Just Tell Me I Can't (16 page)

Many times, Michele and Jerry knew, such meetings are very brief. And that was fine: Erin would meet her idols, they'd talk baseball, the ballplayers would pass on some compassionate words of wisdom about the battle in front of her, and she'd be left with an inspiring memory.

But a strange thing happened that night in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the upscale restaurant Michael's at the Citadel. In walked Jeff Fassero and his wife, Cathy, along with Jamie and Karen Moyer and their six-month-old infant, Duffy. And the Moyers then proceeded to go off script.

At the time, Erin was not feeling well. She'd been undergoing grueling chemotherapy and had developed neuropathy—nerve pain in her toes—as a result. She'd been having a tough time digesting bland pieces of chicken, let alone the five-course meal chef Michael DeMaria had prepared for the group.

Much of the talk revolved around baseball. The Metcalfs had lived in Philly, so they and Jamie bonded over tales of Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt. Karen asked Erin about her medical odyssey, and what followed was a plainspoken litany of invasive treatments, surgeries, and weekly chemo sessions. Erin was sluggish, but Karen noticed that she was nonetheless eyeing Duffy. “Would you like to hold her?” Karen offered.

Erin was an athlete on the fast-pitch softball field, with a hard-hitting, imposing plate presence. But now, with a baby cooing in her arms, she was just a teenage girl, falling in love. It wasn't just that here she was cradling a new life when hers was in such jeopardy that touched the Metcalfs so; it was also that the Moyers seemed to immediately welcome Erin into their family. Duffy stayed with Erin throughout the dinner, even when Chef DeMaria sent over a pizza from his nearby pizzeria for Erin, who was able to get down a couple of slices.

At the end of dinner, Karen asked for the Metcalfs' contact information. “We'd like to stay in touch with you,” she told Michele. The Metcalfs hadn't thought the night would involve anything beyond a pleasant dinner. On the way back to their hotel, Michele asked Jerry, “Do you think we'll ever hear from them again?”

The next morning, there was a package waiting for Erin at the front desk. Karen had dropped off a box of Mariners gear. More packages, home visits, and phone calls followed. Early that season, the Mariners played the Yankees and Erin watched as Jamie plunked Paul O'Neill with a pitch. The next day, Jamie stopped by for a visit—with that very game ball for her. “I'm so glad you hit Paul O'Neill,” she said. “He's such a crybaby.”

Every time Erin would get down, it seemed like the phone would ring and Karen Moyer would be offering tickets to a baseball game or just stopping by for a visit. “It was like Karen would sense when Erin was low,” Michele remembers.

The Moyers were touched by Erin's spirit. “Mom, it's not fair that these one-year-old and two-year-old kids have cancer,” she'd say of the infants in her ward.

“Well, honey,” Michele replied, “I don't think it's fair that you have cancer.”

“But I've lived fifteen years,” Erin said. “These babies haven't had a chance to live a life yet.”

On June 3, 2000, Karen and Erin planned to take part in a three-hour walk in support of organ donation. Erin was failing, but she insisted on going in her wheelchair, attached to an IV filling her with pain meds. She and Karen talked the whole time. Erin told Karen something she hadn't told her family: that she was worried how her older sisters, Maria and Megan—who had taken a semester off from college to help care for Erin—would cope with her death.

“Can you imagine?” Karen said to Jamie, tearing up later when recounting the conversation. “Her biggest fear is how her dying will affect her sisters?”

Two weeks later, after telling her mother, “I'm ready to go,” Erin Metcalf passed away.

Karen Moyer doesn't let an emotion fade; she acts. She became determined to address Erin's concern about her sisters and decided to create a grief camp for kids. Now the mother who asked her children each morning, “What is your purpose today?” and the pitcher who considered every pitch to have one as well, had found a bigger purpose: after Erin's passing in 2000, and with the blessing of Michele and Jerry Metcalf, Camp Erin was born.

Today, Camp Erin is the largest network of child bereavement camps in the country. The Moyer Foundation has raised in excess of $22 million to serve kids in distress.

“We put kids with other kids who have gone through what they've gone through, and with counselors who tell them that what they're feeling is what they should be feeling,” Karen explains. “We've provided a safe place for kids to talk about their loss and achieve closure, while honoring their loved one and having fun with other kids all at the same time.”

