Just Tell Me I Can't (13 page)

Indeed, Moyer had messed with Justice's head for years. In 1998, Justice hit the only home run off Moyer of his career when, after Justice fouled off five straight pitches, an exasperated Moyer walked off the mound toward him. “What do you want?” Moyer asked.

“Huh?” Justice responded.

“Tell me what to throw and I'll throw it,” Moyer said.

Could this be serious?

“A fastball,” Justice said, motioning with his bat to indicate the preferred spot. Moyer was true to his word. Justice lined the ball out of the park. For Moyer, breaking down baseball's version of the fourth wall that existed between pitcher and hitter was an occasional calculated risk. Michael Lewis's
Moneyball
contains a scene in which Moyer uses the same tactic against Scott Hatteberg to induce a line out. Ever playing mental ball, Moyer reasoned that the sudden intrusion into the at-bat can throw off the hitter as effectively as any off-speed pitch.

Moyer wanted to goad hitters into carrying on an inner dialogue about
his
intentions, instead of thinking about theirs. In a game that requires ultimate concentration, he wanted his voice reverberating in his opponent's head. After the gift of that one homer, Justice never tagged Moyer again, and he'd subsequently dreaded facing him.

Listening to Justice, it was the first time Johnson had ever thought of the soft-throwing Moyer as an intimidator. But then he started watching closely. So when Jamie Moyer appeared one day, recommended by a mutual friend in the Phillies organization, Johnson leapt at the chance to work with him.

Johnson, a beefy, imposing presence, was something of a local sports legend himself. He'd starred on Poway High School's three-time championship basketball teams in the mid-'80s that included future NBA player Jud Buechler. When Dom led Poway to a 1986 upset over Pasadena Muir High School and future NBA star Stacey Augmon, his dad attended the game from Anaheim, where he was a coach with the California Angels. Deron Johnson's presence at the game created a stir, because he was one of Poway's original local legends, having turned down a Notre Dame football scholarship in the 1950s to sign with the Yankees and going on to have a sixteen-year big league career that included a World Series championship in 1973 with the Oakland A's.

Deron's son, forsaking basketball, followed his father's footsteps into the game. Dom signed with the San Francisco Giants and advanced to Double A in the Angels system. When Dom first told his father he wanted to align himself with the enemy—pitchers—Deron told him he'd introduce him to a who's who of pitching greats. “You'll talk to them,” Deron said, “and when a common theme emerges, pay attention.” That led him to Gus Hoefling and Steve Carlton, not to mention greats like Howie Gershberg (who counted among his protégés Frank Viola, John Franco, and Chuck Finley), Darren Balsley, Dave Duncan, and Claude Osteen.

But perhaps his greatest teacher was Deron, who schooled him to think like a hitter. Deron showed Dominick how hitters try to pick up the pitcher's grip on the baseball through the “back window”—the farthest point from the batter in the delivery. Ideally, when rearing back to throw, the lefthanded pitcher's left hip should obscure the hitter's view of the ball; if not, if the arm swings too far toward third base, the hitter can spy the grip and have a leg up. “Every time the hitter sees the ball, he has the advantage,” Dom explains. “The more you can keep the ball out of his sight, the later he has to react to the pitch.”

Johnson has spent years developing his pitching philosophy. It's built around four fundamentals. The first two dovetail perfectly with Liba's fitness emphasis on proper balance: Dom argues that, first, the lower and upper half of the body should always face the same direction—square to the plate—and, second, that after the leg kick, both feet should remain on the ground through the motion. “You're never stronger on one leg than you are on two,” he says.

Principle number three is what is commonly known as “arm path,” which holds that the arm should follow the same linear direction to the target each time, on a downward plane with the same forty-five-degree release point, or arm slot. Johnson's fourth and final precept he calls “sighting.” When starting out, most pitchers don't know where the ball is going, outside of aiming for the catcher's glove. But to really get it to the catcher's glove, often you have to pick a different spot to throw to. For instance, a lefty throwing a slider to a lefty may train his eyes on the catcher's left shin guard.

When Moyer first started throwing to Johnson in the backyard, the pitching coach was amazed by Moyer's sighting skills. “Okay, this one is up and in to a lefty, in the window between your ear and shoulder,” Moyer would say, before delivering the ball right there, with stunning, as Johnson would say, “repeatability.”

