn’t the agreement,” Moyer tells his agent. The Tides have already left for Toledo; Moyer has been holed up in his Norfolk hotel room, waiting for a call-up that isn’t on its way. He’s feeling disrespected, used: he’s an insurance policy, while Duquette—who wasn’t exactly straight with him some seventeen years ago in Boston—tries to map his next move, thinking he can buy time by asking for another start.

  Moyer loves the minor league experience because of the purity of the game on the field, but he’s getting too old for the cynical machinations that too often define the game in its front offices. “I’m forty-nine years old and I’m waiting by a phone in a hotel room like a rookie,” he tells Karen, who is in Philly for a Moyer Foundation charity event. He could stay and putter around his hotel room, or he could tell Bronner to tell the Orioles to stuff it, rent a car, and be in Philly in six hours—in time to make a different kind of pitch, an exhortation to donate to the cause of helping kids in distress. In other words, he can either be played with or do something good for his soul.

  “I’m free!” he texts a friend as he makes his escape from Norfolk. The next day, the story moves across the wire: Jamie Moyer Requests Release from Baltimore Orioles.

  By that night, the Blue Jays have called. Two starts for the Triple A Las Vegas 51s await.

  Maybe knowing that the curtain is coming down on him is making Moyer feel overly nostalgic, but shortly after walking into the 51s’ clubhouse he feels transported back in time once again to a simpler baseball era. He’d grown weary of the big league post-camaraderie atmosphere; those Mariner teams more than a decade ago were the last to feature teammates who worked and socialized together. In his last years in Philly, he’d have dinner on the road with the announcers or the team’s video coordinator, because the players tended to go their own separate ways. (And when they did get together, they went out to clubs—not exactly Moyer’s speed.) By then, the game had become a business, and teammates whom you used to live, argue, drink, and form lifelong bonds with had become merely colleagues and passing acquaintances.

  But when Moyer meets up with the 51s in Tacoma, Washington, where he’d be making his first start in the Seattle area since he’d left the Mariners six years prior, he finds a group of young guys who pull for each other even though they know they are competing against one another for a shot at that big career break. They eat together, they come to the ballpark together, they work out together, they play cards together, and they wile away the hours before a game by watching movies together in the clubhouse.

  It takes Moyer back to his earlier minor league days, in small towns like Geneva, New York; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he and his teammates would live, two or three to an apartment, where they’d pile into his light blue Pinto station wagon to get to the ballpark, where they’d eat at IHOP, often running into other teammates—becau
se they all shared the same moment in time. They’d corral a booth and drink coffee, refill after refill, while reliving at-bats and cursing out managers and commenting on girls in the stands, until it was time to go to bed so they could do the same damn thing tomorrow.

  As at Norfolk, these kids ask questions of this oldster in their midst, looking at his concentration cards like maybe they hold the all too elusive secret, mining his memory for tales about the game’s greats. (When Moyer regales a couple of young pitchers about how Bonds had owned him until he got over his fear of coming inside to the slugger, he could see a few faint light switches turn on.) One night, he goes to a nearby sports bar for a burger, where he runs into two teammates, a couple of pitchers from Texas. They invite him to join them, and they all watch a game on the big screen while Moyer tries his best not to remind them of their fathers.

  Moyer’s first start for Vegas contains a dramatic Mariners past-versus-future story line. He is facing off against pitcher Danny Hultzen, who is twenty-seven years his junior and Seattle’s much-heralded top draft choice in 2011. Hultzen had posted a 1.19 Double A ERA and had just been promoted to Triple A, where he had five days earlier been shelled in his first start.

  He is no stranger to Moyer. In 2010, Dillon’s Cal-Irvine team faced Hultzen, the University of Virginia ace, in the NCAA baseball tournament. Moyer was impressed by Hultzen’s arm—the kid could touch 96 miles per hour—but felt his secondary pitches needed some work, which Moyer had volunteered on an ESPN broadcast of the game.

  Before the game, as Moyer begins to make his way down the leftfield line from the bullpen to the dugout before the singing of the national anthem, he becomes aware of a stirring in the stands. It starts with some applause in leftfield and it begins to build in intensity; by the time Jamie reaches third base and looks up, over 7,000 fans are standing and cheering for him, one bearing a sign that reads, simply, “Thank You.” He wants to stop and take it all in, but he refrains from breaking stride. Instead, he tips his cap to the crowd and the cheers grow louder. I wasn’t expecting this, he thinks, feeling the emotions well up.