In the process of establishing Camp Erin, the Moyer Foundation became a nationwide model for athlete philanthropy. Much of its success is due to the Moyers' hands-on style. In 2000, when they started with just a couple of part-time employees (there are now two offices, one in Seattle and one in Philadelphia), Jamie would pick up the office's trash every other day in his pickup and take it to a nearby Dumpster.

At the first camp, just outside Seattle, Jamie stopped by after a day game. He walked into the cafeteria, where stood a chalkboard filled with photos of the campers' loved ones who had died. A little boy approached and grabbed his hand, pointing with his other hand to a photo on the board. “My uncle took me to my first baseball game,” the little boy said.

“That's really cool that you remember him this way,” Moyer said, kneeling down. “He'd really like that.”

Later, his voice would quiver when he related the story. “That was his connection to me,” Moyer would recall. “It was bold of him to do that, and you kind of felt like he was healing.”

Moyer paused, still thinking of that long-ago little boy, his first real taste of the difference Camp Erin could make. “Sometimes in life, you have these moments, and they change you forever,” he said. “Baseball has given me many things I'll always be thankful for. That moment was one of them.”

Just as Moyer's relationship with Gregory in Baltimore coincided with his becoming a bona fide big league pitcher, so too did the interaction with Erin track with his emergence as an elite starter in the game. Coincidence? Harvey Dorfman would say not. Moyer, he knew, was someone who sought inspiration from the everyday. Having a front-row seat to bravery—particularly as performed by children—couldn't help but be motivating and perspective-broadening.

In 2000, the year Erin died, Moyer had his first disappointing season in years. It's not as if he consciously thought of Erin, or of the kids who courageously told their stories of loss at camp, or of Gregory's continued good health, as he trained that off-season. But all of those object lessons were with him, on some level. Harvey had long ago predicted it: he'd turn his career around when he became aware that there was life
beyond
it.

As the 2001 season dawned, Moyer once again had something to prove, and so did his team. Not a lot was expected of the Seattle Mariners. Griffey was gone; one year before, his numbers in decline, he had been sent to the Cincinnati Reds. He'd requested a trade after the Mariners wouldn't move in the fences of their new state-of-the-art ballpark, Safeco Field. Rodriguez was history too. After the 2000 season, in which he hit 41 home runs and drove in 132 runs, A-Rod did what many of his teammates long thought he'd do: he took the money and ran, signing with Texas for a record ten-year deal worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

The oft-injured Jay Buhner would miss most of the season. To fill the power gap, the Mariners signed Ichiro Suzuki, Japan's leading hitter, and free agent Bret Boone. Since taking over in 1999, Pat Gillick had said goodbye to Randy Johnson, Griffey, and A-Rod; 2001 looked to be a rebuilding year.

But the Mariners opened the season winning 20 of their first 24 games and never looked back, leading their division by 19 games with a 63–24 mark at the All-Star break. Ichiro became an international sensation, a rookie who would lead the league in batting average (.350) and hits and stolen bases en route to winning MVP and Rookie of the Year honors. Boone had one of the best seasons for a second baseman in history: 37 home runs, 141 runs knocked in, a .331 batting average, an OPS of .950.

And Moyer emerged as an ace, going 20–6 with an ERA of 3.43 and a WHIP of 1.102, finishing fourth in the Cy Young Award voting. When he pitched seven innings on October 5 to beat the Rangers 6–2 (holding A-Rod hitless in four at-bats), it was his ninth win in his last eleven starts. It made him a 20-game winner for the first time, but, more important, it marked his team's 115th win of the season, surpassing the 1998 Yankees for the second best regular-season record ever. A win the next day tied the Mariners with the 1906 Cubs for the single-season record in victories.

It was a magical, mystical season. The catchphrase in the clubhouse became, “Two outs, so what?” because no deficit was too daunting to overcome. “It's an amazing feeling,” Moyer recalls. “It's a feeling like you're going to win every day. And everybody knew it—our team, and the other team. You could feel it. Guys would be in the dugout, saying, ‘Okay, what do we need, four runs? No problem. We'll get 'em.'”