Johnson knew Moyer didn't need his rudimentary philosophies; his role was to dissect the nuances of Moyer's mechanics, to pay attention to the slightest of details, in order to, as he says, “make sure the ball is coming out good every time.”

He was struck by Moyer's openness to every critique, no matter how minor. Once, as the catcher, Johnson noted that he could see the ball through Moyer's back window when Moyer threw from the windup, though not from the stretch.

“That's because I'm coiling more from the windup,” Moyer said.

“Well, if you're not coiling out of the stretch, why coil out of the windup?” Dom asked.

Moyer paused. “That makes sense.” He smiled. “I'm not going to coil anymore.”

Days in Dom's backyard in late 2011 and early 2012 felt happily familiar to Moyer. They were like those lazy days at Camden Yards years ago, when he and Mussina and the others would toss a ball back and forth and talk pitching for hours. He'd spend hours at Dom's, talking mechanics and mind-set with wide-eyed kids. He'd long ago dedicated himself to the cause of continual improvement, becoming something like baseball's living embodiment of
kaizen
, the Japanese business philosophy that seeks to repeatedly upgrade all functions. Well into his thirties, famed Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh once explained his legendary work ethic by observing that one's potential is endless. In the States, Moyer knew, potential was thought to come with an expiration date. Like Oh, Moyer saw self-improvement as a process, not a destination. That's what Dom's backyard represented to Moyer: it was the laboratory for his ongoing experiments.

At times the scene verged on the comic. One of the first times he was about to throw, not three feet from the mound, up popped a gopher through the ground; pitcher and rodent froze, staring each other down, until the pitcher shrugged and assumed the varmint was a baseball fan. From then on, the minor league kids who were always in attendance would begin each session by asking, “Hey Jamie, is your gopher coming today?”

Those same kids made Moyer's twice-weekly bullpen sessions even more special. Each day would turn into impromptu teaching sessions; once, Dom had about forty kids over to hear the veteran. Moyer walked them through the ins and outs of the game, explaining, for example, the complicated “touch signs” he'd developed in Seattle with his catcher, Tom Lampkin. Instead of going through countless signs to indicate the next pitch's location, Moyer would signal that he wanted to throw to the right side of the plate on the next pitch by catching the ball back from Lampkin with his right foot forward.

“Now,” he said to the rapt youngsters, “what if, once I'm back on the mound and looking in for the sign, I want to change where the pitch is going? Tell me how I'm doing that now.” He peered in to Dom, who was crouching behind home plate, nodded yes to Dom's call, and then entered his windup and threw before turning back to the kids. “How'd I just change the location of that pitch?”

They had no clue. He did it again. Still nothing. Finally a hint: “Watch my pearly whites.” And there it was: after nodding yes to Dom's call and while making the first move of his windup, Moyer briefly smiled, showing the whites of his teeth. That tells his catcher to change the location to its opposite side: if the call had been for a fastball away, this subtlest of grins would mean Moyer wants to come inside with it instead. It's a way to speed up tempo on the mound and hide location from runners on base. It also requires a very observant batterymate.

Of course, Moyer couldn't help but impart to the youngsters some Harveyisms as well. He told them how he'll go for a walk behind the mound and bend over to tie his shoe. “That's when I lose it on myself,” he said. “'C'mon Moyer, get it together—execute!' Then I stand and take a series of deep breaths”—Moyer, courtesy of Dorfman, believed that deep breathing in tense situations slowed down the body's fight-or-flight responses and increased the chances that one can find that ever-elusive zone state—“and I put the last pitch behind me and return my focus to this pitch. Because that's all you have, your next pitch.”

Johnson chuckled, knowing that Moyer had just unleashed on the minors and Division I a group of kids who would all be tying their shoes behind the mound while cursing themselves sotto voce.

By the end of 2011, Moyer had gone through Ghandour's strength training, he'd become a veteran of getting up and down Liba's Puke Hill, and, with Dom's help, he'd tweaked his mechanics to the point that he could put his mind on autopilot and trust them. In the months after his Tommy John surgery, he'd put on fifteen pounds, so he spent a weekend eating nothing but a concoction of maple syrup and lemon juice, cleaning out his body's toxins, before switching over to a steady diet of salads and grains, getting down to his 185-pound playing weight in no time. It was time. Now, with spring training roughly three months away, Moyer's agent, Jim Bronner, extended invitations to major league teams to make the trek to Johnson's backyard to see Moyer throw.

“My God, does this guy miss?”

That's what Dom Johnson hears one scout whisper to another while Moyer, time and again, hits Johnson's targets. It's a December 2011 weekday and some ten major league scouts—mostly pro scouts, with a couple who are more used to evaluating minor leaguers also in attendance—take notes while Moyer runs through his bullpen session for them, sixty throws to a variety of spots.

Ghandour is standing nearby. He's watching the mechanics closely, making sure that the stress of the moment and of multiple throws doesn't tire Moyer and alter the delivery. Muscle compensation is the enemy—particularly over the course of a long big league season.

After Moyer's last pitch, he looks at his visitors. “Anything you guys want to see?”

One scout—no doubt one of the minor league guys—speaks up: “Can you throw a two-seamer inside to a righthander?”

Dom wants to blurt out,
What do you think he's been doing?

But Moyer beats him to it: “I've only been doing that for twenty-six years.”

He winds up and—
thwack
—the ball sizzles right over the inside corner, calf high. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” Moyer says, smiling.

The scouts are effusive, as are the reports that major league general managers share with Bronner. “He's Jamie Moyer,” one says incredulously. Another observes, echoing Rollie DeArmas from so many months ago, that watching him felt like “2008 all over again.” Another writes that Moyer can still “hit a gnat's ass.”

Yet there is no barrage of offers. Moyer had long been aware of baseball's risk-averse culture, and to how GMs throughout the game found comfort in subscribing to the conventional wisdom. He'd even seen it in managers, in their groupthink rush to embrace pitch-count mania or the allegiance to the three-out save. (When Moyer was coming up, closers sometimes pitched two or three innings to preserve a win.) It made him miss managers like Don Zimmer, who was a gambler by habit and in nature, and would make moves on hunches.

Getting a team to take a chance on a forty-nine-year-old starter is going to require someone willing to roll the dice. Plenty of teams are willing to have him come to spring training, but these are invitations born of polite formality. He doesn't mind paying his own way, but he wants a real opportunity. Pittsburgh is interested, but Moyer had always hated the Pirates' mound: it was harder than most, less forgiving, and the dirt was dry and choppy. The list of serious suitors quickly comes down to the Baltimore Orioles or Colorado Rockies; the Orioles say they'll be making a big league offer, but a minor league one comes instead. Moyer thinks it's no coincidence that their interest seems to cool after the Orioles hire Dan Duquette as general manager. Duquette, who had been out of baseball for a decade, had been Moyer's general manager in Boston in the mid-'90s and had traded him to Seattle when Moyer had a 7–1 record.

Meantime, Dan O'Dowd of the Colorado Rockies tells Bronner that Moyer would have the opportunity to compete for his team's fifth starting spot. The Rockies don't figure to be that good a team, and though Moyer had pitched well there in the 2007 National League Division Series, he doesn't know how he'll do in the altitude over the course of a season. But someone is willing to give him a chance, which was all he ever wanted. He signs a contract for $1.1 million, provided he makes the team coming out of spring training.

It's two weeks before he packs up the Yukon SUV for spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Jamie Moyer has just made his farewell visit to Dom's backyard, where he watches some high schoolers throw for some scouts, at one point stopping the proceedings to show an eighteen-year-old that the way he's taking the ball out of his glove is tipping his pitches to the batter.

This process, which began a little less than a year ago with some backyard soft-tossing with his sons Dillon and Hutton, has now come to this: like a rookie, he'll be going to spring training to make a team. Unlike a rookie, though, his excitement is tinged with bittersweetness. For the last year, for the first time in his adult life, he has been able to be present in the daily life of his family. He's gone to Dillon's games at the University of California at Irvine, and he's been in the stands for Hutton's baseball, Duffy's soccer, Grady's tennis, Mac's golf, and Timoney's basketball games. Every day, he has cuddled up with Yeni and Kati—the two “littles” who were adopted from Guatemala—and worked with them on their Kumon, an at-home math and reading program.