How'd they do it? To hear Moyer and Gillick tell it, it was all about character. The 2001 Mariners had no superstars, just a collection of close-knit, fundamentally sound ballplayers who adopted their manager's persona on the field. They were an old-school bunch; if an opposing pitcher threw high and tight, nothing needed to be said: high and tight it was, in pointed reply. They went into bases hard, spikes up, and performed the selfless acts of winning baseball: throwing to cutoff men, hitting behind runners, bunting base runners over. Over four million fans flocked to Safeco, because the Mariners were winning, yes, but also because of
how
they were winning. It was as if Safeco were a time machine and, entering it, you could catch some great 1950s baseball.

“I used to think ability was 80 percent of the game and things like character and mastering the mental aspect accounted for 20 percent,” Gillick says. “Now I think it's much more even. That Seattle team proved the difference that character and baseball smarts can make.”

In the postseason, Moyer continued his storybook year, going 3–0 with a 1.89 ERA, outdueling Cleveland ace Chuck Finley twice in the divisional series. But the Mariners couldn't beat the Yankees when they needed to the most, and the magical season ended bitterly with a loss to New York in the American League Championship Series.

It was a swift, unforeseen end. Still, after the dust had settled and the years had passed, and even after Moyer had realized the boyhood dream of every major leaguer and won a World Series, he'd look back on 2001 with more fondness than any other year, and on the 116 wins with more pride than any other accomplishment. Part of it was the sheer constant adrenaline rush of stepping onto the field night in and night out with the absolute certainty you were going to win—they lost a mere seven games per month. And part of it was because he and his teammates had done it together, right up until that final out in the Bronx.

Like Piniella, Moyer is a baseball traditionalist, someone who's aware of the game's unique position among American sports. History, and agreed-upon yardsticks to judge that history, matter in baseball in a way they don't in, say, football and basketball.

During Moyer's decade in Seattle, however, the sport underwent two game-changing trends. In a relatively short span of time, these two developments—the rise in use of steroids and the sabermetric revolution—upended the most traditional of sports.

Pinpointing the precise dawning of the steroid era is a fool's game, but somewhere in the early to mid-'90s is a good starting point. Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez, and Lenny Dykstra have all been implicated in the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the early '90s. By the middle of the decade, it was impossible to deny that something had fundamentally altered the game. In the thirty-two seasons following 1961, when Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle both hit over 50 home runs, the game had seen only three seasons of 50 or more home runs: Cecil Fielder's 51 in 1990, George Foster's 52 in 1977, and Willie Mays's 52 in 1965. But, starting in 1995, there would be sixteen 50-home-run seasons over the next seven seasons.

By the time Moyer became a top-flight pitcher in 1997, there was a widespread assumption that the game's inflated power statistics were attributable to causes beyond the effects of lowered pitching mounds or juiced balls. In 1998, the celebrated “Chase” season, McGwire and Sammy Sosa both set their sights on the single-season home run mark, with McGwire eventually hitting 70 and Sosa 66. Just a step behind them was Moyer's teammate Junior, with 56. Barry Bonds broke McGwire's season-single record in 2001 with 73 homers, despite never having hit as many as 50 in any prior season.

All this time, Moyer never saw evidence that anyone was taking anything—nothing in teammates' lockers or in the trainer's room. Nor were there any admissions in the clubhouse of any performance-enhancing drug use. But common sense told Moyer and his teammates that widespread cheating was going on, and that baseball was turning a blind eye. During games, Moyer and teammates would sit on the bench and point at opposing players and vote on who was using.

“Yes, yes, no,” they'd say, singling out players, sometimes arguing. Some were no-brainers. A reliever who ended the previous season throwing at 92 would show up to spring training clocked at 97 or 98. A slight leadoff hitter five years earlier had now become a bulky power hitter. They'd page through old media guides, comparing the size of players' heads now to earlier in their careers.

Moyer was angry about what steroid use had done to the game, and he faulted baseball for its laissez-faire reaction to the trend. He considered the numbers of anyone who had tested positive to be tainted and argued that such players shouldn't be voted into the Hall of Fame: “Who in their right mind would vote for anyone who got caught taking that stuff?”